The Reign of the Tech Bros ...
Compassion and Empathy
Dear Friends,
The tech bros, in many ways, are winning—and Elon Musk is their leader.
Incredibly smart people (mainly men) who have amassed fortunes in the tens and hundreds of billions are now running the U.S. government—determining which programs get cut and which remain.
The challenge is that intelligence often does not come with other essential qualities, such as empathy.
"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit." Elon Musk recently told Joe Rogan.
Elon’s own brother, Kimbal once said, “He does not really have an empathy gene.”
Due to Elon’s Asperger’s, Kimbal explained, he has to verbalize to Elon what he is feeling because he cannot feel it otherwise.
Elon also said in the interview with Rogan that he believes in empathy, but it gets exploited into “weaponized empathy.”
Giving What We Have Not Received
Elon has spoken about a time when a group of kids nearly beat him to death as a child. He also endured immense suffering with his father. In his biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson quotes Elon as saying, “It was mental torture.”
This isn’t to excuse anyone’s actions, but rather to acknowledge a truth: it is difficult to give what we have never received. Imagine a life where you never, or rarely, experienced empathy.
Many of the so-called tech bros were once young, hurt kids who were often bullied for being different.
Empathy and compassion are no longer luxuries. We see what happens when they are absent: society fractures, and we all suffer.
Perhaps the hardest work we face today is extending understanding and compassion to those who are different from us. This does not mean we have to agree with them or remain silent when action is needed…
But if a lack of empathy and compassion created pain … maybe the cure is their return.
The invitation is to speak our mind and stand for what we believe in … AND have compassion. Hate is easy.
Ram Dass’s teacher used to say to him, “Love everyone and tell the truth.”
Ram Dass at times would respond, “But the truth is, I don’t love everyone!” It seemed impossible.
Yet this is still our work. While we may not be able to access it now, possibly there is a deeper part of us we can discover that can.
Blessings,
SOREN
Join us May 5th and 6th to explore living with greater mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion in this time of disruption.
Soren, Thank you for your musings. As a former Wisdom 2.0 attendee, I am grateful for you and your leading work and opinions in the field of spirituality. Today, I propose a different opinion on what you have written in the Reign of the Tech Bros. These so-called tech bros are NOT intelligent. In fact, these are the least intelligent folks that I have run across in a long time.
In Western culture, we put too many important concepts into boxes such as the notion that intelligence is a mental capacity to understand and solve problems. I beg to differ. Intelligence is a whole-body, spiritual, emotional and mind capacity that includes self-control, open-mindedness, insight and intuition, creativity, high emotional intelligence, curiosity, understanding, adaptability, critical thinking, good outcome decision-making, empathy (you mentioned this one - yay!), learning, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, wit. The reality here is that we are seeing the removal of nearly all guard rails (a cornerstone for democracy), greed unchecked, no empathy and pure revenge. Yes, it is sad and difficult. It breaks my heart to see how we have allowed this to happen. So let's pull ourselves up as a collective and take the necessary actions to love and have compassion enough for ourselves to move the circus out of our government and begin the hard task of rebuilding - perhaps something even better than before.
I see the lack of Emotional Intelligence and what someone recently called “emotional literacy” is the elephant in the room we do NOT want to talk about. If we applied a trauma informed lense onto this social culture equation, we would also see how FRAGMENTED POLARIZATIONS are the thing that catalyzes the withdrawal into the fantasy world of Artificial Intelligence - the so called brain children of those who had NO SOCIALIZING skills in formative years and were ostracized by their peers.
If we look at what the cult of the tech bros have in common, the story of dysfunctioning imperialist serfdoms and their broken family systems would reveal a great deal about how the end of these stories tend to go. Now that we have lost whatever guardrails our ancient Republic once had, we can look forward to a freefall into strategically designed chaos …as it currently devolves in the year 2025. May those of us who see this truth be Self led and rally our spiritual truths in this collective time and place. Thank you Wisdom 2.0 community. We be lightworkers here and can still hold a lantern in the darkest of times. 🙏❤️