Rhamell Burke had been arrested four times since February 2nd for assault, burglary, drugs, and weapons charges. On May 7th he was released from New York’s Bellevue Hospital psychiatric facility, and a few hours later he allegedly shoved seventy-six year old Ross Falzone down a flight of subway stairs, resulting in Falzone’s death. One of the prior assault charges involved a young woman who declined to press charges. The 23-year-old lady later said, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.” Reportedly, she now regrets her choice whose tragic consequence has been cited as an instance of suicidal empathy, or more accurately in this case, homicidal empathy.
The term “suicidal empathy”
was coined by Professor Gad Saad, and his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, revolves around the concept. Rhamell Burke’s repeated low- or
no-consequence legal encounters and the young woman’s confession about her
mental disposition constitute two prime examples of the psychic malady in which
compassion for ostensibly victimized groups is so overblown that it outweighs social
well being. Saad provides a plethora of
additional examples including attitudes toward illegal aliens, drug users, the
homeless, transgenders, Hamas terrorists, and even socialism. These feelings are connected to destructive
policies such as open borders, massive benefits for illegals, absurd
indulgences for criminals, men in women’s sports, anti-merit DEI programs, and
numerous redistribution efforts that reward failure and punish success.
Saad’s work is a valuable
resource for identifying areas where empathy has been weaponized with palpably
destructive results. Billed as an
“evolutionary psychologist,” Saad is less focused when it comes to explaining
the reasons behind what he frequently calls the “misfiring” (or even “orgiastic
misfiring”) of the emotional system, thus linguistically linking suicidal
empathy to a cerebral malfunction.
Elsewhere in the book Saad points to a highly theoretical cognitive
function: “The West’s lack of a cultural
theory of mind is destroying our societies.” His primary focus, however, when it comes to
the etiology of the affective malady, centers on academic institutions that
spawned theories such as cultural relativism and
deconstructionism, philosophical perspectives that undermine traditional ideas
about truth and natural law. With intellectuals
freed from the pursuit of truth, their endeavors moved toward emotionally
driven projects as opposed to rational analysis of moral principles and hard evidence,
especially in Saad’s case hard evidence grounded in evolutionary development. (C.S. Lewis came to a similar conclusion in The Abolition of Man based on the modern rejection of objective truth.)
Thus, it isn’t surprising
that Saad cites with approval Thomas Sowell’s idea in The Vision of the Anointed about the intelligentsia espousing “policies
that make them feel virtuous for their unlimited compassion while being
decoupled from the actual consequences of their policies.” Unlike Las Vegas, ideas that originate in
academia don’t stay there. The attitude
of suicidal empathy, Saad observes, spreads like a contagion, as illustrated by
the head-turning pace with which transgenderism infected the whole country bringing
with it biological absurdities, the invasion of girls’ sports, and even the
mutilation of children’s bodies for the sake of “gender affirmation.” Of course this contagion wasn’t spread by
germs floating in the air; it was spread by educational and media institutions
controlled by Democrats, Socialists, and Marxists -- a sociological and
political point obscured by Saad’s overreliance on biological and psychological
perspectives.
My own term for the largely unscrutinized
compassion associated with suicidal empathy is “utopian narcissism.” The policy
of unlimited empathy is impractical and thus utopian, but the true reason for demanding
compassion toward presumably victimized groups is, as Sowell observes, self-congratulation
and not empathy. Thus, being ignorant of
a policy’s negative consequences is essential to bolster one’s sense of moral
superiority. In this regard physical
separation from those consequences, combined with political insularity,
conspire with media complicity to enforce ignorance of rapes, murders, human
trafficking, and drug deaths attributable, for instance, to Biden’s open border
policy. Indeed, in California identifying
a criminal as an illegal alien by law enforcement or the media carries a
professional stigma akin to use of the n-word.
Better to hide the truth from Hollywood stars and a general public infected
with suicidal (or narcissistic) empathy than to risk the discomfort of
cognitive dissonance.
Another explanation I would propose
for unlimited compassion is even crasser than the aforementioned ego-inflating
rationale, namely, power. Political
players often feign empathy as a cynical tool to gain support from various
groups. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center their “empathy” secretly funded enemies of “victimized” groups
to make it clear how important it was for likeminded folks to support their
organization. If one wishes to add a
Messianic savior complex to this cynical power play, that oxymoronic combo
can’t be excluded.
In short, Saad is to be
commended for delineating the large number of cases where empathy for
supposedly victimized groups has suicidal consequences. His diagnosis of the academic origin of the
contagion also has merit, though additional and simpler explanations are
available as well. Saad’s heavy reliance
on biological and psychiatric analytical tools, however, sometimes obscures
motives that aren’t all that murky -- self-aggrandizement, cynical
manipulation, self-hatred, power, and even the thrill (and benefits) of blindly
identifying with an elite in-group under the guise of compassion.
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