{"id":833,"date":"2026-07-28T10:08:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=833"},"modified":"2026-07-28T10:08:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:08:34","slug":"the-right-says-suicidal-empathy-is-destroying-the-west-heres-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=833","title":{"rendered":"The right says \u201csuicidal empathy\u201d is destroying the West. Here\u2019s the truth."},"content":{"rendered":"
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America\u2019s right-wing elites have a theatrical new indictment of liberals that they warn will lead to catastrophe: They care too much.<\/p>\n

Read more The worst year for measles in a generation<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSuicidal empathy,\u201d the phrase coined by Canadian marketing professor and conservative influencer Gad Saad, is suddenly on the lips of everyone right-of-center \u2014 including billionaire Elon Musk, who has promoted Saad\u2019s book by the same name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The catchy two-word indictment crystallizes a broader critique on the right \u2014 that progressive values aren\u2019t just a misdirection of priorities, but an active threat to everything the West has achieved over thousands of years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The problem, in the view of Musk, Saad, and like-minded conservatives, is that the left is so obsessed with sticking up for those on the bottom \u2014 whether it\u2019s aid recipients abroad, asylum-seekers at the border, or the homeless in cities \u2014 that they disregard everyone else, with deadly consequences for society.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cPeople have empathy for the criminals, but not empathy for the victims of the criminals,\u201d Musk told Tucker Carlson in October 2024.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s also a convenient new spin on an old idea. The billionaire tech right cohort Musk belongs to has long looked for a way to unshackle itself from the leviathan of basic social responsibility. With the concept of suicidal empathy, they have found an intellectual framework to argue that their policy preferences and bottom lines aren\u2019t just about greed or self-interest, but a matter of cultural survival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In their quest to make this argument, many on the right have pointed to a study that they see as a sort of intellectual checkmate. In 2019, a group of psychologists gathered participants across political ideologies and asked them to express their level of concern about different groups ranging from their close family to animals to all things in existence. In one section, you see a series of heatmaps that appear to show that liberals focus their moral concerns on groups further away from themselves, whereas conservatives value their close loved ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Conservatives seized on the heatmaps and turned them into a meme, arguing that liberals really do<\/em> value the lives of distant foreigners and strangers over those of their own family and community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Venture capitalist and AI Super PAC megadonor Marc Andreessen, for instance, is a fan of the heatmap meme. Rob Henderson, a conservative author, claimed the heatmap proves that \u201cconservatives devote the majority of their empathy and care to family and friends and liberals devote most of their concern to plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks.\u201d Even the Trump Department of Homeland Security has posted it to respond to a group of protesters opposing the deportation of Kilmar \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But things may not be so simple as this now-infamous set of heatmaps portrays. New research published in the journal Political Psychology<\/em> last month decided to study liberals\u2019 and conservatives\u2019 moral concerns in a more exhaustive way. It came to a very different conclusion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What the research says about empathy and politics <\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Utah and one of the authors of the study, decided to embark on the research in part after seeing the heatmap memes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe assertion going around was that liberals had come to care more about strangers and distant causes than about their own families and communities, and that claim is testable,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt also sat awkwardly against decades of evidence that favoring close others is a widespread default in human social cognition, so we wanted to check it directly rather than assume either side of the debate was right.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The problem, in Law\u2019s view, was that the 2019 study was not robust enough to really tell us who liberals and conservatives prioritize.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe 2019 studies measured how far moral concern extends, and they did that well,\u201d Law wrote to me in an email. \u201cThey were not designed to detect whether concern for distant others competes with concern for close others, because both tasks built an outward-expanding structure (e.g., from close humans to distant humans to non-human life to eventually the natural world and non-sentient targets) into the measure itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead, Law and his colleagues surveyed liberals and conservatives with what\u2019s called the Moral Expansiveness Scale. This scale lets people rank every group independently, which lets us see how much they value them relative to each other (you can do a simple version of examining how much you care about different groups with the test here).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What Law and his colleagues found was that it isn\u2019t so much that progressives value foreigners and other distant groups more than their close family; they simply extend their moral concern outward further than conservatives do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cClose others came first everywhere,\u201d Law said. \u201cAcross all three datasets and essentially the whole ideological spectrum, people gave their inner circle the highest moral concern, and we found no evidence of an inversion among liberals at any level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Meta glasses are killing the vibe<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The only thing ideology seemed to predict in their study was how far out someone\u2019s moral circle of concern goes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201c[Liberals reached] further toward targets like animals, plants, and future generations,\u201d Law said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They did ask respondents about tradeoffs, and liberals were willing to allocate more theoretical points to outsiders than conservatives did. But the differences were small.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When people were asked to divide a fixed pool of 100 points, people close to them received \u201cby far the largest share in every group, roughly 56 to 62 points out of 100,\u201d Law told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Law\u2019s more robust study suggests that the heatmap meme is essentially fake.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn our data, extending concern outward did not come with reduced concern for close others,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How far should empathy extend?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But disproving the heatmap meme only tells us how liberals and conservatives tend to think; it doesn\u2019t tell us how they should think.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Tradeoffs are a fact of life. Whether we should be willing to modestly increase the national debt or taxes to increase foreign aid, for instance, is a question of values rather than something that can be empirically derived.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the heatmap memes and pop psychology theories around \u201csuicidal empathy\u201d that have become so common on the right \u2014 from the world\u2019s richest man to the folks who serve in the Trump administration \u2014 miss something deep and relevant about human beings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a species, we succeeded not just because of our capacity to defend our in-groups \u2014 our family, friends, community, nations \u2014 but because of our ability to understand the interests and values of those far away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After World War II, for instance, multilateral organizations \u2014 like the United Nations \u2014 were established to prevent another global conflict by having diplomatic channels that we can use to anticipate and ameliorate the concerns of other countries; even \u201cMutually Assured Destruction,\u201d the doctrine that prevented a nuclear war, is based on the shared understanding that you cannot destroy someone else\u2019s country without them deciding to do the same thing to you.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s ironic that Saad\u2019s suicidal empathy concept has taken off right as the Trump administration is actively disproving the idea that we can prosper by disregarding everyone else in the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump\u2019s trade wars and actual wars have been conducted under the concept that we can simply bully the rest of the planet and profit as a result.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By trying to run roughshod over other countries\u2019 economic interests, we\u2019ve helped push them to find support in other major countries, like China. Repeated military attacks on Iran, powered by the idea that we should simply impose our terms on that country instead of coming to a mutually beneficial agreement as former President Barack Obama did, have cost us tens of billions of dollars in warfighting and threaten the global economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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None of this has been popular with the people close to home that it\u2019s purportedly meant to prioritize. Far from empathetic, the Trump doctrine seems to be suicidal cruelty \u2014 lashing out at foreigners even when cooperating with them is in our own best interest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The heatmap memes and quips about suicidal empathy may make for great social media fodder. But in the real world, seeing life as a constant zero-sum game where we win only if others lose is just as foolish as any progressive who suffers from an excess of empathy.<\/p>\n

Read more Why the right is freaking out about \u201cthird worldism\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Politics<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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