The recent atrocity in Belfast lays bare a sickness that has taken hold across much of the progressive Left in the West. A Sudanese asylum seeker allegedly stabbed his neighbour in a frenzied attack, sparking riots as local frustration boiled over. Yet instead of confronting the obvious failures of mass immigration and integration, too many voices on the Left responded with the now-familiar script: downplay the perpetrator's background, condemn the public's anger as "racism," and insist that more empathy and openness are the solution.
This is what evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad has powerfully termed "suicidal empathy," the misfiring of our natural capacity for compassion into a pathological willingness to side with those who threaten our own societies. It is not kindness. It is a form of cultural self-harm dressed up as moral virtue.
We have seen this pattern repeat with grim regularity. Grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere were ignored for years because acknowledging the ethnic and religious patterns risked "Islamophobia." Violent incidents involving migrants are routinely met with euphemisms, deflection, and lectures about not generalising. Police handcuff victims while the perpetrator is handled with kid gloves. Politicians and media figures rush to protect the narrative of diversity rather than the safety of their own citizens.
This suicidal empathy is not accidental. It flows from a progressive ideology that views Western societies as inherently guilty: colonial, racist, oppressive, and therefore deserving of transformation through demographic change. The historic majority populations are cast as the problem, while newcomers, no matter how culturally incompatible or violent some among them may be, are cast as victims to be protected and empathised with. The result is a one-way street: endless tolerance for the intolerant, paired with contempt for those who simply want to preserve their own way of life.
The consequences are now visible everywhere. Social trust collapses. Parallel societies form. Crime patterns shift. Native birth rates fall as people sense the ground shifting beneath them. Institutions: police, schools, welfare systems, become strained and captured by the same ideology, prioritising "community cohesion" over straightforward justice and public safety.
What makes this especially dangerous is the linguistic and cultural capture that accompanies it. Terms are policed, dissent is pathologised, and honest discussion of patterns is shut down. As Saad and others note, naming the problem is the first step to confronting it. "Suicidal empathy" is an excellent label precisely because it captures the self-destructive nature of this misplaced compassion.
True empathy is not suicidal. It does not require a society to ignore threats to its own survival. Healthy societies balance compassion with self-preservation, generosity with prudence, openness with boundaries. The progressive version discards those boundaries in the name of abstract universalism, then acts shocked when the resulting chaos erupts.
The Belfast atrocity, like so many before it, is not an isolated tragedy. It is a symptom of a deeper civilisational malady, one in which elites, insulated by wealth and ideology, push policies whose costs fall hardest on working and middle-class communities. The public is not "far-Right" for noticing. They are simply refusing to participate in their own cultural dispossession.
Reversing this requires rejecting suicidal empathy in favour of clear-eyed realism. Compassion for individuals in genuine need can and should coexist with firm borders, rigorous integration demands, and an unapologetic defence of the historic national character. Societies that lose the will to do so eventually cease to exist as coherent entities.
The progressive Left's embrace of suicidal empathy is not moral progress. It is a profound moral and civilisational failure, one that ordinary citizens are increasingly unwilling to indulge. The battle for the future of the West will be won not by more empathy for its destroyers, but by the courage to defend what remains worth preserving.
https://jakewallissimons.substack.com/p/the-belfast-atrocity-suicidal-empathy