Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind
by Gad Saad
New York: Broadside Books, 2026
255 pp. $32.99 (Kindle)

During a burglary, sixteen-year-old Travis Lewis murdered Sally Snowden McKay, age seventy-five, and her nephew, Joseph Baker. Lewis was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-eight and a half years in prison. Sally’s daughter, Martha McKay, forgave Lewis, visited him while he was imprisoned, and petitioned for his early release. She also offered him a job in the same house where he had murdered her mother and cousin. Lewis then murdered Martha, too.

According to Gad Saad, a professor and evolutionary behavioral scientist, this is an example of “suicidal empathy,” the phenomenon that gives his book, a New York Times bestseller, its title. Saad is not against empathy. Although he notes that it “has up to forty-three distinct definitions within the academic literature,” he doesn’t say what definition he’s using (2). Nevertheless, he believes that empathy is a “noble virtue” and that it “helps promote prosocial behavior. . . . But our empathy must be tethered to rational boundaries rooted in reciprocity” (163). More specifically, one’s empathy “must be invoked at the right time, in the right amount, and to the right targets” (166). In short, “empathy must be deployed in a strategically discriminating manner” (100).

Although this implies that we have control over how we empathize, Saad also argues that we have an “empathy module” that can malfunction or “misfire” (a term he uses eighteen times in the preface and first chapter). Empathy turns suicidal when it’s excessive and directed at the wrong targets. Examples of this, Saad claims, include empathy for certain felons, rapists, and murderers but not their victims; empathy for squatters but not the homeowners who can’t remove them; empathy for transgender athletes but not the disadvantaged women who must compete against them; empathy for homeless drug addicts setting up encampments in public parks but not taxpaying park users and their children.

Suicidal empathy, Saad writes, “spreads akin to an emotional contagion throughout an entire society, and its effects are long-lasting” (xiv). These effects include a broad range of outlandish behaviors, systems, and policies. If suicidal empathy is “not properly contained, it will destroy the West” (xiv).

The book discusses examples of suicidal empathy across a wide range of issues, including immigration, COVID policies, climate activism, the welfare state, the criminal justice system, and more. It also includes a chapter on what Saad calls “forbidden knowledge,” meaning facts, ideas, and research that some want to suppress because they might offend certain groups—a mindset Saad characterizes as, “If the truth lacks empathy, reject it!” (xii). One example is the “fat acceptance” movement, which seeks “to elevate the sense of self-worth of overweight people, even if it means espousing pure fiction” (30). In the closing chapter, Saad explains how to inoculate oneself against suicidal empathy.

An important subtheme of the book is the destructiveness of emotionalism, the doctrine and practice of placing emotions above facts, logic, and reason. “Our emotions,” Saad writes, “can lead us astray when they are deployed in contexts when it would serve us best to invoke our reasoning faculty” (10). When people succumb to suicidal empathy, he explains, viewing the world through “the prism of maximizing empathy now,” they focus only on “first-order effects” while ignoring the “disastrous long-term consequences” (158–59).

Although this subtheme is valid, and although Saad detects a real problem in our culture, his theory of suicidal empathy has significant flaws.

To start, “suicidal empathy” is not the appropriate name for his theory. It is more accurately one of misdirected sympathy or compassion than of empathy. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”1 By this definition, Saad’s view that one can empathize with the “wrong targets” is incorrect. One might, for example, empathize with a criminal (i.e., try to understand why he did what he did and to feel what he feels). But that does not necessarily mean that one cares about the criminal, excuses his behavior, or thinks he deserves one’s help. (For consistency with the quoted material, I will use the word “empathy” as Saad does for the rest of the review. But keep in mind how he uses it: Although he doesn’t explicitly define empathy, his usage suggests that he means not only understanding and sharing another person’s thoughts and emotions but also wanting to alleviate that person’s distress.)

The theory is also ill-defined. Saad presents no principle or criteria for determining when empathy crosses the line from merely inappropriate to suicidal. This omission becomes evident as one reads through his numerous examples and anecdotes. Many are questionable, as they are not obviously motivated by empathy, much less “suicidal” empathy.

Consider two. First, Saad describes a Jaguar advertisement from late 2024 featuring “a bunch of weirdly dressed people of color (including some apparent nonbinary and transgender folks) sashaying around.” This “suicidally empathetic advertising campaign” destroyed Jaguar’s “massive intergenerational brand equity” (133). Although the campaign triggered a backlash, its purpose was to rebrand the company for the ultra-luxury electric vehicle market. Jaguar’s sales did collapse, but mostly for reasons unrelated to the ad. Running it was a miscalculation, but I could not find any evidence that it was motivated by empathy.

The second example is the Laken Riley case. José Ibarra, a Venezuelan immigrant who was in the United States illegally, attacked Riley, a twenty-two-year-old nursing student, while she was jogging. He attempted to rape her, then murdered her after she resisted. “A key reason that the death penalty was not sought,” according to Saad, “is because of a suicidally empathetic progressive district attorney named Deborah Gonzalez who does not believe in the death penalty” (35). Instead, she pursued life without parole with the Riley family’s support. One might strongly disapprove of Gonzalez’s decision, but even if it was motivated by empathy, locking up a murderer for life cannot reasonably be considered “suicidal.”

Saad’s questionable examples aside, his others do illustrate problems that point to a common underlying cause. But invoking misdirected empathy, although it may play a role, is an unsatisfying explanation. The crucial question is: Why do some people have empathy for the wrong targets?

