If you’re particularly masochistic, and like subjecting yourself to the X feeds of the worst people in the world, you may have noticed a particular phrase gaining traction recently — ‘suicidal empathy’. The term is typically credited to Canadian professor Gad Saad. His book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense focused on the concept that there are certain toxic ideas which end up harming those who adopt them. He described the phenomenon occurring in nature:

Take wood crickets for example. They avoid any contact with water, as they fear drowning. But when a ‘hairworm’ parasite attaches to them, the parasite needs the cricket to jump into water to complete its reproductive cycle. As a result, the infected cricket undergoes a kind of ‘zombification’ and leaps into the water voluntarily, thereby sacrificing itself for the benefit of the parasite.

This is how I perceive progressive students, radical feminists, and even certain liberal Jews. They internalise foreign ideas that lead them to act against their own interests, and essentially commit suicide. Unfortunately, the source of these ideas is academia.

According to Saad and his disciples, ‘suicidal empathy’ is a manifestation of this in humans. The suggestion is that the West is destroying itself through a desire to help those who will supposedly harm us — immigrants, Muslims, trans people, Palestinians.

Perhaps the leading adopter of the notion of ‘suicidal empathy’ is billionaire Nazi Elon Musk. A search of his X account for the term yields a seemingly infinite set of results. Speaking to podcaster and frequent platformer of the far-right Joe Rogan, Musk said:

The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilisation, which is the empathy response.

Diminished empathy suits the rich and powerful

Others pushing the idea include Reform candidate Matt Goodwin, and assorted prominent right-wing commentators. There’s a pretty obvious reason why an instruction to be selective in our compassion should come from the faction of politics that defends concentrated wealth and power. It’s classic divide and conquer — if we all see society as composed of those who are deserving of assistance and those who aren’t, it’s a lot easier for us to be pitted against each other. The rich will continue to dominate while we are convinced to blame those who have been assigned parasite status.

Saad has an even more sinister reason for perpetuating this concept. As a relentless backer of so-called ‘Israel’ as it carries out a holocaust in Gaza, convincing people that Palestinians are unworthy of empathy is a useful way to ensure the slaughter continues. A recent vile tweet shows footage featuring the remains of ‘Israeli’ prisoner of war Master Sergeant Ran Gvili being returned home. Saad says:

One culture reveres its fallen heroes to know [sic] ends but celebrates life. Another culture reveres death more than life. Which is the one that you’d like to be a member of?

The suggestion is that Palestinians do not mourn their dead. We are asked to ignore the evidence of our own eyes, of families weeping over the shrouds of relatives slain by Zionists, and instead pretend that Gaza is one large death cult, undeserving of sympathy. Be selective in your empathy, we are urged, so that we can properly delineate which groups can be safely marked for extermination.

Suicidal empathy — same shite, different name

This current template is simply the latest chapter in the right’s attempt at controlling how we perceive empathy, the extent to which we should believe in it at all, and who should be its recipients. A previous iteration was the term ‘virtue signalling‘.

Under this framing, we were invited to believe that any act of kindness was merely a dishonest performance intended to convey the appearance of virtue. No one could possibly be doing anything for genuinely altruistic reasons; it must always be an act of cynical manipulation. ‘Performative’ was the twin term usually paired with this slander.

In fact, Sky News Australia managed to produce reports on consecutive days in 2025 attacking activist Greta Thunberg for ‘performative‘ and ‘virtue signalling‘ actions respectively. Thunberg was on board the Gaza flotilla, attempting to deliver aid to Palestinians starved by the Netanyahu regime.

Never mind the fact that virtually no aid was getting in due to the Zionist entity’s policies; never mind that activists had been left with no other option due to failures of governments worldwide to act; never mind the fact that the flotilla put Gaza on the agenda and rallied activists across the world. Don’t focus on verifiable facts to determine what may have motivated Thunberg. Instead, focus on the unverifiable contents of her mind. Oh, and be sure to assume the worst possible motives, in opposition to all available evidence.

