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The Embers of Europe are Dying. A stunning Wake Up ballad by Michael Walsh. Your music is appreciated by so many, and I am sure your sales and exposure will only increase due to your hard work and compassion for truth and justice for all. Good luck on the rest of your journey. Thanks for being along for the ride. Yours truly, Carey Wong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRWJ9jpROso&feature=youtu.be

Il y a quelque chose de profondément cruel dans notre façon d’accompagner la mort. Alors que la peine accable ceux qui restent, on leur impose une montagne de démarches administratives : courriers, formulaires, factures, organismes à contacter, comptes à clôturer… Comme si, au milieu du chagrin, il fallait encore avoir la force de gérer l’administratif. Et comme si cela ne suffisait pas, il faut parfois découvrir que des sommes folles sont réclamées pour régler les dernières choses, jusqu’à donner l’impression qu’après avoir perdu une personne, on vient aussi effacer ce qu’il restait d’elle. Dans ces moments-là, on devrait pouvoir pleurer, se recueillir, se souvenir et prendre le temps de dire au revoir. Personne ne devrait avoir à porter le poids de toute cette bureaucratie alors qu’il porte déjà celui du deuil. #Deuil #Bureaucratie #Compassion

The Embers of Europe are Dying. A stunning Wake Up ballad by Michael Walsh. Your music is appreciated by so many, and I am sure your sales and exposure will only increase due to your hard work and compassion for truth and justice for all. Good luck on the rest of your journey. Thanks for being along for the ride. Yours truly, Carey Wong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRWJ9jpROso&feature=youtu.be

The Politics of Pity For a decade, the West has argued whether empathy should be its highest value. Some praise it as a superpower; others call it harmful. Gad Saad’s “Suicidal Empathy” topped the New York Times list. Elon Musk called empathy a weakness; John C. Reilly called it a superpower. Ideas should be judged by consequences. Compassion-justified policies have coincided with worse addiction and homelessness, rising crime, mass migration, social fragmentation, higher living costs, and controversial medical interventions for gender-dysphoric minors. When these fail, advocates often claim it was not implemented “strongly enough.” ## An Inversion of Truth A quote often attributed to Hannah Arendt claims “the death of human empathy” precedes barbarism, but no source supports it, and her writings argued almost the opposite. Arendt contrasted the American Revolution’s institutions and law with the French revolutionaries’ “politics of pity.” Pity is not compassion: it ranks “fortunate” and “unfortunate,” grants the pitier moral authority, and overrides rights. Arendt argued this enabled Robespierre’s Terror. ## The Trojan Horse Empathy can become projection—imposing your values as if they were others’ needs. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system.” Nietzsche described societies so “soft and tender” they side with those who harm them. Orwell noted equality preaching alongside elite privilege. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs.” I call it suicidal narcissism: acquiring moral status by appearing compassionate while policies erode the foundations others rely on. The reward is immediate; the damage comes later.

Compassion as a Weapon Western civilization is increasingly trapped in a culture of entitlement, where victimhood can become a route to status, privilege, and power. Some elite universities report unusually high disability registrations—e.g., 20%+ at Brown and Harvard and around 40% at Stanford—far above community colleges. Whatever the causes, it raises a troubling question: when systems meant to protect the truly vulnerable become incentives, what happens to everyone else? Rob Henderson describes how accommodations can turn into “status games.” Extra time, special housing, and exemptions can make diagnosis feel like the logical choice, and the lesson travels outward: tomorrow’s leaders in journalism, HR, law, academia, and politics may learn that displaying weakness is rewarded. Research links habitual victimhood displays with traits associated with the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy). That doesn’t mean genuine victims are manipulative—it means rewarding victimhood gives manipulators an incentive to enter. In the “virtue game,” grievance becomes currency. Pity can also function as covert power: the weak person gains leverage, while the giver gains moral superiority. When compassion is treated like a currency, it can become a mutually reinforcing racket. The danger isn’t helping the weak. It’s teaching that appearing weak is the surest way to gain power.

