What Is Suicidal Empathy?

Suicidal empathy is compassion that fires too hard at the wrong target. Gad Saad says empathy is a wonderful virtue for a social species, and a real conversation needs cognitive empathy, or theory of mind. Aristotle taught several thousand years ago that too little of something is bad and too much is bad, so people have to find the middle. No empathy makes a person a psychopath. Empathy that hyperfires in the wrong situations toward the wrong target becomes suicidal empathy.

Society has moved away from logical questions such as whether an idea is right or wrong and whether two plus two equals four. Gad Saad says the demand now is empathy for a lived experience even to the detriment of others. In 2020 he wrote The Parasitic Mind about thought processes that get hijacked. Suicidal empathy is the same parasitism of the emotional system. Hijack both thinking and feeling, and you own the person. Cultural relativism, a parasitic idea, says nobody may judge another culture, even when it cuts off the clitorises of five-year-old girls or practices honor killings. Accept the idea and you cannot decide who should enter the country. Everybody is welcome, which makes open border policies a form of suicidal empathy. He sees the same pattern in transgenderism in sports: biological women lose a place on the podium while the transgender person is treated as holier and more worthy of empathy.