For those of you who don’t know who he is — likely a larger group than he’d be willing to admit — Saad is a Canadian professor at Concordia University who has spent the last few years as a major figure in anti-woke online spaces. Long regarded as a poor man’s Jordan Peterson, Saad has since grown in stature through his indomitable quest to kiss every square inch of Elon Musk’s ass. Elon has returned the favor by beating the drum for Saad’s ideas through a manic series of Tweets, frenetic even by his standards.

Reviews of Saad’s recent book, even by the ideologically sympathetic, suggest even his natural fan base is tuning out. Center-right outlet Quillette resented Saad’s “narcissistic ramblings,” while a scathing review in UnHerd described Suicidal Empathy as peddling “fake science” and relying “on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime.” That even his ideological friends are tiring of this shtick is a testament to how mind-numbingly boring Suicidal Empathy is.

Years ago, I reviewed Saad’s The Parasitic Mind, which I described as opening with “an interminable paean of biographical self-congratulation.” It was one of the most self-indulgent books of the modern era, almost existentially insulting in how life’s precious time was lost reading it. In Suicidal Empathy, Saad outdoes even himself. It’s funny to think of the lack of self-awareness it takes to write a book condemning liberal “narcissism” that opens with lovingly italicized epigraph written by Saad himself and closes with a Twitter quote from, again, Saad himself.

Nominally the book is about the rise of “suicidal empathy.” Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a “dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.” While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force. The “suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing Civilization Seppuku, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.”

This dysfunctional empathy, often emotionally adjacent to liberal narcissism via the drive to applaud oneself as more noble and altruistic, is at the root of virtually every progressive stance ever taken. For Saad, “epistemological empathy” is invoked in academia to silence those committed to a “deontological” quest for the truth. Toleration for Muslims is a form of “Islamophilic empathy.” Empathy for criminals leads us to care “more about the rights of rapists and felons than their victims.” Climate activism is “misguided empathy” from those who want to “protect Mother Earth from being raped by capitalism.” Socialism itself — which Saad points out is preferred by women, a point against it — is rooted in “misguided empathy.”

They say the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. Saad agrees, demanding the safer course of bad intentions and worse jokes. Saad often claims to be a bold truth-teller, though, as we’ll see, what counts as true seems to depend a lot on Saad’s feelings. And for all his railing against victimhood culture, he is very happy to pose as a victim himself. The Parasitic Mind opened with a truly endless discussion of all the ways Saad has been wronged:

Most recognize the gargantuan courage that is required to speak my mind in the manner that I do. . . .  There isn’t a sacred belief that I’m unwilling to critique, and yet whenever I implore people to get engaged, I am at times flippantly told “But professor, you are protected by tenure.”

Tenure is not an all-encompassing magical shied that repels all the threats and harmful consequences that can come from being an outspoken defender of reason. Tenure did not protect me from having to take security measures in Fall 2017 whenever I went to teach classes at my university. . . .  My purity of spirit (as I recall my mother’s words) does not permit me to place any careerist considerations ahead of my defense of truth.

Somehow this Platonic ideal of self-pity is outdone in Suicidal Empathy by the Gospel-length screed against Saad’s “high” taxes. These sob stories are awkwardly paired with Saad’s relentless self-promotion as profoundly successful: a best-selling author and friend to the rich and powerful who do so much and, yes, ask for and deserve so much in return. How these billionaire apologias will play outside boomer audiences in a context where even young conservatives are increasingly wary of capitalism is an open question. Certainly the world’s richest man is very appreciative of Saad’s loyal service attacking progressive calls for equality.

Saad’s armchair pathologization of virtually every progressive cause under the sun is far too vast and sweeping to succeed intellectually: about the only thing one can credit Saad with is realizing that and being far too lazy to try. Most of the book carries on for pages convinced we will be deeply invested in Saad’s Twitter feuds, beefs, faculty meetings, and personal chores. Its main character syndrome if the world’s protagonist was afraid of everyone.

Take the section allegedly on “socialism.” The actual discussion of socialism takes place over about four pages. Saad doesn’t cite a single piece of writing actually produced by a socialist author of note, which is very odd given his book’s many positive references to committed socialists like George Orwell and Albert Einstein throughout. Instead, we get sub–Fox News tirades like the following:

The quest for radical equality as envisioned by Utopians, socialists, and communists will always fail because it is contrary to human nature. The establishment of hierarchies within human societies is a universal reality, albeit there are ecological conditions wherein it would have been adaptive to promote egalitarianism to maintain cohesion among a group. Socialism relies on a misguided application of an egalitarian ethos, dooming it to always fail.