The Pathology Behind Compassion Something sinister can lurk behind compassion. Caring for others is noble, but when institutions are rewarded not for reducing suffering—only for managing it—care can become pathological. Munchausen syndrome by proxy shows the logic: a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in someone dependent on them to gain sympathy and attention. The caregiver looks devoted; the “sickness” is manufactured. In that sense, devotion can hide control. I call this the Daycare Governance model: society splits into infants to be protected (oppressed), caregivers who provide protection (allies), and predators to be removed (dissenters). Caretakers gain prestige, funding, and moral authority by managing suffering. Many may believe sincerely, yet incentives can overpower intentions—if status and resources grow with the number of “vulnerable” people, the system has reason to expand the victim class. It does so via concept creep (“trauma” broadens until ordinary difficulty counts), and by creating the perpetual patient, where normal sadness becomes pathology and struggle is rebranded as dysfunction. Care institutions and “victims” then reinforce each other. Dependency costs competence. True care prepares people to stand alone; pathological care keeps them dependent. Endless expansion of victimhood risks producing more dependency. We call it compassion—but compassion without boundaries can become control.

Daycare Governance and the Tyranny of Compassion Something sinister can hide behind compassion. Caring is virtuous, but it becomes pathological when institutions gain power by expanding the number of people who need care. Munchausen syndrome by proxy shows how: a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in a dependent person, then gains sympathy by performing devotion. The sickness is manufactured, but the care is real. The claim: modern society can scale this into governance. Call it the daycare governance model: (1) victims to protect, (2) caregivers to provide protection, (3) dissenters to remove. Health, therapy, NGOs, academia, media, and bureaucracy gain prestige, funding, and moral authority by managing ever-expanding categories of suffering. It unfolds in two stages. First, the victim class expands: “trauma” drifts from specific, severe harms to everyday experiences, lowering the threshold for suffering until demand is nearly limitless. Second, the perpetual patient forms: ordinary difficulties are medicalized—strength as toxicity, sadness as disorder, restlessness as pathology—creating a cycle where caretakers and victims gain status or protection. This drives a crisis of competence. Victimhood can shield accountability, and institutions are rewarded for treating problems rather than eliminating the need for themselves. Plato warned against doing for people what they can do for themselves: removing every burden removes the reason to grow stronger. True care aims to make itself unnecessary. That’s the difference between a good mother and a poisoning one: one allows appropriate hardship to build independence; the other denies it. Failing to distinguish these forms of care makes the pathology hard to recognize—and easy to applaud.

When Pathology Takes Power If the last decade in the West felt unstable, you’re not imagining it. Andrew Lobaczewski studied how psychological pathology can spread into politics and produce “pathocracy”: societies where disordered personalities gain disproportionate power. He argued that revolutionary upheaval drives “negative selection.” Healthy people are pushed out or leave; manipulative, lying, and ruthless personalities rise through institutions. The system keeps its name and funding, but its character changes. At the top are essential psychopaths—empathy- and guilt-free exploiters. Beside them are schizoids who treat people as data and design control systems from abstract theories. Next come spellbinders: charismatic figures who package authoritarian ideas in the language of compassion, using invented moral standards for convenience. Then the spellbound: true believers. Around them gather conformists who comply to protect careers, while resisters are targeted and bystanders adapt to avoid trouble. Lobaczewski estimated a small minority builds the system, a larger group serves it, and most merely adjusts. Over time, society becomes the censor: truth turns dangerous, sanity is labeled extremism, and resistance is punished. The point isn’t only that bad ideas harm. It’s that pathological personalities can exploit good intentions, ideology, and institutional power—so the real conflict is psychological health versus pathology, and healthy institutions must be able to recognize the difference.

When Morality Becomes a Weapon Having the “correct” opinion doesn’t make you a good person. Our age is increasingly ruled by those who believe it does. In *The Brothers Karamazov*, Dostoevsky shows this through the Grand Inquisitor, who imagines Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition. He arrests Him for threatening an institution that claims to represent Him. The Inquisitor argues people don’t truly want Christ’s freedom; they want bread, certainty, and someone to carry the burden of choice. He eventually admits they don’t need Christ’s teachings—only His moral authority. Dostoevsky reveals how power works: dominators can hide behind morality, while the dominated may trade freedom for the comfort of having others decide. Later, Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski observed communism invoking “the people” to justify terror and execution. He argued that a small minority without conscience can rise during revolutionary upheavals, with ideology serving as moral camouflage. The lesson: moral language can be weaponized by those lacking moral character. Words like justice, equality, safety, harm, care, and compassion can become tools of control. Return to Aristotle’s view of virtue: virtue isn’t a belief you hold but a habit you practice. We become just by repeatedly doing just things; bravery comes from doing brave things. No slogan can replace character.

