Gad Saad (pictured in an illustration with President Trump) is an evolutionary behavioral scientist, marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, and host of The Saad Truth podcast. He has become one of the most provocative cultural critics of modern American progressive ideology. Building on his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind, which argued that political correctness and “idea pathogens” are destroying Western reason, Saad’s focus has increasingly centered on a specific framework outlined in his work on suicidal empathy.
His central thesis is straightforward yet explosive: America is engineering its own civilizational decline because its greatest virtues—compassion, tolerance, and empathy—have been weaponized by progressive elites and pushed into pathological extremes that threaten the nation’s survival.
In the 2020s, as American cities grapple with rising crime, universities become battlegrounds over free speech and identity politics, corporations implement sweeping DEI mandates, and progressive antisemitism surges on college campuses, Saad’s framework has gained remarkable traction among conservatives, tech leaders, and cultural commentators who see his theory as explaining the seemingly inexplicable self-destruction of American institutions.
The Core Theory: What is ‘Suicidal Empathy’?
Saad defines suicidal empathy (or “maladaptively irrational altruism”) as the psychological inability to make rational, self-preserving decisions because a society has been conditioned to prioritize the perceived feelings and victimhood of outside or minority groups over its own survival, security, and fundamental values.
In the American context, this means progressive elites have created a moral hierarchy where demonstrating compassion toward designated victim groups—regardless of the consequences—has become the highest virtue, superseding national security, public safety, economic rationality, and even the protection of other vulnerable populations.
He uses an evolutionary lens to argue that while empathy is a vital human virtue that bonds communities and enables cooperation, it must operate within proper boundaries. When a society experiences what Saad calls a “catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities,” empathy becomes a self-destructive pathology. In evolutionary terms, a tribe that cannot distinguish between members and threats, that cannot prioritize its own survival over the comfort of outsiders, is a tribe destined for extinction.
For Saad, contemporary America—particularly its progressive-governed cities, elite universities, Fortune 500 corporations, and Democratic Party leadership—represents the most advanced case study of this pathology in human history.
The Dynamics of American Decline
According to Saad’s framework, this pathological empathy manifests across several core areas of American public policy and culture, each representing a different dimension of the nation’s self-inflicted wounds.
DEI: The Institutionalization of Suicidal Empathy
Perhaps nowhere is Saad’s thesis more vividly illustrated than in the explosive growth of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across American institutions. What began as reasonable efforts to address historical discrimination has metastasized, in Saad’s view, into a comprehensive ideological apparatus that systematically dismantles meritocracy in the name of compassion.
American universities now employ vast DEI bureaucracies—administrators whose sole function is to enforce equity mandates, conduct bias training, and ensure proportional representation across identity categories. At many elite institutions, DEI staff outnumber faculty in traditional disciplines. These departments operate on the premise that any disparity in outcomes between demographic groups constitutes evidence of systemic oppression requiring immediate remediation, regardless of individual merit, effort, or aptitude.
In corporate America, Fortune 500 companies have implemented preferential hiring practices explicitly designed to achieve demographic quotas rather than optimize for competence. Tech giants, financial institutions, and consulting firms have publicly committed to hiring targets based on race and gender, effectively creating a two-tiered system where membership in designated victim categories provides competitive advantage over qualifications. Saad argues this represents suicidal empathy in its purest form: organizations voluntarily handicapping their own effectiveness to signal compassion, prioritizing the feelings of activists over the rational pursuit of excellence.
The medical field provides particularly stark examples. Several American medical schools have reduced or eliminated standardized testing requirements in the name of equity, arguing that such tests perpetuate systemic racism. Saad points to this as civilizational madness—the willingness to compromise the competency of future physicians, who will literally hold lives in their hands, because acknowledging differential performance across demographic groups causes psychological discomfort to progressive administrators. The empathy is directed toward the feelings of activists and underperforming applicants; the suicidal element is the inevitable decline in medical care quality that will harm the very communities these policies purport to help.
American law schools have similarly embraced equity over excellence, with some institutions implementing grading systems designed to eliminate performance gaps between demographic groups. The California Bar exam has faced pressure to lower standards or eliminate the test entirely because pass-rate disparities create “inequitable” outcomes. Saad argues that this represents a society so captured by suicidal empathy that it would rather have less competent lawyers—officers of the court responsible for justice itself—than acknowledge uncomfortable truths about differential performance.
