Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.
"We’ve got civilisational suicidal empathy going on," Musk said. "And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilisation as a whole and not commit to a civilisational suicide."
The idea that caring about others could end civilisation may seem extreme, but it comes amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right. Musk learned about "suicidal empathy" through his "public bromance" with Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor whose casual application of evolutionary psychology to culture war politics has brought him a sizable social media following. By Saad’s accounting — and this is not dissimilar from the white nationalist "great replacement theory" — western societies are bringing about their own destruction by admitting immigrants from poorer, browner and more Muslim countries.
"The fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy," Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X.
"The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilisation, which is the empathy response."
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a "sin" or "toxin".
It’s not every day that evolutionary psychologists and evangelical creationists end up on the same side of an issue, but it’s also not every day that empathy is treated as anything other than a broadly positive feature of human experience — your standard, golden rule-type stuff.
Coined in 1908 as the English translation of the German "Einfuhlung", or "in-feeling", empathy originally referred to the feelings a person might have when projecting themself into a piece of artwork or nature. It is now understood to mean both the effortful, cognitive process by which a person projects themself into another’s situation and point of view, and to the unconscious (and at times unwelcome) affective process by which another person’s emotions can influence or even take over one’s own.
How we relate to the pain of others is a question that always lurks beneath our politics, but it’s one that is particularly relevant now.
In its first months, the Trump administration has begun to implement a radical right-wing regime featuring mass deportations without due process, draconian cuts to domestic and foreign aid programmes, and venally self-interested foreign policy — a set of policies that amount to a prescription for mass suffering and death.
Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.
On January 21, the Right Rev Mariann Budde delivered a message from the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral to a newly inaugurated President Trump.
Immigrants and LGBTQ+ children were living in fear, the Episcopal bishop of Washington said. "In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now."
Budde’s appeal was standard fare for a denomination that has been inclusive of LGBTQ+ people since 1976 and, like many churches, undertakes ministry work in support of immigrants and refugees. But it touched off a firestorm among some of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who saw in Budde three outrages — the ordination of women, tolerance of LGBTQ+ people and support for immigrants — with a common, rotten core: empathy.
Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey tweeted: "This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up."
The pastor Joe Rigney drove the argument home in the evangelical publication World.
"Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness," Rigney wrote.
"Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy."
Rigney has been the leading evangeliser against what he calls the "sin of empathy" since 2019, when he first aired his views on a video series hosted by the far-right Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson.
Rigney serves as a fellow at a Christian college in Moscow, Idaho, where Wilson is attempting to build a "theocracy". Rigney’s book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits was released in February by Canon Press, a publishing house founded by Wilson and best known for releasing — and then withdrawing over allegations of plagiarism — Wilson’s co-authored apologia for the antebellum south that characterised slavery as "a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence".
Rigney’s argument is empathy can be sinful if it is "untethered" to biblical truth on issues such as homosexuality and gender. While he acknowledges "the Scriptures command us to have sympathy and a tender heart", he defines empathy as "an excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing of the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet".
Women are more empathetic than men, which is why God does not allow them to be ordained, Rigney argues. Quoting extensively from Calvin Robinson, the right-wing British cleric who was recently defrocked by the Anglican Catholic church for mimicking Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at an anti-abortion rally, Rigney connects progressive political values to "a culture of victimhood flowing from toxic female empathy".
"Empathy feeds the competitive victimhood mentality that is rampant in our society," he writes.
"The same empathetic logic lies beneath the societal indulgence of criminality that particularly plagues progressive cities (always provided that the criminal is a member of some aggrieved group), as well as the empathetic paralysis that prevents western nations from wisely and justly addressing the challenges of both legal and illegal immigration. Compassion for refugees and ‘kids in cages’ is used to open the border to millions of able-bodied young men. But nowhere is this pathological feminine empathy more evident than in the various controversies surrounding transgenderism."
This is pure Maga red meat, useful for those devout Trump supporters who are looking for Christian-coded justifications of their political beliefs.
"This guy is super progressive and empathetic," Saad begins in his jocular style. "He’s very touching. Let me tell you why. He’s a Norwegian guy who presents himself to the world as a male feminist and anti-racist ally."
Here Saad gestures to the headshot of the man, Karsten Nordal Hauken.
"He was raped and sodomised by a noble Somali immigrant," Saad continues. "As it goes in Norway, you don’t get much of a sentence for rape. You know, very, very light sentence. I think maybe he got a year or something, whatever it was. When he came out of detention, [Hauken] was racked with existential guilt because his sodomiser was now going to be potentially deported to Somalia, where he wouldn’t be able to maximally flourish. And so he was guilty that his rapist was now going to have a bad life in Somalia."
The story concludes with the moral, which is also the title of Saad’s forthcoming book: "That’s not an emotional system that we have evolved," he says, clicking to the next slide. "This is what happens when you have suicidal empathy."
