Suicidal empathy: is the West killing itself with kindness?
Abdul Ballout was a German citizen of Lebanese descent who’s alleged to have driven into a crowd at Berlin’s Pride Parade, before stabbing attendees – killing one and injuring several others. A year before, Ballout travelled to Lebanon in a bid to join ISIS. He was sentenced by Lebanese authorities to three months in prison, then deported to Germany. Yet, unlike in Lebanon, a German judge adopted a more enlightened approach, releasing Ballout on probation.
The German state was certainly empathetic towards a would-be ISIS fighter, free to wander around Berlin provided he participated in a once-a-week deradicalisation programme. But where was the German state’s empathy for Ballout’s victims?
This is just one example of so-called progressive policies that appear self-defeating, often justified by the need to protect one group at the top of the grievance league table while showing little regard for the interests and concerns of others. To what extent is this a vain exercise to prove one’s virtue and generosity?
Such an approach goes beyond the issues of immigration or safety. For example, net-zero strategy has undermined our own energy security and industrial base, justified in part by our generational guilt toward poorer countries that may suffer catastrophic effects from climate change. When attempts are made to reform welfare benefits, they are blocked by those who cry cruelty and stress the vulnerability of the millions now permanently caught in a dependency trap. Police chase down those guilty of “hate speech” while ignoring theft, grooming gangs and knife crime. The Church of England pays ‘reparations’ while its Parish roofs cave in. Psychiatrists are reluctant to incarcerate the dangerously psychotic; judges are reluctant to imprison those with protected characteristics; institutions elevate the desires of transgender women above those of biological women, all in the name of being kind.
Some argue that such self-destructive inverse morality – which prioritises compassion, understanding and empathy over national and rational self-interest – is in danger of dismantling the very pillars of Western society. Indeed, that is the thesis of Canadian Gad Saad’s bestselling book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.
On the other side, The Guardian drew a grim conclusion from Saad’s book, arguing that the trend seeks “to dismantle and discredit… our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering,” which is “a flashing red light warning of fascist intent.” Other critics dismiss it as “culture-war ideology dressed up as evolutionary insight,” arguing that prioritising family and community over culturally distant others amounts to little more than selfish othering of the vulnerable. Pope Leo XIV similarly rebuked the US Vice President’s case for prioritising one’s immediate circles, posting on X: “JD Vance is wrong… Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Regardless of religion, isn’t empathy a key ingredient in making functional societies work? How else might we justify caring for the elderly, collecting taxes to fund welfare provision and education? But have we gone too far in empathising with selective victim groups at the expense of the wider public interest? And if the answer is to wage war against empathy itself, how do we avoid going too far in the opposite direction, normalising cruelty and indifference?
