Suicidal Empathy

Adaptive processes gone haywire. Saad models suicidal empathy on disorders like OCD, where an evolutionarily useful behavior (checking for germs or threats) gets stuck in a destructive loop. Drawing on evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse's framework of emotional malfunctions, he locates suicidal empathy in three failures: the response is too high, too excessive, and triggered by inappropriate cues.

The wrong-target problem. Humans evolved to discriminate in their care: parents protect their own children before strangers, kin before cousins. Saad's most jarring example is a Norwegian man, raped by a Somali immigrant, who felt wracked with guilt when his rapist faced deportation. This, Saad argues, is empathy pointed at exactly the person who harmed you, a violation of the coalitional psychology that distinguishes kin from foe, friend from threat.

Epistemological empathy. Saad argues that uncomfortable facts get suppressed not because they are false but because they might harm favored groups. He calls this treating truth as forbidden knowledge. If research on group differences, immigration and crime, or biological sex yields politically inconvenient results, it gets buried or attacked. The scientific method becomes subordinate to an "epistemology of care."

Faulty consequentialism. Saad distinguishes deontological principles (truth should be pursued regardless of outcome) from consequentialist ethics (weigh costs and benefits). He accuses progressives of selectively abandoning principles like free speech and presumption of innocence whenever the consequences threaten their politics. Examples include social media suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and journalists increasingly reporting a murderer's race only when the perpetrator is white, a pattern he says intensified sharply after George Floyd's death.

Cultural theory of mind. Extending the psychological concept of "theory of mind" (inferring others' mental states), Saad coins "cultural theory of mind": the ability to recognize that values like kindness and tolerance are interpreted differently across cultures. The West, he argues, lacks it. It assumes generosity extended to all immigrants will be reciprocated with gratitude and assimilation.

The categorization mistake. Saad's analogy: a hummingbird and a cassowary are both birds, but only one can disembowel you. Treating Elon Musk and a jihadist as equivalent simply because both are immigrants is, he says, a failure of basic cognitive categorization that even an amoeba avoids. He points to grooming-gang scandals in British cities, where authorities allegedly declined to act for fear of accusations of Islamophobia, as evidence that protecting a group's reputation was prioritized over protecting children.

Blank slate felons. Saad argues that progressive criminology, rooted in the belief that humans are born equal and shaped entirely by environment, removes personal agency from criminals. If society or systemic racism caused the crime, punishing the offender becomes a second victimization. He illustrates with recidivism data: roughly a third of U.S. male prisoners have had five or more prior incarcerations, meaning "second chances" are often fortieth chances.

Empathy inversion in action. Saad recounts cases where forgiveness backfired fatally, including a woman who helped free her mother's killer and offered him a job, only to be murdered by him. He ties this to the rejection of heroism (the prosecution of subway intervener Daniel Penny) and the celebration of what he calls "sneaky f ker" male feminists who perform empathy to gain status, borrowing a term from zoology for males that mimic females to sneak past dominant rivals.

Science is never settled. Invoking Karl Popper's falsification principle, Saad insists genuine science is always provisional. The phrase "settled science" is therefore anti-science, a conversation-stopper used to avoid weighing trade-offs. He cites the "Semmelweis reflex," named for the physician mocked for suggesting doctors wash their hands, and notes how many Nobel-winning ideas (H. pylori causing ulcers, kin selection) were first ridiculed by the orthodoxy.

Trade-off neglect. Saad argues COVID lockdowns, climate policy, and trans activism all relied on suppressing cost-benefit analysis via appeals to empathy. His sharpest example: 1,288 public health officials signed a letter declaring it too dangerous to attend funerals, yet endorsed mass Black Lives Matter protests as essential. As economist Thomas Sowell put it, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Suicidal empathy optimizes a single variable (compassion now) subject to no constraints.

Selling indulgences. Saad likens diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (which he relabels the "DIE cult") to the medieval Catholic practice of buying forgiveness for sins. Privileged elites expiate guilt over colonialism, slavery, and "existential privilege" by elevating identity over competence. He documents job postings restricted to specific gender or racial identities, university projects to "decolonize" physics, and medical training that he says proposes centering anti-racism over medical expertise.

The equality confusion. Saad sharply separates equality of opportunity (no institutional barriers) from equality of outcome (everyone ends in the same place). He argues the latter, championed in speeches about people starting on different bases, treats all group differences as evidence of injustice requiring correction, even innate differences in talent or interest. The result, he warns, is meritocracy attacked as itself a form of white supremacy.

Empathy fuels the leviathan. Saad argues that communism, socialism, and the welfare state all recruit empathy to justify expanding government. Research shows empathy correlates with support for wealth redistribution and government intervention. Because women score higher on empathy, he claims they are more drawn to socialism, and people tend to grow more conservative with age as experience corrects youthful idealism.

Parasitic taxation. Saad recounts paying over half his income to the Canadian and Quebec governments, including royalties on a book written from his own life, and feeling robbed. He invokes the boiling-frog parable: the U.S. income tax began in 1913 as a modest measure and the tax code ballooned from 27 pages to over 17,000. Citing Margaret Thatcher, socialist governments eventually run out of other people's money, while "free" Canadian healthcare leaves patients waiting years and dying on emergency-room benches.

Empathy as instant gratification. Saad's first inoculation is recognizing that suicidal empathy is a failure of delayed gratification, akin to Walter Mischel's marshmallow studies. The person holding a #RefugeesWelcome sign gets an immediate emotional reward while ignoring downstream consequences borne by future generations. Train yourself to see past first-order effects to the second and third-order chain reactions, the butterfly effect of policy.

Three more mental guardrails. Saad prescribes: reject the singular-exemplar bias (one sympathetic deportee does not invalidate border enforcement, just as one surgical death does not condemn surgery); reject the false-equality bias (people are equal under law but not in talents, and cultures are not equally likely to assimilate); and demand reciprocity. Citing Robert Axelrod's tournaments, where the Tit-for-Tat strategy won, he argues relationships without reciprocity become parasitic. Choose your empathy's targets as deliberately as people choose whom to give gifts.