Gad Saad's Empathy Alibi?

On Gad Saad, “suicidal empathy,” and what the word might be covering for

In 2024, Gad Saad explained why professors generate so many bad ideas. They’re “fully decoupled from the autocorrective mechanism of reality,” he said. Pretty sweet turn of a phrase there.

Build a bridge on bad physics and the bridge falls down, and it’s pretty darned likely the people who built it will have to answer for it.

Make an economic prediction based on nonsense and the information marketplace marks you down; the economist at least gets some shit for it. (Hey Krugman, 1998 called, it’s still waiting to see whether this internet thing is going to catch on.)

Sit in a good number of humanities departments in 2026 and pontificate, and nothing ever comes back to bite you. No feedback, no consequence, no correction. Likely even some praise for being “on-narrative.”

I’ve spent a couple of years on some version of that idea: a whole series on how AI stress-tests our theories of what even counts as knowledge, the humanities piece I just linked on why they in particular drifted off the base of reality, and a follow-up on a report two universities commissioned that said the same thing in careful institutional prose and promptly got called “diabolically evil” for the trouble.

So when Saad, arriving from evolutionary psychology, lands on “the autocorrective mechanism of reality,” I nod with some vigor. So, reality bats last, except in the rooms where it never gets up to the plate.

Last month Saad published Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, hit number one, got a blurb from Elon Musk, and then Gad announced he’s leaving Canada for the University of Mississippi. Last week he sat for a long interview with the Wall Street Journal and explained why Western elites keep backing policies that wound the very people those policies claim to protect. His answer: they get to “bask in a glow of self-satisfied virtue,” the Journal summarized, “while being fully decoupled from the negative consequences.”

Same author. Same word. Decoupled. Two books, two targets, and underneath them the identical mechanism: somebody makes a call, and the cost of said call lands on somebody else, likely with impunity.

Here’s my problem, and it’s really the whole essay in one sentence. I think Saad is right about the mechanism, twice over. I just don’t think either time he’s given it the right name yet. In 2024 he called it parasitic ideas. In 2026 he’s calling it empathy. And the second name is doing something the first one didn’t: it’s picked a fight with one of the few human capacities we cannot actually afford to lose.

Let me try to rescue his evidence from his frame. Knowing what I know of Prof. Saad, he’d probably hate the help. That’s fine.

Also, one clarification before a title with “empathy” in it gets screenshotted out of context. The alibi I mean is the one empathy provides: “we were only trying to care” is the cover story a decoupled status economy hides behind.

So this is a defense of empathy, framed for a crime it didn’t commit, and not a prosecution of it.

First, the steelman, because it’s real and it’s stronger than his critics admit.

Saad is not against empathy, whatever the title screams. He’s careful about this in the interview, and he’s right: “You need empathy to serve as the lubricant of our sociality.” His actual claim is Aristotelian: everything in moderation. Too little empathy and, well, you’re a psychopath. Too much, aimed at the wrong target, at the wrong moment, and you get what he calls civilizational self-harm. A good thing, pointed badly.

And the cases he collects are not imaginary. An institution that won’t name a pattern of abuse because naming it feels bigoted. A city that extends more solicitude to the accused than to the victim. A policy conversation where saying “these two groups of immigrants might integrate differently” gets you branded before you’ve finished the sentence. I wrote a whole piece two weeks ago about one of these cases, Rotherham, where officials in an English town let the sexual abuse of children run for sixteen years partly because identifying the perpetrators’ ethnicity felt racist. Saad would look at that and say: yep, suicidal empathy. Compassion for the wrong party, at a catastrophic price.

So the phenomenon is real. Something is going wrong, it’s going wrong in a patterned way, and a lot of respectable people would rather not talk about it. Saad talks about it, loudly, which is most of his value and, as we’ll see, most of his problem.

