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Home / The Listener / Opinion

Charlotte Grimshaw: An empathy deficit is wreaking havoc around the world

New Zealand Listener
14 Jul, 2025 06:00 PM4 mins to read

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Charlotte Grimshaw: The empathy message could be read as code for we need to talk about US president Donald Trump. Photo / Getty Images

Charlotte Grimshaw: The empathy message could be read as code for we need to talk about US president Donald Trump. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion by Charlotte Grimshaw

Taking a train from Brussels, I found Paris sweltering under a heat dome. Here, in the new weather, it was pushing 40 degrees.

I took another train south. There’s a hillside path in southern France that I walked up every day in the summer I was 10. Now, in 2025, there’s a change: all the butterflies have gone.

“All the butterflies have gone” is not a statement about rainbows and unicorns; it is a brutal fact, backed by science, that needs to be faced by serious people. The loss of the clouds of butterflies through which I walked as a child is a story about climate change and environmental degradation.

Today, I heard a journalist back home describing as “junk” Jacinda Ardern’s refrain that we need to value empathy.

“We have a problem with lack of empathy” is not a statement about rainbows and unicorns; it is a brutal fact, backed by science, that needs to be faced by serious people. The shortage of empathy currently wreaking havoc in international relations is a story about populism and pathology.

If you’re an insular journalist, it must be easier to dismiss Ardern’s empathy idea. In fact, in urgent and particular ways, it’s the issue of our time. Arguing for empathy isn’t a philosophy that exists in a vacuum; it applies now, to politics and current events. It may be that the linkage needs to be explained more clearly to those who are not serious people, and who languidly bandy about words like “junk”.

The idea should be explicitly tied to politics. You could suggest that the empathy message is code for “we need to talk about Donald”. Not to mention “Vladimir”. Or, you could describe it locally as shorthand for, say, “we need to talk about Shane”.

We’re saddled with one world leader who, as agreed by experts, has a personality disorder that renders him immune to others’ suffering. His inability to empathise has led to domestic cruelties and abuses, and to an upending of stabilising international pacts and the balance of powers.

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To scorn Ardern’s empathy idea is to dismiss, childishly, one of the world’s grown-ups, who is concerned about war and destruction.

Take this problem: the same world leader who feels no empathy has just persuaded Nato countries to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP. That’s vastly more money to be spent on weapons and less on the planet and human beings, necessary only because the leader with no empathy refuses to support the old balance of powers. He’s wrecking the world order, and EU countries are scurrying around doing his bidding.

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Bizarrely responding to his pathology, in a televised press conference, a fawning Nato Secretary General Rutte called him “Daddy”.

When Daddy is a narcissist, he spreads his malaise outwards. The world becomes divided between sycophants who enable Daddy, attacking and bullying his opponents, and those who stand up to him. Daddy doesn’t respect any of them, but he’s ruthless with those who won’t bend.

Another problem with elderly non-empathisers – and there are too many of them in politics right now – is that they don’t care about the world their grandchildren will inherit. Those who don’t feel empathy don’t care about the future. Why should they? They’re not in it.

This is perhaps why they can, without dying of shame, wear a cap that reads “Drill, baby, drill”.

It’s not only that they’re craven and cynical, it’s that emotionally, for them, the future is a void.

If it’s not about them, it’s meaningless. If they don’t star in it, it’s irrelevant. The grandchildren, baby, can fry. That’s what lack of empathy means.

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That’s what serious people are worrying about.

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