Can Celebrities Stop Lecturing Us?

So celebrities, most of the time they don't know anything about politics and John C. Reilly is not much of an exception. So you remember John C. Reilly, he's the dude from Step Brothers, super talented, very funny, great actor. Well, he just took it upon himself to say that the right needs to be more empathetic, which again is sort of a get out of jail free car for bad policy. You make a bad policy and then you say, but it's just my, it's just my empathy. Empathy apparently is supposed to solve all of our problems. Well, believe it or not, this terrible take on empathy has a lot to do with geopolitics and the rules of war. I promise I will explain. Plus we get to another celebrity who is smart enough not to tell Americans how to vote. All right, let's dive in. Alrighty. So John C. Reilly, who's looking a little peaked to be fair. He, he appeared on another ubiquitous podcast and he explained that the right wing has no empathy. The right has no empathy at all. I'm so tired of hearing about how, if you favor public policy, the John C. Reilly doesn't like it must be because you lack empathy. Maybe it's not about the empathy. Maybe it's that bad public policy remains bad public policy, regardless of your feelings. You know, if you stand up for human rights, why is that a right or a left thing? Why aren't people in the right wing concerned about human rights? They're human too. This whole thing that like kind of has come into vogue of like empathy trap, you know, you know, like that's an Elon Musk says like empathy is like, don't be. But the trap, yes, yes, yes. Stick to your, uh, your agenda and what's best for you. Don't start feeling bad for so-and-so they're on their own thing. Look out for number one. Like, it's like, wait a minute. Empathy is not a trap. Empathy is a superpower. That's right. It's what makes human beings exceptional. Our ability to like look outside of ourself. We're not an alligator trying to just get the next fish, you know, we're human beings. We can relate to something that's not us that, you know, like that's a superpower. He's missing the point. When we talk about an empathy trap, that is not what we're talking about. We're not saying you shouldn't empathize with other people. You absolutely should try to. The empathy trap is the idea that you and the other person are the same. You have the same priorities as that person by necessity. That is false. It is a lie. When you say that, you know, people should be in favor of human rights, we all should be in favor of human rights, meaning treating people well, not abusing their basic human rights to life and liberty, for example, obviously. But the empathy trap is where you project your own values onto another person and then pretend that person thinks the same things as you. So an empathy trap would be you allow a murderer to come into your house because you have empathy for that person. You know, that person might want to kill you and your family, but you say, no, no, they're just like me. That person is just like me, because after all, I have to empathize. I have to project myself into that person. That's actually a form of narcissism. Not everyone is like you. Not everyone believes the same things as you. It is a peculiar idiocy that is, I think, native to Western civilization. I'm not aware of any other civilization that thinks that other civilizations are just like it, that everybody from another civilization, like if you're a member of radical Islamic civilization, you do not think of members of the West thinking like you think and having the same priorities. But the West is so arrogant in its belief that everyone must inherently think the same way that we end up collapsing to people who are perfectly willing to take advantage of us at every available opportunity. So we set up rules that the other side doesn't abide by, and the other side then takes advantage of those rules, and then we yell at ourselves for having to violate our own rules. So we will say, for example, no, no, we should definitely never hit civilians when we're aiming at terrorists. We need to target the terrorists. And terrorists say that, oh, so your priority is not to hit civilians. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hide among schoolchildren. And then we say, you know what? But that terrorist probably believes like we do, that schoolchildren are valuable. No, they don't. That's literally why they're hiding among the schoolchildren. There is nothing you could say to me that would make me hide behind my own children. Nothing. Zero things. But that is not the value of a huge chunk of the world. And so what do they do? They fire rockets literally from behind schoolchildren. And then if you are forced to hit, you say, oh, my God, we're so terrible. How could we be violated human rights? Taking advantage of our own stupidity and projecting our values on people who do not share them. That's the empathy trap. Empathy itself is not a trap. It's good to empathize with members of your family. There's also a difference between sympathy and empathy. Empathy is where you start to identify