The Age of Pathological Benevolence
31st July 2026
Herzens), one could closely follow the psychological turmoil raging within the soul of Lieutenant Hofmiller after he asks the host’s daughter for a dance at a social gathering, completely unaware that she is paralyzed. What follows is the lieutenant’s Walk to Canossa, a primary lesson of which is understanding the different types of pity. Through the lieutenant, Zweig demonstrates that pity can be, on the one hand, active, rational, and genuinely helpful. On the other hand, it can be weak, sentimental, and selfish: not truly concerned with saving the other person, but with quickly appeasing one’s own conscience and avoiding the discomfort of confrontation. This sort of virtue signaling, devoid of rationality, ultimately drives both the victim and the benefactor to ruin.
Our age has hardly changed, as we currently live in the cult of empathy, which relates to the second type of pity depicted by Zweig. I recall from my own experience, even during my university times, that it was repeatedly emphasized: if you are not empathetic, you cannot be a good teacher since you must put yourself in the child’s shoes. This is undeniably true but just to a rational extent. Nowadays you cannot even be a corporate executive without empathy, as its absence is said to harm workplace well-being and increase organizational turnover. In fact, even the police are now expected to be empathetic since, according to contemporary progressive narratives, a person exhibiting unlawful behavior is often merely a victim of social circumstances like ‘systemic, white supremacist oppression.’
However, this is one of the greatest fallacies of our time. Empathy is an individual, personal virtue, not a prescriptive behavioral norm—not a universal metric that dictates at all costs how you ought to be. Elevated from the micro to the macro level and made the exclusive basis of state and institutional decision-making, boundless empathy has a self-destructive effect; this is the thesis argued by Gad Saad in his latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.