Still on the cruise and shamelessly "nicked" another one off farcebook. We will see if weather will make our return problematic or not
Gad Saad is one of my favorites. His book The Parasitic Mind was excellent, and I pre-ordered his new one, Suicidal Empathy, a while back. Saad has developed compelling theories about why we’re seeing empathy weaponized—and why Western civilization seems willing to let its enemies use that weapon to undermine institutions that have stood for centuries. Watching today’s protests and media performances, I see anger and disgust, along with a striking lack of concern for consequences. But I also see something else in those faces: fear. Not rational fear—the kind you’d expect in war or when facing a wild animal—but fear of imagined conditions, abstract threats, and constructed enemies.
I’m just a layman when it comes to evolutionary psychology, but like any proper amateur pundit, I have a theory nd I do my homework. My theory is far less sophisticated than Professor Saad’s (and you should probably listen to him, not me), but here it is: much of this is sadistic, malevolent manipulation by political sociopaths in pursuit of power. That manipulation works because there are millions of people who have undergone arrested adulthood, and many more who, despite being chronologically adult, lack the ability to recognize or regulate their emotions well enough to engage in reasoned conversation. They retain adolescent emotional reactivity while being granted adult moral authority. This isn’t merely cultural, there is a neurological basis for it.
I think that is why this excess empathy is especially rampant in Hollywood and the desperate housewife segment populated by AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals). They spend their waking hours wanting to be someone else, so emotional displacement is already at work.
Modern political persuasion increasingly bypasses deliberation by targeting the emotional circuitry of the brain directly. The strategy is simple: trigger empathic distress first, then insert policy while judgment is impaired. To understand how this works, we have to distinguish between empathy and compassion. They are not the same psychological state, and they do not activate the same neural systems. Empathy is emotional mirroring—internally reproducing another person’s pain. When it’s triggered, stress hormones rise, attention narrows, and executive control drops. The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for proportional reasoning and long-term planning—loses influence. In plain terms, the nervous system enters threat-response mode.
Compassion is different. Compassion recognizes suffering while maintaining psychological distance. Instead of activating distress circuits, it engages regulatory systems in the brain. The result is calm focus, preserved judgment, and sustained motivation to help. Empathy floods. Compassion steadies. Modern political messaging overwhelmingly aims for empathy, not compassion, because empathy creates urgency while compassion preserves clarity.
This explains why political narratives are almost always personalized. Complex policy questions, immigration, policing, healthcare, war, are converted into emotionally vivid individual stories: a crying child, a grieving parent, a viral clip. Humans respond far more strongly to one visible person than to statistics involving millions. Our moral intuitions evolved for small tribal groups. They are not designed for civilization-scale problems. One face will always outweigh a spreadsheet.
Once emotional identification occurs, attention shifts away from systems and toward symbolic individuals. Structural analysis gives way to protective instinct. Messaging then collapses emotional boundaries. The language moves from “they are suffering” to “imagine if this were your child.” The listener is no longer observing suffering; they are invited to inhabit it. Healthy empathy requires self–other separation. Political rhetoric deliberately removes that separation, producing emotional flooding.
Flooded minds don’t ask about incentives, second-order effects, or long-term consequences. They ask a single question: how do we stop this feeling right now? That’s when urgency and moral absolutism enter. Action must be immediate. Hesitation becomes cruelty, nuance becomes complicity and deliberation is replaced by moral pressure
Disagreement is reframed as a character defect: if you don’t agree, you lack empathy .
Here’s the critical point: empathy is inherently biased. It favors the visible over the invisible, the similar over the distant, and the immediate over the proportional. It feels virtuous, but when elevated to a governing principle it reliably produces distorted priorities, impulsive decisions, and punitive moralism. Empathy evolved to guide interpersonal care. It did not evolve to manage large societies. That’s why emotionally driven policy so often results in symbolic legislation and cascading unintended consequences. Emotional logic doesn’t scale. Policy does. What begins as a response to one compelling story becomes permanent structural change—usually without recalculating costs or downstream effects.
This is where arrested adulthood becomes politically useful. People who never fully developed emotional regulation respond to distress the way children do: urgently, absolutely, and without proportional reasoning. Their feelings become their facts. When entire movements rest on this foundation, politics becomes emotional theater rather than governance.
Compassion would lead somewhere else. Compassion preserves boundaries. It asks not merely who is suffering, but what actually helps. It allows concern without surrendering judgment. Empathy collapses self and other; compassion maintains separation. Only compassion supports rational action.
The political consequences are profound. A society trained to maximize empathy becomes reactive, manipulable, morally theatrical, and cognitively exhausted. Emotional escalation becomes the currency of public discourse. Every issue is framed as an emergency. Every disagreement becomes a referendum on virtue. Modern politics favors this because emotionally flooded populations are easier to mobilize, easier to shame, and easier to steer.
This isn’t about kindness. It is about control. It is always about control.
Philosophically, the imbalance is clear. A lack of empathy reflects emotional underdevelopment. Excess empathy reflects emotional dysregulation. Civilization depends on something rarer than either: disciplined concern under reason.
Empathy without regulation becomes hysteria and regulation without concern becomes cruelty. The narrow edge between them is where functional societies live. Modern political systems increasingly push people off that edge and toward emotional flooding while claiming moral superiority for doing so.
That is the mechanism. It is cruel but it works. That is why they will keep using it.
