When we lose empathy

We become like brain-damaged people.

Even when people have power, they remain mostly constrained by their sympathetic instincts.

However, it only takes one minor alteration for this benevolence to disappear. When the dictator cannot see the responder⎯the two players are located in separate rooms⎯the dictator lapses into unfettered greed. Instead of giving away a significant share of the profits, the despots start offering mere pennies, and pocketing the rest. Once we become socially isolated, we stop simulating the feelings of other people.* As a result, our inner Machiavelli takes over, and our sense of sympathy is squashed by selfishness. The UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has found that, in many social situations, people with power act just like patients with severe brain damage. "The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior," he writes. "You become very impulsive and insensitive, which is a bad combination."

Of course, we live in an age when our most powerful people - they tend to also have lots of money - are also the most isolated. They live in gated communities with private drivers. They eat at different restaurants and stay at different resorts. They wear different clothes and skip the security lines at airports, before sitting at the front of the plane. We shouldn't be surprised that they're also assholes.

I have often wondered if the most important thing we could teach young people is the sense of empathy. If you imagine the pain of that other person, it is harder to hit them, or push them down, or make them cry. It is harder to wish them ill if you can imagine how that will make them feel.

Here is the conundrum I have been working through. Republicans have recruited the support of the moral conservatives, yet have governed and treated others with nearly a complete absence of empathy. Who cares if people don't have insurance? Who cares of some suspected terrorist is tortured?

What is this disconnect? Or, perhaps, how do we describe it? When otherwise moral people embrace (in seeming oblivion) the politics of immorality? How do we explain the people of Christ (some of them, anyway) preferring the politics of Machiavelli?