America is the greatest country in the world.

Welcome to our special compassion collapse, America's empathy crisis.

But I want to be clear, the crisis here is not that we're lacking empathy,

it's that we have too much of it, or more accurately, maybe not properly aligned

or calibrated or well-balanced.

The expert on this issue, the man wrote the book about it,

the great Dr. Gad Sad.

His new book is called Suicidal Empathy, Dying to Be Kind. He is also a scholar at the Declaration

of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss. Dr. Sad, I'm grateful you're

here. Is empathy even good? Where did this concept come from? Right. So empathy is a wonderful virtue precisely because we are a

social species. For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your

mind and you need to do the same and putting yourself in my mind. That's called theory of mind

or cognitive empathy. So it is perfectly reasonable to presume

that for a social species, we have evolved the capacity to empathize. We want our spouses to be

empathetic. We want our best friends to be empathetic. We want our physicians and therapists and

veterinarians to be empathetic.

So unlike many of the people who are already writing, have been writing hit pieces on my book for a while, even before they could read the book,

I'm not attacking empathy. I am attacking the dysregulation of empathy.

And I'll explain in a second how it becomes

dysregulated, but let me draw from our ancient wisdom of Aristotle. In his

Nicomachian ethics, he talked about the golden mean Aristotle did, where he said

that too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and you

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