Okay, but on X/Twitter I regularly see people quoting this in a supportive fashion. So it isn't clear it is a joke.
If you are letting “empathy” drive your civilization to ruin, it is no longer empathy. That is the point.
In contrast, we know that lack of empathy directly leads to atrocities:
> In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy. —Captain G. M. Gilbert