The book cover’s sketched lamb holding a sign reading “FREE THE WOLVES” delivers the book’s thesis in a nutshell—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, customs, 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 it. Traditionally, for example, merit and scientific aptitude have comprised the hallmark for entrance into medicine. But according to Saad, 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.”
Suicidal empathy—a Saad coinage, by the way—has 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. Position one “is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as woman, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or Two-spirit” while position two “is open only to qualified individuals who self-identify as a member of a racialized minority.”
Not to be outdone, the University of British Columbia recently advertised for a chair in oral cancer research. “The selection,” read the ad, “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.”
So that’s how the empathy cookie crumbles these days. Illegal immigrants are welcomed by the hundreds of thousands and often more accommodated than tax-paying citizens. Hamas terrorists are noble; Israel’s IDF “genocidal.” Squatters are prioritized over residents. Twerking drag queens entertain kindergartners during reading hour. Foreign aid is sluiced out with no strings attached. The “unhoused” occupy and despoil public parks. Free needles are handed out with little expectation that they’ll be returned. Medical and fire department personnel are burned out by the coddling of street addicts.
Saad notes an academic movement that actually seeks 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.”
It’s somewhat reassuring that the phenomenon of suicidal empathy has existed, in some form, for centuries. Saad cites two Aesop’s Fables. 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, then fatally stings the frog, because it’s in his 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, who 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 the Joe Rogan podcast that, amid repeated death threats, he’s leaving Canada to live in the United States.
Saad told the National Post: “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’s now a scholar at the Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
Saad tells how, in March of 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.”
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.”