Saad is also, and this matters for how I read him, a repeat witness. I flagged the 2024 quote up top because it’s my own thesis in his vocabulary, and an evolutionary psychologist and a political scientist coming at the same idea from opposite ends of campus and landing on the same spot has gotta be worth something.

I’m not here to dunk on him. I’m here because he keeps finding the right mechanism and reaching for the wrong label, and I think the label is starting to matter.

About the loudness. Let me be fair to it before I turn it against him.

Saad is a lot. In the space of one interview he calls Kamala Harris a “lobotomized cackler,” stages Western decline as ritual disembowelment with a seven-inch blade already two inches deep, and describes the men who run our institutions as “invertebrate castrati, lacking in spine and testicles.”

That’s the sound of a man trying to be heard over a very loud room.

And I don’t entirely blame him, because the room really is that loud. A professor who wants to make an argument outside the peer-reviewed journals is competing in an attention market, and that market pays for heat, not for care. Nobody shares the measured version. Nobody blurbs the caveat. If Saad wrote Suicidal Empathy the way I’d write it, with the Batson citations and the “on the other hands,” it would sell four hundred twenty-seven copies and likely change nobody’s mind. He turned the dial to eleven because eleven is the price of admission. That volume is the market-clearing price of being heard at all, especially in this weird wild time.

Which is, without his meaning it to be, a demonstration of his own thesis and mine at once. What the market rewards is what you become. Saad competes in an economy that pays out in outrage, and over time the outrage becomes the product. Are the outrage and the righteous indignation motivated by real concern? I think so. Never in anything I’ve seen with him have I doubted his care or sincerity.

Also, I should say plainly that I’m not standing outside this. I write on the internet too as a much smaller fish. The take you’re reading pays me in restacks and subscribers, and if it travels it’ll be because it had enough edge to travel, which means I’m subject to the same gravity I’m describing. Everybody selling ideas in public is.

Caveat emptor, baby.

I flag this now because it’s going to come back. (If my last piece on liberalism is what brought you here, welcome.) Liberalism, the real proceduralist article, competes in this market at a structural disadvantage. Reasonable can sell (you’re reading a reasonable essay I hope travels), but it sells at a discount while heat sells at a premium, so the measured register is forever climbing against the grade while the crusade rides the escalator. “Let’s check the conduct against the terms and enforce them evenly” can be made to move, but usually only by smuggling in enough edge to pay the toll.

My last piece got heard partly on a provocative title and a fight it picked. The tax is real, and I guess I paid it too. You can only sell the building code by making it sound a little more like a crusade than it is, which is its own kind of defeat.

On to the actual disagreement.

Saad’s frame is that empathy is a virtue that has misfired. His phrase in the book is “the orgiastic misfiring of one of our most noble virtues.” A gun aimed at the wrong target.

The metaphor works and does a lot of arguing for him: it says the machinery is fine, the aim is off, and the fix is to re-aim it, which in practice means feel it less toward the wrong people.

Look at the machinery, though, because it doesn’t behave the way the misfire story needs it to.

Start with what empathy actually does when you put it in a lab. Daniel Batson spent thirty-five years running the cleanest experiments in this area, and the core finding is this: people high in empathic concern will help someone even when they could walk away at no cost. Give them an easy exit, a socially acceptable reason to stop caring, and they keep helping anyway. That’s the fingerprint of the real thing. Real empathy pays a cost it really could have dodged.

Now put that next to Daryl Cameron’s work. Across eleven experiments, Cameron and his colleagues found that empathy is effortful, and that people avoid it precisely because it’s effortful. Offered a choice between empathizing and not, most people pick not, because feeling your way into another person’s situation is cognitive work and the mind conserves. So empathy is less a flood that sweeps you off your feet than a task you opt into, and mostly opt out of.

