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Toxic Empathy Will Destroy the West – HotAir

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January 29, 2026
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Empathy is one of the pillars of functioning human societies because, without it, the conscience fails to develop and inform our actions. And while people lacking empathy can still follow the rules, they generally do so because they believe doing so serves their interests more than not. 





That is a very shorthand analysis and hardly comprehensive, but good enough to serve the purpose. Empathy and civilization tend to go together. We behave well to other human beings, even those to whom we have no specific connection, at least partly because we recognize something of ourselves in them, because we are capable of “feeling” their pain. 

But as with all human traits and virtues, an excess or distortion of the virtue becomes a vice and quite destructive. Aristotle explained this thousands of years ago, and his writings only formulated what ought to be obvious to all adults. The classic example is the virtue of courage: too little, and you are a coward; too much, and you are reckless. Both excesses can easily cause harm to oneself and others. 

There is much discussion of “toxic empathy,” which is a convenient shorthand for a somewhat more complicated phenomenon that includes both an excessive focus on the pain or potential pain of others, usually combined with an obsessive focus on the pain experienced by a subset of people, and not everybody equally. 

I wrote on Tuesday about an extreme case of this phenomenon, in which a rape victim described in The Nation that she refused to report her rape because she didn’t want to ruin the lives of her rapists and refused to participate in a system that incarcerates people, depriving them of their freedom. 

The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.





This is not virtue. It is madness. Notice how her own pain matters not at all, although the rape still haunts her. Notice how the future victims don’t matter, because she can’t “harm” the criminals. Punishing people is “silly and strange,” so of course vicious predators should roam the land. 

FFS. 

Yet we see this kind of thinking everywhere today. “Defund the police.” As if the victims of crime do not matter. “Open borders.” “Criminal Justice Reform.” “Massive fraud is OK.” “Attacking law enforcement is ‘First Amendment Activity.'” I wrote about the Race2Dinner phenomenon many times, in which AWFLs literally pay two women to harangue them about how evil they are for being white. 

In Canada, indigenous women are murdered at a much higher rate than others, and they are almost always killed by indigenous men who get light or no sentences because the Canadian ‘justice’ system takes “colonialism” into account when sentencing the murderers as a mitigating circumstance. So indigenous men get the kid glove treatment, and the liberals complain that indigenous women are killed at a high rate for some mysterious reason. 





Let me try to explain how retarded Canada is:

Canada has race-based sentencing policies. Native criminals get shorter sentences because judges are REQUIRED to take “colonialism” into consideration in sentencing.

Native men also kill native women at extremely high rates. And this has created an ideological paradox for Canadian libs, who are permanently confused as to why the killers of native women get disproportionately lenient sentences.

Their explanation? Racism. The courts simply don’t care about punishing the killers of native women.

The actual reason? The “anti-racist” policies they pushed for which guarantee native men shorter sentences for killing native women.

But we have to endure academics, journalists, and activists pretending not to know the actual reason why, and taking millions in taxpayer funds to “research” this great mystery every year.

It doesn’t have to make sense in a normal way. You just have to combine toxic empathy and the intersectional ladder of oppression, and you get this bizarre system of thought that is opaque to normal people, and often seemingly self-contradictory. 

As a result, you see situations like this all the time:

The crime was horrific, but hardly horrific enough to be punished harshly. Sweden has seen a dramatic rise in the incidence of rape, almost always from “South Asian” men, and they routinely get treated with kid gloves. Not quite as bad as Britain’s rape gangs that were allowed to roam for decades without punishment (and often punishment for the victims), but it’s bad bad bad. And there are similar stories throughout Europe, all based on some misguided sense of empathy and compassion for “refugees.”





I have often used this clip, but that’s because it captures something about how deeply this sickness is embedded in the views of the liberal elite. Venezuelan gang members have a right to terrorize Americans, because, well, they are victims and we are victimizers. 

Real people die from this attitude. Venezuelan drug runners get hordes of liberals to cry for them, but none of them care that deaths from fentanyl have dropped like a rock under Trump. Cartel members are higher on the intersectional ladder than American addicts, so they get to kill anybody they like without consequence. 

You see it in the coverage of the deaths of the ICE protesters, too. There is almost no coverage of the murders of Americans by illegal aliens with long records of violence in the US, but a protester assaulting a federal agent is treated as a martyr and the site of his death is “holy ground.” 





Pretti didn’t “deserve” to die, but is his death martyrdom? He created the conditions that made it inevitable, if unfortunate, and the people he is protecting are literally rapists and murderers. 

Empathy belongs only to those high up the intersectional ladder, and when you get high enough, the empathy and compassion are infinite. You can, literally, do no wrong. 

This attitude is everywhere. Remember Ibrahim Bharmal? He assaulted a fellow Harvard student because he was Jewish, and Harvard rewarded him with a prestigious fellowship, and he now works for CAIR on Harvard’s dime. 





Why? Ibrahim is higher on the intersectional ladder than his victim, so the victim gets screwed, and Ibrahim is handed a reward. 

For years Canada has been held hostage to the hoax that residential schools for natives were murder factories with mass graves—not a single bone was found at any of the supposed mass graves, but that is irrelevant. Churches were burned down, reparations paid, and there is a movement to make “denialism” of the HOAX punishable in Canada. 

The authorities are trying to censor people pointing out that it is a hoax, even though it is. There are so many examples of this phenomenon; it is bizarre, yet whenever you point it out, you are guilty of not having empathy and compassion. 

This is societal suicide. Entirely premised on 


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