Can Too Much Empathy Destroy Society? Gad Saad Explains 'Suicidal Empathy'

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]The one thing we often hear is that society and the world doesn't have enough empathy. We need to do a better job of teaching empathy to our children.

[00:00:07]And it's interesting in reading your book is that you sort of take the opposite side or you talk about the perils of that. You say that too much empathy can destroy society. Like many things in life as Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago, too little or too much of anything is not good. This is known in Aristotelian logic as the golden mean. So for example, if a soldier is cowardly, therefore he doesn't exhibit enough courage, that's not good. If he is too courageous to the point of becoming a reckless martyr, then he's going to die very quickly. And so much of life is about finding that sweet spot. And that exact insight applies to empathy. Too little empathy or no empathy makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy, but not just too much. First, it is hyperactive.

[00:00:58]It is invoked in the wrong situations and it targets the improper targets. Put all those together into one soup and you end up with suicidal empathy. And if I can just kind of give a bit of a theoretical framework of how I came up with the idea. So if you look at many psychiatric dysfunctions, they are often a maladaptive misfiring of an otherwise adaptive process. Empathy when invoked in a well-modulated evolutionarily relevant range is perfectly wonderful. As a matter of fact, we expect a social species to be empathetic. But too much empathy in the wrong situations towards the wrong people results in the death of Western civilization.