Five Thomas Sowell Lessons the West Refuses to Learn The West has proven Thomas Sowell right: “compassionate” policies often ignore trade-offs and incentives. Sowell offers no villains—only reality. 1) **Ask the right question.** Poverty is the default; prosperity is what needs explaining. Study what creates abundance, not inequality as automatic proof of injustice. 2) **Pick your poison.** There are no perfect solutions, only costs and benefits. Every policy uses scarce resources and shifts who pays. No free lunch. 3) **Leaders need skin in the game.** It’s dangerous to grant power to people insulated from consequences. When decision-makers aren’t harmed by error, bad choices spread. 4) **Keeping what you earn isn’t greed.** Treating production as selfish and redistribution as virtue inverts morals—and concentrates power in those who control taking and giving. 5) **Judge ideas by outcomes, not vibes.** The West keeps discarding institutions that worked because their reasoning feels unfashionable. Sowell’s core point: reality ignores intentions—scarcity, incentives, and consequences still rule.

Why Psychopaths Rise to Power: What Hitler, Stalin & Mao Had in Common Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski argued that in certain conditions, psychologically disordered people can rise through institutions and create “pathocracy,” where pathological personalities gain disproportionate power. He described “negative selection”: upheaval pushes aside those with conscience and competence while manipulative, ruthless figures thrive. At the core are psychopaths, who feel little guilt or empathy and use normal human weaknesses as tools. Around them are schizoids, ideological architects who turn abstractions into systems for managing people. Next are spellbinders, charismatic leaders who frame authoritarian ideas as moral duty. Together they produce “paramoralisms”—moral standards that invert reality: dissent becomes extremism, censorship becomes protection, coercion becomes compassion. Beneath them are true believers and conformists who follow out of conviction or career safety, echoing Milgram’s insight that the key question is who gives the orders. Finally come bystanders, a frightened majority that adapts to avoid trouble until self-policing replaces external coercion. Lobaczewski’s warning: pathological behavior becomes far more dangerous when society mistakes it for morality. The real struggle isn’t left vs. right—it’s whether institutions can preserve truth and resist normalization of destructive behavior.

The Victimhood Economy: Why Young People Prefer Socialism Western civilization is increasingly shaped by entitlement and a culture that rewards displays of victimhood. At elite universities, disability claims have risen: 18% of male and 22% of female undergraduates report a disability, and 54% of non-binary students, with higher rates at some wealthy schools than at community colleges. The issue isn’t genuine disability; it’s what happens when accommodations become status and advantage. Extra time, separate housing, and exemptions can turn diagnosis into leverage. When weakness is rewarded, some will learn to perform it. This matters because today’s students become tomorrow’s institutional elites. If grievance produces rewards, the lesson may spread into journalism, government, HR, academia, and business, letting beneficiaries inherit the power to expand the system. Research on victimhood signaling raises uncomfortable questions: people who habitually emphasize victim status, on average, show higher narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—not to say genuinely suffering people are manipulative, but that systems rewarding victimhood create incentives for manipulators to exploit the category. Rob Henderson describes this as a status game: in elite institutions, grievance can become the currency of virtue signaling. For some, the rational strategy is to manufacture grievance and convert it into status. Nietzsche similarly argued that displays of helplessness can become covert power, while pity can create moral superiority for the caregiver. The danger isn’t compassion; it’s a culture that turns suffering into currency and teaches ambitious people that the easiest route to power is to claim they are powerless.

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.

