Marcel Schmelzer

Leftist “Empathy” Is Actually Narcissism Leftist “empathy” is often narcissism, not real compassion. Over the past decade, Western politics has debated whether empathy is the highest value—yet many policies justified in its name have produced serious unintended consequences: safe-supply programs, lenient bail, mass migration, identity-based social policy, and gender medicine for minors. Hannah Arendt helps explain why. In *On Revolution*, she contrasted the American Revolution’s focus on institutions and limits on power with the French Revolution’s “politics of pity,” an effort to eliminate suffering through political action. Robespierre’s compassion for the masses helped justify terror. Pity isn’t compassion: it creates a hierarchy between the person who pities and the person pitied. Once you claim to represent “the oppressed,” you can stop listening to real people. Much progressive “empathy” projects idealized versions of others, erasing cultural differences and treating disagreement as ignorance or prejudice. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system,” who thinks society can be rearranged like chess pieces, ignoring human wills. Dostoevsky argued abstract love is easy; loving real people is hard. Nietzsche described a morality that flatters weakness and condemns what rises above the herd, while Orwell questioned whether some socialist intellectuals truly loved workers or simply used them to vent resentment. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs”: status-providing ideas for elites that impose costs on those below them. The moral prestige is immediate; the damage unfolds over decades. So “suicidal narcissism” may fit better than “suicidal empathy”: projection, superiority, and power disguised as compassion.