BY PAUL YOWARD
‘Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind’ by Gad Saad (Broadside Books, 2026)
“Fare il frocio col culo degli altri”
The Italian proverb lands with earthy bluntness: it is easy to be generous with someone else’s backside. The costs are never yours. This single observation captures the heart of Gad Saad’s 2026 polemic Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. What masquerades as boundless kindness is often cheap virtue performed at someone else’s expense—luxury beliefs funded by taxpayers, institutions, or abstract “society,” never by the people waving the placards. The term Suicidal Empathy, therefore, requires a sarcastic interpretation, because the gesture is in reality neither suicidal nor genuinely empathic. It is a signal of virtue, which itself is a concept spoken out of the side of its mouth. This is because a central component of virtue is that it bears a cost, and that cost has to be borne by the one being virtuous. So the loan of someone else’s butthole for sexual gratification is easy virtue in more than one way.
Milton Friedman recognised four kinds of spending of money. There is expenditure on yourself of your own money that you have earned. This is the most precious, and you will tend to seek the best value for this as you know the cost of the money. This applies even if all you seek is a good time—that good time was paid for by the pain of labour. The other three kinds of expenditure are plain to those keeping up: spending your money on someone else, someone spending money on you, and spending someone else’s money on another third party. The degree of care in spending, and how closely it maps to fulfilling the utility function, diminishes through these categories.
So the modern malaise of what is here termed ‘Suicidal Empathy’ only becomes significant when it transfers from the realm of emotions to the material realm, and so is best not thought of as empathy but altruism. But even that is subverted because of the payment of the ultimate cost—as is sometimes the case in altruism of one’s life for another in a suicidal act (saving brothers from drowning while exhausting yourself in the waves)—because the compound phrase ‘suicidal empathy’ is essentially spending other people’s resources on another identity group to which neither the resources are taken from, nor does the signaller of the virtue of supporting the strangers belong. This results in a worst-case scenario of value and may not even benefit the recipients. In this case the virtue signaller has become a “Stupid Person” in the technical sense (i.e. a negative, negative interaction; see: Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana), 1976, Cipolla, Carlo M.).
George Price was a genius and to me a latter-day saint, scarred from his role as a key chemist on the Manhattan nuclear bomb project, and dedicated his pensioned years to biology with a special interest in altruism. He understood the selfish nature of genes before The Selfish Gene, where it can genetically pay to save brothers, in the example I already cited, because they share on average half the same genes as you, and so from the gene’s eye point of view are as valuable as the one unit of genes consolidated in you.
Where sub-lethal altruism is given, then an evolutionary advantage may be obtained from others where “you scratch their back and they scratch yours” or the gesture is reciprocated. If we go further and draw upon our Italian epithet, then the itch that can only be scratched by another is less back and more backside? The summation over time in repeated interactions will even out, but because of comparative advantage and exchange rates at each transaction, the integral is vastly more than a solitary life. Imagine hunters bringing game back to a cave with a variable return to the hunt; by sharing the meat with other hunters, starvation may be averted because by yourself you may go too long between successful captures.
Here is the clincher in the life of George Price, though: recognition of the fact that if you are kind to one’s children, then that is self-serving, for they share your genes, as too if one gives to friends who are capable people and will get back a drink at the bar or “scratch an itch” when not quite able to reach, quite, ‘there’. They are not truly altruistic in a spiritual sense; one must cast one’s bread out on the water without a tenfold expectation. Price was a Christian convert with the zeal of the Woke adrift in a foreign land, London. The American paid the ultimate price of his peace of mind and actual suicide by opening his house up to homeless strangers. John Maynard Smith, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists, was the only attendee of George’s funeral after finding him a home where he died taking nail scissors to his jugular, and everything that could be stolen was taken. I am in no way trying to be exploitative of this story, but it is worth risking that perception because it is a cautionary tale. It is a microcosm of the current predicament of the West, as it is orientating by the thought contagions of the elite’s parasitised minds that are being manipulated into states of suicidal empathy, giving away our 1,000-year-old birthrights by offering out-groups the joy of harshly taking us up the ass.
All this provides context for Gad Saad, the evolutionary psychologist whose 2020 bestseller The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense dissected infectious ideas, and who returns with a brisk 256-page diagnosis, taking the scope to encompass more of a sociological perspective. To recap, he argues that empathy, a typically adaptive module honed for mother-child bonding and cooperation, has been hijacked among Western elites. Unmoored from evolutionary guardrails such as reciprocity, kin selection, and long-term consequences, normal moral priorities are inverted: criminals over victims, feelings over truth, outsiders over citizens, the destructive over the productive. The result is not compassion but civilisational self-harm of an existential nature.
The book’s strength lies in its accessibility and concreteness, with numerous examples. Front and centre—as people familiar with Saad’s social media will be aware—is the problem of Islam, where his personal biography is fundamentally impacted. Saad’s anecdotal style also piles up other vivid, real-world cases: coddling violent recidivists, shielding squatters, prioritising illegal migrants over veterans, sacrificing women’s sports and safety on the altar of transgender ideology. Readers instantly recognise the pattern: empathy deployed indiscriminately, stripped of boundaries, producing what Buddhists call “idiot compassion.” The need to signal virtue overrides all normal loyalties, and when the cost is borne by others, that is very tempting.
