It's Not Empathy

In 1988, the movie Twins came out. It was a one-joke comedy. Here's the trailer. See if you can spot the joke.

This year, Gad Saad's book, Suicidal Empathy, came out. It, too is a one-joke tragicomedy. Here's Gad's 5-minute summary of the book. See if you can spot the joke.

Spoiler: the joke is that when the progressives use the word "empathy" it is deliberately misleading to the point of fraud. Gad pounds that point into the ground on every single page.

To be clear, I'm a big fan of Gad Saad. I consume most of his content in various forms. On the whole, including in this book, he is a large force for good in the world.

Getting back to the book, what Gad is noticing is that none of what he describes and what else we can observe is empathetic. If a system is designed to maximize empathy or, to put it better, minimize suffering, it will self-correct as it evolves and move to improve its model so it can better reduce suffering. 

The progressive experiment, which is the never-ending effort to destroy and replace Western Civilization, never does this. It doubles down on what it was doing before. Here in San Diego, the progs have been expensively "working" to fight homelessness for over a decade. Our diocese has been "lifting up the marginalized" as well. In all that time, the number of homeless has increased. The filth and decay has only gotten worse.

A system designed for the purpose of remediating suffering would adapt to new data. This one hasn't at all. Ergo, empathy is in no way related to what the progs are doing.

Dittos for the open border. When it became obvious that the language of the blue collar jobsites was changing to Spanish and American blacks were more solidly locked out of those jobs than they had been under the Southern Democrats' Jim Crow, the system should have adjusted. It did not.

When the importation of Muslims into England led to the gang raping of 100,000 white, English girls, the system should have adapted. It did not.

The progs' system did not adjust because it is not in any way guided by empathy. However, most of its adherents are. All of the AWFLs I know are empathetic to their cores.

The problem I have with the book is that for it to do any good at all, it needs to be read by the people who want to be empathetic, read: AWFLs, but are now following the progs' playbook. Instead of snarking about empathy being suicidal, it should have embraced Thomas Sowell's maxim, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Similarly, the Church should embrace and preach a tragic yet noble view of life instead of their current notion that Man is redeemable through social justice, which, ironically, is a heresy.

Perhaps a better theme for the book could have been, "What is empathy? Whatever it is, this isn't it."

Still, I understand Gad's focus being what it is. A Lebanese Jew, Muslim migration chased him first out of Lebanon under duress and by a narrow, harrowing escape and now out of Canada to Mississippi. He's been a Casandra for several years now, one we should heed.

Gad's right, we are being suicidal, but the self-destruction is coming from ideological capture, not empathy. There's no empathy in any of this.