And then the one that folks should know more about from my world. In 2020, three political scientists, Elizabeth Simas, Scott Clifford, and Justin Kirkland, asked what dispositional empathy does to your politics. If empathy were the indiscriminate, universalizing flood of Saad’s nightmare, high-empathy people would be the most even-handed, the most willing to extend grace across the aisle. The opposite is true. People high in empathic concern are more affectively polarized, not less. They show more partisan bias in judging political events. They take more satisfaction when the other side suffers. Empathy in the wild is not a searchlight sweeping the horizon for anyone in pain. It’s a spotlight, and it points at your own.

Stack the three together and see what you’ve got. An emotion that is effortful, routinely avoided, and (very) reliably tribal. That is a very strange candidate for the thing Saad says is destroying the West, which is empathy that is effortless, overflowing, and aimed indiscriminately at strangers and enemies. The suicidal-empathy story needs empathy to be a wide-open floodgate. The science says it’s a narrow, expensive, in-group-favoring trickle. Who’s right??

You could object that I’m measuring the wrong empathy: the lab studies a narrow affective state, Saad means a sprawling cultural ethos, and with forty-three definitions in play we’re talking past each other. Fair, except the frame is Saad’s own. He’s an evolutionary psychologist, and his entire case is that empathy is an evolved adaptive module that got hijacked.

If the thing misfiring is the evolved emotion, then the science of the evolved emotion is the right court, isn’t it? In that court the emotion is effortful, avoided, and tribal. The tribal part is the one that undoes the story. If empathy runs to the in-group by default, then compassion lavished on out-groups isn’t the module overflowing its banks; it’s the module being aimed somewhere it doesn’t naturally go, and aiming takes a reason. Something has to move the spotlight off its default and hold it there.

At the level of one person that’s a stretch. At the level of an institution it’s pretty routine. A newsroom, a university, an HR department is a machine for deciding which compassion gets amplified and rewarded, which means you can manufacture the appearance of an empathic flood out of a population of perfectly ordinary, parochial, effort-conserving people. The flood isn’t in the hearts so much as in the incentives that decide whose feelings get a megaphone.

So what is actually going on in Saad’s cases?

The cases share a structure. The Rotherham officials. The administrators who won’t name the pattern. The elite, in the Journal’s own summary, basking in the glow. In every case, the person performing the compassion is not the person who absorbs the cost of it. The council keeps its anti-racist reputation; someone else’s children pay. The professor keeps his standing; the graduate he credentialed with nonsense goes out and does the damage. The comfortable get the moral glow, and the invoice gets mailed to people who aren’t in the room.

That’s not empathy misfiring, whatever any individual official privately felt. Empathy, the real thing, pays its own costs; that’s the Batson fingerprint. What steers these outcomes pays somebody else’s. I’m not mind-reading here or accusing anyone of faking a feeling. Some of those officials surely felt a real pang for the family in front of them. I’m saying the pang isn’t what drove the result. What drove it was what the institution rewards, and what it rewards is the visible posture, not the private state. And we already have a name for a moral posture that confers status on the person expressing it while the costs fall on people elsewhere. Rob Henderson called it a luxury belief, an idea that works, for the person holding it, the way a Rolex works, as a status display the less fortunate can’t afford. The abolish-this or open-that position is safe to hold in the neighborhoods where its consequences never arrive.

And unlike a motive you’re just imputing, this one comes with a test. A conviction survives a change in price; a status posture doesn’t. Real empathic concern, per Batson, keeps paying when it could quit. A luxury belief fades when the audience leaves and reverses the instant the cost stops landing on strangers and starts landing on the holder. So watch what a position does when its owner has to eat the downside personally, and you find out fast which one it was. None of which requires anyone to be lying. You can hold a luxury belief with your whole sincere heart; sincerity is cheap when the bill goes to someone else, and that’s exactly why this describes a gradient rather than accusing anyone of fraud.

None of this is new. A decade before Saad, a group of researchers put the clinical version of the thesis in an Oxford volume called Pathological Altruism: altruism that, in trying to help, predictably does harm. Careful, footnoted, completely un-viral. Saad’s contribution was to douse the same idea in gasoline, which is how most people finally heard it.