Arguably, the memes that went along with the COVID virus were more virulent than COVID-19 itself.
It may be becoming clear that I have, for the sake of an analysis of the cover of the book and the title, studied not just this but many books. Well, yes. But the terminology is conceptually important because so many caveats have to be applied to the two-word poem “suicidal empathy” to understand the phenomena it is meant to be describing that it is not possible to understand without a screed of exposition. This job of work has been done, fortunately, as Gad Saad is a charismatic and prolific, very worthy cultural warrior. I am in no place to criticise, and in any case it is as a meme fixed in the public consciousness. So be it.
I in no way wish to be churlish about what is an entertaining and worthwhile contribution to the cultural debate, but I would also take issue with the idea that empathy is a universal good in the first place. Empathy between mother and child is intuitively obvious: an attuned mother can anticipate a neonate’s needs and rear the child more effectively. At the opposite extreme, empathy between rival men competing for the same woman or between warriors on the battlefield seems far less adaptive. Yet genes often exert similar effects in different contexts to achieve different ends via a similar mechanism. An empathic warrior can, therefore, gain a decisive edge by “getting inside” an opponent’s head: anticipating moves, feigning vulnerability, or manipulating the adversary’s responses. This is empathy’s darker face, and it can be lethal. Between these poles lies everyday social life, where the ability to read intentions confers a clear advantage. Neurodivergent individuals with empathy deficits often stand out precisely because they lack this tool.
This spectrum makes it implausible to treat empathy as purely “touchy-feely” or a universal good. It has manipulative and even lethal uses. Psychopaths and skilled con artists demonstrate the point: they frequently score high on a utilitarian form of empathy, reading micro-expressions and body language with surgical precision to extract information and weaponise it against their ‘mark’.
From this vantage, the mass adoption of “Woke” ideology in Western societies becomes easier to understand. In peer groups, reputation is currency. Genuine virtue is costly; it requires an internal moral compass and real sacrifice, such as returning a friend’s unattended property when no one is watching. Signalling virtue, however, is cheap. One need only proclaim the act publicly, especially when the risk was negligible. Using dark empathy to scale the hierarchies of society with sharp elbows, rather than overt punches, allows ascent up the greasy pole without ever exposing the ‘black side’ that someone might penetrate. The combination of sacrificing the resources of an adjacent group for an impoverished out-group at no personal expense, and getting all the kudos, is to the Machiavellian such a good deal that Woke, which has required so much analysis to see the appeal, is somehow mystifying when one sees how obvious the equation is. In fact it has been going on in all the schemes of con men in history, like socialism, gangsters, and social parasites of all kinds.
The internet has turned society into a digital Panopticon (Doyle 2025). Without an omnipresent God, morality becomes whatever observers can see. Behaviour matters only when it has a ‘digital witness’. In this environment, the purest altruism—costly acts performed for non-kin with zero chance of reciprocation—becomes the ultimate status display. Placards declaring “Refugees Welcome” are classic examples: the bearers, often insulated in affluent suburbs, pay no personal price for the policies they champion. The costs fall on others. This is not genuine empathy, nor is it suicidal. It is fake altruism, more akin to societal Munchausen syndrome by proxy than to self-sacrifice. The meme “suicidal empathy” is snappier and has stuck, but it obscures the underlying mechanism. Precision matters. Richard Dawkins’s concept of the extended phenotype captures it cleanly: an organism’s influence can extend beyond its body to manipulate the behaviour and psychology of others, parasitising minds. Allied to this is niche-construction theory, which shows how organisms reshape their environments, including the mental environments of rivals to their own advantage, from a spider’s web to the already cited con man’s psychological traps. Such suicidal empathy behaviour is best understood as an enactment of a luxury belief. It may undermine the bearer’s own prosperity, safety, or comfort, yet it purchases social capital, often at a greater cost to society than any marginal or avoided costs to themselves. For some it will pay off, and for others they will be the useful idiots to the social climbing of the new elites. Like a potlatch or a secular ascetic ritual, the transfers involved publicly demonstrate that one is a “good person,” even if the ritual is performed at other people’s expense.
The simplest theories, in the end, can be the most elegant. While the terminology is flawed—because we little understand suicide or empathy, so combining them in an analogy is still a black box—fortunately the book’s contents explore a panoply of examples that are possible to refer to under this loose umbrella, so that the problem becomes clearer. Rather than post-modern resource-rich societies creating the attractive displays analogous to the beauty of the bird of paradise plumage, people have convinced themselves that the most fortunate people of all time are living in a hell. We could end up in a hell, but it will be of our own making, and instead of a smooth ride we will only end up with our Crown Jewels excised and a sore arse.
Paul Yoward originally trained as an evolutionary biologist with an interest in behavioural ecology, went on to a career in engineering from which he has now retired, and concentrates on comedy writing in various forms, from fiction to stand-up and podcasting, as well as more serious criticism. Substack: @SamHain X: @BoloXology20250 YouTube: @paulyoward3795 ResearchGate: @PaulYoward