The West’s Suicidal Empathy | Gad Saad

Empathy is a cornerstone of human cooperation. It allows us to understand other minds, to care, and to act on behalf of those in need. But like any adaptive trait, empathy can misfire. When it becomes hyperactive, misdirected, or treated as the ultimate moral test, it can produce outcomes that harm the very people it intends to help.

I call this phenomenon suicidal empathy: compassion so badly calibrated that it undermines social order, justice, and flourishing.

A Personal Lesson in Identity Politics

I grew up in a tiny Jewish community in Lebanon. That upbringing taught me, in ways textbooks never could, how organizing society by group identity warps civic life. Before the Lebanese Civil War, hateful chants and casual threats were part of everyday reality.

A classmate once stood in front of our school and announced he wanted to grow up to be a “Jew killer” to applause. My brother, a national judo champion, was told to retire for the authorities’ convenience. Small humiliations, and later much worse, added up.

Those experiences shaped two convictions. First, systems that anchor political power and civil status to collective identity—religion, ethnicity, or any group marker—invite exclusion, resentment, and violence. Second, immigration and cultural change are not abstract policy choices; they have tangible consequences for minorities and social cohesion. Saying that is not bigotry. It is the prudential lesson of having lived through a society organized around identity labels.

Defining Suicidal Empathy

Empathy evolved because the theory of mind and emotional resonance solved real social problems. But evolution does not guarantee perfect moderation.

The parallels are useful. Cancer cells are ordinary cells gone rogue; obsessive-compulsive disorder is an adaptive avoidance mechanism pushed to pathological extremes. Empathy behaves the same way.

Suicidal empathy occurs when our compassion becomes overgeneralized or misdirected. Instead of protecting victims and stabilizing norms, it prioritizes perpetrators, outsiders, or abstract identities. The moral intuition flips: the person who harms is treated as the primary object of compassion because they are framed as a victim of larger social forces. Meanwhile, actual victims receive less moral attention and less protection.

Classic moral puzzles reveal this calibration problem. In forced-choice empathy—whose life matters most—humans reliably favor close kin and proximate sufferers. That is not cruelty; it is an evolved, functional bias. Suicidal empathy denies these evolved heuristics when they still make sense, and that denial can produce catastrophic moral calculus.

Where Did This Miscalibration Come From?

Several cultural and psychological forces have converged to fuel suicidal empathy:

• Moral signaling and virtue performance. In some circles, the appearance of radical compassion confers social status. The nobility lies not in the outcomes produced but in the public demonstration of being the most compassionate.
• Externalizing causality. A pervasive tendency to explain personal and social failure in terms of systems and oppression—that is, to attribute bad outcomes almost entirely to external forces—reduces individual agency and elevates categorical victimhood.
• Historical narratives turned into policy shorthands. Legitimate historical grievances become universalized moral claims that demand present-day redress in ways that can distort institutions and laws.
• A contagion effect. As sexual selection amplifies a peacock’s tail, social rewards for extreme compassion create feedback loops that encourage increasingly radical expressions of empathy—even when those expressions are counterproductive.

Examples of Misdirected Empathy

The problem shows up in public policy and moral rhetoric. When the compassion of institutions and commentators is disproportionately directed at offenders—framing them as victims of structural injustice—then victims of crimes receive less protection and less moral recognition.

When immigration and multicultural policies ignore cultural practices that conflict with liberal norms, the consequences fall disproportionately on vulnerable groups within the host society.

There are also subtler forms. Prioritizing the feelings of ideological allies over objective outcomes, or valorizing civic penance, civilizational seppuku, to borrow a term, for perceived collective sins, can hollow out social norms that sustain liberty and order.

Is this a Left vs. Right Issue?

Suicidal empathy tends to be more prevalent on the progressive side of politics because of how certain psychological tendencies line up with ideological narratives: externalizing blame, elevating systemic explanations, and rewarding moral performance. That said, both sides misapply empathy in different ways.

On the right, empathy can be too narrow or misattributed. Economically displaced workers deserve compassion and real policy solutions. But empathy expressed only as protectionist tariffs or sentimental policies—without clear-eyed analysis of costs, trade-offs, and long-term effects—can also cause harm.

So the problem is not strictly partisan. It is about calibration: knowing when empathy should guide policy and when other moral primitives—justice, deterrence, individual dignity—must take precedence.

Practical Steps to Recalibrate Empathy

If empathy can be both virtue and vice, then the solution is prudence. Here are practical anchors to avoid suicidal empathy:

1. Aim for moderation. Aristotle’s golden mean applies: the right amount of empathy at the right time, toward the right target.
2. Prioritize victims and fairness. Compassion should protect the vulnerable and uphold basic rights. That means not letting empathy for offenders eclipse the needs of those harmed.
3. Insist on individual dignity over group determinism. Resist systems that sort political power by identity categories rather than by citizenship and individual rights.
4. Check causality. Ask whether policies rest on accurate causal claims. Are outcomes explained by structural forces, by individual choices, or by a mix of both? Policy responses should follow sound causal analysis.
5. Discourage moral preening. Reward concrete outcomes—safety, flourishing, equal opportunity—over virtue displays that produce no real benefits.
6. Build institutions that balance compassion with competence. Law enforcement, welfare systems, and educational institutions should be designed to resolve trade-offs, not to perform ethical theater.

Empathy is noble, but like all virtues it must be properly calibrated.

Conclusion

Empathy is essential. It binds families, communities, and nations together. But compassion without judgment, signaling without substance, and victim narratives without verification are recipes for social harm.

The challenge is to keep empathy as an instrument of flourishing—temperate, targeted, and guided by reason—rather than turning it into an ideology that self-destructs. That recalibration is not merely academic; it is a civic necessity.