Where the Money Goes When the Problem Grows The worst evil is identifying a problem—addiction, illness, hatred—then building an industry to “solve” it. Organizations grow, the problem worsens. Many call this wasted money. Some argue for more funding or stricter oversight. After decades of the same results, a reasonable person should ask whether it’s failure—or the system working as designed. Call it the Caretaker’s Incentive. Three conditions keep problems managed forever: status (praise for “tending” the afflicted), money (budgets rise with the problem and shrink when it improves), and conscience (moral framing shields caretakers from questioning their role). Economist Bruce Yandle described a parallel in “Bootleggers and Baptists.” In Prohibition, moral reformers and profitable bootleggers backed the same policy for different reasons, with virtue providing cover. Today, reformers and funded interests may be the same institution, making corruption harder to spot. When the mission is caring for the elderly, it’s easy to hide fraud behind compassion. Costs spread across millions, benefits concentrate among insiders. No one loses enough to unite against it; insiders gain enough to defend it. The people being paid are awake. The people paying are asleep. C.S. Lewis warned in 1948 that torment for “our own good” can continue endlessly because conscience approves. Corruption is dressed as virtue—and those who object are shamed.

The Psychology of the Modern Leftist Once you understand the psychology of the modern leftist, the last decade of the woke revolution makes more sense. The endless outrage, hypersensitivity, and rejection of rational debate may reflect something deeper than ideology: a crisis of self-worth expressed as a moral crusade. “Leftist” is a broad term, but here it refers to socialists, collectivists, LGBTQ activists, and similar movements. What unites them may be more than politics; it may also be a psychological orientation. Modern leftism can be associated with feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred, and resentment. These feelings may be repressed while still influencing behavior. The hypersensitivity to language illustrates this. Words once used without negative intent can become symbols of oppression through activist campaigns. Ironically, those most offended are sometimes privileged academics rather than the minorities they claim to defend. Many leftists identify with groups perceived as weak or disadvantaged. This may reflect genuine compassion, but it can also involve projecting personal feelings of weakness onto others. Strength, success, competition, and rationality can consequently become objects of suspicion. Western civilization, America, and other symbols of power may be treated similarly. The criticism can also be inconsistent. Flaws condemned in Western societies may be excused when found in socialist regimes or traditional cultures. This suggests that resentment may sometimes play a role alongside genuine moral concerns. Self-reliance, personal responsibility, and merit are often viewed skeptically, while collectivism is favored. Objective truth can also become threatening because it creates distinctions: some arguments are better than others, and some people succeed while others fail. When equality of outcome becomes the moral standard, truth, merit, and individualism may be attacked—not necessarily to uplift the oppressed, but to reduce psychological discomfort. When victimhood becomes central to identity, problems may no longer simply be discovered; they can become necessary to sustain that identity.

Empathy, Compassion, and the Limits of Emotional Moral Judgment Empathy is widely regarded as a foundation of morality, but psychological research suggests that it is not an unqualified virtue. Paul Bloom (2017) argues that affective empathy—the experience of sharing another person’s feelings—has important limitations when used as a guide for moral judgment. First, empathy is biased. We respond more strongly to suffering that is vivid, identifiable, and psychologically close. Research on the “identifiable victim effect” shows that people can be more willing to help a specific individual than anonymous victims, even when the latter represent a much larger number (Kogut & Ritov, 2005; Lee & Feeley, 2016). Emotional salience therefore does not necessarily correspond to moral significance. Second, empathy is innumerate. Human emotional responses do not naturally scale with the number of people suffering. A single identifiable victim can evoke a powerful response, while thousands or millions of anonymous victims may produce comparatively little emotional engagement. This creates a problem when moral decisions concern suffering on a large scale (Bloom, 2017). Third, empathy can be exhausting. Repeatedly sharing the distress of others may produce empathic distress and emotional fatigue. Research suggests an important distinction between empathic resonance and compassion: while empathic engagement can increase negative affect, compassion can promote positive affect, motivation, and prosocial behaviour (Klimecki et al., 2014; Weng et al., 2013). The implication is not that we should care less. Rather, caring and feeling are not the same thing. Compassion allows us to recognize suffering and remain motivated to alleviate it without necessarily absorbing the suffering ourselves. Empathy may therefore be valuable for human connection, but it is a poor stand-alone system for making large-scale moral decisions. When millions of lives, limited resources, and competing needs are involved, compassion must be combined with reason, evidence, and deliberate judgment. The goal should not be to feel everything others feel. It should be to care deeply enough to help, while remaining clear-headed enough to help effectively. References: Bloom (2017); Kogut & Ritov (2005); Klimecki et al. (2014); Lee & Feeley (2016); Weng et al. (2013). Empathy and Its Discontents https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27916513/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

