A book review of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, by Dr. Gad Saad, Broadside Books, 2026.’Been wondering what to read next? That’s an easy one. Buy, borrow, or download Professor Gad Saad’s newest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. It will jar your mindset and leave you with a degree of shock — but you’ll want to tell others about it. It’s going to be a bestseller. In fact, it already is. In one of the book cover’s endorsements, Bruce Bawer — author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within — says Suicidal Empathy “…is easily more important than any book in recent memory.” He’s right. For, as Elon Musk adds: “Western civilization is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken…”The book-cover’s sketched lamb holding a sign reading “FREE THE WOLVES” delivers the book’s thesis in a nutshell — namely, that the madness of misplaced empathy toward alien entities, cultures, and religions is suicidal. And the Western world — or at least a critical mass of its cultural and political influencers — is sold on the idea.The book is freighted with stunning examples of lunatic policies that prioritize marginalized groups over cherished, time-tested Judeo-Christian tenets and practices. In his chapter “Cultural Theory of Mind,” for instance, Saad discusses how both the British police and government declined, “over several decades” to intervene in “…the organized sexual exploitation of young white girls by ‘Asian’ grooming gangs across countless cities on an industrial-scale level…lest they might be accused of bigotry or, worse, Islamophobia.” Some instances of suicidal empathy occur where you’d least suspect they would. For example, merit and scientific aptitude have long comprised the hallmark for entrance into medicine. But Saad reports that CanMEDS (which develops professional codes for physicians and surgeons in Canada) has devised a new model that “…would seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism, and social justice, rather than medical expertise.” .He then provides a 150-word statement elaborating on CanMEDS’ 2025 renewal guidelines — ones that address “…ongoing structures of racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more.” Suicidal empathy — a Saad coinage, by the way — has also become well implanted in Canadian universities. The University of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science recently advertised for two positions — one in AI, the second in computer science. The call for position 1, it said, “is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as woman, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-spirit.” The call for position 2 “is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as a member of a racialized minority.”Not to be out-woked, UBC recently advertised for a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Oral Cancer Research. “The selection,” it noted, “will be restricted to members of the following federally-designated groups: people with disabilities, Indigenous people, radicalized people, women, and people from minoritized gender identity groups.” Saad refers to an academic movement that’s actually seeking to change the term “pedophile” to “minor-attracted people” (MAPS). In one of its papers, entitled “Humanizing Pedophilia as Stigma Reduction,” the abstract begins: “The stigmatization of people with pedophilic sexual interests is a topic of growing academic and professional consideration, owing to its potential role in moderating pedophiles’ emotional well-being. Thus, reducing stigmatization toward this group is of paramount importance.”.My favourite example of suicidal empathy? That’s a tough one, but I’ll go with the government grant awarded researchers at Concordia University to de-colonize light. On their ‘Decolonizing Light’ website, the researchers explain that “…the website explores ways and approaches to decolonize science, such as revitalizing and restoring Indigenous knowledges, and capacity building. The project aims to develop a culture of critical reflection and investigation of the relation of science and colonialism.” It’s somewhat reassuring that the phenomenon of suicidal empathy has existed, in some form, for centuries. Saad cites two Aesop’s fables that attest to that. In one case, a kindly farmer takes a freezing viper into his warm coat pocket, but is fatally bitten when the viper warms. In another, a scorpion convinces a frog to carry him across the river on his back, but nevertheless fatally stings the frog, because it’s in its nature to do so.How proud one could feel if our political leaders were wise to the folly of misplaced empathy. But as Saad puts it: “Two former Canadian prime ministers, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his son Justin Trudeau, are perfect exemplars of Western political leaders who have destroyed their nation’s cultural fabric via their empathetic commitment to cultural relativism.”Saad fled the Lebanese civil war with his Jewish parents (who had earlier been kidnapped and ill-treated by the Palestine Liberation Organization), settled in Montreal, and was taken on by Concordia University in 1994 as a marketing professor. He now terms himself an evolutionary behavioural scientist..He recently revealed on Joe Rogan’s famous podcast (which he’s been on eleven times) that, amid repeated death threats, he’s leaving Canada to live in the USA. “I love Canada, but there comes a point where the abject antipathy that you experience from Canadian society forces you to look elsewhere to a place where you might be appreciated and allowed to flourish,” he told the National Post. He’s now a scholar at the Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He recounts how, in 2024, he posted some thoughts on his X feed regarding the “suicidal empathy” he felt is sending the West “into a death spiral.” He received an email from the publisher of Broadside Books with a link to the post and the comment, “Here’s your book idea.” That idea is in sync with a number of previous thinkers and writers. Arnold Toynbee argued that societies collapse when they fail to intelligently respond to new challenges. Thomas Sowell believed that the intelligentsia often espouse policies that make them feel virtuously compassionate, while being decoupled from the negative consequences of said policies. James Burnham, in his Suicide of the West (1964), wrote that “…suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” So Saad is in good company in holding that “…the West’s elitist progressive political class is infected by a mind parasite that causes its empathy module to misfire in every conceivable manner. Many of the policy decisions that are wreaking havoc in the West stem from this poor calibration of empathy, resulting in a society that is galloping toward the abyss of infinite lunacy.”Bronwyn Eyre is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation. This article appeared in a modified form in the Epoch Times.
