What Is Suicidal Empathy? The Golden Mean and Cultural Relativism

What is suicidal empathy? First, let me explain what I'm not arguing, because most of the detractors who've started to attack me have completely misconstrued my position.

Empathy is a wonderful virtue to possess.

We are a social species. For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind, and vice versa.

That's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind.

So empathy definitely serves as a social lubricant.

It helps us instantiate our human sociality.

But like most things in life, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot.

Aristotle had explained this to us more than a few millennia ago in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he talked about the golden mean.

If a soldier is not at all courageous, if he's cowardly, that's bad.

If he's too courageous so that he becomes a reckless martyr, he dies quickly, that's not good.

And so I apply that principle to empathy.

If I have no empathy or very little empathy, that's typically a trait of a psychopath. Right.

But if I have too much empathy, if it hyper fires in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets, I end up with suicidal empathy.

So let me explain how I would exhibit suicidal empathy from an open border perspective.

If I internalize the parasitic idea of cultural relativism, which basically argues that there are no human universals, everything has to be measured according to the idiosyncratic realities of that culture.

If some culture wishes to engage in child brides, shut up, racist.

So the parasitic idea leads to suicidal empathy