Saad provides a couple of answers, though he places little emphasis on either. First, he says that suicidal empathy is “driven by misplaced existential guilt. . . . The suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not as fortunate” (19). But this raises a further question: Why would one feel guilty about that?

His other answer, which is much less clear, is “parasitic ideas” (a phrase he borrows from his earlier book, The Parasitic Mind). These ideas include “woke social justice” (xiv), intersectionality (32), cultural relativism (47, 81), doomsday environmentalism (102, 104), and social determinism, the doctrine that “all life outcomes are due to external forces” (17). In most cases, however, he doesn’t explain exactly how these ideas connect to suicidal empathy. And when he does address it, his accounts are inconsistent. For example, he says, “the West’s intelligentsia . . . is infected by a mind parasite that causes its empathy module to misfire” (xi). Later, he suggests that the causation runs in the opposite direction: “Parasitic ideas . . . are driven by misguided empathy” (15). In yet another place, he implies that they are merely associated, neither clearly causing the other: “Parasitic ideas . . . flourish best when coupled with a narrative of empathy” (xiv; emphasis added).

To the extent that “parasitic ideas” and “existential guilt” contribute to suicidal empathy, they are, at best, intermediate causes. But Saad fails to identify the fundamental cause because he is looking in the wrong place. Consider his examples involving squatters, certain criminals, and the welfare state. In these and other cases, the persons receiving empathy are deemed weaker, needier, or otherwise less powerful. But what about the aggrieved parties? For example, empathizing with a squatter while dismissing the burden imposed on the homeowner implicitly assumes that the squatter’s need gives him a moral claim on what belongs to someone else. The underlying premise here is that those more fortunate should yield their rights, property, or security to those less fortunate. This goes deeper than mere empathy (suicidal or not); it is a moral demand for sacrifice.

According to ethicist Peter Singer, “we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility. . . . This would mean, of course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.”2 On this view, if anyone is worse off than you are, then to be moral, you must sacrifice your wealth, values, and interests for his sake. As philosopher C. D. Broad writes,

each of us is often under an obligation to sacrifice his own happiness, and sometimes to sacrifice his own development and life, for the benefit of certain other persons and groups, even when it is doubtful whether more good will be produced by doing so than by not doing so.3

The morality Singer and Broad are conveying here—the morality that demands self-denial, self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice, the morality of subordinating the lives of some people to the needs of others—is altruism.

The example with which I opened this review clearly displays this morality. Martha McKay sacrificed justice, common sense, her safety, and ultimately her life for the sake of helping the man who murdered her mother and cousin.

But one might wonder: Aren’t altruism and empathy essentially the same? Although often associated, they are categorically different. Altruism is a morality; empathy is an emotional-psychological capacity and skill. Unlike altruism, which provides ethical guidance, empathy alone doesn’t tell you how to act or how to judge others.

The morality of altruism, not misdirected empathy, is the root cause of the unhinged—and sometimes suicidal—behaviors, systems, and policies that Saad is trying to explain. In any issue or situation, when some people automatically side with whomever they consider weaker, needier, or less powerful while evading any relevant facts, altruism is the implicit moral premise behind this pattern of judgment. After all, if those more fortunate are morally obligated to sacrifice for those less fortunate, then why shouldn’t we always side with the latter—even when they harm, threaten, or burden the former? (Siding with the needier party may be right, but not simply because they’re needier.) By elevating need above all other considerations, altruism provides a moral rationalization for dismissing the rights, interests, and liberties of anyone whose quality of life exceeds that of Singer’s Bengali refugee.

Saad writes, “A behavioral outcome of empathy is the human capacity to be altruistic,” a capacity he describes as a “noble reflex” (6). Although he stops far short of taking altruism to its logical conclusion, as Singer does, Saad’s favorable view of it likely explains, at least in part, why he fails to identify the deeper moral issue.

Besides the problems with Saad’s central argument, some of his claims about specific issues are highly dubious. Because of this and his occasionally snarky, hyperbolic tone, his writing often reads as an attempt not to persuade skeptical readers but to pander to a conservative audience.

For example, he writes, “The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] headed by Elon Musk has . . . eliminated a breathtaking amount of corruption, waste, and fraud” (144). A breathtaking amount? DOGE’s initial goal was to cut $2 trillion in federal government spending, which it lowered to $1 trillion, then to $150 billion (a paltry 2 percent of federal spending). DOGE claimed estimated savings of $215 billion, but this figure could not be independently verified. A Government Accountability Office audit found significant problems with DOGE’s calculations and methodology, suggesting that the cuts fell short of even its own $150 billion unbreathtaking goal.4

Despite factual overstatements such as this, Saad’s attempt to formulate a theory that explains a broad range of personal behaviors, cultural issues, and political policies is both ambitious and admirable. Unfortunately, it fails, as his theory is misnamed, ill-defined, and a poor fit for many of his examples. Most important, he doesn’t look in the right place (morality) for the fundamental cause of the phenomena his theory is trying to explain.

 

"A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that ... [i]t gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."

~ Milton Friedman from his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom (Chapter 1: "The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom")

"You have to vote," they tell me.

People insist. 

"It's easy to enrol," they say (or said). 

But that's only relevant if I wanted to vote.

And I don't. I don't, because there is no one to vote for.

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The right to vote is also a a right not to vote. That's a vote for 'None of the Above.' And none of the above deserve my vote.