Gad Saad on this persistent political and cultural disease:
Various books on empathy and how it should properly be understood have appeared over recent years. They do not disparage empathy, rightly understood, but they do remind us that like most good things, empathy can be greatly abused and misused. Consider just these three volumes:
Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (Sentinel, 2024)
Joe Rigney, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits (Canon Press, 2025)
Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (Broadside Books, 2026)
The most recent title dealing with empathy gone wrong is of course Saad’s important new book. In it he looks at how empathy, wrongly understood and applied, is causing havoc throughout the West. Early on in the book Saad tells us that “Suicidal empathy is a manifestation of a … dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue. More specifically, it is maladaptively hyperactive.” He looks at obsessive-compulsive disorder as an example: “An adaptive process (checking for threats) becomes maladaptive when it misfires.” (p. 11)
The 200-page book looks at many examples of this. Here I want to focus on just one area: the political and economic, especially his assessment of communism and socialism, and how those who espouse and promote these ideologies are guilty of suicidal empathy. Indeed, they are involved in civilisational suicide. Consider several lengthy quotes from Chapter 7: “Govern Me Harder, Daddy!”
Saad begins the chapter this way:
A foundational tenet of the US Constitution is the principle of limited government. This is in sharp contrast with overreaching centralized governments, which are always justified via an appeal to empathy. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which laid the groundwork for the American welfare state, as well as Joseph Stalin’s Soviet propaganda, both relied heavily on mass empathy appeals. How ironic that the two great adversaries of the eventual Cold War each recognized the effectiveness of empathy-based appeals to justify their respective societal visions. People’s levels of empathy and their beliefs in communism are positively correlated. To the extent that communism purports to create utopian equality for all, it makes sense that the more empathetic you are, the more you are likely to support this failed ideology. Interpersonal empathy is positively correlated with one score on the government intervention scale, an item of which is “I think that the government needs to be a part of leveling the playing field for people from different racial groups.” In other words, woke social justice, as instituted by the benevolent welfare state, runs through the empathy module. If you score high on empathetic ability and you do not believe that you possess personal agency over your successes or failures in life, you are more likely to support social welfare programs. (pp. 135-136)
Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kindby Saad, Gad (Author)
He goes on to say this:
Communism and socialism are roughly the same system, albeit they vary in how Unicornia, the land of mythical egalitarianism, is implemented. Marxism is the philosophy that guards the implementation of socialism and communism. Socialists are somewhat nicer in the ways by which they seek to create the socialist dream (e.g., via the ballot box), whereas communists are less concerned with such niceties and prefer a swift implementation of their goals (be it by killing their detractors or sending them off to gulags, and other “rehabilitation” centers). Notwithstanding these small differences in how Unicornia is to be implemented, these ideologies are all rooted in misguided empathy. Several evolutionary-based scholars have argued that since the human mind evolved within an ecosystem consisting of small groups, the economic intuitions that people hold apply to small-scale economic systems (e.g., zero-sum thinking and the supposed unfairness of economic inequality). Hence, the persistent appeal of socialism and communism, despite their abject failure everywhere that they have been implemented, rests in a naive understanding of economic systems known as folk economics. It seems inherently unfair that some people make $50 million per year whereas others have to get by on $50,000. This might perhaps explain why people living in capitalist societies continue to be enticed by the promise of the supposed fairness of communism, notwithstanding the fact that “[c]ommunism’s redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property, and economic control are quite an alluring vision to the general populace because of the equality and stability it promises. Although communism masquerades as justice, it is the worst kind of inverted egalitarianism.” (p. 137)
He notes the failed experiments of Utopian Socialist Robert Owen and his son Robert Dale Owen in New Harmony, Indiana, and then says this:
The quest for radical equality as envisioned by the Utopians, socialists and communists will always fail because it is contrary to human nature. The establishment of hierarchies within human societies is a universal reality, albeit there are ecological conditions wherein it would have been adaptive to promote a form of egalitarianism to maintain cohesion among a group. Socialism relies on misguided application of the egalitarian ethos, dooming it to always fail. “The advocates of socialism generally condemned selfishness and advocate altruism. They want to make a better world, improve human relationships, establish fairness and equality. These are, indeed, noble goals, but they ignore the emotions that guaranteed equality in our evolutionary past. And they ignore the inescapable fact that the conditions that produced equality in ancestral human bands no longer exist.” Perhaps no Western leader was more adept at explaining the falsity of radical socialist egalitarianism as the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady fully recognized that socialism was a gigantic Ponzi scheme, as evidenced by her now famous quote: “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” While it is often argued that the welfare state is a generous entity, there is nothing generous about exhibiting largess with other people’s hard-earned money: “The concept of generosity is not operative, one way or the other, in any of the roles that are essential or distinctive to the welfare state.” Despite its failure in every society in which it has been tried, the socialism phoenix rises from the ashes of devastation fueled by the allure of empathetic fairness.
Political systems and associated policies that are incongruent and antithetical to key features of our evolved human nature will always fail, of which socialism/communism is a telling example. It has been repeatedly tried in countless countries with the same outcome: abject failure. Of course, the refrain is always the same: If only True Socialism were implemented, we would achieve Unicornia, a mythical utopia that solely exists in the deep recesses of the minds of leftist utopians…. (pp. 138-139)
After looking at areas such as taxation, healthcare and the military, Saad finished the chapter with these words:
The parasitically gluttonous welfare state rooted in the spirit of utopian socialism destroys the spirit of freedom and liberty. It imposes a punishing system of taxation meant to create empathetic equality across people. The compassionate nanny state is unconcerned with the bloating of governmental programs and the asphyxiating intrusion into our daily lives. Remember, they enslave the most productive members of society for a greater collective good. Once the suicidal empathy of socialism is coupled with the degeneracy of woke ideology, you are no longer a free and dignified human being, but an empathetic worker ant slaving for a greater common goal. (p. 155)
Saad closes his book as follows: “I end with the following reminder, which I first posted on my social media: ‘A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct. It truly is that simple’.” (p. 167)
He is certainly on to something here. Good intentions alone are not enough. The consequences of our intentions must be closely examined. Simply being ‘empathetic’ without giving due diligence to how that might work out in the real world is no virtue.
I urge you to get this book, read it, and share it with a friend.
Perhaps retuning to the three strikes your out rule may limit the empathy practice.