Suicidal Empathy may still be in the process of being written, but its thesis has already been taken up by the world’s richest (and arguably most powerful) man, Elon Musk. It is, Saad has explained, the other half of the thesis from his previous book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which became a bestseller in part thanks to Musk’s enthusiastic endorsement of Saad’s notion of a "woke mind virus".
"Parasitic mind is what happens to human brains when their cognitive abilities are parasitised," Saad explained in a recent talk. "We’re both a thinking and feeling animal. Suicidal empathy completes the story by now explaining what happens when [human emotions are] hijacked by parasitic nonsense, and hence suicidal empathy. It’s the misfiring of an otherwise noble emotion called empathy."
Saad has a PhD in marketing, and his academic career saw him apply evolutionary thinking to consumer behaviour through studies on the testosterone levels of men after they drive a Porsche or the amount women spend on food versus apparel over the course of their menstrual cycle.
He rose to prominence on social media when he began applying this kind of evolutionary thinking towards politics, often presenting his views (anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-feminist and anti-trans) as possessing the weight of scientific or biological truth. He uses examples of parasites to argue that certain "pathogenic" ideas — such as postmodernism, social constructivism and radical feminism — can take over a person’s brain and force them to act counter to their own survival.
Saad claims to support empathy "at the right place, to the right people, at the right amount". But he also argues that evolution has resulted in him being "much more likely to jump to save my biological children if there’s a truck hurling at them than I am to save a random person. That doesn’t make me callous. I’d like to also save the random children, but that’s not how evolution works."
Except, it doesn’t appear he would like to save the random children, considering the fact he accuses those people who do want to save random — or, perhaps, asylum-seeking — children of suffering from either a brain virus or a case of suicidal empathy.
It’s an entirely circular logic that relies on appeals to "biology" or "common sense" in the same way Rigney and Stuckey appeal to biblical truth. The only real difference is the audience.
There is precedent for expanding the logic of natural selection to social groups, and it’s not a pretty one. Social Darwinism rubs shoulders with eugenics and scientific racism, and Saad does himself no favours by so frequently referring to his ideological nemeses as "degenerate", another pseudoscientific concept with an ugly history.
Because there should be no mistaking the real menace that lurks beneath Saad’s gregarious delivery of anecdotes. Take the rape story. The version Saad related at the University of Austin was designed to cast support for immigration from the global south to western countries as self-sabotaging lunacy; it is also highly inaccurate. Saad exaggerates the leniency of the sentence (the attacker served four and a-half years), and the significance of Hauken’s sense of guilt (Hauken described a complex range of emotional reactions to his assault, which included but were very much not limited to feelings of guilt around his relative social position to his attacker).
Hauken spoke out about his ordeal to encourage other young people to seek mental health support despite feelings of stigma and shame; Saad took the opportunity to pile more shame upon him.
Not all of the questioning of empathy comes from the far right.
In the 2016 book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, the Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom argued that allowing empathy to guide our actions — particularly around philanthropy or politics — opens us up for emotional manipulation, unconscious bias and chauvinism. Leftwing critics have also warned against the potential for a claim of empathy to bleed into colonising others’ experiences. Empathy cannot replace mutual respect and recognition, as the bankers of Davos who cosplay as refugees as an "exercise in empathy" each year should surely know by now.
But what is happening on the American right is on an entirely different scale. Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, said by email that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had "never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources".
"The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanise others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community," she said. "To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanisation of others to open discrimination and maltreatment."
Indeed, the right-wing critique of empathy is not an attempt to find a better way to achieve altruistic ends; it’s an excuse to turn away from altruism entirely. We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale. While the religious right attends to a moral justification, the secular right is hard at work on a pseudoscientific one. Meanwhile, the Maga movement has created an online culture that is steeped in an aesthetic of anti-empathy, from dismissing fellow human beings as "NPCs" (non-player characters) to joking about relaxing to "ASMR" sounds of human bondage.
For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat — it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilisation as we know it.
The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to "save" America — whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.
If there is any consolation, it is perhaps in the fact that such work is even necessary.
Take Jesse Watters, the shock jock of Fox News who built a career by ambushing people and filming their humiliation. As hard-hearted a Trump supporter as they come, Watters was nevertheless shaken in his enthusiasm for Musk’s federal job cuts when they hit first a veteran friend of his.
"We just need to be a little bit less callous with the way ... we talk about Doge-ing people," he said on Fox News. "I finally found one person I knew that got Doged and it hit me in the heart."
Watters’ fit of compassion for his personal acquaintances was short-lived, but impactful, according to the Atlantic, which reported Watters’ viral plea for a bit more empathy bothered Trump so much he took his "first steps to rein in Musk’s powers". Trump’s frantic democratic destruction continues apace, but it seems noteworthy he sensed in Watters’ reluctant admission to caring about other people a vulnerability that could prove to be his achilles heel.
Empathy is not a sin, a toxin, or an evolutionary dead end. It is a tool, and like all tools it can be a weapon. We are going to need it. — The Observer
