Last week Reform’s treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick set out proposals to cut welfare spending on working age adults in half. There are, to put it politely, some highly questionable assumptions in the analysis and costing (see footnote).1 But what really caught my eye was a piece Jenrick wrote for the Sunday Telegraph to launch his plan in which he criticised the current arrangements as an example of “suicidal empathy”.
I had been wondering when this phrase would escape social media confinement and make it into mainstream political discourse (it also featured on Radio 4’s “Moral Maze” last week). It was coined a few years ago by Gad Saad, a Canadian professor of marketing, who has embarked on the now familiar and lucrative career path of utilising an academic title to provide flimsy intellectual justifications for various prejudices. The basic concept is that empathy has become maladaptive in modern western societies leading people to direct assistance towards inappropriate recipients. This supposedly does such harm to truth and self-preservation that it will lead to societal suicide.
Saad has built up a following on the radical right due to his prophesies that European countries are on the verge of civil war thanks to immigration (and, as per Jenrick’s piece, spending too much on welfare). But his phrase really took off when Elon Musk started using it regularly on X and elsewhere to explain why wokery is going to end western civilisation.
If it was just another unpleasant right-wing meme it could, perhaps, be ignored. But the reason it is catching on is that it is based on an old set of ideas about how empathy, or related concepts like pity, can be harmful. These raise genuinely interesting philosophical and political questions. What Saad and Musk have done is develop a viciously ideological version to attack their enemies. It is not the first time philosophical discussion of empathy has been hijacked by the political right into a crude dismissal of suffering, with dire consequences.
In the rest of the post I’ll look at the antecedents of the phrase, how it has evolved, and why Saad’s version is particularly misleading and dangerous. Then I’ll use a few examples, including Reform’s welfare proposals, to show how it leads to inevitable misdiagnosis of problems and the wrong solutions. But also how a variant of the idea, properly applied, can lead to very different policy approaches to ones Musk or Jenrick would endorse.