Which lands us right back where Saad started in 2024. Decoupled from consequences. The 2024 version was epistemic, the professor who never learns he’s wrong. The 2026 version is material, the elite who never feels the policy’s downside. Those look like two different complaints until you notice they’re one structure seen twice: in both, the person making the call is walled off from the feedback the call generates, so nothing ever returns to correct the caller. Saad diagnosed that structure pretty darned well when the subject was professors. When the subject became elites and the feeling became empathy, he swapped the mechanism (a broken feedback loop) for a pathology (a broken heart). The mechanism was the right read. What he’s looking at is a status economy that pays out in moral display, with reality’s bill sent to a different address.

Why does the misnaming matter? Because the name you give a problem is a prescription, and these two names prescribe opposite medicine.

If the disease is empathy, the cure is less of it. Harder hearts, drier eyes, a deliberate throttling of the impulse to care about the wrong people. And notice who’s standing by with that prescription already filled. Musk, on Joe Rogan, put it about as bluntly as it can be put: “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” That’s the misfire frame followed to its end. If empathy is the exploit, the patch is to feel less. And a civilization that sets out to feel less does not have a great track record of stopping where it meant to.

To be fair to Saad, that hard pole is Musk’s, not his. Saad says plainly he isn’t against empathy, and the Aristotle line means he wants it recalibrated, not amputated. But his register keeps leaning on the amputation’s door, because you don’t reach for “castrati” if all you’re asking for is moderation, and his readers hear the harder thing. So the fork that matters runs between the hard reading his rhetoric keeps inviting and the fix his own 2024 self already wrote down, not between Saad and me.

Because if the disease is decoupling, the cure runs the other way, and it doesn’t cost you your capacity to care. You re-couple. You put the people making the calls back in contact with the consequences of the calls. You make the council that buried the Rotherham pattern answer for the buried pattern. You build, for the humanities department, some version of the feedback the engineering school already has. Skin in the game, not stone in the heart.

None of this is easy; insulation is the default condition of power, and dragging deciders back into contact with what they decide is the whole grinding history of accountability, of inquiries with teeth and elections and liability. But it’s a project we know how to run, with tools we already have. “Feel less” offers no tools, only a temperature.

Even Paul Bloom, who wrote the book literally called Against Empathy, doesn’t prescribe hardness. His alternative is rational compassion, care that runs through the head as well as the gut, that can count, that doesn’t let a single vivid face crowd out a thousand statistical ones. Bloom settles it. You can grant every one of empathy’s cognitive bugs, the innumeracy, the parochialism, the spotlight, and still land on “care better,” not “care less.” Bloom and Saad are reading the same evidence and walking opposite directions, and what turns them is political, not scientific. Saad’s evidence points at Bloom’s conclusion; his frame drags it somewhere colder.

Let’s look at it the other way, because a mechanism that only indicts one side isn’t a mechanism, it’s a weapon.

The display market sells hardness too. Every luxury belief has a mirror-image luxury posture, and the reversed version is just as decoupled. The hawk who wants the war but whose own children will never deploy. The politician who performs contempt for the vulnerable to a crowd that will never need the program he’s cutting. The whole “owning the libs” economy, in which cruelty is the product, the applause is the payment, and the cost lands somewhere downwind. If consequence-free compassion is a status good, so is consequence-free toughness. The targets differ: the compassion pose spends the safety of the protected group’s neighbors, the toughness pose spends the skin of the group in the crosshairs, but the constant is the performer, insulated either way from the cost he generates. Same insulation, opposite costume. Saad has a sharp eye for the first and, as far as I can tell, a blind spot for the second, which is itself a fact about the market he’s selling in. The audience that pays for anti-empathy is not in the mood to hear that its own hardness might be a pose.