Progressive Antisemitism: Empathy Catastrophically Misdirected
The resurgence of antisemitism in progressive American spaces—particularly on elite university campuses following October 7, 2023—provides what Saad considers a textbook case of suicidal empathy’s moral inversion. When Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 Israelis, including women, children, and elderly Holocaust survivors, the immediate response from progressive student organizations at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and other elite institutions was not horror but justification. “Palestine is decolonizing,” they declared. “This is resistance.”
Saad’s framework explains this seemingly inexplicable response: progressive ideology has constructed a rigid hierarchy of victimhood, with Palestinians positioned near the apex as quintessential oppressed people. Jews, particularly Israeli Jews, are coded as white, Western, and therefore oppressors. When this ideological schema encounters reality—Jewish civilians burned alive, women raped, babies murdered—suicidal empathy demands that progressives maintain their compassion toward the designated victim group (Palestinians) even when members of that group commit atrocities, while denying empathy to Jews because they occupy the “oppressor” category.
The result has been an explosion of antisemitic incidents on American campuses. Jewish students at Columbia reported being told to “go back to Poland” and being physically blocked from accessing parts of campus. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were trapped in a library while a mob pounded on the doors. At MIT, Cornell, and Stanford, Jewish students reported pervasive hostility, vandalism of Jewish spaces, and faculty members justifying or minimizing Hamas terrorism.
University administrators, captured by suicidal empathy, responded with remarkable paralysis. When pressed by Congress, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn could not definitively state that calling for genocide of Jews violated their institutions’ codes of conduct, instead offering legalistic evasions about “context-dependent” speech. Saad argues this represents the terminal stage of suicidal empathy: elite institutions cannot defend their own Jewish students—a genuinely vulnerable minority with a history of persecution—because doing so would require acknowledging that the designated victim group (pro-Palestinian activists) includes antisemites, which would disrupt the moral hierarchy that progressive ideology demands.
The suicidal element becomes clear when one considers the long-term consequences. American Jews have been disproportionately represented in progressive movements, academia, and Democratic Party politics. They have been among the most reliable supporters of liberal causes. Yet progressive institutions have demonstrated that when forced to choose between Jews and the Palestinian cause, they will sacrifice Jews without hesitation. Saad predicts this will accelerate the disintegration of the progressive coalition and further erode trust in elite American institutions—a self-inflicted wound driven entirely by ideological rigidity masquerading as compassion.
Democratic Socialism: Guilt-Driven Economic Self-Destruction
The rise of Democratic Socialism in American politics—embodied by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and embraced by substantial portions of the Democratic Party base—represents what Saad identifies as economic suicidal empathy driven by elite guilt about American prosperity.
Democratic Socialist proposals—Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, wealth taxes, universal basic income, student debt cancellation—share a common feature: they promise to redistribute resources from productive Americans to designated victim categories, justified by narratives of systemic oppression and historical injustice. Saad argues these policies emerge not from rational economic analysis but from the psychological need of privileged progressives to alleviate their guilt about living in a successful capitalist society.
The student debt cancellation debate exemplifies this dynamic. Progressive activists demand that the federal government forgive hundreds of billions in student loans, effectively transferring wealth from taxpayers (including those who never attended college or who responsibly paid their debts) to college-educated borrowers who made voluntary financial decisions. The policy is economically regressive—it disproportionately benefits higher-earning professionals—yet it’s framed as compassionate relief for victims of an unjust system.
Saad sees this as suicidal empathy because it undermines the fundamental principle of personal responsibility that enables functional societies. When consequences are systematically divorced from decisions, when those who make poor choices are rescued by those who make prudent ones, the incentive structure that produces prosperity collapses. The empathy is directed toward borrowers who regret their choices; the suicidal element is the destruction of the moral framework that made American prosperity possible.
Wealth tax proposals reveal similar dynamics. Progressive politicians propose confiscatory taxation on the wealthy—with some suggesting marginal rates exceeding 70%—justified by claims that billionaires are inherently immoral and their wealth is stolen from workers. Saad argues this represents suicidal empathy because it would drive productive capital and talent out of America while satisfying the emotional needs of activists who resent success. The empathy is toward those who feel victimized by inequality; the suicide is the destruction of the economic dynamism that creates opportunity.
