Suicidal Empathy Is Real – But Its Opposite Has Its Own Risks

The first sentence of a recent report by the Irish Penal Reform Trust – a taxpayer-funded body that exists, by and large, to advocate for the elimination of almost all prison sentences – reads as follows: “Amid the cost-of-living, housing and mental health crises, it is no coincidence that people experiencing significant levels of poverty, deprivation and structural inequality are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.”

The basic argument will be familiar to anybody with a rudimentary understanding of modern progressive thinking. It transfers responsibility for crime away from the criminal and onto society. It posits that crime happens primarily because of social deprivation, or – to translate – that the existence of criminals is essentially society’s fault and not the fault of the criminals themselves, and that as such it is therefore unfair to punish the criminal for his actions beyond what is necessary to get him or her into a rehabilitation program in which the underlying grievances that caused their criminal actions might be redressed.

This is the kind of thing that Gad Saad was talking about in his best-selling book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. In that book, Saad argues that Western society is afflicted, across many policy areas and right into the depths of the culture, with a dangerous form of extreme empathy which – as his title suggests – has become suicidal. Many of our policymakers and thought leaders have come to sympathize more with the criminal than his victim; more with the migrant than the native; more with the transgender woman’s need for a bathroom than a young girl’s right to a single-sex space, and so on.

It is difficult to look around the modern West and not conclude that Saad is onto something. Yet it is also worth noting that the counterreaction to the idea of suicidal empathy on the right may be sailing dangerously close to the idea that there should be no empathy of any kind whatsoever. This conflict between extreme empathy on the one hand and a performative lack of empathy on the other is increasingly defining Western political conflict.

Bad Hombres

If one was to summarize the progressive case against Donald Trump’s character, one could do worse than to simply say: “They think he has no empathy.” The president’s broad characterization in a 2016 debate of Hispanic migrants as “bad hombres” was of course a reference to the reality that the Hispanic migrant community in the United States is overrepresented in, among other things, drug cartel arrests and prosecutions.

But to progressives, it sounded like Trump was painting with a broad brush: that the many people who flee to the United States from repressive regimes in South America, including from the terror inflicted by drug cartels, were all somehow tainted with the stench of criminality.

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In Europe, the migrant debate can often sound identical to progressive and even moderate ears. Last week, a summit on remigration was held in Portugal where radical-right voices from across the continent came together in support of the idea that tens of millions of people of migrant heritage must be asked – nay, told – to leave Europe. Including, presumably, many millions of law-abiding citizens who were born in Europe and know no other home.

Were such a policy adopted, even those who support it must surely recognize that it would create enormous social upheaval and conflict, in the service of a cause many progressives have come to see as deeply immoral and racist.

The Zero-Sum Game

One of the problems that might be diagnosed is that the great war over empathy has become a zero-sum game, waged between two sides that – as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said of the Sith – only deal in absolutes. On one side, a group of people whose empathy for the supposedly oppressed has become so absolute that it defines them to the exclusion of any ability to rationally balance the rights of the majority against the needs of their pet groups.

And on the other side, an increasingly radical counter-revolution that sees any empathy whatever for groups favored by progressives as a sign of intolerable weakness. It is a zero-sum game – especially in an environment where much political debate takes place online and in which the loudest and most extreme voices get the most attention.

This poses grave strategic risks for the right.

The most obvious is that the politics of immigration – to use the most prominent example – are deflected away from a focus on government decisions and instead onto a debate about the morality of migrants as a collective. This is particularly amplified online, where a quick and easy way to drive engagement on certain social media platforms is to post videos of individual migrants or, sometimes, simply dark-skinned people engaging in bad behavior.

Thus, the discussion is driven away from the immigration policies of government and onto the much more progressive-friendly turf of whether migrants themselves deserve to be held responsible for the actions of a minority of their number. When the debate is about the wisdom of government policy on this issue, conservatives tend to win. But when it is about whether a graduate student should be deported to Afghanistan because his parents fled from that country in 1994, progressives are on much stronger ground.

It is also simply not where the majority of the public appears to be. Consider the following opinion poll from Ireland, which seems to closely mirror European attitudes: asked whether immigration policy should be “more open”, “more closed” or “just right”, 59% chose more closed, while only 16% chose more open. But when asked whether immigration had been positive or negative for Ireland “on balance”, 48% said positive and 35% said negative. In other words, the public as a whole is able to distinguish between immigration policy at a high level and their relatively positive experiences with individual migrants or migrant groups at a more granular level.

In this way, neither progressives nor reactionaries are grasping for what might be the winning argument: that while immigration is a net positive for any society, migration into Europe has been too high for too long and needs considerable restriction moving forward.

When Suicidal Empathy Becomes Literal

But back to suicidal empathy, because the concept encompasses much more than simply crime and migration. It also manifests itself in other policy areas such as education and health.

Consider, literally, the case of assisted suicide: in March of this year, a Spanish woman called Noelia Castillo died by assisted suicide after a Spanish court ruled that she might be permitted to do so. Castillo sought death following a gang rape and a failed suicide attempt that left her paraplegic.

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In this instance, to be polemical, the state’s response to a grievous sexual crime was to organize the death of the victim, even as it would never countenance death for the perpetrators. Castillo’s desire to die was treated – one might say objectively – as much more important than society’s interest in her receiving justice for the crimes committed against her.

What does this case demonstrate? Well, for one, it demonstrates that empathy and compassion are not the same thing. By its decision, the Spanish state emphasized its empathy with Castillo – her desire to die was all that mattered. Yet no definition of compassion ever recorded in human history encompasses a policy of state killing, even as an act of mercy. The precedent is terrifying.

There exists, for example, a very rare psychological condition called body integrity dysphoria (BID) in which perfectly healthy people develop a desire to have healthy limbs amputated, or in extreme cases to have their spinal cords severed or their eyes removed so that they might live as a disabled person. Psychiatrists have recognized the condition as real and as manifesting. Should society cripple a person in that way? Should a surgeon blind somebody if that is their wish? The empathy afforded to Castillo would suggest, at minimum, that they should, since all of that is short of killing. Yet most of the public would be horrified at the suggestion, as would any student of medical ethics.

For the right, the challenge in all of this is to be the voice of compassionate reason and not to abandon empathy entirely, as some appear to be doing. To be the voice of sound policy, understanding and balancing the rights of competing groups against each other.

This does not mean retreat. It simply means understanding that empathy is a natural and good human instinct when used well. Understanding Gad Saad’s excellent work is essential if progressivism’s worst excesses are to be combated. But abandoning empathy in return is a recipe for either political failure or something much worse than that.