The Evolution of Modern Leftism Left-wing and woke ideology often presents itself through noble ideas: compassion, justice, equality, and progress. But progress toward what? That question is rarely asked. To understand modern leftism, we must look back nearly 200 years. Ideas evolve like viruses: when society develops resistance to one form, academics modify it until it becomes more contagious, destructive, and difficult to recognize. Hegel proposed the dialectic: opposing ideas—a thesis and antithesis—collide to produce a synthesis. Marx applied this framework to economics through dialectical materialism. He viewed history as a struggle between the “haves” and “have-nots” and predicted that workers would overthrow capitalism and create a communist utopia. When Marx’s vision failed, Lenin reworked it. He argued that workers needed to be led by an elite revolutionary class. This produced the idea of perpetual revolution: after one oppressor is defeated, the next ruling class becomes the new enemy. The struggle never ends. The Frankfurt School later adapted Marxism for the West. It argued that capitalism’s material success had made workers less receptive to revolution, so the focus shifted to culture, education, media, religion, and the arts. The goal became a gradual “long march through the institutions.” Postmodernists expanded the theory further, arguing that power exists everywhere—not only between rich and poor, but also between men and women, racial groups, heterosexual and homosexual people, and colonizers and the colonized. The personal became political. Intersectionality then presented oppression as a matrix in which every identity adds another layer of victimhood and moral authority. At one extreme is the idealized figure of a poor, disabled, rural, transgender lesbian woman from a developing country. At the other is the supposed ultimate oppressor: a wealthy, educated, able-bodied, straight, white, cisgender, Christian, Western man living in a city. Modern progressivism, in this view, is essentially neo-Marxism in drag.

When Failure Becomes a Demand for More A worldview that persists despite its unending list of failures is not interested in truth but in power. Consider how its adherents respond to the breakdown of their policies. They do not believe that multiculturalism itself has failed; they believe it was not implemented forcefully enough, or that the host nation was not subjected to enough propaganda promoting compulsory compassion. It is not that gender dysphoria is a mental illness; they argue that society simply has not normalized it enough. It is not that safe supply has failed; it merely has not been expanded enough. Decriminalization is not a bad idea, they insist. We simply failed to provide criminals with enough free resources and support programs before implementing it. Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the idea of suicidal empathy in his own words nearly a century and a half before Saad. In *Beyond Good and Evil*, he described a society that had grown so “pathologically soft and tender that it sides even with those who harm it.” Once society reaches this stage, he observed, anything that raises a person above the herd or intimidates their neighbors is declared evil. Mediocrity becomes the highest achievement.

Marxism: A Religion of Destruction and Resentment Marxism is not an economic theory. It is a religion for destructive and resentful losers. The *Communist Manifesto* opens with spiritual language. Marx and Engels declare that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism”—and that “all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance” to exercise this specter. Academics and useful idiots claim that the doctrine aims to redistribute wealth in order to create a more equitable world, erasing the distinction between the haves and the have-nots. It is all about love and compassion, guys. Yet, in the roughly 12,000 words of the authorized *Communist Manifesto*, Marx does not use these words of positive affirmation. “Neighbor” is not mentioned, “redistribute” does not appear, and “love” is used twice—but not in reference to loving anybody else. Now consider the opposite. “Violent” or “violence” is used seven times; “overthrow,” nine times; “radical,” fifteen times; “force,” “forced,” or “forcible,” forty-seven times; and “abolish” or “abolition,” sixty-one times. The doctrine is presented as something achieved through violence, revolution, and theft. The one place Marx gets concrete is in his list of ten measures, and every one of them involves a seizure, a confiscation, or an abolition. Of the classless heaven that is supposedly meant to follow, he says almost nothing. Rather, writing to Arnold Ruge in September 1843, Marx claims that his program is “the ruthless criticism of all that exists”—that everything is worthy of criticism—and builds his work from there. Perhaps he was echoing a line from Goethe’s *Faust* that had caught his attention: “All that exists deserves to perish,” a line spoken by a devil. This is another pattern in Marx’s thought. He is not a reformer aiming to make a tweak here or there. His language is totalizing: all, every, everything. Marxists constantly claim that real communism has never been tried. They argue that totalitarian psychopaths such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were merely defects or deviations. Yet their attempts to control everything, down to thought itself, echo the dogma of the *Communist Manifesto*.