Description
Before Gad Saad argues anything, he hands the reader a ledger. The preface lists the West’s moral priorities as a column of inequalities, each set off by a greater-than sign: criminals above victims, squatters above homeowners, drug addicts above children in parks, “transgender ‘women'” above women, foreign aid above reciprocity. Fifteen-odd entries, no argument yet, just the arithmetic of a civilization he says has its values backward. It is an efficient opening. You know within a page what you are getting. It is also the method in plain sight, because those inversions arrive as findings when they are in fact the conclusions the book sets out to reach.
Saad’s premise is borrowed from biology and stated with total conviction. Empathy is an evolved adaptation, selected because we are a social species; like any adaptation it has an optimal range, and like anger or disgust it can fire too hot, too often, at the wrong target. “Suicidal empathy” is his name for the Western malfunction, a compassion so unbounded it dismantles the society hosting it. Across eight chapters the diagnosis travels: immigration, crime, COVID and climate policy, diversity hiring, the welfare state, gender. The frame leans on real sources. Paul Bloom on empathy’s limits, Thomas Sowell on the self-flattering politics of compassion, the long decline literature from Burnham to Toynbee, all sit behind it. Saad’s own contribution is mostly the phrase, which he is pleased to report went viral before the book existed; his editor read the post and wrote back, “Here’s your book idea.”
The most interesting thing about the book is that it tells you, repeatedly and well, how to take it apart.
Saad is a fine instructor in epistemics when his opponents are the subject. He invokes Popper to insist science is never settled, that a claim worth holding must specify what could disprove it. He devotes pages to trade-offs and opportunity costs, scolding policymakers who optimize one variable and ignore the constraints. He warns against generalizing from a single vivid case, and reminds us that statistical regularities, not anecdotes, carry the weight.
Good rules. The book breaks every one.
Falsifiability goes first. Saad never says what could count against “suicidal empathy.” The concept absorbs all outcomes: a failed policy proves the misfiring, a critic who objects is himself infected, and Trump’s victory reverses some damage while the pathogen waits, shingles-like, to flare again. A frame that explains everything and survives every objection is the unfalsifiable construct Popper warned him about. He has built his own destiny example.
Then the anecdotes. For a writer who cautions against the singular case, Saad runs almost entirely on them. The Norwegian raped by an immigrant, then sick with guilt at the man’s deportation. The Danish pirate fitted with a taxpayer-funded prosthetic. The Iowa superintendent who turned out to be undocumented. A podcaster’s relentless positivity. Arresting stories, often infuriating ones, and exactly the evidence he tells readers to distrust a few chapters later. Aggregate figures do surface (Danish reoffense rates, a UN tally of medals lost by female athletes), but the book’s forward motion is outrage, one story at a time. A sympathetic reader will say the stories merely illustrate patterns the data already settles. Sometimes that holds. More often the data is gestured at and the story does the persuading.
The trade-off frame cuts both ways too, and the book only ever swings it in one direction. Saad is right that “settled science” can be a cudgel, that opportunity costs get hidden, that empathy can be gamed; Bloom made the narrower version, and it stands. But the calculus he demands of others is suspended the moment it might bind him. Mass deportation has costs; the wrongful ones become rounding error. Restricting immigration by culture or creed has costs to the excluded and to the pluralism he claims to defend; those go unweighed.
The apparatus could have turned inward. It clearly could. Saad knows what a confounded variable is, knows the difference between a population and a story, which makes the missing self-scrutiny look less like oversight than choice. The Darwinian vocabulary ends up doing decorative work, lending the authority of mechanism to positions that are, underneath, ordinary cultural conservatism held at unusual temperature. Strip the biology and the diagnostics, and a familiar argument about borders, crime, and identity remains, told with more sarcasm than most.
That sarcasm is its own cost. The mockery never lets up. The “undocumented lovemaker,” the cackling vice president, his sardonic “Six Degrees of Jew” routine about people who blame Jews for everything. Some of it lands, but it does to Saad what he says empathy does to progressives: it forecloses the trade-off. The convinced reader cheers. The undecided one, weighing an actual hard case on immigration or crime, finds no model of how Saad reasons through difficulty, only the pleasure of watching him win the easy ones.
He is most revealing in a line he offers as triumph. “It truly is that simple,” he writes of civilizational survival, and a man who has just spent a chapter on Popper, on the provisional nature of all knowledge, ends by promising the answer is simple. He also writes, “There is nothing more existentially empathetic than the dogged defense of the truth.” I think he means it. The defense that would have impressed me is the one he never attempts, against himself.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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