Saad’s Suicidal Empathy: A Review

In the first episode of Mad Men, the young and ambitious account executive Peter Campbell tries to convince Don Draper to use Freud’s theory of the death drive in a pitch to Lucky Strike. Pete hopes to turn the danger of cigarettes into an exciting asset in advertising. Don immediately shoots him down, literally throwing the research packet Pete is relying on into the trash.

Through Don’s rejection of the pitch, we learn that he is interested in dreams, nostalgia, and memory as tools for advertising. We also learn that Mad Men, as a show, is not interested in offering the audience pop-culture psychoanalysis. The show wants to focus the viewer on desire, rather than the death drive. The grammar of psychoanalytic explanation tends to flatten and even close off thinking rather than open it up. By rejecting this grammar, Mad Men engages the full range of human emotion, life, and meaning. You don’t smoke Lucky Strikes because of the death drive: you smoke Lucky Strike because it’s toasted.

No addict’s hunger has ever been excited by Freud.

And yet here we are: true crime dominates podcasts and streaming, therapy-speak saturates culture and politics, and Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy arrives to explain the liberal left through the grammar of evolutionary psychology. Boasting a rare endorsement from Elon Musk, Saad’s book aims to be a “wake-up call” to “Stop ignoring your survival instincts in the name of political correctness.” Saad begins by briefly explaining the origins of empathy as a valuable trait in human evolution and survival, but almost immediately moves to a discussion of how serial killers take advantage of empathy to kill, maybe hoping to hook the reader with true crime.

As we read, we learn that his aim is twofold: to explain suicidal empathy and to inoculate the reader against it. On both counts, he fails. He devotes only one chapter to discussing the why of suicidal empathy and immediately moves on to list countless examples of what he considers suicidal empathy. This begins early with his discussion of serial killers, which reads almost like a listicle or BuzzFeed article. He fails to connect his analysis of how empathy can go wrong with a broader discussion of “woke” politics. He does not attempt to explain how or why empathy, a deeply personal, individual trait, may become the emotive logic of a social doctrine with the awe-inspiring power to remake society. Saad’s explanation is cursory and seems oddly uninterested in actually understanding why some people are suicidally empathetic, or what empathy even is. He does not explore what social or political conditions structurally favor or incentivize empathy. He does not interrogate whether liberals are genuinely empathetic, or feel they are, or what else may be going on beneath the surface.

The bulk of this short book discusses examples of suicidal empathy, which, at times, seem pulled directly from the X timeline. As we read, his use of the term “suicidal empathy” seems so elastic as to become meaningless. Is Claudine Gay’s appointment as head of Harvard suicidal empathy? For Gad, yes: institutional suicidal empathy. What of DEI? That, too, was suicidal empathy: as you’d have to be suicidal to prioritize race over merit. What of a mass migration? Yes, that too is suicidal empathy!

Saad ignores the rationale behind liberal policies, actions, and ideas, and instead, in almost satirical fashion, describes them as irrational for reasons that are supposedly obvious. He ignores that DEI was a rational attempt to engineer a new, racially diverse, power elite; that mass migration is rational for powerful political and economic actors; and that even Claudine Gay had her uses for Harvard.

The most glaring issue is that Saad treats liberalism as either irrational due to misplaced empathy or inconsistent with its own principles. It is as if he thinks a golden world awaits, but for the absence of rational, rightly ordered empathy. But what if suicidal empathy is not a rejection of liberalism, but its fulfillment? What if liberalism is consistent, because it is an expression of a certain group’s desire for power, and “empathy” is its sword? If the “principles” of liberalism are ultimately about power, then the endless hypocrisy, double standards, and betrayals aren’t failures of the ideology: they are the ideology working exactly as intended. There is no consideration of this darker conclusion, which most serious people have already come to. Saad remains deeply committed to liberalism, despite spending 170 pages cataloging the vicious, festering wounds it has left on our country. Perhaps the one with suicidal empathy is him.

