Sep 16, 2025

Debunking Gad Saad's "Suicidal Empathy" Theory

Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy” thesis is the kind of shallow culture-war framing that sounds clever in a tweet but falls apart when you look at it seriously.

By Tim Hjersted / filmsforaction.org

Debunking Gad Saad's "Suicidal Empathy" Theory

The idea, in short, is that the left's emphasis on empathy—especially toward marginalized groups, refugees, or people fleeing violence—has become excessive, overriding our ability to make rational, hard-nosed decisions. This excess, he argues, is weakening the West and leading to its collapse.

Saad does not argue that empathy is inherently bad. He argues that too much empathy—empathy that allegedly overrides risk assessment and policy judgment—becomes "suicidal."

If that claim is true, it should be possible to show a clear causal chain from empathy → specific policies → measurable societal collapse. That causal chain is never established. Instead, the theory relies on intuition, anecdote, and moral alarm rather than evidence.

It's a familiar reactionary trope: "too much" kindness equals weakness. But the reality is far more complex.

First, Saad isn't offering a neutral warning about policy tradeoffs. He's advancing a culture-war narrative in which empathy is recast as weakness and a war against "woke nonsense" is recast as realism.

This framing doesn't illuminate how governments actually fail. It redirects anger away from power and toward convenient targets: immigrants, Muslims, "woke liberals," and anyone who resists authoritarian politics. That's why his theory dovetails so neatly with Trumpism, which thrives on the idea that cruelty is strength and solidarity is naive.

When we look honestly at the forces disarming reason and driving the West's decline, the primary driver is not empathy. It is fear—politically manufactured panic amplified to justify hard power, exclusion, and permanent emergency. Treating empathy as the culprit turns political failure into a moral pathology, while excusing leaders who dismantle institutions, enrich elites, and stoke division. That isn't survival thinking. It's culture-war ideology dressed up as evolutionary insight.

Second, Saad's argument becomes concrete only when it turns to immigrants and Muslims—and this is where it breaks down.

Saad claims that empathy toward particular groups causes societies to override self-preservation. Muslims and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are repeatedly framed as uniquely incompatible, carrying ideologies that threaten Western life, and protected by a moral culture too afraid to say no.

The real error here is causation. Western societies do not experience strain because they extend compassion to immigrants or Muslims. They experience strain because social contracts have been dismantled and entire communities have been rendered economically expendable.

Resentment follows inequality, not empathy. That resentment is then redirected—away from the forces producing decline and toward cultural scapegoats.

In reality, history shows immigration is not inherently threatening. After the Vietnam War, the United States accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from a region it had just fought. After World War II, Europe absorbed millions of displaced people amid devastation and scarcity. These were not acts of sentimental surrender. They were political decisions made in societies under real strain, where judgment and authority still functioned. Empathy did not crowd out survival instincts; they helped us avoid a false choice.

If empathy toward Muslims were truly "suicidal," we would expect to see consistent evidence that Muslim populations drive societal collapse across countries and time. We do not. What we see instead is that breakdown tracks with austerity, deindustrialization, permanent war, and institutional failure.

Third, cultural tension is real—but it is not the cause Saad claims it is.

Pluralistic societies do experience friction. They always have. The real question is what determines whether that friction becomes manageable or destructive. The evidence shows it is not "suicidal empathy" that drives breakdown, but inequality, exclusion, and abandonment. Tensions rise when people are shut out of stable housing, decent work, and real participation in public life. Blaming immigrants for that insecurity is a deflection.

Fourth, how the theory misidentifies the source of collapse.
The real suicide of civilizations has more often come from greed, arrogance, corruption, and a society betraying its own stated values—not from excess compassion. Rome didn't fall because its people were too kind to outsiders. It collapsed under exploitation, overexpansion, and elite rot. Our existential threats today—climate breakdown, runaway inequality, endless war—are products of systemic incentives, not of ordinary people caring too much.
Fifth, the framework selectively amplifies statistically marginal threats while rendering systemic violence invisible.

Saad's thesis rests on curated anecdotes—grooming gangs, isolated attacks, individual crimes by immigrants—presented as evidence of civilizational threat. But this requires systematically ignoring scale.