Which socialists apparently called for the elimination of all human hierarchies? What’s the content of this “egalitarian ethos” and who espoused it? And why are Utopians, socialists, and communists all being lumped together? These aren’t matters Saad has time for. Instead, we need a full eleven pages on why Saad is angry about how many taxes he has to pay. And unlike the history of socialism or the other intellectual currents he finds abhorrent, Saad is convinced his readers really do, or at least ought to, want to know the nitty-gritty of why he shouldn’t have to pay those taxes. It’s about as intellectually stimulating as a W-2:

I have two broad sources of income: my salary as a professor and all other revenues earned from my other professional activities, including book royalties, online revenue (e.g., YouTube ad revenue stemming from my show), and speaking engagements. Whereas my professor’s salary is taxed at the source, the other revenue streams are not, so the total sum of money that I had to transfer to the two governments [Quebec and Canada] on that fateful day were truly life-altering, if not existentially shattering.

But he goes on:

Let me backtrack. That year was a successful one for me, a culmination of an entire career of hard work. My book The Parasitic Mind was a certified international bestseller, with more than twenty translation rights already signed. . . . 

And on it goes. Saad wants you to know he thinks it’s unfair that he is taxed as much as a “hedge fund manager.” After all, he’s contributing to “the richness of society” and its “cultural and intellectual heritage.” When discussing his salary as a professor, Saad insists he is “being grossly underpaid compared to my market value.” (Saad’s students seem to disagree). He’s not even happy about paying for public health care, since the “Canadian healthcare system is ‘free’ only if you ignore the pesky fact that I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. Over the entirety of my professional career, I have paid astronomically more taxes than any governmental services that I might have gotten in return.”

Saad is also sad (last time I use that pun) that whenever he airs his “frustration on social media at the amount of taxes that I pay, many people are not in the least bit sympathetic.” Reading this chapter is likely to make this problem far worse. Apparently while Saad is against an excess of empathy for poor children in Uganda, the internet’s lack of empathy over his paying high taxes as a rich, tenured academic irks him.

Some parts of the book are less boring but only because they get a lot stranger too — and a lot darker. Suicidal Empathy is so luridly fascinated with rape it could keep an endowed chair in feminist cultural theory employed for a lifetime. It’s filled to the brim describing chats with “Arabic-speaking men” who tell Saad, “The West is a woman to be mounted.” He has more anecdotes about illegal immigrants being “arrested for raping the daughter” of migrant sympathizers.

Things get even stranger from there. In one section, Saad justifies never letting his kids have sleepovers “precisely because I recognize that this would place my children at risk of being sexually molested.” Excessive? Did you know that “child molesters are your uncle, brother, stepfather, friendly neighbor, priest, football coach, or camp counsellor. Hence my approach has always been that since I cannot know with absolute certainty who is a prospective danger to my children, I assume that all men are potential predators.”

For entire chapters like this, Saad’s book doesn’t even rise to the level of a pop-conservative polemic. Instead, it reads more like the inner monologue of a twenty-something who has spent way too many hours feeding his paranoia on 4chan boards.

A lurid section titled “Be Empathetic Toward [Your] Rapists” chronicles stories of woke women getting sexually assaulted by the kinds of men they sought to protect: immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and minorities. One example is Saad’s discussion of Selin Gören, a left-wing German politician and activist. In 2016, she was sexually assaulted by three migrants in Mannheim, but she chose to hide that her attackers had arrived from the Middle East. Saad mockingly muses: “See dear reader, Ms. Goren is so much more empathetic than you. She does not want her rapists to be marginalized. She is a good person who holds no ill will toward blank slate felons. She ended her Facebook letter with the hashtag #refugeeswelcome.”

There is lot to unpack here, but I’ll stick with the observation that what Saad is rhetorically doing is a radical version of Albert Hirschman’s old perversity thesis. In his classic The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman observed that conservatives will try to negate the Left’s calls for justice by insisting that trying to do good will only bring about the exact opposite of what’s intended. Hirschman noted that this is rarely presented as a rational argument, and conservatives are very often wrong about the details. Its appeal has always been mythic, a sense of cosmic order in reaping what you sow.

In these sections, Saad offers an extreme version of this perversity thesis, never quite insinuating pro-immigration feminists got what they deserved but vindictively relishing how their benevolent ideological leanings were dramatically repudiated by the very people they sought to help. There is a deep sense of resentment in sections like this, a thinly hidden glee in the harsh universe taking revenge on the naive who imagine themselves your moral superiors. Moreover, by addressing his “dear reader,” Saad invites anyone unfortunate to slog through to that part of the book to identify and commune with his own dark feelings.

Much like the complete lack of intellectual rigor on display, sections like this tell you a lot about where the Right is at these days.

Throughout Suicidal Empathy, Saad occasionally remembers to try and marshal some actual arguments. His heart is rarely in them, but in the interest of fairness, we’ll take them seriously here.

At various points, Saad claims to be a “deontologist” and contrasts the kind of absolute certainty deontology provides with consequentialism. For Saad, progressives and liberals are far too willing to sacrifice principles like free speech on the altar of sensitivity. In what should be a winning chapter for Saad, he discusses how the university is now abridging free speech — for him, a key “deontological” principle — to accommodate effeminate sensitivities and anxieties:

In other words, women are more likely than men to violate the deontological principles that define academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the pursuit and defense of truth, in the service of a consequentialist ethos rooted in misguided empathy. The rapid feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. I have recently attended departmental meetings where it was unclear to me that it was not a kindergarten classroom in terms of the incessant focus on emotional safety and empathetic understanding.

