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When I was in high school, I made an off-hand comment during an extra-curricular activity that Jimmy Carter was our worst president (this was before Joe Biden and, I’m dating myself, Barack Obama). One of the other students seemed taken aback and sputtered: “I’m related to Jimmy Carter.” The implication was that I should apologize and make some kind of amends. Her information did not perturb me in the slightest. What does your relation to Jimmy Carter have to do with my opinion of Jimmy Carter’s performance as president?

I’m related to Hanson. I wouldn’t be irritated if you said you hated “Mmbop.” I would just think you’re wrong because Mmbop is an absolute banger.

Why did this girl think her familial ties would change my mind?

She was trying to provoke an empathetic response. Not because Jimmy Carter was a good president, not because he’s a beloved member of the family (from what I remember, she had never actually met him), but from what was likely because her relation to a president, no matter how awful, was a point of personal pride, some significant part of her identity, and by voicing an opinion about him, it burst the bubble, it was an insult to her. I was not being empathetic.

(I’ve never met Hanson. If you guys are up for it, we’re second cousins on my mother’s side.)

A trend in my own life seems to bear out in the wider world: when I meet someone on the Left, they assume I agree with them. Conservatives know better. Conservatives feel each other out in conversations, use code words and veiled references to see if someone runs in the same circles. The Left never feels anyone out. They take their viewpoint for granted and damn you if you disagree. Their empathy is misfiring. And the misfiring and misappropriation of empathy is the driving force behind Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy.

Suicidal Empathy is a meticulously researched, heavily annotated accounting of how misfiring empathy is killing Western civilization. It is a spiritual, if not out-and-out, follow-up to Saad’s The Parasitic Mind, and, while you can read one without the other, you probably shouldn’t.

Saad’s argument, continuing from The Parasitic Mind, is that the ideas that are causing cultural hari-kari began in the institutions and worked its way out from there. It’s wokeness, it’s multiculturalism, it’s Communism, it’s critical theory. Saad delves into several areas where suicidal empathy has reared its ugly head, including Covid, Islam in the West and Islamophobia, criminal justice, and environmentalism. Conservatives will read this with renewed horror. Any liberal who deigns to pick up something so far outside their comfort zone, will look at the rapes, murders, and suicide of Western society and not understand what the problem is.

For the Louder with Crowder audience, most of the examples he cites and the fallout from them will come as no surprise. We have been documenting this in real time. In the final chapter, Saad offers advice on how to inoculate ourselves from the mind virus that leads to suicidal empathy. Spoiler alert: that does not include cutting ourselves off from empathy entirely.

Saad’s diagnosis is that our human empathy is misfiring. While Saad is documenting the symptoms, I still didn’t feel like misfiring empathy was digging down to the core of ‘why?’ Why is Western civilization seemingly caught up in its own self-destruction? Why are we suicidally empathetic?

Western civilization cannot exist without empathy. Without empathy, the slaves don't get freed, America doesn't rebel, women don't get equality. There is no justice, just the will of the strong. Even the atomic bombs were dropped empathetically when the loss of life equations were calculated. Without empathy, human life doesn't have value. But, what do we do when that empathy is misapplied? What happens when, instead of serving as a guide, empathy becomes an end goal in and of itself?

Ironically, I don't think that Leftists actually believe that all cultures are equal (not most of them, anyway). I think they know that our culture is so much better, that they assume everyone wants to be a part of it. And that misapplied empathy leads to open borders, release of criminals, feminism and socialism. In doing so, they are ignoring the basic nature of man. The Left does think Western civilization is superior so much so that they think everyone will assimilate because they see the value of that empathy, too.

And that's not empathy anymore. I don’t think Leftists are empathetic. What they have labelled ‘empathy’ is just veiled narcissism, and, if there’s one thing we know Leftists are good at, it’s changing the definition of words in order to make themselves feel better and make their enemies look like uncaring bigots.

I have started reading The Parasitic Mind to see if Saad digs deeper into the whys of the human condition. Because I’m worried that Western civilization’s natural progression is suicidal empathy. It isn’t a disease or a misfiring or a misappropriation of an emotion that allowed the West to flourish. Suicidal empathy might just be inherent to a culture that had to use empathy to succeed. Now that empathy's at the top, Western culture has reached its final form. And its final resting place.