>>514942628
I only read the part where you were responding to me. But I'd also like to comment about pathological empathy.

You see Charles Darwin argued that we should wipe out the blacks, and implement eugenics. He wrote about this in his less favored book "the Descent of Man", where he compared racial skull sizes and said we need to suppress birthrates of the Irish...etc.
That doesn't sound like pathological empathy, that sounds like a cold, calculated logic and self interest. In fact his intellectual descendants founded the Eugenics movement. Pic related was his cousin.
The Brits have long grasped onto the ideas of capitalism and market law as guiding light principles. That definitely doesn't follow traditional pathological empathy, which would lead you to communism.

So the brits are definitely able to come to grim calculated opinions if necessary. They are not governed purely by pathological empathy.

But then you had this guy, Henry Fox Bourne, who worked for publication services. He kicked up a bunch of hoo-ha about the plight of the poor people of the Congo, and even formed the "Aboritinal Protection Society" to fight colonial incursions into Africa. He took quotes out of context, interviewed lying eyewitnesses, and absolutely bombarded the British population with pictures of black people with their arms cut off. These pictures were shocking to the British population, who was unaware this was the normal state of things in Africa, and they made an emotional jump towards anti-colonialism.
(I somewhat suspect the likes of Henry Fox Bourne were influenced by communist ideas, but I actually don't know.)

So it's not that their empathy was "pathological", but it was "weaponized".