Sometimes, empathy with one person entails a real struggle not to murder one or more other people with extreme prejudice.
This, at scale, is why "raising the level of empathy" in society is not some sort of positive ambition.
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I'm possibly not very civilized, in that I think the world would certainly be a better place if certain people could just be, y'know, killed.
But that's never how it happens, at any scale worth talking about for society. You never just kill the superpredators and call it a day.
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Our species gives birth to these individuals because they have a niche. No amount of murder will ever get rid of them.
If anything, our propensity for violence is one of the things that carve out this niche for antisocial disorders and exceptional levels of self-interest.
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I suspect you can blame our general, species-level ugliness for the exceptionally awful ugliness of some individual members of it.
So we could shoot all the bankers, politicians and executives we want, then watch as new predators move in to fill the vacant niche. Yippie.
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So is there any basic political thrust that could change any of that?
Perhaps some form of transhumanism would make sense. Except, of course, any transhumanist project would be managed, on some level, by humans.
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Ok guillotine appreciator. :P
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Fun fact: I have the exact same IQ result as some famous "researcher" alleged Napoleon to have had. Always found that amusing.
But no, not much faith in empire-as-a-solution here.
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