The Consequences of Suicidal Empathy

American Thinker 

Rhamell Burke had been arrested four times since February 2nd for assault, burglary, drugs, and weapons charges. On May 7th he was released from New York’s Bellevue Hospital psychiatric facility, and a few hours later, he allegedly shoved seventy-six-year-old Ross Falzone down a flight of subway stairs, resulting in Falzone’s death. One of the prior assault charges involved a young woman who declined to press charges. The 23-year-old lady later said, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.” Reportedly, she now regrets her choice, the tragic consequence of which has been cited as an instance of suicidal empathy, or more accurately in this case, homicidal empathy.

The term “suicidal empathy” was coined by Professor Gad Saad, and his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, revolves around the concept. Rhamell Burke’s repeated low- or no-consequence legal encounters and the young woman’s confession about her mental disposition constitute two prime examples of the psychic malady in which compassion for ostensibly victimized groups is so overblown that it outweighs social well-being. Saad provides a plethora of additional examples, including attitudes toward illegal aliens, drug users, the homeless, transgenders, Hamas terrorists, and even socialism. These feelings are connected to destructive policies such as open borders, massive benefits for illegals, absurd indulgences for criminals, men in women’s sports, anti-merit DEI programs, and numerous redistribution efforts that reward failure and punish success.

Saad’s work is a valuable resource for identifying areas where empathy has been weaponized with palpably destructive results. Billed as an “evolutionary psychologist,” Saad is less focused when it comes to explaining the reasons behind what he frequently calls the “misfiring” (or even “orgiastic misfiring”) of the emotional system, thus linguistically linking suicidal empathy to a cerebral malfunction. Elsewhere in the book Saad points to a highly theoretical cognitive function: “The West’s lack of a cultural theory of mind is destroying our societies.” His primary focus, however, when it comes to the etiology of the affective malady, centers on academic institutions that spawned theories such as cultural relativism and deconstructionism, philosophical perspectives that undermine traditional ideas about truth and natural law. With intellectuals freed from the pursuit of truth, their endeavors moved toward emotionally driven projects as opposed to rational analysis of moral principles and hard evidence, especially in Saad’s case, evidence grounded in evolutionary development. (C.S. Lewis came to a similar conclusion in The Abolition of Manbased on the modern rejection of objective truth.)

Thus, it isn’t surprising that Saad cites with approval Thomas Sowell’s idea in The Vision of the Anointed about the intelligentsia espousing “policies that make them feel virtuous for their unlimited compassion while being decoupled from the actual consequences of their policies.” Unlike Las Vegas, ideas that originate in academia don’t stay there. The attitude of suicidal empathy, Saad observes, spreads like a contagion, as illustrated by the head-turning pace with which transgenderism infected the whole country bringing with it biological absurdities, the invasion of girls’ sports, and even the mutilation of children’s bodies for the sake of “gender affirmation.” Of course, this contagion wasn’t spread by germs floating in the air; it was spread by educational and media institutions controlled by Democrats, Socialists, and Marxists -- a sociological and political point obscured by Saad’s overreliance on biological and psychological perspectives.

My own term for the largely unscrutinized compassion associated with suicidal empathy is “utopian narcissism.” The policy of unlimited empathy is impractical and thus utopian, but the true reason for demanding compassion toward presumably victimized groups is, as Sowell observes, self-congratulation and not empathy. Thus, being ignorant of a policy’s negative consequences is essential to bolster one’s sense of moral superiority. In this regard, physical separation from those consequences, combined with political insularity, conspires with media complicity to enforce ignorance of rapes, murders, human trafficking, and drug deaths attributable, for instance, to Biden’s open border policy. Indeed, in California, identifying a criminal as an illegal alien by law enforcement or the media carries a professional stigma akin to use of the n-word. Better to hide the truth from Hollywood stars and a general public infected with suicidal (or narcissistic) empathy than to risk the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.

Another explanation I would propose for unlimited compassion is even crasser than the aforementioned ego-inflating rationale, namely, power. Political players often feign empathy as a cynical tool to gain support from various groups. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, their “empathy” secretly funded enemies of “victimized” groups to make it clear how important it was for like-minded folks to support their organization. If one wishes to add a Messianic savior complex to this cynical power play, that oxymoronic combo can’t be excluded.

In short, Saad is to be commended for delineating the large number of cases where empathy for supposedly victimized groups has suicidal consequences. His diagnosis of the academic origin of the contagion also has merit, though additional and simpler explanations are available as well. Saad’s heavy reliance on biological and psychiatric analytical tools, however, sometimes obscures motives that aren’t all that murky -- self-aggrandizement, cynical manipulation, self-hatred, power, and even the thrill (and benefits) of blindly identifying with an elite in-group under the guise of compassion.