His writing would not convince a liberal reader to question their ways. And in fact, at times, it seems Saad is not really interested in asking them to. Brief asides that refer to “Saint Floyd” and the DEI “cult” are not rhetorically persuasive to people who take these things seriously. Thus, when we arrive at his later chapters, which attempt to help “inoculate” people against suicidal empathy, I am not convinced anyone who would have made it thus far is the type of person that needs inoculation. 

Most off-putting: Saad writes as if the reader is totally ignorant of the world. On one page, he mentions indulgences and notes that Martin Luther, who he says founded the Lutheran faith, opposed them; on another, he explains what an unfalsifiable statement is, as if these things are not common knowledge amongst high school graduates. One can imagine this is because he spent years lecturing freshmen business majors. But at times, his writing veers into the strange and unnecessary in ways that defy even this explanation. As an example, Saad feels the need to explain why losing a child during birth is painful, producing a sentence a college sophomore would receive a failing grade for: “The death of a mother during or shortly after childbirth is an existential cruelty in that one of the happiest and momentous life events is irrevocably tainted by the untimely dying of the giver of life.”

He uses actual appeals to authority in his writing, which is littered with authoritative quotes and references, even when they make no sense. Every chapter begins with a quote from a famous figure. While discussing how suicidal empathy can affect liberals’ understanding of science, he writes:

Semmelweis was eventually vindicated, and his insight has since saved innumerable women. As one of his biographers stated: ‘Semmelweis’s saga demonstrates that when a given group, and physicians are no exception, learns some set of facts, those facts too often become immutably ingrained in the minds of that group. Then, tragically, when a valid revolutionary scientific discovery comes along, that group is either unable or unwilling to accept it.’ In his commencement speech at Southampton College in 1981, the American author Kurt Vonnegut offered a powerful ode to Semmelweis’s courage to go against the orthodoxy.

No, you do not get to know what Vonnegut said about Semmelweis! It’s enough that Vonnegut offered him an ode. I am genuinely not sure what role this is supposed to play in the text. Vonnegut is never mentioned again. Is the reader supposed to conclude from this fact that Semmelweis was courageous, because Vonnegut thought so? (Incidentally, terrible pick, Saad! Vonnegut was suicidally empathetic)

I read a recent review of a new novel which, like Suicidal Empathy, was marketed on X to the dissident right. In that review, the critic attacked the author for seeming to endorse Oswald Spengler because of a lone, passing reference to The Decline of the West. The critic did not bother to write about the novel and instead spent his entire review crusading against Spengler, seemingly thinking that the reading public needed to avoid the book, lest the Spenglerian mind-virus warp their gentle minds.

Writing this review, I came to realize I was making the opposite mistake: whereas that critic unseriously reviewed a serious book, I am seriously reviewing an unserious one. The clown makeup was on my face the whole time…

During college, I briefly worked as a waitress. There was a line cook who loved Rick and Morty, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk. He had a Sonic tattoo. We never got along. Suicidal Empathy is a book for him (Saad boasts nearly a dozen appearances on the Joe Rogan show). This book is for people who do not quite know what falsifiability is and have the barest grasp of history — weed smokers who haven’t gone to college but still vote Republican. It’s understandable why Elon Musk supports him. It’s critical and even admirable to try to help normal people who are constantly hounded about their politics feel more comfortable and confident expressing them.

But it’s tragic that Musk’s reach and influence are spent on Saad. We already have the line cooks. We need to win doctors, lawyers, and professors, none of whom will find Saad compelling. They will become even more “suicidally empathetic” if they read this book, which they will find insulting to their intelligence, and which will affirm their worst stereotypes about the right.

I can’t recommend this book to my readers, who I am sure have much better things to do, but perhaps you have a weed-smoking cousin or boomer uncle who likes Trump? If so, perhaps send them a copy for Christmas. It’s a cheap gift, and they’ll take being sent a book as a compliment.

Lucky Strike. It’s toasted.