>>509553071
Empathy and lots of it creates extra carrying capacity in terms of additional complexity in a civilization. The way it works is it minimizes the expenditure of energy/resources/time watching and controlling bad actors when the majority of people trust each other. The more trust, the more efficiently a society organizes itself and advances. Introduce the ethnic groups the Russian mentions and problems start because a non empathetic low trust population group lowers almost every beneficial metric. The empathetic people aren't inherently bad because of that they just need to be protected from outside groups to flourish. Same thing happened to Rome.