Suicidal Empathy

About the book

Book author: Gad Saad

Suicidal Empathy attempts to explain ongoing issues with society from an evolutionary and behavioural basis, with hundreds of examples of the book namesake “suicidal empathy”, where one’s desire to be pathologically empathetic overrides all reason and logic, and hurts the bearer of the empathy (or society).

Reflection and takeaways

I think this book really came out at the right time. Gad is pointing out that several issues currently faced in the west are driven because we want to do good. But one’s desire to do good can overrule common sense, and can get you stuck in suboptimal decisions through rules and victimhood.

We’re gonna enter a slightly controversial space right now. But this is my blog and no one reads it so I feel free to write whatever I want.

We can agree that house cats and lions are cats. But you don’t invite a lion to live in your home, yet a house cat is no problem. That’s kind of unfair to lions if you think about it. We shouldn’t take decisions that way, lions are really victimised and all cats are equal. If you view unregulated immigration through the same lens it kind of drives home the point. Sweden has become messy because we literally have terrorists and war criminals here that are waging clan warfare, yet people argue for their right to stay. I think that’s absolutely insane. They’re buying guns for welfare checks, and everyone gets draconian surveillance and visitation laws. Most cats are house cats, and are nice and cuddly and behave well, but we can’t have just those for some reason, we need to accept any kind of cat lest we be bigots.

Gad puts it well with this little story: imagine 100 people who sit in a field. You ask a question and one person stands up answering it. He gets shot immediately. Everyone else watches them get shot (“cancelled”). The same happens again – a question is asked, and another person stands up, answers and gets shot. Now, the people will remain sitting no matter what you think - you’ll never speak your mind. There is a silent majority that of course has a common sense, but they don’t want to do a public crucifixion or hurt their career, they just want peace and no drama in their lives. Anyone who says things gets shot publicly. It’s a real problem. It allows a kind of violent minority to rule.

I feel like in certain groups, virtue signaling harder is a status. The problem is the right has a limit - if you start speaking about race, genetics etc, everyone kinda says ‘OK my man, now you’re getting too nazi-weird’ and dismiss you. The left doesn’t have a similar clear line to cross. It’s kinda fine to say that you believe in equality of outcome and communism, and that we should accept all criminals because the criminals are victims too of this hostile system, we should defund the police, we don’t need an army, and that all billionaires deserve to die. You can’t really call them out to be crazy the same way publicly, but you can at least think that they are crazy in private.

Anyway, these empathetic systems can misfire. Gad has hundreds of examples he draws from that kind of illustrate the point. The LGBTQ+ community for example is really pro-palestine. That’s interesting, because in Palestine, they would be stoned to death – in effect they are sharpening the knife that could kill them.

Another interesting case was some norwegian man who was violently raped, but insisted that the perpetrator should get no punishment or consequences because that person must have lived such a hard life to commit such a horrible deed, and it would reflect poorly on immigrants.

“Progressive people prefer to attribute all failures to external forces rooted in the evils of the West. Viewed from this lens, Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election in a humiliating manner not because she was a lobotomized cackler but because Americans are sexist and racist, albeit they were insufferably racist when they elected Barack Obama twice into office.”

Why did I pick it

I’m just curious to understand what’s going on. It feels like the “woke” thing died really fast and things are shifting quickly and there are plenty of political perspectives I don’t understand, but this book helped a little bit.

Verdict

4.4 / 5. Good one.