Why Empathy Is Now ‘toxic,’ ‘suicidal,’ And A ‘sin’

Updated at 8:45 a.m. ET on September 27, 2026

A crusade against empathy is sweeping through the right. In sometimes apocalyptic terms, prominent conservatives are denouncing that feeble human capacity to understand the feelings of others. This is a trend I’ve written about before, but I’ve been intrigued by the way these figures have lately been adopting the language of the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad and his influential book, Suicidal Empathy, released earlier this year. According to Saad, suicidal empathy is when otherwise positive impulses are “hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis”—a phenomenon that will lead to nothing less than “the collective suicide of the West.”

Like other works in this growing genre, including Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy, and Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy, Saad’s book contends that a progressive fixation on oppressed groups in the name of compassion and fairness has been not just counterproductive but also destructive, threatening Western values and even civilization itself. Robert Barron, a Roman Catholic bishop and podcaster in Minnesota, recently took up Saad’s argument in an episode that contrasted suicidal empathy with Christian charity.

Barron calmly explained that love, far from mandating kindness, can and often should be harsh. This is a classic right-wing talking point: Conservatives have long argued that refusing to offer social-welfare programs, for example, is a way of teaching the dignity of self-reliance. To sideline traditionally conservative values in favor of allegedly empathy-driven liberal causes is, in Barron’s view, to “undermine the foundations of the West.”

Although I have heard versions of this before, I was still surprised to hear a prelate of the Catholic Church arguing that people should not be empathetic if doing so could come at considerable personal or societal cost. Barron has more than 3.6 million YouTube subscribers, 675,000 Instagram followers, and—as of last week—a presidential appointment to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. His Christian commitments and considerable influence make his interest in these ideas notable.

But his reasoning seems more political than spiritual. Suicidal Empathy and books like it are aimed not at liberals, but at conservatives who may be struggling with a conflict between their politics and their conscience. Arguments about the harms of empathy help justify personal and political behavior that might otherwise seem wrong or feel bad, such as cutting food-stamp benefits for poor people or tearing immigrant mothers away from their children. By claiming that an excess of compassion is in fact a social blight, Saad’s book and others offer a theoretical framework for selfishness.

Given just how influential Saad’s book has become among people with power and political capital, such as Elon Musk, the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen, and the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, I decided to read it myself. This was not idle curiosity: These arguments plainly matter, and they have serious implications for American politics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy]

By empathy, Saad means “a noble and evolutionarily selected virtue, a central feature of our humanity” which, he says, is correlated with kindness. What he means by suicidal is less clearly defined, but the overarching idea is that when people—typically woke liberals—advocate certain actions or policy positions out of empathy for other people, rather than based on Saad’s idea of objective reasoning, they undermine the societal values of security and cohesion.

To illustrate this concept, Saad nods, in his introduction, to policies that elevate the needs of an allegedly oppressed minority over those of everyone else, such as efforts to raise immigration rates or to allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports. For Saad, these policies are not pet peeves, but catastrophes with civilizational consequences.

The book is loosely constructed, with chapters that leap wildly from subject to subject—from how to punish criminals guilty of rape and murder to Canadian tax policy. This messiness reflects the shambolic nature of the underlying argument. Interspersed throughout are angry accounts from Saad’s own life, in which his critics always happen to suffer from misguided empathy. This was ostensibly the problem that afflicted Saad’s interviewer for an academic job, who took issue with a video Saad had posted on social media in which he called a woman who littered on the beach a “human pig.” Two attendees of a talk Saad gave, who took issue with his stated claim that all men are potential pedophiles, were also apparently guilty of forsaking objective reasoning for emotional impulse.

As a category, suicidal empathy is almost infinitely capacious. Saad’s examples include lax immigration laws; high taxes; mandatory sensitivity training; universal health care; “the diversity, inclusion, and equity cult”; every manifestation of anti-Zionism; “twerking drag queens during kindergarten reading hour”; and “communism, socialism, and the welfare and nanny states.” He also offers anecdotes about people who suffered for their empathy, such as the researchers Zaida Catalan and Michael Sharp, who were killed by locals in the Democratic Republic of Congo while they were on a mission to investigate human-rights violations there. Saad offers up this case study with a haughty tone and the following observation: “At times, people place themselves in harm’s way in their noble desire to help others.”

I had to pause and read that sentence twice. What Saad meant as a warning against empathy struck me as evidence that human beings are capable of great acts of heroic moral character. In my religious tradition—Catholicism, just like Bishop Barron’s—self-sacrifice represents the apex of love and humility, epitomized by the Crucifixion of Jesus and the lives of many saints. The concept of forgiving those who have wronged us is essential in Christianity, which led me to wonder what Barron and other prominent Christians see in a theory like Saad’s.

To the degree that books such as Saad’s are meant to help conservatives resolve their internal conflicts and ignore their consciences, they are basically right-wing self-help guides. Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy seems especially targeted at conservative Christians who feel torn about subjects such as immigration and welfare. Stuckey is at pains to reassure her readers that any dissonance they might feel between their religious duties and political interests is a treacherous mirage generated by the left. The goal of “toxic empathy,” she says, is “to get us to suppress our opposition to a particular issue or point of view by playing upon our desire to be a good person.” By this account, liberals are emotionally exploiting feelings of guilt or shame in conservatives to persuade them to support left-wing goals.

And, like much self-help literature, the anti-empathy genre does not have to make sense to change minds. In Saad’s imagination, seemingly any personal or political cost, such as paying high taxes, or halting human encroachment on the habitat of endangered animals, is a form of individual or collective suicide. Attentive readers will note that the literal costs of these actions fall well short of death, but making every issue sound ruinous is important for conservatives who wish to believe that their at-times harsh policies—such as denying poor people health insurance—are somehow morally necessary to preserve themselves and, indeed, all of Western civilization.

[Hillary Rodham Clinton: MAGA’s war on empathy]

In theory, Saad is describing the putative destruction of traditional Western culture by liberals and immigrants, through either the great replacement of white Christians or a grand shift in public opinion. But given Saad’s choice of targets, what this idea means in practice is that every time you pay your taxes, sit through a diversity-training session at work, or interact with a disabled employee at the post office, you are witnessing the collapse of the West.

To help burnish this point, Saad contorts progressive thinking so that it conforms to his rigid views. He dismisses leftists who approach homelessness as a housing-affordability problem as somehow blinkered by their misguided empathy. “Progressive policies presume that it is compassionate to ignore the fact that homelessness is in large part due to mental disease and substance addiction,” he writes. “It is perhaps more empathetic, albeit incorrect, to blame greedy capitalist landlords for the lack of affordable housing.” Saad is plainly unmoved by the fact that the median price of single-family homes in the United States is now five times that of the median annual income.

Saad is also alarmed by the apparently irrational empathy of a prosecutor whose ethical objections to capital punishment moved him to seek a sentence of life without parole rather than the death penalty for a convicted murderer. Saad complains that the American penal system is “endlessly empathetic” and insufficiently punitive, and argues that some prisoners should be put to death not only for retribution and public safety, but also for the sake of Western civilization. That various countries in Europe and numerous American states have long banned the death penalty, without obvious injury to the Western tradition, goes unexamined.

But Saad is not interested in counterarguments to his claims. That is because Suicidal Empathy is not really a theoretical text, but rather a guidebook for ignoring human suffering. Saad and his ideological colleagues may be helping conservatives resolve the tension between their political positions and their moral values, but only by compromising the religious principles at the heart of the Western civilization they purport to defend. And unlike the exhortation to love thy neighbor, this kind of thinking merely reinforces the idea that might makes right.