Suicidal empathy has become a popular phrase to depict well-intentioned policies that bring about negative results. I have a much harsher view: I don’t think those who champion destructive policies are well-intentioned.
First Principles: Pity and compassion are not the same.
Beneath the Surface: Explaining the perverse motives behind the “empathy” class and why that word doesn’t describe them properly.
From the Archives: Eric Hoffer and James Burnham on the kind of person who joins a moral crusade and politicians who claim to be implementing the will of the people.
"The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular."
— Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Pity Is Not Compassion
Compassion is an emotional response to the suffering of a specific person.
It is immediate and personal, grounded in face-to-face relationships, and private rather than performative.
Pity, by contrast, is often directed towards groups or humanity in general. It often abstracts and focuses on “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and “the marginalized.”
Once a pitier claims to represent the suffering of an entire class or nation, almost any action can be justified.
If millions are suffering, then imprisoning or executing thousands become necessary in the pursuit of a “humanitarian” goal.
The Politics of Pity
Western civilization has spent the last decade arguing over whether empathy should be its highest value. Some call it a superpower, others a pathology.
Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy came out in May and went straight to number one on the New York Times list. Elon Musk championed it, and had already told Joe Rogan that “the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” In June, John C. Reilly said the opposite: “Empathy is not a trap — empathy is a superpower.” Last week a resurfaced clip of Anne Hathaway, speaking at a Human Rights Campaign dinner, went viral. She declared that everything about how she was born had placed her at the center of a damaging myth — that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender around cisgender, and all races around whiteness — and closed on a promise to the room that together they would not merely question that myth: “we are going to destroy it.”
We no longer need to rely on rhetoric to settle this. The policies built on so-called empathy have a record now, and the record is disastrous. Safe supply programs worsened addiction and homelessness. Lenient bail and sentencing reform arrived alongside a crime wave. Mass migration fragmented communities, drove up the cost of living, and suppressed wages. Billions of tax dollars administered on behalf of Indigenous communities have not improved material conditions on the reserves. Teens with gender dysphoria were given life-altering hormones on an evidence base that was never established in the first place.
The policies marketed as compassion have produced no tangible benefit. Many of these catastrophic disasters are now being swept under the rug. Some jurisdictions are reversing course, but none are learning the lesson. The comforting takeaway would be that these were good intentions inside a rational worldview, and they simply failed the people they were meant to help. I think they succeeded, once you reframe the motive behind them. Consider how Hathaway finished. The goal she named was destruction.
So while the failure of each individual policy is now undeniable, the worldview that produced all of them remains in full effect. Until we strip the moral cover of empathy away from that worldview, it will keep conjuring new ways to destroy the status quo and marketing them as compassion.
An Inversion of Truth
I’ve seen multiple people and pages contrast Elon’s claim that empathy will be the downfall of Western civilization with a quote attributed to Hannah Arendt — the philosopher of totalitarianism: “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Except there’s one problem… nobody can produce a source for it. We can’t even call this a fib or a paraphrase of something she stated. It is closer to an anti-truth, where it’s not merely wrong but a complete inversion of the truth, considering Arendt wrote about this at length and argued close to the opposite.
In On Revolution she contrasted the American and French revolutions, asking why the former produced a republic and the latter a reign of terror and mass murder. Her answer was that while the American Founding Fathers focused on building a stable government of checks and balances, the French were much more concerned with reorganizing society and enacting perceived justice (murder) on the aristocratic class.
Instead of pragmatic political thought, the Jacobins implemented what Arendt called a politics of pity. She — much like Musk — understood that this is not the same as true compassion. Pity relies on the spectacle of suffering observed by those who do not suffer, creating a distinction between the fortunate and the unfortunate, a hierarchy where the pitier gets to feel superior, and a “moralizing” politics that ignores the rule of law or universal principles.
Arendt argued that pity is what allowed Robespierre to justify the terror. The desire to eradicate suffering for the “miserable” masses overrode any respect for individual rights or legal procedures. She had made a version of this argument years earlier in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Once you see yourself as speaking on behalf of the sufferer, you’ve actually replaced the sufferer. Speaking for the pitied, instead of speaking to them.
This brings us back to empathy and why I don’t believe it to be an accurate description of the motivations of progressives.
The Trojan Horse of Empathy
The preachers of equality justify their beliefs and policies by appealing to empathy. Although it would seem they don’t even understand what it means to be empathetic.
Merriam-Webster defines empathy as “understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings of another.”
That is not what elites and progressives are doing. They do not understand the people they claim to care about. Instead, they project their own idealized vision of themselves onto them. They assume everyone shares their values, then treat that false assumption as empathy. “The third worlder is no different than me,” they think, with zero understanding of that person’s culture. The best example of this isn’t even a moral issue but a practical one. It is considered racist if you think newcomers are worse drivers. Except am I really to believe that someone who spent their whole life driving in India — where the roads are pure chaos — is going to get behind the wheel in a Western nation and instantly have internalized all of the different driving etiquette and regulations? To empathize with these people would be to understand their experience, which would lead you to recognize it’s quite different from our own.
