Empathy scores correlate positively with support for communism, with governmental intervention scales that include items such as “the government needs to be a part of leveling the playing field for people from different racial groups,” and with support for censorship in the service of protecting feelings. Women score higher on empathy than men across every measured population and across the lifespan, and correspondingly prefer socialism over capitalism at higher rates, support woke ideas at higher rates, and are more likely to endorse open borders regardless of consequences. This is the empirical infrastructure beneath Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (2025), and it explains a great deal that the standard cultural commentary cannot. The book documents a specific measurable trait, distributed unequally across the population, now controlling the institutions that decide what a civilization is and whom it protects.
Gad Saad is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, where he has taught for over thirty-one years at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior. His prior book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, examined how ideological rapture disables human cognition; Suicidal Empathy extends the same analytical framework to the emotional system. Saad was born in Lebanon into a Jewish family that fled the civil war in 1975 after his parents were kidnapped by Fatah — a biographical fact that shapes his approach to questions of cultural theory of mind and Islamic immigration policy. He testified before the Canadian Senate on Bill C-16 in 2017 and has been a persistent public critic of woke ideology, incurring costs at his own university including death threats and security protocols. His podcast The Saad Truth provides much of the raw material the book synthesizes.
The book arrived in 2025, following an eighteen-month stretch in which the West’s calibration of empathy had become impossible to ignore. Empathy as public virtue had reached its most operationally destructive form in the preceding decade: COVID-era policies that treated any discussion of taboo trade-offs as psychopathy; academic institutions restricting Canada Research Chairs by identity category; European courts delivering probation-level sentences for gang rapes of children on the reasoning that harsh punishment would damage the perpetrators’ integration prospects; the systematic replacement of merit with demographic representation across universities, medicine, and aviation. Suicidal Empathy was written into this environment, drawing on evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, and documented case-by-case failures to name a mechanism the establishment could not name because the establishment was the mechanism.
Where the book underdelivers is in the causal weighting of what Helen Andrews and Janice Fiamengo have named directly: female demographic dominance of the institutions that manufacture Western belief. Saad has the trait — he documents that women score higher on empathy, that women are more likely to endorse the ideological package that flows from empathy misfiring, that the feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. What he does not fully reckon with is the vector. Law schools became majority female in 2016. The New York Times newsroom in 2018. Medical schools in 2019. The Great Awokening arrived simultaneously with these tippings, at the 30% threshold researchers identify as the point where minority preferences begin reshaping organizational culture. Saad’s framework describes the destination without fully accounting for the timing. His seven inoculation prescriptions are gender-neutral, addressing the trait while leaving untouched the structural fact that the institutions setting the terms of public life are now demographically configured to reward exactly the misfiring he warns against. A complete account would say that feminization created the institutional conditions under which suicidal empathy became the operating logic of Western public life. Saad names one and gestures at the other, treating female-higher empathy as one variable among many rather than as the demographic vector through which the trait now dominates.
The full summary unpacks what Saad calls empathy agnosia — the inability to identify appropriate targets for compassion — through the specific research and documented cases that ground his argument. It walks through the 890 medals lost by female athletes across more than 400 competitions to biological men and the 44% of trans women inmates in Canadian correctional facilities incarcerated for sexual crimes; the Huddersfield grooming case naming twenty perpetrators and the pattern replicated across Britain, Germany, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, and Finland; the 1,288 public health officials who signed the open letter declaring anti-racism protests exempt from COVID restrictions while grandmothers died alone; the seven inoculation prescriptions Saad offers as the reintroduction of the evolved capacity to discriminate. Maria Ladenburger, a nineteen-year-old German medical student who volunteered at migrant shelters, was raped and murdered by an Afghan asylum seeker in December 2016. Her family requested donations to refugee charities in lieu of flowers.
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