What made Robert Jenrick complain about “suicidal empathy” in a Telegraph article about benefit reform? The phrase barely existed until the end of last year, when it started to attract flutters of interest on Google search.
Then, in May, a Canadian professor of marketing called Gad Saad published a book called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. Elon Musk wrote an admiring blurb, and the concept was fired straight into the far right lexicon. Three months later, it had crossed the Atlantic, and Jenrick was invoking it to justify cuts to disability benefits. Others within Reform have seized on it, and the phrase is in wide currency on right wing social media.
Although some of his blurbers praised Saad’s book as ground-breaking, similar concepts have been knocking about in American evangelical circles for several years. What the Canadian has done is to broaden them into a society-wide critique of ‘woke’ politics. Suicidal empathy, for Saad, is a disease against which we need to “inoculate” ourselves by paying attention to objective truth.
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That might seem odd, given that most of the people complaining about suicidal empathy are also admirers of Donald Trump, who is not a man known for his commitment to fact-based reality. But the people coming up with far-right talking points are well aware of the president’s intellectual deficits. They are sick of being accused of misinformation. They know their movement lacks much intellectual credibility, and they are looking to a future where an ageing Trump passes his inheritance to the Catholic JD Vance.
Plenty of evangelical leaders have already been won over by MAGA. But the support of the Pope – whose opinion matters to many Americans, especially Latinos – remains elusive. What if there were a way to deflect the complaints about ICE cruelty and the gutting of USAID? What if you convinced people that their Christian values were being perverted and abused by the woke left?
That is the essence of suicidal empathy. In this telling, liberal progressives care too much about people who despise them and endure any amount of abuse and humiliation as a result – and when they do so, they undermine the moral foundations of their own society.
The cover of Saad’s book pictures a lamb holding a banner reading “Free the wolves”. The vulnerable Christian, blinded by goodwill, believes their enemies do not represent a threat.
For Saad, most of those enemies are immigrants, and particularly Muslims, though transgender women, drug addicts, squatters, feminists and socialists are part of the problem too. One of the ironies of Suicidal Empathy is that a Jewish man of Lebanese origin has written a book to warn Western societies of the danger of extending goodwill to outsiders.
Indeed, Saad displays only contempt for Canada, complaining bitterly about having to pay tax on his book royalties as well as his professorial salary. His default position is distrust: he never lets his children go to sleepovers, because they might become prey to paedophiles. When he received online death threats, he asked for permission to carry a gun, but to his fury, the authorities refused it.
Women, Saad warns, are especially prone to suicidal empathy because of our innate capacity for caring. He believes the “feminisation” of society means that we are prepared to be raped by migrants rather than submit to the “toxic masculinity” of men who want to protect us. (He leans heavily on the case of a German woman in 2016 who lied about the ethnicity of her attacker because she did not want other migrants to be demonised as a result.)
He writes: “Radical feminists are so keen to identify misogyny … that they redefine desired masculine traits as subtle manifestations of the evil patriarchy.”
In response, some men – notably the former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau – adopt ‘feminine’ traits in what Saad calls “the sneaky fucker marketing strategy … to sneak in some surreptitious mating opportunities”.
This is the stuff the paranoid manosphere thrives on. But because it borrows the language of behavioural psychology and talks up the importance of evolutionary selection, it appeals to a few academics who specialise in those fields, such as Robin Dunbar, a professor emeritus at the University of Oxford.
He described Suicidal Empathy as “probably the single most compelling analysis of how and why woke culture is destroying western society”. His best-known work is Dunbar’s Number, the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships. Based on his analysis of primate brains, he put it at around 150.
Theories like these rely on a model of society where tribal loyalty and clear gender roles are key to human survival. The tribe cannot accommodate more than a certain number of members. Too many intruders destroy trust. It is hard to see how an immigrant academic with a busy YouTube channel and international book deals quite fits into this model, but Saad is completely uninterested in what digital culture might be doing to our brains.
He has also borrowed from a strand of muscular US evangelism that urges Christians not to submit to the tyranny of other people’s ‘feelings’. It does not sit easily with much of Jesus’ teaching, especially the parable of the Good Samaritan. But it does offer a way for Christians to excuse the cruelties of MAGA.
In an influential 2019 article, the theologian Joe Rigney argues that too much empathy stops us from being able to judge whether someone is truly good. Satan tricks you into indulging evil by making you feel guilty about being nasty to them. Last year, Rigney published a book called Leadership and The Sin of Empathy: A Christian Guide to Discernment, Emotional Manipulation, Boundaries and False Compassion.
The word “suicidal” is important, too. It suggests not only that the whole of western civilisation is at risk (a nod to the Great Replacement Theory that Muslims intend to impose Islam on Europe and America), but that the reader has convinced himself there is no way out. Saad believes he is revealing a “collective psychiatric diagnosis”, and at times Suicidal Empathy reads like a self-help manual.
The former academic Matt Goodwin has also embraced the language of mental illness, publishing the AI-assisted Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity last year, which includes a number of fake quotes and inaccurate statistics. When Saad turned down an invitation to talk about suicidal empathy on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Goodwin stepped in to endorse the concept. It was a short step for Jenrick to refigure it for a British audience.
“Since 2002, the share of working-age people claiming for mental and behavioural conditions has tripled. This is not generosity,” he wrote. “It is suicidal empathy.” A British audience might not buy the narrative of civilisational collapse that Saad is pushing. But they are very ready to believe that people are faking disability claims.
It takes some chutzpah for Saad to rail against people who talk of “settled science” while also appealing to the “objective truth” about “race differences in criminality”. But it is easy to dig up enough liberal hypocrisies to fill a short book – as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez recently admitted, “Woke 1.0 was crazy” – and the pseudo-intellectual gestures serve to justify a primal instinct. It is all right to distrust outsiders. They probably hate you too.
“Suicidal empathy” is a novel phrase, but it turns out to be the latest flex of an old muscle: the spasm of fury and resentment, the one that readies us to fight. It is nasty, and it is meant to be.
Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind by Gad Saad is published in the UK by Broadside
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