McCarthy and Reagan tried the same tactic

From undermining the very existence of empathy, to denouncing those who exhibit it; a previous approach was to label anyone with a conscience as a ‘bleeding heart liberal’. An article in Atlas Obscuratraces its first use to one Westbrook Pegler, a:

…soul-sick, mud-wallowing gutter scum columnist

according to one contemporary. Pegler:

…didn’t like the labour movement, Communists, fascists, Jews, and perhaps most of all, liberals.

He used the term in the 1930s to reprimand those trying to pass an anti-lynching bill in the US congress. ‘Bleeding heart liberal’ was later adopted by infamous persecutor of the left Joseph McCarthy, and later still by Ronald Reagan.

Throughout this same period, conservative philosopher Ayn Rand was attempting to push her own understanding of empathy’s role in the human soul. While it was permitted under her reasoning, she viewed it as entirely secondary to the most virtuous course of action — pursuit of one’s own selfish desires above all else. Rand actively advocated against support for disabled and poor people, and for causes like feminism and those battling to liberate themselves from US domination.

Suicidal empathy — the cult of selfishness benefits neoliberalism

Her ideas were of great use to the burgeoning neoliberal project, which necessitated a concept not of homo sapiens, but of homo economicus. That is, a being that cared solely about its own resource maximisation. If consideration of others existed, it was purely confined to one’s immediate family. Hence the Thatcherite dogma of there being no such thing as society:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society?

There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

Rand’s and Thatcher’s was a Social Darwinist vision for how society should be designed. The most extreme purveyors of that approach were the Nazis, in which the strong crushing the weak was viewed as progress, cleansing the gene pool of unworthy material.

Empathy need not even come into the discourse — it was a simple scientific matter of removing objectively lesser specimens. Hitler’s regime used medicalised language in reference to those it wished to expunge. They spoke of ‘racial hygiene’ and characterised Jewish and Roma people as pathogens harming the German ‘body’.

Suicidal empathyA return to Nazism

We now see a return to this language in the work of Saad, as he speaks of “neuro-parasites” and the impact of “pathological ideas” on Western culture. He has recently completed a tour of so-called ‘Israel’, the ultimate modern achievement in eradicating empathy.

Zionist soldiers showed themselves to have zero compassion for innocent Palestinians, resulting in what is perhaps history’s first ‘joyful genocide‘. The impulse for caring was successfully overridden to the point where rampaging genocidaires delighted in their eradication of an entire people.

Fundamental to Zionism is an ethno-purist notion of a land for one people. This naturally veers towards a ruthless purging of all who don’t fit within this plan. Benjamin Netanyahu himself has previous when it comes to celebrating the notion of the strong crushing the weak. In 2018 he said:

The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.

His remarks were immediately criticised for sounding like something from Mein Kampf.

Far from being irrational, empathy is the only logical course

The hope of the right now appears to be that this template can be applied more broadly. Their current focus is on the protesters in Minneapolis standing against the fascists of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Assorted ghouls inform us that those being gunned down to protect their neighbours from being dragged off to gulags are exhibiting suicidal empathy.

In reality, what they are doing is profoundly rational. The activists risking their lives have correctly identified their true enemy — the would-be tyrants in the White House destroying the law, and the wealthy donors that back them.

They know that only by standing in unflinching solidarity with those being targeted can they guarantee their own freedom. If the modern-day brownshirts of ICE are successful in rounding up demonised people of colour, it’ll just be the beginning. Ultimately, no one will be safe.

Though Saad is an advocate of evolutionary psychology, he ignores the following interpretation — that empathy is our most fundamental means of survival. That only by guaranteeing the well-being of the collective, can we all thrive. We share this trait with many other pack animals as well. Elephants travel in groups to pay their respect after other elephants die.

That rabid competition is the most primitive drive in nature, whereas cooperation and mutual aid are the most sophisticated.

This was the vision of Mikhail Bakunin 150 years ago — we must urgently revisit it to ward off the nihilistic vision being pushed by today’s ruling class.

Featured image via RS&H

By Robert Freeman

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