Except, much as Saad will whine that the internet doesn’t empathize with his punitive tax rate, he is angry that the state won’t step in to silence others where his feelings are hurt. Later in the book, Saad laments how our excess of “religious tolerance” toward forms of speech and expression like “public prayers throughout the West” — which Saad claims are a “signal of dominance” — restricts his “rights to be free from another’s religious impositions.” So apparently our absolute commitment to free speech can be modulated if the speech in question triggers Saad’s Islamophobia.

In other sections of the book, Saad discusses the links between nature, nurture, and support for meritocracy. Saad links an excess of empathy to a rejection of evolutionary biology, since it apparently allows us to imagine that “all humans are born with equal potentiality, it is solely the environment that shapes people’s future life trajectories.”

This very selective biological reductionism is intended to prop up meritocratic norms. Referring to Kamala Harris’s 2021 speech about how people don’t enter the world on a level playing field, Saad laments how this thinking is “falsely applied to all innate or environmentally induced differences, even those that are otherwise not rooted in anything nefarious. I have been told that innate differences in intelligence are inherently unfair because the dim-witted did not choose to be so.”

In Saad’s view, external circumstances are given little weight in determining life outcomes, meaning one cannot blame society for any inequities that emerge. By contrast, “innate” differences are treated as being of no moral interest; some people are naturally talented or not and there is little more to be said about it. In a pinch, Saad will appeal to “personal responsibility” and hard work to suggest anyone can make it if they try.

It’s hard to unpack how confused this is. If we take seriously Saad’s argument that evolutionary biology forged over billions of years is the main driver of our personality — and ultimately, our behavior — it seriously troubles his impulse to impute both blame and credit to individuals, ironically even more so than if he did accept that “environmental” factors were the primary determinants of where people end up in life.

Humans can have some, albeit very minimal, control over what environments influence them. I can choose to drop the stoner friends I grew up with for some ambitious yuppies. But none of us can have any meaningful control over how the biological lottery plays out. When Saad isn’t invoking “personal responsibility” to blame people, he admits as much when he says, ultimately, we are “going to behave in ways consistent with [our] evolved dispositional behaviors.” If that’s the case, blaming or crediting someone for their “evolved dispositional behaviors” makes little sense.

This has serious moral implications. If we took Saad’s — again selective — naturalistic reductionism seriously, it suggests that the distribution of natural talents is also the result of a roll of the biological dice. People can take no credit for being talented any more than we can blame them for being untalented. This heavily suggests that the emphasis on “meritocracy” — rewarding personal responsibility and self-consciously cultivated excellence — is at the very least highly problematic.

Saad seems vaguely aware of this and doesn’t have a single meaningful argument in response beyond calling the anti-meritocracy worldview “sinister” and implying it would lead to calls to rectify any and all generic injustice. But that doesn’t follow. Since Saad and his followers would never accept this point coming from a “woke” author like myself, here is Friedrich Hayek making exactly this point in The Constitution of Liberty:

The inborn as well as the acquired gifts of a person clearly have a value to his fellows which does not depend on any credit due to him for possessing them. There is little a man can do to alter the fact that his special talents are very common or exceedingly rare. A good mind or a fine voice, a beautiful face of a skilled hand, and a ready wit or an attractive personality are in large measure as independent of a person’s efforts as the opportunities or the experiences he has had.

In all these instances the value which a person’s capacities or services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything that we can call moral merit or deserts.

Contra Gaad’s self-presentation as someone pitching hard scientific truths, what we get in his book is a bundle of contradicting impulses. It vacillates between a selective empirical essentialism, where whole groups of people are defined by vaguely drawn characteristics, and hypermoral nominalism stressing “personal responsibility” so that each person can be ruthlessly judged and evaluated.

That this could never make sense intellectually shouldn’t distract us from the fact that it persuades his followers solely because it’s very appealing to their instincts and feelings. Lionel Trilling once claimed that conservatives don’t really have ideas, only irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble ideas. It was a deeply unfair accusation to make against a flawed but frequently interesting and even profound tradition. But it has to be said that Trilling absolutely had Saad’s number in confirming the most Bluesky-level clichés about the conservative movement.

Suicidal Empathy is not a book in the sense of offering a careful, rational argument sequenced over pages. It’s not a coincidence that Saad spends his time relitigating online beefs rather than reading and rebutting Gender Trouble. Suicidal Empathy is the unreconstructed grievances of red-pilled Twitter given physical form. The motivating through line in Saad’s pivots isn’t intellectual but ideological and affective, tracking the contingent animating passions of those in our society who remain very angry about black Disney mermaids. Its contradictions and tensions never become troublesome to their author, because they aren’t meant to be thought through, only delicately affirmed.

And that is why it has been received with such gratitude by the ruling class that Saad bends over to flatter. Here you can judge a book by its cover, which for Suicidal Empathy, features a blurb from none other than Musk. He assures us that its contents are nothing less than “great.”