None of the revolutionary leftist “empathy” survives a collision with reality. Adam Smith argued that feelings do not scale and never will. He described “the man of system,” who is so pleased with his noble ideas for society that he thinks he can arrange people on a board like chess pieces, while forgetting the pieces he’s rearranging have motions of their own. Believing you can take people inculcated in their own society and culture, learning one set of norms and behaviors, then import them into a culture with different norms and behaviors with no negative consequences, is akin to trying to move a pawn horizontally. The entire game breaks down.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of history’s greatest novelists, beautifully depicted the issue with abstract pity. Love in dreams (ideals) is greedy. It’s good for applause but little else. True love requires action. It’s easy to say that one must love their neighbors in the abstract or in political theory. It’s much more difficult to do so when face to face with your actual neighbors who are hard to love.
This is the totality of the leftist revolutionary spirit: love and care in the abstract but never actualized. The highly influential leftist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose work birthed the “noble savage” myth, wrote an entire book on how to raise a child, yet abandoned five of his own.
Projection and a superiority complex explain this phenomenon much better than true empathy.
The Caretaker Needs the Sick
A worldview that persists despite its unending list of failures is not interested in truth but power.
Consider how these people respond to the breakdown of their policies. They don’t believe that multiculturalism itself fails but that they didn’t implement it hard enough, that they didn’t propagandize the host nation into forced compassion hard enough. It’s not that gender dysphoria is actually a mental illness; it’s that they didn’t normalize it enough. It’s not that safe supply failed but that it was not scaled up enough. Decriminalization isn’t a bad idea; we simply didn’t provide the criminals with enough free things and support programs before implementing it.
Friedrich Nietzsche put suicidal empathy into his own words nearly a century and a half before Saad. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes about a society grown so “pathologically soft and tender that it sides even with those who harm it.” Once it reaches this stage, he noted, anything which raises a man above the herd and intimidates his neighbor is declared evil. Mediocrity becomes the highest achievement.
A year later, in the Genealogy of Morals, he took this thought further, to what I believe is a more accurate analysis. He describes the ascetic priest who does not cure suffering but redirects it and uses it to his own benefit. He gives the sufferer someone to blame, while his authority grows in exact proportion to how sick his subjects stay. Empathy cannot explain a moral system that harms those it claims to serve. But envy and resentment do.
George Orwell saw the same pathology play out in his time. In The Road to Wigan Pier he wrote that most middle-class socialists, while theoretically pining for a classless society, “cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige.” Elsewhere in the same chapter he casts doubt upon the notion that the intellectual, tract-writing socialist’s real motive is love of anybody, least of all the working class, from whom he is the furthest removed.
Rob Henderson has a framework that helps build on Orwell’s observation. He calls them luxury beliefs: opinions and ideas that confer status upon those who hold them but harm people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. An example he uses is the Defund the Police movement. Upper-middle-class educated whites supported the idea much more than impoverished minorities, who are the true victims of unchecked crime.
I’ve experienced this first hand. A woman I knew in high school messaged me to say how sad it was that I had become an unemployed incel ranting about feminism from my parents’ basement. Which simply wasn’t true. I had a stable job, my own business on the side, an apartment, a girlfriend, and the videos I made were a hobby. I take no offense at this attempt at an insult, because the fact that it was used as an insult proves my point. This is a woman who proclaimed she cared about the disaffected, unemployed, homeless, and social outcasts. Then the moment she wanted to cast me as beneath her, all of those labels became weapons. A socialist did the same thing on a video of mine about subsidizing the unproductive. His argument was that he is an engineer who contributes to society and I am a high school graduate who has produced less economic value than him, so my opinion does not count. He claimed to want a society reorganized around people at the bottom, but then tried to place me there as a way to discount my perspective.
This is why I think suicidal narcissism describes their behavior better than suicidal empathy. And it is genuinely suicidal, even for them. They sit on top of a structure while eroding the layers beneath them. The social status payoff for these luxury beliefs is immediate; the collapse that follows takes decades. They get all the short-term personal benefits, while collectivizing the long-term downfall.
The Vanity of the Selfless
Eric Hoffer, who wrote The True Believer, and James Burnham, who wrote The Machiavellians, never heard of DEI or safe supply programs, but between them they described the kind of person who builds such things and the kind of ideology that lets him. Hoffer explains why those who market themselves as selfless are so often people who have lost faith in their own ability and joined a movement as a matter of psychological survival. Burnham argues that the will of the people is a convenient escape hatch for those in power, casting blame for their failures onto the people who supposedly wanted them.
