Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. It is reprinted here with permission from Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins.
There is something unique about the West’s feverish desire to commit collective suicide by misguided empathy. Interestingly, in his mammoth twelve-volume A Study of History, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee explained why civilizations die. This has since been summarized by the following maxim: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” The general argument is that societies decay because of the self-inflicted failures of their elites in a myriad of ways. The American philosopher James Burnham echoed that sentiment in his 1964 book Suicide of the West, wherein he proclaimed: “It may be added that suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization” and added that “[L]iberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” I posit that in the current zeitgeist, the collective suicide of the West is occurring via the orgiastic misfiring of one of our most noble virtues, empathy, which of course is deeply anchored within the ethos of progressive liberals.
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