Through their high capacity for affective empathy and empathic guilt, these Northwest Europeans had an edge in adapting to later cultural environments that would be structured not by kinship but by other ways of organizing social relations: the State, ideology, and the market economy.

This has been one path that leads to advanced societies, but it is not the only one. East Asian societies have pursued a similar path of cultural evolution while having relatively low levels of affective empathy and empathic guilt. They seem to have done so by relying more on external means of behavior control (shaming, family discipline, community surveillance) and by building on cognitive empathy through learned notions of moral duty.

Meanwhile, Northwest European societies have had their capacity for empathy pushed to the limit, as seen in the commonly heard term “aid fatigue.” And there is no easy way to turn it off. The only real way is to convince oneself that the object of empathy is morally worthless.

Was it all an evolutionary mistake? Time will tell.