The West Is on a Suicide Mission

This week, a few news stories caught my attention.

Former congresswoman Katie Porter said she supports taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants, during the Democratic California governor’s debate.

Closed-circuit television cameras helped catch two men who violently attacked a 77-year-old man in Seattle, undermining mayor Katie Wilson’s claim that “turning on more cameras won’t magically make our neighborhoods safer, but it will certainly make our neighborhoods more vulnerable.”

And the judge presiding over the case of accused White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter Cole Tomas Allen said about his jail conditions: “At a minimum, I should be apologizing to him. We are obligated to make sure he’s taken care of. Mr. Allen, I’m sorry that things have not been the way they are supposed to.”

In each example, a form of empathy was on display. But what happens when it misfires?

In the new book Suicidal Empathy, evolutionary behavioral scientist and professor Gad Saad makes the case that the West’s most celebrated virtue has been weaponized, miscalibrated, and taken to a place that is actively destroying the societies it claims to protect.

In our conversation, we look through the most striking examples: open-door migration policies that reshaped Europe, grooming gangs that went unaddressed for decades, brazen shoplifting that closed stores in low-income neighborhoods, open-air drug markets built on compassion and designed for catastrophe, the cultural relativism that shields radical Islam from scrutiny, and politicians—from Seattle to New York City—whose empathy has come at a devastating cost to everyone else.

Gad also explains why women are more susceptible to suicidal empathy, why the left is more afflicted than the right, why communism will always appeal to the young, and why Jews are consistently on the wrong side of the empathy hierarchy—even as antisemitism surges across the West.

And perhaps most urgently, Gad explains what it will actually take for the West to wake up.