'Suicidal Empathy': Is the West Committing Suicide-by-Compassion?
by Drieu Godefridi • January 30, 2026 at 5:00 am
According to [Gad] Saad's thesis, empathy becomes misdirected into a type of benevolent altruism that prioritizes the perceived feelings and needs of "marginalized" or external groups at the expense of the survival, security, and interests of one's own group and its values. The outcome is the weakening, and ultimately the destruction, of the very civilization that expressed this emotion.
The problem? This concept of suicidal empathy unfortunately does not work. As the term predicts, it ends up killing its host.
What we observe, however, in many people, is a highly selective empathy, precisely the opposite of caring about everyone. What shows up is an exclusive, and exclusionary, concern for certain groups — asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, people unhappy with their gender, racialized people (whatever that means), criminals, for example — at the same time paired with indifference or even open hostility toward other groups that might be equally minoritized, victimized, or marginalized.
What becomes harder to defend as genuine empathy is the increasingly common pattern of displaying loud, intense, public identification with distant victims while simultaneously showing indifference, contempt or outright hostility toward victims right under one's nose, here in one's own society, whose suffering is visible and immediate.
We might be dealing then with a moral posture, a political performance, a selected narrative for virtue or social status.
In short: selective empathy -- with selective hostility or indifference nearby -- is not "higher", "purer" or "more universal". It is just a posture wearing empathy's clothes.
Many people seem to be incubating a rage looking for somewhere to go. Dogmas that admit no dissent provide a perfect vehicle for that. This new rage appears to have nothing to do with empathy — or even selective empathy — but more with envy, frustration, and possibly opportunism, perhaps accompanied by large payments.
When there are real protestors out on the streets risking their lives, as recently in Iran, there is scant support. What vibrates in Western outbursts, on the left and on the right, appears to be rage looking for a cause, and constantly feeding on new dogmas. Sadly, there seems to be no shortage of them.
The theory of "suicidal empathy," taken up and developed by Canadian Professor Gad Saad in his book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, describes a psychological and societal condition in which excessive or misguided compassion leads Western societies — particularly, it seems, "progressive" ones — to adopt self-destructive attitudes and policies that will ultimately "succeed" in destroying them. The process, however well-intentioned, is a form of civilizational suicide.
According to Saad's thesis, empathy becomes misdirected into a type of benevolent altruism that prioritizes the perceived feelings and needs of "marginalized" or external groups at the expense of the survival, security, and interests of one's own group and its values. The outcome is the weakening, and ultimately the destruction, of the very civilization that expressed this emotion.