In the United States, deaths from Islamic terrorism represent a fraction of one percent of homicides. Far-right domestic terrorism kills more Americans. Mass shootings by native-born citizens dwarf attacks by immigrants. The UK shows the same pattern: terrorism of all kinds accounts for a vanishingly small portion of violent deaths compared to domestic crime, with far-right extremism increasingly dominant among terror threats.

The data on immigrant crime is unambiguous: large-scale studies across both the U.S. and Europe consistently show immigrants commit violent crime at lower rates than native-born populations. This isn't cherry-picking favorable studies—it's the overwhelming consensus across decades of research.

But here's the more important point: even if these anecdotes represented real patterns, they would still pale compared to the structural violence that Saad's framework systematically ignores.

Consider what kills and harms Americans and Europeans at scale:

Forty-five thousand Americans die annually from lack of healthcare access—not because resources don't exist, but because healthcare is rationed by ability to pay.

Wage theft by employers exceeds all other property crime combined.

Preventable workplace deaths from safety violations that go unenforced.

Environmental contamination that produces cancer clusters near industrial sites.

The opioid epidemic, fueled by pharmaceutical companies that knew their products were addictive and promoted them anyway.
These aren't examples of Sharia Law. They're policy choices and business models. A single decision by a pharmaceutical company or insurance corporation kills more people than every terror attack in a decade. Yet these deaths are rendered invisible—not threats, just "the market working" or “unfortunate outcomes.”

This is the ideological function Saad's framework serves. It directs attention toward statistically marginal harms committed by the powerless while systematically obscuring large-scale harms committed by those with power.

The grooming gang becomes a civilizational threat; the insurance company denying cancer treatment to boost quarterly earnings is just business.

To be clear: the anecdotes aren't wrong because they're false. They're misleading because they're decontextualized.

Sixth, the "suicidal empathy" thesis depends on dehumanization.
It casts the "other"—immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people—as inherently threatening, as if showing them compassion is equivalent to welcoming a wolf into the henhouse. This is the oldest trick in the demagogue's playbook: divide the world into "us" and "them," then shame the people calling for solidarity as naïve or pathological.

Seventh, there is a dark irony here.

The real suicide of civilization begins when people are trained to sneer at empathy itself. Once cruelty is normalized, cages at the border, ICE raids on working-class families, bombs on civilians, and indifference to poverty become easier to justify. A society that kills empathy kills its moral core. That's the actual death spiral Saad should be worried about.

Eighth, notice what Gad Saad never names when discussing civilizational threats: the military-industrial complex, concentrated private power, and the Western imperial nations committing war crimes while calling themselves defenders of civilization.

This omission isn't accidental—it reveals where the framework actually leads. Saad celebrated Trump's 2024 victory as a triumph of "truth and freedom," despite Trump's explicit promises to expand presidential power, purge civil service, and crush dissent. He appears regularly on Fox News defending Trump against what he calls "Trump Derangement Syndrome," framing criticism of authoritarian power consolidation as irrational pathology rather than legitimate concern.

Most damningly, Saad has consistently defended Israel's military campaign in Gaza—a campaign that UN investigators, the International Court of Justice, multiple human rights organizations, and hundreds of international law scholars have identified as genocide.

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded in November 2024 that "Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," documenting mass killings, deliberate starvation, systematic destruction of healthcare and education, and statements by Israeli officials demonstrating genocidal intent.

By October 2025, over 66,000 Palestinians had been killed, 85% of Gaza's population forcibly displaced, and 84% of healthcare facilities destroyed or damaged.

When pressed on Gaza, Saad deflects by blaming Hamas, refuses to acknowledge the scale of civilian deaths, and frames any criticism of Israel as antisemitism. He explicitly rejects the genocide characterization, claiming he doesn't need to "prove" he's against harming innocent people by denouncing Israeli actions. This is suicidal empathy in its purest form—not for vulnerable refugees, but for state powers committing mass atrocities.

This is where the "suicidal empathy" framework inevitably leads: defending concentration camps at the border, celebrating authoritarian power consolidation, and providing cover for genocide—all while claiming to protect Western civilization.

The "incompatible values" he warns about aren't held by refugees. They're held by the military-industrial complex and imperial states he systematically shields from scrutiny.

Ninth, the evidence on what actually builds social cohesion contradicts Saad's framework.

