Empathy is Not What is Killing the West – It's That We Stopped Watching
A bestselling book claims the West is dying of too much empathy. War correspondent Vaughan Smith says that diagnosis is back to front; we need not feel less, but be vigilant of those who feel nothing
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They say empathy is killing the West. The book carrying the claim, Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy, sits at the top of the American charts with Elon Musk’s endorsement on the jacket, and its argument is brutally simple. We feel too much. Our kindness has been turned against us, and the cure is to feel less.
I have spent much of my life watching what actually kills societies, 24 years of it behind a camera, from the Gulf to Bosnia to Afghanistan. I can report that the diagnosis is back to front.
Take what the argument gets right first, because it is real and conceding it costs nothing. Empathy can be gamed. It is a spotlight, not a scale. It over-weights the sympathetic face in front of us and misses the victim we cannot see, and institutions can be captured by the performance of compassion until they reward the appearance of care over its results. All true, and none of it new. The psychologist Paul Bloom made the serious version of this case a decade ago, in his book Against Empathy.
But follow any of the disasters laid at empathy’s door back to their source and you will not find kindness holding the knife.
The day before the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, an engineer inspected the cracks in its walls and declared the building unsafe. The bank on the ground floor sent its staff home. The garment factories above ordered their workers back in, on pain of docked wages. 1,134 people died. The men who gave that order were not overcome by fellow-feeling. They knew. They didn’t care.
That is what is missing from the whole suicidal-empathy conversation. Fellow-feeling is a dial, not a switch, and we all sit somewhere on it. At its cold end is a thin minority, of the order of one in twenty of us, who process social obligation differently from the rest. Most never make the news. They charm, they take, they rewrite what happened. You met this pattern across a kitchen table, your own or a friend's, in a parent, a partner, an uncle who nobody quite trusted, long before you ever met it in a boardroom.
The argument of the moment diagnoses the flock and never sees the wolf.
For most of human history we did see. The village watched. Proximity was the structure, reputation followed a person from birth to death, and the cold few were known and contained. Not cured, not hated. Contained.
Then industrial scale broke the proximity, deregulation stripped out the rules we had built to replace it, and the digital age dissolved the last layer, reputation, which can now be manufactured faster than it can be checked. The few did not get worse. The watching stopped.
Seen from there, the fashionable prescription to care less is exactly wrong. A society counselled to feel less does not become harder to rob. Trust withdrawn, cooperation thinned, the watch stood down: that is the ground a taker wants. The suicidal-empathy argument mistakes the immune system for the disease.
Nor is this the left-right quarrel it is being sold as. The pattern has flourished under governments of the left and the right alike, and the loudest quarrels are its best camouflage. Whilst we fight each other sideways, the taking runs vertically, through whatever institution we have stopped watching.
There is an older, better answer, and a Victorian coal merchant found it. Samuel Plimsoll spent the 1870s enraged by ‘coffin ships’, overloaded and heavily insured vessels sent to sea to drown their crews for the payout. He did not try to reform the shipowners. He did not need to know which of them were greedy. He fought for a line painted on every hull, visible from the dock, marking the point past which no ship may be loaded. The Plimsoll line did not require anyone to feel less. It required everyone to be able to see.
That is what we lost, and it is recoverable. Boundaries that are visible and enforced. Watching rebuilt for the scale we live at now. The neuroscience here is careful but hopeful: the alarm in us that falls silent in unwarranted trust appears to be tuned by circumstance, and what circumstance has switched off, circumstance can switch back on.
The trouble was never that we feel too much. It is that a few feel nothing, and that we stopped watching them. The answer is not less fellow-feeling. It is clearer sight, and the wall rebuilt.
Or, since the argument of the moment likes its animal fables: do not free the wolves, and do not hunt them either. Watch them.
Vaughan Smith is a former frontline cameraman and the founder of the Frontline Club. His new book, The Extraction Pattern, is published in paperback and on Kindle by Frontline Club Books on 22 July.
Pre-order the Kindle edition here.
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Rather the reverse: the piece argues society is exactly the thing worth defending, through the shared watching we dismantled. The few who feel nothing are the anti-society. The many who feel are it. That's why the answer is rebuilding the watch together, not feeling less alone.
It's just Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" trope repackaged. It was evil BS then, and it's evil BS now.