The pattern kept repeating itself elsewhere. The same activists who were championing transgender athletes seemed to have no empathy left over for the female athletes that trans athletes were displacing, sometimes dangerously. The same voices demanding that we welcome Muslim immigrants with open arms had, for years, precious little to say about the mostly working-class girls who were being terrorized by Pakistani Muslim rape gangs in Britain on an industrial scale. (I also found it extremely disturbing how the same legacy media that couldn’t get enough of the Catholic Church sexual abuse story during the early 2000s have been virtually silent about the Pakistani Muslim sexual abuse story today. The chances that we ever get a Hollywood-produced movie about the United Kingdom’s “grooming” gangs, à la Spotlight, are next to nil.) The very people who pride themselves on defending the vulnerable were somehow managing to see no evil and hear no evil when one of the worst evils imaginable was being inflicted upon one of the most vulnerable groups of people in our society.

It was somewhere in the middle of watching all this that I found the vocabulary for what I’d been sensing. That vocabulary is the product of the mind of Dr. Gad Saad, and it’s the subject of his essential new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

I had interviewed Saad once before, on the occasion of his 2023 book, The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life. That conversation left me with a clear impression: Here was one of the sharpest, wittiest, and most engaging public intellectuals working today — someone who could move from hard behavioral science to cultural commentary to outright comedy in the space of a single sentence. That impression is what sent me back to him for this book, on this subject. I suspected he’d have something worthwhile to say. He did — considerably more than that, actually.

Who is Gad Saad?

Saad was a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal from 1994 to 2026, where he held the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption from 2008 to 2018. He has held visiting professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of California-Irvine, and Northwood University, and is currently in the process of moving to the United States, where, as of this August, he’ll be joining the University of Mississippi as distinguished visiting professor of the school’s Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. (This past year, he was a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center while on leave from his Concordia University professorship.) Over more than three decades in academia, he has authored more than 75 scientific papers, pioneering the application of evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior — a career that has earned him, among other honors, the 2015 President’s Media Outreach Award as Concordia’s top global research communicator.

But it’s Saad’s public-facing work that has made him a household name well beyond the academy. His Psychology Today column, “Homo Consumericus,” has amassed over 7.47 million reads across more than 300 pieces. His YouTube show and podcast, The Saad Truth, have racked up more than 50 million views and downloads. His following spans an unusually wide ideological and cultural range — Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have all counted themselves among his admirers.

That crossover appeal is not an accident. Saad’s 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, became an international bestseller by diagnosing the West’s susceptibility to what he called “idea pathogens” — bad ideas that spread virally and hijack sound reasoning. Suicidal Empathy is, in a sense, the sequel and the sharpening: a follow-on diagnosis of one specific idea pathogen that Saad now regards as the master key to understanding nearly everything currently going wrong in Western societies.

A book, a term, and a cultural moment

Suicidal Empathy argues that a corrupted, dysregulated form of compassion — empathy that “hyperfires” toward the wrong targets, in Saad’s phrase from our conversation — now drives a staggering share of the West’s worst policy decisions. The book traces the anatomy of the affliction across eight chapters, from “A Good Virtue Gone Bad” through “Blank Slate Felons” to a closing prescription, “Inoculation Against Suicidal Empathy.”

Saad doesn’t pull any punches; he’s pugilistic in the best sense of the term: intellectually and comedically. The book is laced with the kind of caustic wit that has become his signature. He describes reflexive reality-denial as “Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome” (a term originating in Chapter 7 of his The Parasitic Mind). He calls those most thoroughly captured by the affliction “invertebrate castrati.” In one memorably unsparing aside, he describes Kamala Harris as a “lobotomized cackler.” Saad likens the suicidally empathetic to Gregor Samsa’s transformation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis — people, he writes, who have undergone “a new form of human-to-insect metamorphosis.” I’d add my own Kafka comparison: The suicidally empathetic of the West have been behaving like the title character of “A Hunger Artist,” who starves himself to death performatively, publicly, and entirely unnecessarily. When his lack of appetite is literally killing him, at that point, the only sane thing to do would be to at least try to eat something, anything. As a Jewish mother would say, Force yourself!

The book catalogs the symptoms with a satirist’s eye for the absurd: Dieting and simply not being overweight has been recast as “white supremacy”; how President Joe Biden publicly regretted calling the man who murdered Laken Riley an “illegal” rather than “undocumented”; how the “DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) cult” has metastasized to the point where once-fine schools like the University of Michigan are now spending tens of millions of dollars a year on DEI positions.

“Imagine the number of leading professors who could have been hired with that wasted money,” Saad writes. Or imagine how much more affordable universities could make higher education if they stopped paying these “indulgences” (as Saad describes them) to the high priests of Orthodox Wokeism and instead refocused their efforts and resources on actual education.

Saad is particularly incisive on the West’s asymmetric protectiveness. “The West’s reflex,” he writes, “is always to protect Islam irrespective of the unfolding realities.” Why does one specific religion receive this reflexive deference that others do not? Within the mysterious theology of Wokeism, why is it that some religions are more equal than others?

Saad is equally incisive on the linguistic inanities that suicidal empathy uses to camouflage its deleterious, often violent consequences. These are terms that are so Orwellian that they might even shock Orwell himself.

