You can't wield a certain level of material power while you have empathy. So there are ways to shed it, and it's conducive to sort of bleed it out of populations to facilitate the grand hustles. Empathy is key to who we really are, who we forgot we were. A lack of empathy is essential for acceleration into the upper echelons which indeed seem to be under the jurisdiction of forces with no empathy at all.
Thus all the horror and corruption that seems impossible or worthy of ridicule to people who can't feel it's reality goes on and is shrugged off even even noticed. Meanwhile the same baffles and crushes those of us who have resisted anesthesia. It gets worse and worse even as it is unveiled because the people perpetrating it have become harmonized to the dull hum of their own control machinery and don't know how to switch it off. They are slaves of another kind. We imagine them as masters but maybe they're really much closer to fevered, spent addicts who must go into darker areas and do more unspeakable things just to keep the damned thing in motion.
Because they have traded in humanity for power, they have only power. So if the connection for power demands Hell on Earth, Hell they will construct and maintain. But the thing is, empathy is the glue of what is eternal beneath the material veneer of life and nothing holds without it. No empire, no dynasty, no secret beitherhood or cult lasts forever, however ancient or entrenched.
Resist, subvert, dismantle, but do not become a demon to fight the Devil. Hang on, and keep your heart about you. The game is getting good.