Research across 33 countries found that income inequality strongly correlates with lower social trust (r = −0.51) and lower life expectancy (r = −0.74). The countries with the highest levels of trust are Nordic social democracies—Sweden, Denmark, Norway—where decades of equitable social investment built robust safety nets and strong public institutions.

Sweden's recent struggles aren't evidence that empathy destroys societies—they're evidence that neoliberal austerity destroys the social infrastructure that makes integration possible. Sweden massively cut public spending on housing, education, and social services while simultaneously accepting large numbers of refugees. You can't gut the welfare state and then blame immigrants when social cohesion collapses. That's not too much empathy—it's too little investment in the institutions that actually build trust and solidarity.

The real threat to social cohesion isn't immigration or cultural diversity. It's economic abandonment. When working-class communities—immigrant and native-born alike—are left without decent jobs, housing, healthcare, or hope, resentment grows and trust evaporates.

The solution isn't closing borders, nor is it opening them in an uncontrolled way (that's a strawman). It's rebuilding the social democratic institutions that created the prosperity Saad theoretically defends, and extending those protections to everyone living in the society. This means asking why our political discourse obsesses over border security and cultural threats while ignoring what actually immiserates working people.

Finally, the "suicidal empathy" thesis could be a useful framework if its examples held up to scrutiny—but they don't. In practice, it weaponizes cynicism against the very thing that makes functional societies possible.

A core narrative of this framework is that it's suicidal to extend more empathy to strangers than to "your own"—that we should prioritize our families and communities over those culturally different from us. But this framing does exactly what I've described: it trains us to see empathy as a zero-sum resource to be rationed tribally rather than a foundation for building inclusive institutions. It teaches us to distrust our better instincts and regard appeals to human dignity with suspicion.

"They aren't like us."
"Not all cultures are equal."
"These people don't share our values."
“Islam is a mortal threat to the West.”

Ironically, these narratives violate one of the West's actual core principles: treating every human being as an individual, not as a member of a group.

The KKK and Pete Hegseth don't speak for all Christians. ISIS doesn't speak for all Muslims. Zionists don't speak for all Jews.

For every anecdote of extremist violence used to justify collective suspicion, there are countless daily examples of interfaith cooperation and peaceful coexistence that never make headlines because they don't serve a useful political narrative.

What makes Saad's theory look like a grift is not that it raises uncomfortable issues, but that it raises them in a way that reliably shields dominant institutions. Empathy towards trans people, immigrants, Muslims and other "incompatible cultures" or progressive ideologies are diagnosed as the disease. Meanwhile, corporate power, militarism, and economic exploitation remain curiously untouched. That pattern is familiar. It is how intellectual narratives are constructed to discipline public concern while leaving the real sources of harm intact.

If “suicidal empathy” were aimed upward, at the moral language used to justify war, austerity, and permanent inequality, it might illuminate something real. Instead, it functions largely as a culture-war instrument that legitimizes xenophobia, fuels Islamophobia, stigmatizes trans people, and ridicules dissent as pathology. In that form, it does not challenge power. It serves it.

Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

References:

Empirical research from multiple fields broadly show that empathy, inclusion, and cooperative institutions correlate with safer, healthier, more resilient societies, while collapse and “state failure” track far more with inequality, corruption, and violence than with “excess" or “coerced” empathy”

1. Empathy/cooperation as survival advantages

- Political science work on failed and weak states emphasizes that breakdown is driven by loss of state legitimacy, predatory governance, and uncontrolled violence, not by excessive compassion toward marginalized groups.[1][2][3][4]
- Comparative analyses of state failure find that high criminal violence, corruption, and inability to provide basic services (“political goods”) are key predictors of collapse, again pointing to lack of inclusive, cooperative governance rather than over-empathic policy.[5][6][7][1]
- Disaster and resilience research shows that social capital (trust, networks, norms of reciprocity) is a major predictor of community survival and recovery after shocks, which is essentially empathy operationalized at scale.[8][9]