“Gender-affirming care,” Saad notes, launders what is in fact life-altering, often irreversible medical intervention into something anodyne, making one forget the enormous violence that one is inflicting upon oneself—sacrificing one’s ability to reproduce, and thereby killing any of one’s potential future children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — by undergoing such a procedure. (In that same spirit, I’d nominate “reproductive rights” as another entrant in the genre — a phrase built to obscure the fact that it is authorizing the murder of potential human life.)

And on the wokeist hierarchy that ranks victim groups against one another, Saad paraphrases Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All lives are important but some a lot more so than others.” That same hierarchy produces demands as arbitrary as insisting that a film adaptation of The Odyssey feature more trans actors — a demand no more coherent, he notes, than insisting that the Dallas Mavericks have more Lebanese Jews on their roster.

A unified field theory

What elevates Suicidal Empathy above a mere grievance-cataloging exercise, and what I asked Saad about directly, is its ambition to function as something like a unified field theory in physics: one underlying mechanism that explains a sprawling, seemingly unconnected list of contemporary pathologies, from DEI to open borders to the collapse of common sense around crime and public safety.

I asked Saad whether he had a Eureka! moment in which he came up with the term (and the diagnosis) of “suicidal empathy.” The term’s roots, he told me, trace back further than most readers realize. He used the term in The Parasitic Mind, but its true origin lies even earlier: in the transcript of his testimony before the Canadian Senate on Bill C-16, where he first flagged what he called the miscalibration of empathy. The conceptual scaffolding came from his years in which he was immersed in the work of E.O. Wilson, particularly Wilson’s writing on why communism fails as a human system despite its appeal — “great idea, wrong species,” as Wilson pithily put it — and from Wilson’s book Consilience, a term, Saad noted, that “many people don’t have in their lexicon.” Having spent decades absorbing sociobiology’s central premise — that biology shapes behavior across every species, humans included — Saad found himself, as he put it, hard-wired to look for synthesis. Confronted with DEI, BLM, open-borders policy, calls to “defund the police,” and more, he went looking for the single mechanism beneath all of them, and suicidal empathy is what he found.

That synthesis, he argues, is driven at root by misplaced guilt and what he calls “collective impostor syndrome,” a kind of civilizational self-doubt that twists compassion into self-destruction.

“The West is engaging in civilizational seppuku,” Saad told me, and he was insistent that the framing isn’t merely rhetorical. “This is not just phraseology.”

The Western mind, in his account, has been “hijacked by parasitic thinking” in a way that causes the empathy instinct to fire reflexively toward the wrong. Saad was candid that different societies sit at different points along this trajectory. Much of Europe, he believes, is far further gone than the United States. America benefits, he told me, from “a set of built-in inoculations,” chiefly our First Amendment, that have slowed the disease’s progress here. “But that doesn’t mean the U.S. is inoculated from it,” he cautioned.

Saad pointed to Dearborn, Michigan, as an early marker, with Paterson, New Jersey, potentially next, and Minnesota after that. Extrapolate a century forward, he suggested, and the number of American Dearborns and Patersons could multiply considerably. There are some grounds for optimism, he noted, that this trajectory can still be reversed — but he was blunt about the obstacles: “I see no evidence that the West is willing to implement” the corrective measures that would actually be required to root out the mental parasite that is suicidal empathy.

As for when the parasite first took hold, Saad traces a genealogy stretching back roughly a century, to the rise of cultural relativism, with postmodernism entering the bloodstream about 50 years ago, and other contributing strains arriving more recently — a constellation of factors that had to align before suicidal empathy could metastasize into the dominant force in Western societies that Saad believes it has become.

The book and the term are already having a major impact on political and sociocultural discourse. Elon Musk has been enthusiastically promoting the book on X (the book bears his endorsement as well) in posts that reach tens of millions of people. The term has already migrated into political discourse abroad — Saad cited its uptake among politicians, political pundits, and cultural commentators.

Toward the end of our conversation, Saad lamented how our society has fallen to such a state where books such as Suicidal Empathy have become necessary. It is, he said, “so regrettable that it even requires me to write these books,” referring to both this one and The Parasitic Mind before it. As he put it, all of the problems that these books seek to address “have been self-inflicted.”

It’s a fitting image, and one I’d extend a bit further: It’s rather like being treated in a hospital for self-inflicted wounds. We can thank the doctor profusely for his skill in stitching us back up, but we’re the ones who did the cutting. Ideally, we’d never have cut ourselves at all. Since we have, we should be grateful that a medic as perspicacious as Saad is in the emergency room to treat the wound. It now falls to the rest of us, our institutions and our politicians included, to make sure we stop inflicting new ones.

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Infinite tolerance or survival?

This past academic year, I served as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University, where I taught courses on the history of antisemitism. Saad’s book, and the framework it offers, would sit comfortably on that syllabus if I were to teach the course again. It isn’t just that Suicidal Empathy explains the specific asymmetry I kept encountering — sympathy for black victims but silence for Jewish ones, solidarity with trans athletes but indifference toward the women sidelined by them, protectiveness toward Muslim immigrant communities but willful blindness toward the girls victimized by Pakistani rape gangs. It’s that Saad’s book supplies the single mechanism underlying it all: a wokeist hierarchy in which, per his Orwellian paraphrase, some people really are more equal than others.

Saad closes his book with a line that is destined to outlast the news cycle that produced it: “A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct. It truly is that simple.”

Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.