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they are not acting from their desires, they act to "desires" of capital (roi), like flesh puppets. They perfectly well can empathize with other humans, just their decision making won't be affected by it.
tim cook might think that trans mistreatment is very bad, he won't in million years antagonize usa president over it, cause he would get fired. Average boardroom meeting won't ever take a stand which would hit them monetarily over morality, cause "fiduciary" duties
The economics, that is, the distribution of material goods, of human societies have always been tied to the tribal, societal and communal aspects, whether it was in primitive hunter-gatherers tribes, early agricultural civilizations, the slave economy of the ancient societies, or the feudal system during the Medieval period. There has always been a human component rooted in the sociopolitical and economic arrangements even among class societies.
The bourgeois revolution of the 18th century was a watershed moment that completely transformed human societies beyond all recognition and severed this crucial link between a society and its economy. Bourgeois capitalism transcends and repudiates the human relationships that have embedded within the societal framework for thousands of years, in pursuit of endless accumulation of capital. A completely new form of societal arrangement emerged following the Industrial Revolution.
This is seen daily in the US as people who are not sufficiently useful to the regime are cast out, unhoused, sickened, and socially murdered. But because it's "their own fault" there are huge segments of the labor aristocracy who not as quietly as you might expect wish they would be cast into the meat grinder at a higher velocity.
It's also a quote from Disco Elysium
they have sold their souls/humanity for money and power.
when people of power lose all empathy for the rest of us.
It's not just a matter of empathy, though you are right that they certainly lack it. It's the fact that the very nature of their class position demands that they act cruelly or else get out-competed by someone who does, which is a widely unifying principle that is only set aside when a business that can't compete with its larger equivalents decides to instead cut out a tiny share of the market to appeal specifically to left-liberals who want to have "moral consumption" as part of their lifestyle brand.
Paulo Freire might be who youre looking for.
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity, has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to accept dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of aliena-tion, for the affirmation of men as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
The attempt to be more human, individualistically, leads to having more, egotistically: a form of dehumanization. Not that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it is necessary, some men’s having must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others’ having, to consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.
From Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
It's a willingness to divest themselves of their humanity, by dehumanizing others, in order to maintain class relations and further the accumulation of capital. In doing so they reduce everyone to objects or machines in service of capital. There is a parallel here with the conception of animals as not "having souls" and not feeling pain. It was not always this way in the western world, but came to be stripped from them in the process of historical development as a result of material conditions (The Christian conception of "dominion" thus allowing you to do whatever youd like to animals was not the causal factor, but apologia for the way things were - post hoc justification for the keeping of animals as property). Similarly there should be no surprise that the machine conception of the organism has arisen as a common way of thinking about the brain, people, animals, and so on. In some sense, it's true; we are all reduced to machines by capital, our agency and autonomy is subordinated to a hierarchy and collective conscious over which we have no say. But it becomes true of all of us. The bourgeois are not human - becoming bourgeois won't make you more human.
I really need to read that book.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
This isn't any sort of real philology on my part, but the class interests of the bourgeoisie put them at odds with the vast majority of humanity, and that remains as long as they have that class position. The broad benefit of society is typically even a detriment to them, as it diminishes the totalizing power over their monopolization of what were once the commons, their ability to inflict social murder. There is only one tolerable kind of bourgeois individual, and that is the traitor to their class interests, and even then the existence of those rogue elements must be used to further the project of the destruction of their class rather than as some insipid anecdote that they "aren't all bad" and therefore that class antagonism can be removed without removing classes.
And all of this is to serve capital, the organizing principal which dominates the actions of the bourgeoisie whether they like it or not, which itself is served by humans but is not human.
So taken literally, yes, obviously it's hyperbole, but I don't think you can identify an element of society for whom it is less hyperbolic than for the bourgeois.