None of this requires calling anyone a hypocrite. The structure does the work: a public that rewards moral display, on either side, plus a set of decision-makers insulated from the results, will reliably mint people who buy status with positions other people pay for. Point that lens at the progressive elite and you get Saad’s book. Point it at the populist right and you get a different book, equally fat, equally true. The lens is the contribution. The one-sided aim is the market talking.

There’s also a gendered edge to this that Saad puts right on the surface, and it’s worth being honest about.

“Invertebrate castrati, lacking in spine and testicles.” That’s not incidental color; it’s the argument’s affect showing through. Empathy here is coded soft and feminine, a weakness to be steeled against; the cure is coded hard and masculine, a spine and the anatomy Saad helpfully specifies. The move invites you to feel caring as unmanly and hardness as grown-up, and it does its persuading below the analytical surface, where you can’t argue back.

Saad names the gendering and then walks past it, which is a shame, because one more step is where it gets interesting. What he’s prescribing (the hardness, the throttled feeling, the spine) is the exact cluster his opponents spent a decade calling toxic masculinity. Now, those opponents wouldn’t say empathy is feminine. They’d say empathy is human, and that the pressure on men to suppress it is the wound. Saad says close to the reverse: the softness really is feminine, and men have been shamed out of a healthy hardness. But look at what the two positions share. Both take the coding of empathy as soft and feminine to be the whole battleground. They’re fighting over one gendered map, with Saad calling the map nature and telling men to stop apologizing for the hard half, and his opponents calling the map a cage and telling men they’ve been damaged inside it. Neither is really arguing about whether the map should exist. That contest, over what a man is for, is a bigger question than this essay can carry, so maybe next time.

But notice how even here the fight has slid off its ostensible subject. It stopped being an argument about what empathy does and became an argument about what wanting to feel it says about a man, which is a status question wearing a psychology costume, again.

So. Gad Saad is fleeing Montreal because, he says, its empathy turned suicidal. I take the flight seriously. The antisemitism figures he cites are real, and a man doesn’t usually uproot his life over a metaphor.

But read his own interview closely and it tells a smaller, less operatic, and much more fixable story than the title does. Nobody in the systems he’s describing pays for being wrong, for being out of step with reality. The council, the campus, the ministry, the board: each of them gets to purchase a feeling of virtue with a currency somebody else earns. That’s not a heart that cares too much. It’s a loop that closed, the same loop he pointed at in the business school, where the model that ignores reality gets marked down by reality and the modeler learns. He told us the mechanism himself. He told us in 2024, and he told us again last week, and both times he called it decoupling before he called it anything else.

You don’t fix a broken feedback loop by feeling less. You fix it the way his own discipline fixes it, the way the bridge and the market fix it. You let reality back in the room and give it a vote. Perhaps that feels impossible, but it isn’t, at least not yet.

Reality bats last. Saad, of all people, knows that. He just needs to work on getting it into the humanities departments, the city council, and the chapter of his own book where he decided the problem was the human heart instead of the missing scoreboard.

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Sacred Cow BBQ is free and runs on signal-boost. If this one earned its keep, subscribe and forward it to the person in your feed who’s decided empathy is the enemy.

And a note in the essay’s own spirit. This newsletter runs on the exact market I just spent three thousand words describing, the one that pays for heat and not for care. If you’d rather reward the care than the heat, you can buy me a coffee. Consider it re-coupling the incentive, one cup at a time.

Earlier in the stack:

• Reality Bats Last, the start of the series this whole argument grows out of, on what AI does to our theories of what counts as knowledge.

• The Other Pillar, Part 3 of that series, where “approval-optimized versus reality-optimized” got its first run. That’s the status-economy engine underneath everything above.

• Why Are the Humanities Missing the AI Moment?, where the reality-correction differential got its fullest run.

• Are “Liberals” Useful Idiots for the World to Come?, the same counterfeit-virtue argument, aimed at tolerance instead of empathy.