When empathy became suicidal

G.K. Chesterton foresaw suicidal empathy (@dougponder pointed this out recently). More than that, Chesterton defined the phenomenological domain underlying suicidal empathy — and it’s fascinating!

First: Gilbert Keith Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936. He was a Briton, a writer, a journalist, and a philosopher — and indeed in times when each of these terms was a source of pride, the opposite of today. And he was a Catholic in times when bishops were not yet at war with Catholic tradition.

Then also: By „suicidal empathy“ one understands the motivation, occurring exclusively in the Christian West, to place the well-being of the stranger above one’s own survival.

The „suicide“ is always only collective, rarely individual. (Only in exceptional cases do, for example, „Grannies Against the Right“ or Green Party functionaries themselves take in a „refugee“; this is imposed on schools and troubled neighborhoods with which one has nothing to do in reality and personally.)

„You shall love your neighbor as yourself,“ says Jesus in Matthew 22:39. Suicidal empathy says: „Ignore your neighbor, but love the most distant, and sacrifice your country and your neighbor for the most distant.“

Those who can think and soberly observe the times (that is, those whom the idiocy of these times calls a „right-wing extremist“ and „fascist“) see this phenomenon of „suicidal empathy,“ but until now an explanation has been lacking.

Billions from Downfall

Yes, one explanation is that certain actors earn a lot of money from suicidal empathy. When, for example, German bishops call for open borders and more migration, one must know: Church (and other) welfare organizations earn billions from the destruction of German society through mass immigration.

A further explanation could possibly be that certain international actors have an interest as simple as it is comprehensible in maximizing migration to Europe.

China has a foreign population share of about 6 per thousand, in recent years even with a decline in culturally foreign Western expats. Germany’s foreign population share is around 15 percent, and 20 percent if one includes first-generation migrants. In absolute numbers: China with 1.4 billion Chinese hosts approximately 800,000 foreigners. Germany with its 84 million inhabitants (one can say „Germans“ less and less each day) has, including first-generation immigrants, over 17 million foreigners. And yet it is Germany, not China, that tears itself apart over whether it is really friendly enough to foreigners.

Chinese work for China, and China works for Chinese. But for whom do Germans work? Putin still had to invade Ukraine with tanks. In Germany or Great Britain, no one needs to „invade“ anymore to eliminate it as international competition.

What Motivates Normal People

While actors such as welfare organizations or competing powers (along with their henchmen on the ground) have a very concrete interest in destroying the country from within, one still wonders what motivates „normal“ people.

In his key work Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote the explanation in 1908:

When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy; via gutenberg.org

The empathy that the Zombies Against the Right display is a remnant from Christian days. Since empathy today finds no natural restraint in other Christian values and truths, it can proliferate like a tumor and thereby destroy its host organ.

And empathy is not the only case in which a Christian value begins to proliferate wildly without its „natural“ limitation — and thus destroys what made it possible in the first place.

Virtue Without Limit Destroys

It was white Christians who ended slavery — at least within their own sphere of influence. In Muslim countries it continues in part to this day. But this good and deeply Christian deed today leads to irrational self-flagellation, such as white „Democratic“ politicians in the USA kneeling before Black people, thus symbolically declaring themselves slaves. (Actually they cling to power into old age — and want to dispose of Black people and other foreigners as a self-evident voting bloc.)

It was Christianity that declared woman metaphysically equal:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

– Galatians 3:28

But from the metaphysical equation, combined with the spiritual special status of Mary and thus all women, a secular society derived functional equivalence in all areas. The result is a stereotypically feminine hyper-emotionalization of decisions (nuclear power plants, migration, climate) that should better be made rationally.

Tertium Datur

The West calls itself „Judeo-Christian“ and at the same time „secular,“ but if one does not want to align oneself with the ethnic Jewish people, it could possibly be read as an interesting exception to tertium non datur: A third is possible, namely always that each contradicts the other two. — No, the West is possibly not un-Christian, but simply heretical.

Heresy is not the absence of faith. Heresy is the cherry-picking of individual articles of faith, the distortion of others, and the ignoring of still others.

Chesterton structurally describes the classic heresy, as history has experienced it more than once. A single aspect is overemphasized, and in this overemphasis it is functionally inverted into its opposite.

Sugar, Like You and Me

Ah, the examples are many, and not all are religious like „Sola Scriptura“ (the Bible is robbed of all authority by declaring it the only authority, which immediately exposes it to any interpretation). In this spirit, for example, the consumption of sugar is also a „heresy“! An important nutritional component is separated from its natural, healthy context (fruits), and then it suddenly attacks the health of its consumers.

But that is the situation: The West became great through Christianity. If the West falls, it will be through heresy. Just like you and me.