so much with one person or one group that you fail to recognize that public policy applies to everyone. So you empathize with that poor guy there. And so you become a communist. Well, you violate the rights of 100 million people because you empathize deeply with that one poor guy there. It's not my point. There's a point by the psychiatrist Paul Bloom. So John C. Reilly doesn't know what he's talking about, obviously. That's what we should be worried about in terms of empathy. But this is what happens when I understand actors have to be in a very feelings place all the time. This is what actors do. It's you do for a living. They have to empathize with their characters. They play some of the most egregious characters on screen, but they have to find the humanity in them. So I get why they would think this way. It is a very, very bad and stupid way to do public policy. And the implication that somehow you don't care about humans if you wish to, by the way, minimize civilian casualties, because it turns out the only way out is through when it comes to some of these questions. So play it out all the way. You say we don't want to kill civilians. We want to target only terrorists. The terrorists say, ah, I see your priority. The only way I can be safe is for me to hide behind civilians and I will use those civilians as human shields and shoot at you. So now you have two choices. You need to take incoming fire just incessantly and do nothing about it. Or you can say you violated the rules and now you will pay. And if there's collateral damage, the collateral damage is tragic. It's on you since you're the one who's putting the kids in front of you and you have to show that it is stupid for them to hide behind kids. Otherwise, they'll keep hiding behind kids. Put aside the civilian casualty example. Think about being in uniform. So one of the rules of the Geneva Conventions is that they apply to people who are in uniform. Why? Well, we want to be able to distinguish soldiers from people who are civilians. If you are uniform, we know you're a soldier. If you're not wearing a uniform, we assume you're a civilian. So what do evil people do? They immediately take off the uniform and they hide as civilians because then they feel like they are immune to us doing anything. And so if the rule is that when we capture a terrorist wearing civilian garb and we treat them the same as a soldier, we have created an incentive for them to continue cheating because they are safer hiding as a civilian than dressing as a soldier. What you actually should do with terrorists who dress up as civilians and don't get into uniform is say the Geneva Conventions do not apply to them. If they want the privileges of the Geneva Convention, they must abide by the rules. This is the problem. This is the empathy trap. People don't think like you. And yes, people take advantage of you. It doesn't mean that you ought to be uselessly cruel. No one's talking about that. It does mean that when you are attempting to set up a system of rules for the road, you must, in fact, look at the behavior and intentions of the other party. You can't just project your own ideas of how the world should be on that other party. Well, the opposite of John C. Reilly, Kenny Chesney was on with Bill Maher over the weekend, and he said that actually he never saw his platform as a reason to preach politics, which is refreshing. I just never felt like it was my place. It's it's not always everybody's place. You're right. There's a certain ego, I think, that lives in there and a certain box inside your head and your soul that you have to check for some reason to think that whatever that you can make a difference. And I. Well, you can make a difference by speaking out and it doesn't it just you're just I mean, I think they've actually studied this when celebrities talk. I think it has the opposite effect. I agree. They were all waiting, by the way, for Taylor Swift in twenty twenty four to if Kamala just had Taylor's it didn't help and they think it hurt. Yeah, well, I mean, that makes sense because people don't like being lectured to about politics by people whose chief claim to fame has nothing to do with that matter. Again, it'd be like me lecturing people on how best to cook pork. I don't know anything about that. I know nothing about that. I'm not qualified in that. Me lecturing you on that would be really, really, really weird. I understand politics is a thing where everyone has an opinion. One of the bizarre parts of my job is that if I go to a dinner party, everyone wants to talk about my job. I want to say about the thing that I study all day long. And most people don't know that much about these things, but at least Kenny Chesney has the brains to say, listen, you know, this is not my it's not my bag. I don't know that much about it. You want to go read somebody who knows something about it. There are plenty of places you can go. That's sort of sort of humility about what you know and what you don't. It's refreshing, I think. What an amazing video you just watched. Wasn't that amazing? Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.