The Green New Deal—which would require restructuring the entire American economy at a cost of tens of trillions of dollars—represents perhaps the most ambitious expression of suicidal empathy. Framed as necessary to prevent climate catastrophe and achieve “environmental justice,” the proposal would eliminate fossil fuels, guarantee government jobs, provide universal healthcare, and ensure “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.” Saad argues this is suicidal empathy at civilizational scale: the willingness to dismantle the energy infrastructure that powers American prosperity, to guarantee resources to those unwilling to contribute, all to signal compassion and alleviate progressive guilt about American success.
Immigration and Border Policy: Compassion as National Dissolution
The American border crisis provides what Saad considers the most visceral example of suicidal empathy in action. Under progressive governance, the southern border has effectively ceased to function as a boundary. Millions of migrants have entered the United States illegally, with progressive politicians and activists arguing that enforcing immigration law is inherently cruel and that America has a moral obligation to accept unlimited numbers of asylum seekers.
Sanctuary city policies—where local governments refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement—epitomize this dynamic. Cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have declared themselves sanctuaries, protecting illegal immigrants from deportation even when they commit serious crimes. Saad argues this represents suicidal empathy because it prioritizes the feelings and interests of foreign nationals over the safety of American citizens.
The consequences have been predictable. Kate Steinle was murdered in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times but kept returning to the sanctuary city. Laken Riley was murdered by an illegal immigrant in Georgia who had been released despite ICE detainer requests. Rachel Morin was murdered in Maryland by an illegal immigrant who had fled his home country after committing murder there. In each case, American women died because progressive jurisdictions chose empathy toward illegal immigrants over the safety of their own citizens.
The Biden administration’s border policies have accelerated this dynamic. By effectively ending detention and deportation for most categories of illegal immigrants, by releasing millions into the American interior with notices to appear at future court dates (which most ignore), the administration has signaled that American immigration law is optional. Saad argues this represents a governing class so captured by suicidal empathy that it cannot perform the most basic function of sovereignty: controlling who enters the national territory.
Progressive activists justify these policies with appeals to compassion: these are desperate people seeking better lives, America is a nation of immigrants, borders are artificial constructs that perpetuate global inequality. Saad counters that this is precisely the pathology he describes—the inability to distinguish between legitimate compassion and self-destruction. A nation that cannot control its borders, that prioritizes the interests of foreign nationals over its own citizens, that cannot deport even violent criminals because doing so seems uncompassionate, is a nation in terminal decline.
The suicidal element becomes clear when one considers the long-term trajectory. Millions of migrants from cultures with values fundamentally incompatible with American liberalism—including attitudes toward women’s rights, religious freedom, and democratic governance—are being integrated into American society with no expectation of assimilation. Progressive ideology demands that America accommodate these values rather than requiring newcomers to adopt American norms, because demanding assimilation would be “cultural imperialism.” Saad argues this guarantees the eventual dissolution of the American national identity and the values that made America attractive to immigrants in the first place.
Criminal Justice: The Victimhood Inversion
American criminal justice policy under progressive governance has undergone what Saad calls a “moral inversion”—a systematic reorientation away from protecting victims toward empathizing with criminals. This manifests in bail reform, reduced sentencing, progressive prosecutors who refuse to prosecute entire categories of crime, and the broader “defund the police” movement that gained prominence after George Floyd’s death.
Cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago have elected progressive prosecutors who explicitly campaigned on reducing incarceration and treating crime as a symptom of systemic oppression rather than individual moral failure. These prosecutors have declined to prosecute theft under certain dollar amounts, have reduced felonies to misdemeanors, have eliminated cash bail, and have sought minimal sentences even for violent offenders.
The results have been catastrophic. San Francisco experienced an explosion of retail theft, with organized gangs brazenly looting stores in broad daylight, knowing they faced no consequences. Walgreens closed multiple locations due to theft losses. Louis Vuitton and other luxury retailers were repeatedly ransacked. Progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin (since recalled by voters) argued that prosecuting these crimes would perpetuate systemic racism and that theft was driven by economic desperation—despite video evidence showing organized criminal enterprises.
Philadelphia under progressive DA Larry Krasner has experienced surging homicide rates, with the city regularly recording over 500 murders annually—levels not seen in decades. Krasner has consistently sought reduced sentences, opposed life sentences even for repeat violent offenders, and framed criminal justice as primarily about addressing the trauma and disadvantages experienced by perpetrators.
