This article is a provocation for a debate at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival, ‘Suicidal empathy: is the West killing itself with kindness?’. Agree or disagree? Let us know in the comments. Or better still, come to the festival and have your say. The festival takes place at Church House in Westminster on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 October. For the latest information on the programme, speakers and tickets, visit the Battle of Ideas website.
Abdul Ballout was a German citizen of Lebanese descent who is alleged to have driven into a crowd at Berlin’s Pride Parade, before stabbing attendees – killing one and injuring several others. A year before, Ballout travelled to Lebanon in a bid to join ISIS. He was sentenced by Lebanese authorities to three months in prison, then deported to Germany. Yet, unlike in Lebanon, a German judge adopted a more enlightened approach, releasing Ballout on probation.
The German state was certainly empathetic towards a wannabe ISIS fighter, free to wander around Berlin provided he participated in a once-a-week deradicalisation programme. But what about the 65-year-old victim? The 30-odd people who sustained injuries? Those left mentally scarred after witnessing the attempted massacre? Where was the German state’s empathy for them?
This is just one example of so-called progressive policies that appear self-defeating, often justified by the need to protect one group at the top of the grievance league table, while showing little regard for the interests and concerns of others. To what extent is this a self-regarding exercise to prove one’s virtue and generosity, waving ‘Refugees Welcome’ banners while denouncing those concerned about hundreds of thousands of undocumented young men residing in the country as racists?
But such an approach goes beyond the issues of immigration or safety. For example, the UK’s mandated net-zero strategy has undermined our own energy security and industrial base, justified in part by our generational guilt toward poorer countries that may suffer catastrophic effects from climate change. When attempts are made to reform welfare benefits, designed as a safety net, they are blocked by those who cry cruelty and stress the vulnerability of the millions now permanently caught in a dependency trap.
Police chase down those guilty of ‘hate speech’ on behalf of the permanently offended, while ignoring theft, grooming gangs and knife crime. The Church of England wants to pay ‘reparations’ while its parish roofs cave in. Psychiatrists are reluctant to incarcerate the dangerously psychotic; judges are reluctant to imprison those with protected characteristics; institutions elevate the desires of transgender women above those of biological women, all in the name of being kind.
Some argue that such self-destructive inverse morality – which prioritises compassion, understanding and empathy over national and rational self-interest – is in danger of dismantling the very pillars of Western society. Indeed, that is the thesis of Canadian Gad Saad’s bestselling book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. The proposition is that suicidal empathy occurs when an excessive or misguided desire to help others, especially marginalised groups, comes at the expense of the survival, security, values and interests of one’s own group. This act of societal self-harm, it is argued, will ultimately weaken the West and could lead to its collapse.
Such hyperbole has led to a mainstream backlash. Perhaps predictably, The Guardian drew a grim conclusion when discussing Saad’s book and the wider right-wing attack on empathy, arguing that this trend represents a dangerous effort ‘to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognise and respond to suffering’, and describing the campaign against empathy as ‘a flashing red light warning of fascist intent’.
Another critic has condemned the book as ‘culture-war ideology dressed up as evolutionary insight’. Some claim that prioritising our families and communities over those culturally different from us amounts to little more than a small-minded, selfish and thinly disguised othering of strangers, foreigners and the most vulnerable. Indeed, Pope Leo XIV publicly rebuked the argument put forward by the US vice president that we should prioritise love and care for one’s immediate circles before extending it to others, posting on X: ‘JD Vance is wrong… Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.’
Yet, perhaps most cruelly, we don’t get to choose what we are suicidally empathetic to. Usually, it’s not the men and women holding the ‘refugees welcome’ signs who have to welcome the refugees, but those who never offered to surrender their homes, communities or security. And when they are asked to shoulder the consequences themselves, attitudes predictably change. For example, Labour MP Rachael Maskell, who once said Britain should take as many refugees as it could until it reached ‘saturation point’, recently opposed government plans to house 1,200 asylum seekers at a site near her North Yorkshire constituency.
As I write, the struggle for the village of Piddington is taking place. The tiny population of 314 is set to be dwarfed by the arrival of 1,250 ‘asylum seekers’. The likely fall in the standard of living, and any crime – petty or serious – that follows will be brought to the villagers courtesy of our suicidal government. As the saying goes: ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’
I accept there are tens of millions of people, or more, living in abject poverty in areas of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa - people with murderous, medieval cultures, whose religions treat women as chattels at best, and whose leaders actively loathe us and want to destroy us.
I may have objective sympathy for these people, but I have zero empathy and I accept zero responsibility for their plight - not least because over the preceding half century, we have contributed hundreds of billions of pounds which has been used for personal enrichment, corruption, warmaking, slavery and generally evil purposes.
I certainly do not want any more of these people in MY country.
Hear hear. Hopefully with articles like this and Saad’s book plus that of Matt Goodwin will help us build a path back to sanity