Gad Saad's book "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind" landed May 12, becoming an instant Amazon bestseller, with endorsements from Elon Musk and Bill Ackman. It revives a fight Musk lit in February 2025, when he told Joe Rogan that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." This past February, Hillary Clinton's Atlantic essay "MAGA's War on Empathy" answered back. The question underneath: is empathy a virtue or an exploit?

1. Empathy Is Killing the West (Elon Musk, Gad Saad)

Compassion is a real human capacity — and bad actors have learned to trigger it against our own interests.

Empathy stops being a virtue the moment it overrides survival. On Joe Rogan in February 2025, Elon Musk called "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization" its empathy, describing an "empathy exploit" — a bug adversaries trip to push self-harming policy — and warning that "suicidal empathy" could end in "civilizational suicide." He credited the phrase to Gad Saad, who argues a society dies when it "cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct." The targets: open borders and unconditional foreign aid.

A parallel version comes from the Christian right, on different grounds. Theologian Joe Rigney's "The Sin of Empathy" calls untethered empathy "the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century," and Allie Beth Stuckey's "Toxic Empathy" argues progressives weaponize Christian compassion to win arguments on abortion and immigration.

2. Calling Compassion a Weakness Licenses Cruelty (Hillary Clinton, Russell Moore)

Reframing empathy as a flaw isn't tough-minded realism — it's permission to be cruel to the vulnerable.

The danger isn't too much empathy; it's politics that treats savagery as strength. In a February 2026 Atlantic essay, "MAGA's War on Empathy," Hillary Clinton argued the idea that "compassion is weak and cruelty is strong" has become "an article of MAGA faith," with savagery treated as "a feature, not a bug." Empathy, she wrote, doesn't overwhelm critical thinking — it opens our eyes to moral complexity. Critics add that the "science" of suicidal empathy isn't really science, but ideology in evolutionary-psychology dress.

Some of the loudest objections come from inside the church. Christianity Today's Russell Moore rejected the "sin of empathy" framing outright, warning that a "religion without empathy" loses the gospel itself and ends up coddling the very sins it claims to fight. David French made a similar case in the New York Times, cautioning Christians against treating identification with immigrants or the suffering as a sin to be purged.

3. The Real Argument Is Rational Compassion — and Both Sides Miss It (Paul Bloom)

There's a serious case against empathy. It has nothing to do with cruelty, and the weaponizers have mangled it.

Empathy makes a poor moral compass not because caring is weak, but because feeling is biased. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom made this argument a decade ago in "Against Empathy": empathy zooms in on one identifiable victim while ignoring the statistical many. It favors people like us, which makes it a bad guide for large decisions on aid, war, or justice. His fix isn't callousness — it's "rational compassion," caring governed by reason.

Bloom wants no part of the people now quoting him. He has said flatly that his "moral views are very different from those of Stuckey, Rigney, and Musk," and that "many of the policies that these individuals defend are awful." The serious critique, in his telling, is about thinking more clearly so you can help more people — the opposite of using "empathy is a weakness" to justify helping fewer.

Where This Lands

The Musk-Saad camp has a real observation buried in an inflammatory phrase: feelings can be manipulated, and policy driven purely by the most sympathetic face on a screen can be bad policy. The critics have the more urgent warning: once you call compassion a civilizational bug, you have built a permission structure for cruelty, and history tells us what comes next. And Bloom, who literally wrote the book against empathy, says both sides have mangled the point — the goal was never to feel less, but to think better so you can help more.

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