Misguided Empathy Is Killing Us

By Gad Saad

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.

 

There is something unique about the West’s feverish desire to commit collective suicide by misguided empathy. Interestingly, in his mammoth twelve-volume A Study of History, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee explained why civilizations die. This has since been summarized by the following maxim: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” The general argument is that societies decay because of the self-inflicted failures of their elites in a myriad of ways. The American philosopher James Burnham echoed that sentiment in his 1964 book Suicide of the West, wherein he proclaimed: “It may be added that suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization” and added that “[L]iberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” I posit that in the current zeitgeist, the collective suicide of the West is occurring via the orgiastic misfiring of one of our most noble virtues, empathy, which of course is deeply anchored within the ethos of progressive liberals.

 

Empathy misfires akin to how a wide range of human emotions can also malfunction. Take, for example, anger. It can be a useful emotion when deployed at the right moment and in the right amount. If someone attacks you in an alley, you will experience an autonomic affective response, including fear and anger, which will permit you to mount an appropriate defensive behavioral pattern. However, if you become insanely angry in otherwise innocuous situations, you might need to enroll in an anger management class. A key precept of Stoicism is that oftentimes what harms us is not an actual event but the adverse reaction to said event. Hence, the Stoics would propose that when facing a situation that might trigger our ire, remain calm and composed. I recently held a chat with Donald J. Robertson on his podcast, in which we discussed the difference between how the Stoics viewed anger and how anger might be analyzed from an evolutionary lens. I disagreed with the view that anger is a useless and irrational emotion, or, as the ancient Roman Stoic Seneca referred to it, a “temporary madness.” Anger is clearly within our emotional repertoire, and it can lead to one of the seven deadly sins if it is poorly regulated (wrath). That said, it cannot be true that humans have somehow outgrown their need ever to be angry, as this would be akin to positing that anger is a vestigial emotion. Vestigial traits or behaviors are those that were once selected by evolution but no longer confer any adaptive benefits (e.g., wisdom teeth). Clearly though, the potential for anger has many functional and adaptive purposes. One of the main reasons that person A does not attack person B to steal their coveted resources is the recognition that such an attack might be met with anger-fueled retaliatory violence. A society wherein all its members adhere to deontological pacifism (an inviolable absolute principle) would quickly be overrun by other tribes that do not share this penchant for kumbaya. It is rather trivial to demonstrate the game theoretic outcomes of such an interaction. Absolute pacifists will always be victimized. Hence, human aggression, anger, physical formidability, and revenge (and forgiveness) all possess clear adaptive benefits. Deontological pacifists suffer from suicidal empathy in that they shut off adaptive mechanisms meant to ensure their survival, in the service of a maladaptive worldview.

 

To reiterate, emotions exist because they help us solve evolutionarily important problems. This holds true whether we are dealing with positive emotions (empathy, kindness, contentment, love) or negative ones (anger, disgust, guilt, envy). That said, our emotional system can go awry in several ways, resulting in suboptimal outcomes, be it at the individual or societal levels. First, our emotions can lead us astray when they are deployed in contexts when it would serve us best to invoke our reasoning faculty. Humans have evolved cognitive and emotional systems to address key challenges that arose in our ancestral past. As I explain in The Parasitic Mind, the feeling-versus-thinking dichotomy is a false one. The problem arises when we invoke the wrong system in a particular situation. When voting for a political candidate, people end up being largely driven by their emotions (“Donald Trump disgusts me”) rather than by a coherent set of cognitive justifications (“I disagree with Donald Trump’s immigration and fiscal policies for reasons X, Y, and Z”). Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign strategy was to precisely invoke people’s affective system (joy and fun) rather than their cognitive one, knowing full well that she did not stack well on substantive matters. The electorate did not fall prey to the affective ruse, leading to a decisive victory for Donald Trump. Suicidal empathy is a manifestation of such a systems failure whereby a noble virtue is hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis rooted in our reasoning faculty.

 

Emotional dysregulation is a feature of many psychiatric disorders. Too much anxiety and sadness can lead to a clinical bout of depression. Emotional dysregulation, though, is not solely reserved for the hyperactivation of negative emotions (sadness, anger, anxiety). It can also stem from the dysregulation of positive emotions. Laughter is medically therapeutic, as I briefly explained in “The Saad Truth about Happiness.” It is wonderful to adopt a playful mindset in life. But there are times when laughter is activated in wrong situations and in the wrong amounts. Emotional incontinence (pseudobulbar affect) is one such disorder where patients can laugh hysterically in profoundly inappropriate manners. If you have seen The Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, you know exactly what I am referring to. There are several haunting scenes where his character laughs uncontrollably, the condition ostensibly arising from the severe childhood abuse that he had suffered. Of course, inappropriate laughter is not restricted to infamous villains in the movies. The cackler Kamala Harris can go toe-to-toe with the Joker when it comes to cringey laughter.

 

Suicidal empathy is a manifestation of a similar dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue. More specifically, it is maladaptively hyperactive. There are many instances of such a misfiring, namely an adaptive process becomes hyperactive. Take, for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which is often rooted in a targeted fear. It makes perfect evolutionary sense that humans have evolved an assiduous scanning of environmental threats (e.g., washing our hands to avoid germ contamination; checking that the front door is locked). The problem with OCD is that the checking is stuck in an infinite loop. Hence, rather than washing one’s hands once and moving on with the day, an OCD sufferer will spend several hours washing their hands in scalding-hot water. An adaptive process (checking for threats) becomes maladaptive when it misfires. I used this argument in The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption and The Consuming Instinct to explain dark side consumption (e.g., pathological gambling, pornography addiction, compulsive buying, eating disorders). For example, women constitute the great majority of compulsive buyers, albeit their product hoarding largely occurs within the beautification domain. An adaptive process (beautifying oneself) becomes hyperactive, leading to many downstream negative consequences (financial ruin, divorce).

 

The misfiring of an otherwise adaptive emotional response is a common feature of the human condition. Take, for example, crying along with the production of tears. As far back as Charles Darwin in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, scientists have explored the evolutionary roots of this response, its equivalent counterpart in other animals, along with its universality notwithstanding culture-specific norms regarding its expression. Generally speaking, crying serves as an honest signal of distress that activates parental or social support from the receiver of the signal (e.g., parent tending to an infant, offering succor to one’s best friend post a romantic heartbreak). Crying is such an important feature of the human condition that there are countless idioms that reference it, including “cry me a river,” “for crying out loud,” “a voice crying in the wilderness,” and “it’s a crying shame.” Two idioms, though, refer to how people engage in either fake crying (“crocodile tears”) or hyperactive alarmism (“cry wolf”). In a classic Seinfeld episode titled “The Understudy” (season 6, episode 24), Jerry is annoyed by his girlfriend who has a habit of easily crying for minor issues that should otherwise not trigger such a response. He is forced to repeatedly console her. In other words, even an otherwise honest signal of our emotional state (happy or sad) can be coopted deceptively or in a dysregulated manner. The same occurs with suicidal empathy.