New York’s bail reform eliminated cash bail for most crimes, meaning that even repeat offenders are immediately released after arrest. The result has been a carousel of crime, with the same individuals arrested dozens of times for theft, assault, and other offenses, only to be immediately released to reoffend. Progressive activists defend this as compassionate—cash bail is unfair to the poor—while ignoring the victims who suffer from the predictable crime wave.
Saad argues this represents suicidal empathy because it systematically prioritizes the feelings and circumstances of criminals over the safety of law-abiding citizens. The empathy flows toward perpetrators, who are framed as victims of systemic racism, poverty, and trauma. The actual victims—the elderly Asian woman beaten on the subway, the store owner whose business is destroyed by theft, the family whose son is murdered—are rendered invisible, their suffering deemed less important than avoiding the appearance of being “tough on crime,” which progressive ideology has coded as racist.
The suicidal element is the destruction of the social contract. When citizens cannot rely on the state to protect them from predation, when criminals face no consequences, when the justice system empathizes with perpetrators rather than victims, civil society collapses. Productive citizens flee (as they have from San Francisco, Portland, and other progressive cities), businesses close, and the urban environment deteriorates into dysfunction. The very communities progressive prosecutors claim to help—poor minority neighborhoods—suffer most from the crime wave, yet progressive ideology demands continued empathy toward criminals because acknowledging that public safety requires incarceration would contradict the narrative of systemic oppression.
Free Speech and the Compassion Censorship Complex
American universities and corporations have implemented increasingly restrictive speech codes justified by appeals to compassion—the need to protect marginalized groups from “harm” caused by offensive speech. Saad argues this represents suicidal empathy because it sacrifices the foundational American value of free expression to avoid causing psychological discomfort to designated victim groups.
On college campuses, this manifests in trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias response teams, and the systematic disinvitation or disruption of speakers deemed offensive. Conservative speakers like Ben Shapiro require massive security expenditures and still face violent protests. Professors who express views contrary to progressive orthodoxy—on gender, race, or other sensitive topics—face investigation, suspension, or termination. Students report being afraid to express their genuine views in class for fear of social or academic consequences.
The justification is always compassion: certain speech causes harm to vulnerable students, creates hostile environments, perpetuates trauma. Saad argues this is suicidal empathy because it prioritizes the subjective feelings of the most sensitive over the collective benefit of free inquiry and robust debate. Universities—institutions explicitly designed to pursue truth through open discourse—have subordinated that mission to the emotional comfort of activists.
Corporate America has followed suit. Companies now police employee speech on social media, terminate workers for expressing politically incorrect views, and require participation in DEI training that enforces ideological conformity. Google fired engineer James Damore for writing a memo questioning aspects of the company’s diversity policies, despite his carefully reasoned arguments citing peer-reviewed research. The message was clear: certain questions cannot be asked, certain truths cannot be spoken, because doing so might cause discomfort to protected groups.
Saad sees this as civilizational suicide because free speech is the mechanism by which societies identify and correct errors. When certain topics become unspeakable, when asking questions or presenting evidence is punished as harmful, the society loses its ability to adapt to reality. The empathy is directed toward those who claim offense; the suicide is the destruction of the truth-seeking process that enables progress.
Reception and Impact in America
Saad’s thesis has polarized American cultural and political discourse, gaining significant traction among conservatives and tech leaders while drawing sharp rebukes from progressive academics and activists.
The Support: Tech Billionaires and the Conservative Embrace
The concept of suicidal empathy has become a highly popular framework among prominent American tech leaders, billionaires, and right-of-center commentators. Elon Musk has frequently amplified Saad’s work, using variations of the phrase (such as “civilizational suicidal empathy”) to describe progressive governance and explicitly crediting Saad’s framework in his critique of DEI policies, immigration, and crime. After acquiring Twitter (now X), Musk cited concerns about suicidal empathy as justification for eliminating the platform’s content moderation policies that he argued censored legitimate discourse in the name of protecting feelings.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, embraced Saad’s framework in his public campaign against Harvard President Claudine Gay, arguing that her inability to condemn calls for Jewish genocide represented suicidal empathy—the prioritization of DEI ideology and protection of pro-Palestinian activists over the safety of Jewish students. Ackman explicitly connected Gay’s testimony to Saad’s thesis about how elite institutions have been captured by pathological compassion.
Conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murray have integrated Saad’s framework into their cultural criticism, using “suicidal empathy” as shorthand for the entire progressive project. The phrase has become common in right-wing media, podcasts, and social media, functioning as a unifying theory that explains seemingly disparate progressive policies—from border chaos to crime waves to DEI mandates—as manifestations of the same underlying pathology.
Republican politicians have begun adopting the language, with figures like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy incorporating critiques of “suicidal empathy” into their campaigns against woke ideology. The framework has proven politically potent because it reframes the debate: progressives aren’t simply wrong on policy; they’re suffering from a psychological disorder that threatens national survival.
Supporters view Saad’s thesis as a refreshing, clear-eyed defense of common sense, logic, and self-preservation against the excesses of identity politics. They argue it explains why progressive policies consistently produce outcomes opposite to their stated intentions—because the policies aren’t actually designed to solve problems but to satisfy the emotional needs of elites seeking to alleviate guilt through performative compassion.
The Criticism: Progressive Rejection and Accusations of Xenophobia
Conversely, progressive critics, psychologists, and left-of-center outlets argue that “suicidal empathy” is a politically motivated assault on human compassion designed to provide intellectual cover for xenophobia, racism, and cruelty.
It creates a false dichotomy: Critics argue that Saad frames human rights, immigration charity, criminal justice reform, and DEI initiatives as a zero-sum game where showing empathy to an outsider or minority inherently harms citizens or the majority. Progressive academics contend that this is a false choice—that America can simultaneously maintain border security and treat asylum seekers humanely, can pursue both public safety and criminal justice reform, can promote diversity without sacrificing excellence. They argue Saad’s framework is designed to make any progressive policy appear as civilizational suicide, thereby delegitimizing all efforts at social reform.
It relies on anecdote over data: Critics point out that Saad bypasses established academic literature on social psychology, empathy, and policy outcomes, opting instead to build a socio-political narrative around highly publicized, isolated negative events. They note that he focuses on individual crimes by illegal immigrants while ignoring data showing immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, highlights retail theft in San Francisco while ignoring broader crime trends, and emphasizes controversial DEI policies while ignoring evidence of persistent discrimination.
Progressive social scientists argue that Saad’s evolutionary psychology framework is itself ideologically motivated—that he selectively applies evolutionary logic to justify conservative preferences while ignoring evolutionary explanations for cooperation, altruism, and in-group expansion. They contend that human evolution actually favored flexible, expansive empathy and that Saad’s “proper boundaries” for compassion are culturally constructed rather than biologically determined.
It serves as a dog whistle: Some commentators and historians warn that vilifying empathy toward marginalized or immigrant populations borders on xenophobic rhetoric, functioning as a polished, academic version of “Great Replacement” narratives by warning of an imminent civilizational collapse driven by outsiders. They argue that Saad’s framework provides intellectual respectability to nativist sentiments, allowing people to oppose immigration, diversity initiatives, and refugee resettlement while claiming to defend “rational self-preservation” rather than admitting to ethnic or cultural prejudice.
Critics note that Saad’s framework consistently identifies empathy toward non-white, non-Western populations as “suicidal” while rarely questioning empathy toward white or Western groups. They argue this reveals the theory’s true function: not as objective analysis but as ideological justification for maintaining existing hierarchies and resisting demographic change.
Progressive activists contend that the “suicidal empathy” framework is particularly dangerous because it pathologizes compassion itself, framing kindness toward vulnerable populations as a mental disorder. They warn this rhetoric could be used to justify increasingly harsh policies toward immigrants, criminals, and minorities by recasting cruelty as rational self-preservation.
It ignores systemic analysis: Left-wing critics argue that Saad’s framework deliberately ignores structural and historical factors that explain contemporary social problems. They contend that criminal justice reform is necessary because the American system has been demonstrably racist, that DEI initiatives address real discrimination, that immigration from Latin America is driven by American foreign policy and economic exploitation, and that wealth inequality reflects systemic injustice rather than individual merit.
From this perspective, Saad’s “suicidal empathy” is actually a refusal to acknowledge America’s moral obligations arising from its history and power. What he calls pathological compassion, they argue, is actually appropriate moral responsibility—the recognition that America’s prosperity has been built partly on exploitation and that remedying historical injustices requires sacrifice from those who have benefited.
