Why do I care?

I had my annual physical this week and told my doctor, “So far, I’m an immortal” —meaning, I don’t yet know what my disease will be, I’ve not yet been diagnosed with a condition, I’m not taking any medications. When my blood work comes back next week, I expect to be in the safe range on every count.

This is not just a function of good luck. Nor of my genes. It’s as much a result of never doing physically punishing work in crappy environments; never going without food or medical attention; never living in a state of constant, inescapable anxiety, under a cloud of despair.

I’ve never been one of the four million American children — four million! — who are the prime or sole caretakers for their sick and disabled parent(s), as the New York Timesreported this week. I’ve never been one of the 46 million Americans — 46 million! — who rely on food stamps and food pantries to meet their nutritional needs. I’ve never been one of 43.5 million American women who experience serious violence or stalking during their lifetimes from their husband or boyfriends. I’ve never been one of the 400,000 women and girls who are raped in our country each year.

All of this is why a white man like me, living on a bit less than the American median household income (but with no debt and no mortgage or rent), has a life-span advantage of at least seven years over poor men and women of every race.

And this upsets me. My well-being — or their lack of it — upsets me.

WHY? WHY DO I CARE? Why do I suffer from what Elon Musk absurdly calls “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization” — empathy?

I don’t know why. I seem to have been born this way and raised this way.

There are moments, for sure, when I wonder what it would be like not to care about what’s happening to other people . . . not to feel “lucky” but “deserving” . . . not to be scrupulous about treating people fairly , , , not to be upset by the news.

What might I have accomplished if I had been unleashed from my conscience? If I had focused only on cultivating my own exceptionalism in a society that makes such a big whoop about exceptionalism?

In those idle moments, I again realize that unless we are sociopaths, the effort of avoiding empathy requires us to pervert ourselves with theories that blame the victims, laud the lucky, despise the “other,” and idolize power. Those are the theories that arise in my mind when I contemplate extinguishing my empathy.

I want none of that, which is why I would still call myself a “social-ist” — with a hyphen. Marxist theory, pooh. Dictatorship of the proletariat, fuggetaboutit. Still, I take seriously the reality of human interdependence, the reality that produces babies and civilizations. I am a social-ist because I want to see policies that cultivate and build upon that reality in our lives.

Musk’s denunciation of empathy is, in fact, what established his fascist bona fides for me, even more than his loony Nazi salute. It was Adolf Hitler, after all, who identified the “Jewish virus” to be compassionate ethics, which, he believed, had corrupted the will to brutalize and dominate that was needed for the “Aryan” race to thrive.

Forgive me for sounding reductionist, but the struggle in which we are engaged IS about social-ism versus fascism. It’s an ideological struggle far older than the United States. And right now — for the time being — we’re losing it.