The Smugness of Anti-Empathy Politics: Gad Saad spells out his ‘own the libs, scorn the weak’ ethos: a review of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad (Cathy Young, May 22, 2026, The Bulwark)
Quillette ran a scathing review by conservative British writer Ben Sixsmith titled “Playing Gad,” critiquing it as simplistic and intellectually self-absorbed. The reviewer in another “heterodox” outlet, Unherd, panned the book for dressing up a catchy concept in a lot of incoherent and “vibes-based” arguments, political vitriol, and lame humor.
The thing is, Saad’s concept—empathy is a good and necessary trait, but can be bad and self-damaging when taken too far—is one few people would dispute. Obvious examples include being trapped in an abusive relationship or a toxic friendship because you’re afraid to hurt the other person by ending it, a concern exploitative people can easily manipulate. On a larger scale, it is self-evidently true that empathy alone is usually not a reliable guide to policy or collective action: refusing, on compassionate grounds, to forcibly hospitalize people experiencing certain acute mental health crises can result in grave harm not only to other people but to the patients themselves.
Indeed, other people have critiqued the overreliance on empathy—at least in the literal “I feel your pain” sense which distinguishes empathy from the related concepts of sympathy and compassion, even if many people use the words interchangeably. Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom wrote a generally well-received book titled Against Empathy in 2016, proposing “Rational Compassion” instead. Bloom argued, among other things, that the emotional component of empathy leads us to focus too much on highly visible cases of suffering (a little child who falls down a well becomes more important than a lot of little children whose lives are quietly wrecked by poverty). Ironically—given that Saad spends a lot of time excoriating liberals for being too afraid to seem racist—Bloom also argued that empathy-based morality can easily become de facto racist and tribalist, since we tend to empathize more with people like ourselves: hence the disproportionate media focus on young white women who go missing.
For Saad, though, “suicidal empathy” is strictly a culture-war concept. In his framework, the term refers to ostensibly compassionate political views he considers misguided: support for migrants and refugees, Muslim immigrants in particular; excessive concern with the rights and well-being of criminals and/or homeless people; high taxes to pay for social programs; defense of transgender identities; an #IBelieveHer stance toward women who accuse men of sexual misconduct. (Unless, of course, the alleged perps are migrants or Muslims or both, in which case insufficient support for the victims is a sign of suicidal empathy for those groups.)
Gaad has just dressed up Identitarianism. By definition empathy is a personal concept, not one you apply to entire groups (whose personal experiences you can not even pretend to know, as advocates of empathy do).
