Civil Liberties

Well, let's start with children. Empathy is not something we are born with, It's a combination of our own cognitive development, and learning from others.

Empathy is also more than just being able to understand another person's feelings - Even a sociopath can do that, that's simply communication, most able people can manage this just fine. No, empathy also includes the understanding that you are not the star of the show, that not only are there other people, but that those peopel are also important, but that not you, northem, are the central figures of some seventy-year personal drama story.

For whatever reasons, a lot of children don't develop that, or it becomes stunted. I'm no professional, i'm sure there are lots of reasons why - and let's not take the lazy route of blaming the parents, I've seen plenty of great parents whose kids still grow up as manipulative pricks. Who knows why, maybe it's genes, maybe it's peers, maybe it's just something that amuses the kid, maybe it's a lot of things, different for each case.

People like you describe... they all think the world is about them. That's what it comes down to, that selfishness, that inability to perceive other people as mattering, except inasmuch as they matter to that person. The reason they hate welfare, for instance, isn't because they hate the poor. They don't even fucking see the poor. No, welfare pisses them off because they think it's a slight against them, taking "their" money, and giving it to "someone else" - someone who, in their heads does not matter, and will never matter.

They buy these wacky conspiracy theories, because it's gratifying. it makes them feel special, not just because they "know" something that "isn't being reported," but also because, inevitably, these conspiracies are about someone coming to inconvenience them in someway. The UN wants to take their guns. Michelle wants to make them eat broccoli. Pelosi is going to set up death camps for christians. They don't worry about things that don't revolve around them. Something awful happening in that country over there? Will it make gas prices go up? No? don't care, then!

The conservative media complex, as you call it, doesn't create the problem. It's clearly intended to be exploitative, capitalizing on these people's paranoia and self-centeredness to make a buck. But.. .that has the effect of encouraging that sort of thing. And I suppose that's just "expanding the market" until market demands mean that the hacks squeezing money from chumps like Limbaugh, get replaced by the chumps themselves, like Beck. Oh, there's a difference there, hard though it may be to see with our liberal eyes. Pretty soon you've got a feedback loop, with paranoid self-centered fucks, telling other paranoid self-centered fucks, to go forth and be paranoid self-centered fucks.

The effect this has on the society it parasitizes off of is clearly obvious, and is, as we've been seeing recently, beginning to bite the asses of the money-squeezing hacks. The Republican reaction to the Tea Party of late is that of Victor Frankenstein upon realizing what he's done. But, like that ill-fated German doctor, their creation is not going to stop until it sees their destruction, or is itself destroyed.