In remarks laced with scientific inaccuracies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Wednesday that autism was preventable while directly contradicting researchers within his own agency on a primary driver behind rising rates of the condition in young children.
I think we’re mostly on the same page.
I’d just add as someone who was a practicing psychologist that it has been conclusively proven that empathy is learned, it usually needs to be learned young if it is to be learned at all, it is easily tought, and our culture chooses to teach the opposite in glorifying/inflating individual potential with disdain for considering the needs of others.
Which had led us to this collapse as the rugged individual peasants tear eachother down instead of bringing power back down to earth.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/introduction-2/
If it were up go me, this experiment would be required curriculum for all young children, but modern American parents would burn schools down if a teacher DARED to tell half a class that kids with other color eyes were better than them for a single day (and then doing the opposite the next day) to safely instill what it feels like to be deemed less important by others. That’s how anti-empathy, and thus I’d argue antihumanist, Americans are TRAINED to be.
After all, when my kid grows up he needs to COMPETE AGAINST and BEAT your kid so he has MOAR than them. 🇺🇸
Yea I think a lot of valuable traits can be taught, although you probably know more if you actually studied psychology. But unfortunately I think you are right destructive traits can also be learned. Retraining yourself more desirable traits is much harder than learning it when you’re young. A ‘good’ society is a lot more than just a ‘good’ government.
But the traits that come with autism aren’t just a matter of learning (not sure if you imply that), their brains are formed differently before birth already, just like how people are born with other traits (like being more/less athletic than average or more/less intelligent to name something).
I wasn’t implying the empathy deficit was from those with autism, but from most of the US population, and by design.