The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social Psychology Review, found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.I think that this trend has a lot to do with the growth of neo-liberal thinking in the dominant US Empire. This school of thought has various roots, most celebrated are such exponents as Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand. Hayek established the Society for the Renovation of Liberalism and Rand expressed her philosophy in several books beginning with Fountainhead. Both were determined to revise the philosophy of the social contract that was originally used to justify the attacks on the old feudal rule of monarchy, aristocracy, and the Catholic Church in favor of the new commercial class.
"Social Contract" theory held that people originally came from an anarchic original state to secure their common well-being by establishing laws, judicial procedures, and agencies of enforcement. This thinking was succinctly expressed in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government....Hayek and Rand were most concerned with justifying the concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively few hands, the capitalist class, which was often seen as deleterious to the common good, especially as seen and experienced by working people. In the late 1930s the capitalist class greatly feared the rise of labor power and the threat of a different social system by the revolution that created the Soviet Union. Working people had made substantial gains in the 1930s in the form of labor legislation establishing rights to organize and other social legislation. Also during this time, the Soviet Union was making rapid strides with industrialization and experienced no unemployment which appealed to workers in much of the rest of the world.
Neo-liberals, on the other hand, saw the state as interfering in their pursuit of profits and wanted to remove all restrictions on their activities. And they definitely wanted to roll back the gains made by labor, gains which cut into their profits. Thus they wanted to counter any ideas of the common good and replace them with ideas that advocated individual self interest. The pursuit of individual wealth was seen as resulting in the greatest good of all.
One of Rand's students, Alan Greenspan, became one of the most powerful actors on behalf of this philosophy and neo-liberalism. In 1974 in told the NY Times:
What she [Rand] did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism was not only efficient and practical, but also moral.Since the 1970s this neo-liberal thinking was promulgated through numerous right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Under the powerful influence of media controlled by the ruling class, these influences have permeated all institutions of society. Thus, it is not surprising that young people today exhibit such beliefs.