In his new book, “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind” (Broadside Books), out May 12, Dr. Gad Saad explores how liberal politics have too often led societies to collapse. Here he explains how empathy sounds good — until it ends up permitting all manner of bad behavior and chaos. 

Empathy is an admirable virtue; as a social species, we have evolved the capacity for empathy. We seek prospective spouses and close friends who exhibit this trait.

We look for empathetic health care providers, be they physicians, therapists, or veterinarians.

But as Aristotle explained millennia ago via his golden mean, all good things in moderation. Too little or too much of anything is often worse than some optimal sweet spot. 

This insight applies to empathy as well. Little or no empathy is a hallmark of psychopaths. Too much of it is a telltale sign of the suicidally empathetic, which also includes invoking empathy in the wrong situations for the wrong targets.

Suicidal empathy results in the misfiring of an adaptive virtue in ways that result in the willful suicide of one’s civilization. In Japan, seppuku was the act of self-disembowelment that a samurai would commit to redress the shame of his actions.

I argue that the West is committing civilizational seppuku via suicide by empathy.

In his gargantuan, 12-volume “A Study of History,” famed British historian Arnold J. Toynbee examined the factors that cause civilizations to go extinct, the key insight of which has been summarized as follows: “Civilizations die from suicide, and not by murder.”  

Examples of suicidal empathy abound throughout the West, but I’ll focus here on examples from New York and California precisely because they lean heavily toward the Democrats, the party of empathy. On 9/11, the skyline of New York City was irrevocably altered when Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the Twin Towers.

Less than 25 years later, New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani as their mayor, a man who heretofore had few if any substantive professional accomplishments and who is deeply committed to promoting his Islamic and socialist ideals.

Mamdani, via his “radiant,” inauthentic smile, will usher in a new era of empathetic income redistribution to fight against the ogrish and mean capitalists.

That many productive and wealthy New Yorkers will likely flee the new socialist regime is inconsequential; the socialist revolution must march forward. While running for mayor, Mamdani explained how after 9/11, his “aunt” was apparently too afraid to wear her hijab due to New Yorkers’ rampant Islamophobia.

Mamdani’s reaction reminds me of the prophetic tweet by the late Canadian comedian Norm MacDonald in 2016: “What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?” 

New York City, the capital of capitalism and the historic center of Jewish life in the United States, has seen an exponential increase in Muslim migrants, which engenders new realities including massive Islamic public prayers in Times Square. 

It is perhaps not surprising that New York City has experienced an astounding increase in hate crimes targeting Jews. Demography is indeed destiny, and failure to recognize that not all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate within the fabric of American life is the height of suicidal empathy. 

Most Americans suffer from what I labeled a lack of cultural theory of mind. They wrongly presume that compassion, tolerance, and empathy are interpreted in similar ways across cultures. Regrettably, that which we view as commendable virtues are construed as feminized weakness by other societies. 

California is another state that is severely afflicted with suicidal empathy. Take, for example, the ruinous 2025 Los Angeles fires that destroyed so many lives.

Kristine Larson, LA deputy fire chief, was quick to explain the importance of diversity, inclusion and equity when hiring firefighters: “You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it’s a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.”

If you are an overweight queer woman with a prosthetic leg about to be consumed by a raging fire, it is best that your firefighter be a double amputee obese queer woman rather than an athletic, able-bodied heterosexual man.

Suicidal empathy also yields California’s irrational policies to address the homelessness crisis and recidivist criminality.

Apparently, homeless people and habitual felons do not have any personal agency. Hence, to “punish” them when they are the real victims of an unfair society is mean-spirited. To require the homeless to seek treatment in mental health facilities or addiction centers is unkind.

It is best to build them luxury towers to the tune of around $600,000 per dwelling. Californian politicians are very empathetic with taxpayer funds. Suicidal empathy is also the engine that shapes soft-on-crime policies including classifying thefts under $950 as misdemeanors and narrowing the “three strikes” law for recidivist felons.  

When he was 24 years old, Darryl Lamar Collins committed two murders and was serving 50 years to life. Under a “youthful offender” provision, he was paroled after having served only 25 years and committed a third murder less than one year after his suicidally empathetic release.

Incidentally, California residents are so compassionate toward killers that they signal their suicidal empathy even from the grave. In 2023, Jen Angel was murdered during a robbery in Oakland. Her loved ones were quick to point out that Angel would not want her murderers to be sent to prison. Angel may be dead, but at least she stayed true to her angelic empathy.  

Californians are also very kind toward Mother Earth. Their climate-based empathy served as the debatable justification for building a train linking Los Angeles to San Francisco. Given the endless delays, it has now been dubbed the “train to nowhere” and its estimated cost has ballooned to nearly three times the original estimate.

This is immaterial to the suicidally empathetic as they are not tethered to trade-off calculations. They do not bother to weigh the pros and cons of policies. Their decisional landscape is solely populated by a calculus of empathy. When unsure about which policy to choose, they invariably pick the one that garners the immediate empathy-based dopamine hit.  

Suicidal empathy is a civilization malady that has entered every nook and cranny of our lives. During her 2022 confirmation hearings to the US Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson was unwilling to define what a woman was. She flippantly retorted that she was not a biologist. This is precisely why I always seek the expert advice of a veterinarian prior to adopting a dog. I do not possess the necessary knowledge to differentiate between a giraffe, a cow or a dog. That the 117 billion people that have existed on Earth were perfectly capable of solving the conundrum of identifying the two sexes is apparently immaterial.  

Trans activists have parasitized our collective minds via an appeal to suicidal empathy. That thousands of women have had to experience the injustice of having their rightful places on the podium stolen or having to share the showers with “women” with penises is unimportant. In the calculus of suicidal empathy, the rights of one “trans woman” weigh much more heavily than those of actual women. 

We still have time to implement rational auto-corrective policies, but time is quickly running out. As Americans head off to the ballot boxes for the midterm elections, it is crucial that voters not succumb to the allure of policies that promise to deliver an immediate empathy-based dopamine hit. Supporting open borders might allow you to admire your reflection in the Mirror of Moral Preening, but life is not comprised solely of first-order effects.

The consequences of your votes have long-term consequences, some of which have the potential of destroying the foundational fabric of the United States. Well-modulated empathy is admirable; unrestrained suicidal empathy is lethal.

Dr. Gad Saad is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of the book “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind” (Broadside Books, out May 12).