We’ve all heard the relatively new phrase called “suicidal empathy.”

Suicidal empathy was apparently coined by Gad Saad in his book titled appropriately enough “Suicidal Empathy” (Published by Harper Collins, 5/12/2026). I haven’t yet read the book, but the basic premise is when a people are so tolerant toward their enemies, they end up being destroyed by them.

Empathy is defined as (according to Miriam-Webster): the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.

I recently engaged in a debate with someone about the Dutch government euthanizing a two-year-old child, because, according to them, it was so disabled its life was not worth extending. My opponent (and others who agreed with the parents, doctors, and the government that killing the child was both moral and loving) said at one point, “If I couldn’t breath, couldn’t feel anything but pain, was constantly having seizures, was so impaired that at TWO calling me a toddler was a [censored] lie I’d want this ending.”

I told him (a bit snarky I’ll admit) about how nice it was that he could read a child’s mind to know that he/she wanted to die. He then said he never claimed to be a mind reader, to which I commented: “You indeed claimed it by saying that if you were similarly disabled, you would want to be killed. Thus assuming you could know the baby’s thoughts and would want the same.”

He responded thusly: “That’s not MIND READING, that’s EMPATHY. Placing myself in the same situation and considering what I would want.”

Is that really empathy, though? It’s one thing to say we can understand what a person must be thinking or feeling at a particular moment. It’s quite another to say something must be done to that person, especially when they’re given no choice because of what we would want if given the same circumstances.

So what happened here wasn’t empathy at all, but the reverse: placing one’s own feelings and desires on another who may or may not feel or believe the same, and expecting (or demanding) they do, act, or have done to them what we would want. Worse, in this case at least, this gentleman and others believed taking action against the child was the moral thing to do, because of what they wanted, not necessarily what the child may have wanted.