Welcome to Politics by Faith. Today's special is about suicidal empathy inspired by Dr. Gadsad.

Enjoy.

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 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,

...