'The West is really a miracle': Gad Saad deconstructs Suicidal Empathy

According to Gad Saad, when empathy is stripped of limits, trade-offs and self-protection, it stops being humane and starts being suicidal.

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, released this week, the longtime Canadian professor warns that countries like ours are turning that treasured virtue of empathy and dialling it to an extreme, so it becomes a slow acting poison from within.

The question Saad presses is whether the West still believes it has a right to prioritize its own citizens, culture and institutions — or whether the urge to appear infinitely kind is the new moral “north star.”

Empathy can misfire in several ways, he asserts. It can be weaponized by bad actors who understand that Westerners, including Canadians, fear nothing more than being called cruel or intolerant. It can smother hard conversations about immigration, crime and ideological extremism. And it can turn public policy into a kind of morality play, where the measure of a law or program is not whether it works, but whether it lets politicians and activists feel good about themselves.

Saad is not writing about these crises from a distance. Born in Beirut in 1964, he fled the Lebanese civil war with his Jewish family, settling in Montreal. That early lesson in how quickly a seemingly stable country can unravel under ideological and sectarian pressure runs through his work.

Professionally, he spent 32 years as professor of marketing at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, and is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. Beyond campus, he has become a public pundit-intellectual, through his podcast The Saad Truth, 11 appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience, and his previous bestseller The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

In Suicidal Empathy, he brings those strands together: the refugee who saw a state collapse from the inside, the academic who studies human nature and the polemicist who thinks the West, and Canada with it, is sleepwalking toward a possible crumbling of its own making. His argument asks: will a country, in the name of being abundantly nice, stay a cohesive country for long?

Saad announced this week on Joe Rogan that he is moving to the United States.

“I love Canada but there comes a point where the abject antipathy that you experience from Canadian society forces you to look elsewhere to a place where you might be appreciated and allowed to flourish,” he said on X.

Dave Gordon interviewed Saad for the Post. The interview was edited for brevity.

How would you define suicidal empathy?

Empathy within well-modulated, evolutionarily appropriate ranges is exactly what you want in a social species.

In order for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, we need to have empathy toward one another. And empathy could be partly cognitive empathy – I understand your pain – and emotional empathy, I feel your pain.

So empathy, when invoked in the right amounts, to the right targets, in the right situations, is perfectly relevant.

Suicidal empathy erases all that evolutionary calculus. It targets the wrong target like: Guatemalan gang members are more important to let into the country than investing in American vets.

Homeless people who take over our parks are more important than the children whose parents have paid taxes, so that their children can play in this park.

It becomes suicidal both at the individual level – you have some rape victims who feel guilty reporting their rapist, because it might spread Islamophobia – but it also then results in domestic and foreign policies that result in the suicide of the West.

How did the door open to suicidal empathy in the West?

You know how a military wants to eventually put boots on the ground, it first will hammer you through the air, to soften (the enemy), and then they can come in, hopefully have little resistance. This is why the one-two punch of Parasitic Mind with Suicidal Empathy makes so much sense.

Parasitic ideas lay the ground for the flourishing of suicidal empathy. Take for example the parasitic idea of cultural relativism: Who are you to judge the norms and behaviours and beliefs of other cultures? If other cultures want to do female genital mutilation, shut your mouth, racist. Don’t judge others.

Well, if you make me impotent to the possibility of judging what should be absolute statements of moral revulsion against other practices, then that softens the landscape for suicidal empathy to come in.

Because if I had been rightfully indignant about some of the practices that immigrants from some countries might be bringing to the country, then I am well-armed to say, ‘Well, I don’t want those beliefs to flourish here.’

You talk of the “softening” – what other factors played a part?

It’s when all of the parasitic ideas jointly in a perfect orchestra as a cocktail flew the planes of bullshit into our edifices of reason. So first, I hit you with postmodernism. There are no absolute truths. Up is down. Left is right. Women are men. Peace is freedom.

Islam is peace. Judaism is terrorism, and so on. Because if there are no absolute objective truths, no calculus of adjudicating truth, then all bets are off.

Now you throw in cultural relativism. Now you throw in identity politics. Now you throw in radical feminism.

Now you throw in biophobia, fear of using biology to explain human behaviour. So I am slowly, if not cataclysmically, destroying the edifices of reason. And now this lays the perfect ground for suicidal empathy.

And one of those parasitic ideas is the inherent self-flagellation of knowing that one of the ways for me to be a moral person is to say that all other cultures are beautiful except uniquely the West: because the West was built on Indigenous genocide and on transphobia and on Islamophobia and on misogyny.

So the West is uniquely evil. Not all those other beautiful cultures in Waziristan and Yemen. And therefore, how do I expiate this original existential sin? I do that by becoming orgiastically empathetic to the noble other.

I would say by about 30 years ago, the ground was set for a nice warm swim in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy.

Can you offer examples of policy trade-offs?

It would be nice that everyone could receive an unlimited number of second chances, because boo-hoo, you had a rough childhood. But the reality is that if you’ve already committed three felonies, you’ve already given up all of your second chances, and it’s time to now throw away the key.

It would be nice if every single human being had the possibility of living in the beautiful experiment called the United States, but that would be infeasible, because we don’t have unlimited resources, because we cannot carry some of the value clashes with incoming people, that may be inconsistent and incongruent with Western values.

You can practise your homophobia and genocidal hatred of the Jews and cutting off of the clitorises in your own beautiful countries.

We don’t want that here.

What message do you want to send to policy makers?

All of the insane policies that are destroying the West are rooted in suicidal empathy.

To return to a commitment of liberty, freedom and an individual dignity that made the West great.

Throughout human history, most societies did not adhere to the ethos of the West. The West is really a miracle, within the buffet of human societies that have ever existed, and we’re now seeing that it takes very little for us to lose it.

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