Caring only about one's immediate blood legacy strikes me as more opportunistic than empathetic when one is a top leader whose explicit responsibility is to work to improve the lives of all citizens.
On the other hand, this is Dick Cheney we're talking about; an empathetic human response isn't something he's otherwise demonstrated in his business or political dealings.
You don't know the human. You only know a character on TV. That character is intermediated for you by many hands. Maybe the character acts in reality as you think, or maybe they are literally acting to gain your approval. We don't know anything about the people presented to us.
I would argue that this is how you become a top leader. It's really discouraging to realize that only a certain type of people even want to win a popularity contest. Even dictators are winning the "more popular than the alternatives" contest, though the alternative might just be death.
Also that might be the stated responsibility, but the implicit one is to improve the outcomes relative to perceived alternatives. Many times the alternatives area manufactured.
There's an overall trend that this example fits in where people tend to act on spectrum of outright denial, not caring or actively exacerbating/ridiculing/etc, when it comes to problems experienced by people other than themselves.
It's only when they themselves, or someone they care about, experiences something that they begin to care about it. It speaks to a selective empathy, one that is ultimately selfish, because it is only given when it starts to impact them. It is especially selfish when that lack of empathy has benefited them in the past, as well.
I feel like this is just how most people behave, for better or worse. I have a set of strongly held opinions about certain things that may or may not be considered socially acceptable and when people I actually know that I care about are experiencing particularly bad consequences as a result of secondary or tertiery effects that "derive from" from views (in the sense of legislation being passed that is in line with the views that I hold, or anything adjacent from this) as such, I sometimes loosen up - isn't this pretty reasonable, natural given that we empathize with people we know more than people we don't know?
It isn't really hypocrisy -- it's more of a moderating factor given one's connections with people one might know, assuming the desire to fit in with society and have more pro-social interactions with others.
> I have a set of strongly held opinions about certain things that may or may not be considered socially acceptable and when people I actually know that I care about are experiencing particularly bad consequences as a result of secondary or tertiery effects that "derive from" from views (in the sense of legislation being passed that is in line with the views that I hold, or anything adjacent from this) as such, I sometimes loosen up - isn't this pretty reasonable, natural given that we empathize with people we know more than people we don't know?
I'd say that it is natural to empathize more with people we know. I'd also say that it is totally unreasonable to ignore what is happening to other people when forming ones opinion on something. Maybe it is normal but I can not understand why you would think that it is in any way reasonable.