The Prescription: Saad’s Vision for American Revival
Saad argues that to halt America’s perceived decline, the nation must move past what he calls “empathy-based dopamine hits” designed to signal virtue. His solution requires a fundamental reorientation of American culture and policy around several core principles:
Demand strict cultural reciprocity: America must require that immigrants and minority populations embrace core American values—free speech, religious tolerance, gender equality, democratic governance—as a condition of participation in American society. Saad argues that multiculturalism without assimilation is suicidal, that America cannot survive as a coherent nation if it accommodates values fundamentally hostile to liberalism. This means ending the progressive celebration of cultural difference when that difference includes illiberal practices, and unapologetically asserting that American values are superior to alternatives.
Re-establish objective truth over subjective feelings: American institutions must reject the premise that subjective feelings of offense or harm constitute valid reasons for policy decisions. Universities must return to pursuing truth regardless of who finds it uncomfortable. Corporations must hire and promote based on competence rather than demographic quotas. The justice system must focus on protecting victims rather than empathizing with criminals. This requires dismantling DEI bureaucracies, eliminating bias training that enforces ideological conformity, and restoring meritocracy as the organizing principle of American life.
Restore rational self-interest as legitimate: Americans must reject the guilt and self-flagellation that progressive ideology demands. Saad argues that America’s success is not a crime requiring penance but an achievement to be celebrated and defended. This means unapologetically prioritizing American citizens over foreign nationals, defending American prosperity against redistributive schemes, and recognizing that a nation’s first obligation is to its own people.
Recognize that boundaries are compassionate: Saad argues that defending the core pillars of American civilization—even when it requires drawing hard, exclusionary lines—is the highest form of long-term empathy a society can practice. Deporting illegal immigrants, incarcerating criminals, maintaining academic standards, and defending free speech may seem uncompassionate in the moment, but these actions preserve the functional society that enables genuine flourishing. The alternative—the progressive path of unlimited empathy—leads to societal collapse that ultimately harms everyone, including the designated victim groups that progressive policies purport to help.
Embrace the tragic vision: Saad’s prescription requires Americans to abandon the utopian assumption that all social problems can be solved, that all disparities reflect injustice, that sufficient empathy and resources can create perfect equality. Instead, Americans must embrace what Thomas Sowell calls the “tragic vision”—the recognition that life involves trade-offs, that some problems have no solutions, that human nature includes ineradicable elements of tribalism and self-interest, and that the best we can achieve is imperfect systems that minimize harm rather than perfect systems that eliminate it.
This means accepting that some level of inequality is inevitable and not evidence of oppression, that border security requires turning away desperate people, that public safety requires incarcerating criminals even when they’ve experienced trauma, and that meritocracy will produce disparate outcomes across demographic groups. Saad argues that America’s survival depends on recovering the wisdom to make these hard choices without succumbing to the emotional blackmail of activists who frame every boundary as cruelty.
Conclusion: The Stakes of the Debate
Whether one embraces or rejects Saad’s framework, the concept of “suicidal empathy” has crystallized a fundamental debate about America’s future. At its core, the question is whether American compassion—expressed through immigration policy, criminal justice reform, DEI initiatives, and wealth redistribution—represents moral progress or civilizational decline.
For Saad’s supporters, the evidence is overwhelming: American cities are descending into chaos, elite institutions are abandoning meritocracy, the border has collapsed, and progressive ideology has created a moral framework that systematically prioritizes outsiders and criminals over citizens and victims. They see suicidal empathy as the explanation for why America seems determined to dismantle the very institutions and values that made it prosperous and free.
For Saad’s critics, the framework is a dangerous attempt to pathologize compassion and provide intellectual cover for policies that would increase suffering among vulnerable populations. They argue that America’s challenges require more empathy, not less, and that Saad’s prescription would return the nation to a darker past of exclusion and hierarchy.
What’s undeniable is that Saad has identified a genuine tension in American life: the conflict between universal humanitarian values and particular national interests, between compassion for individuals and preservation of systems, between the emotional satisfaction of appearing kind and the hard choices required for societal survival. How America resolves this tension—whether by embracing Saad’s call for bounded empathy or by rejecting it as cruelty disguised as wisdom—will determine the nation’s trajectory for generations to come.
N.B. Saad, 61, says he is fed up with suicidal empathy gone wild in Canada and is relocating to the United States. Are they that much farther gone than we are in creating a “mad, mad, mad, mad world”?