2. Refugees/immigration: not “suicidal,” but beneficial

Crime and public safety
- Large-scale reviews in the U.S. find immigrants (including undocumented) commit crimes at *lower* rates than U.S.-born citizens, with growth in immigrant population associated with *reductions* in violent and property crime in cities.[10][11][12][13]
- A multi-year national study published in PNAS found undocumented immigrants are roughly half as likely as U.S.-born people to be arrested for violent and property crimes.[10]
- Summaries by research centers (Migration Policy Institute, Brennan Center, ASA, Stanford) consistently conclude that data do not support any “migrant crime wave”; if anything, immigration tends to coincide with safer communities.[14][11][12][15][16]

Economic and fiscal effects (Vietnamese refugees as a key case)
- A difference‑in‑differences study of Vietnamese refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area finds their arrival had a statistically significant positive effect on wages, likely via increased consumption, productivity, and specialization.[17]
- A national analysis of refugees in the U.S. shows that, over a 15‑year period, refugees generated 124 billion dollars more in state and local revenue than they received in services, and have contributed an estimated 581 billion dollars in taxes overall.[18]
- Refugees are more likely than U.S.-born residents to become entrepreneurs; in 2023, more than 178,000 refugee entrepreneurs generated over 6 billion dollars in business income and more than 31 billion dollars in taxes.[18]
- Vietnamese immigrant households in 2022 had a median income of about 81,000 dollars, higher than both U.S.-born and overall immigrant households, and somewhat lower poverty rates than the U.S. population as a whole, indicating strong long‑term integration and contribution.[19]

3. What actually drives breakdown and violence (inequality, desperation, climate, corruption)

- A recent modeling and empirical study in *Proceedings of the Royal Society B* shows violence is strongly associated with economic deprivation and inequality, with “desperation” tipping people toward violent strategies; both poverty and inequality increase equilibrium levels of violence.[20]
- Reviews of failed states highlight civil war, internal violence, economic collapse, and delegitimized, corrupt governance as core mechanisms of failure, not policies of compassion toward refugees or minorities.[2][3][6][4][1]
- UN and IMF analyses document a “vicious cycle” between climate change and inequality: existing inequality makes disadvantaged groups more exposed and less able to cope, which then deepens inequality further and contributes to instability and conflict.[21][22][23][24]
- Studies on “socioenvironmental injustice” show that state failure to address pollution, climate harms, and basic needs produces “slow violence” that undermines legitimacy and fuels unrest—again, an absence of protective, empathic policy.[7]

4. Mutual aid, social trust, and welfare states as resilience

- Disaster studies document that mutual aid networks rapidly fill critical gaps in emergency response, improve equitable access to resources, and are integral to survivors’ ability to cope and recover, particularly where formal relief is delayed or inadequate.[25][26][27][8]
- A case study of mutual aid in New Orleans (Hurricane Laura) shows grassroots networks provided essential services and supplies “rapidly and consistently,” and that partnerships between mutual aid groups and local government improved overall crisis response.[25]
- Research on social trust and welfare states finds a feedback loop: universalistic, encompassing social protection systems reduce poverty and inequality, support higher levels of trust, and in turn sustain democratic stability.[28][29][30]
- Social epidemiology shows that more equal societies with robust welfare states have lower health inequalities and better overall population health, indicating that institutionalized empathy (through safety nets) supports societal well‑being.[31][30][28]

5. Dehumanization, low empathy, and democratic erosion

- Work on failed states and political violence finds that when governments lose legitimacy through repression, corruption, or systematic exclusion of groups, the result is elevated risk of civil war, terrorism, and regional instability.[32][6][4][1]
- Conflict research indicates that climate stress interacting with existing inequalities and grievances increases the risk of organized violence, especially where institutions fail to protect vulnerable populations—an archetypal scenario of low institutional empathy.[22][24][21]
- Studies on “state‑perpetuated slow violence” show that neglect of marginalized communities’ environmental and social needs corrodes democratic legitimacy and deepens conflict lines, aligning with the claim that normalized cruelty, not empathy, is what eats away at democracies.[7]

6. Diversity, inclusion, and stronger economies/societies

- Sociological syntheses note that cities with higher immigrant populations often have lower crime rates, partly because immigrants build dense social networks and local businesses that stabilize neighborhoods.[11][12][10]
- Cross‑national welfare and trust research suggests that societies that combine inclusive, universal social policies with higher social trust are more cohesive, with lower inequality and better health, supporting the assertion that empathy‑infused institutions correlate with healthier and more resilient societies.[29][30][33][28]