This article is by journalist and recent TRIGGERnometry guest, David Josef Volodzko. You can read David’s own Substack here.
Western society is now plagued by two nearly opposite pathologies. When people feel such empathy for others that they ignore facts to avoid causing offense, throw open their borders, or refuse to prosecute criminals for fear of seeming racist, this is known as suicidal empathy. On the other hand, where they perceive themselves as eternal victims of nebulous forces, becoming increasingly scornful of their own society and fellow citizens, this is a victimhood mentality.
Suicidal empathy and victimhood mentality may have served us well in our ancestral past, but now they do more harm than good. Thankfully, by understanding the evolutionary origins of these traits, we have a better shot at survival.
In a social species like our own, being attuned to the suffering of others helped foster group cohesion, which sheltered us from the harsh indifference of our ancient savanna homeland. But what once protected tiny African tribes from predators and the elements now conspires to destabilize entire societies.
Victimhood mentality finds its neurological home in the amygdala, the brain’s sentinel of fear and vigilance. This structure was fashioned by evolution into a radar for detecting threats. Modern neuroimaging reveals its connections to the hypothalamus and brainstem, forming a feedback loop that floods the body with stress hormones—cortisol and adrenaline—at the faintest sign of danger. It’s a system designed for speed rather than accuracy, and the errors of overreaction are more than worth the cost when the alternative is having a giant cat sink its teeth into your throat.
But what happens when we no longer need to constantly look over our shoulder for a lurking leopard? What happens when the faintest sign of danger comes not from a wilderness filled with man-eating beasts, but from the digital world?
In his 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, argued that we experience the sublime, the highest form of beauty, when we encounter great danger without being directly threatened by it. Consider a mountain or a shark. It might kill you to be up on that frigid peak and you certainly wouldn’t want to be within range of the king of the deep, but from the safety of a warm valley floor or through your television screen during Shark Week, you have the “safe space” needed to appreciate their majesty without your amygdala firing like a lawnmower hitting gravel.
But if instead the danger is within range, or you become convinced that it is, your brain will focus on staying alive and quickly become blind to the beauty. Imagine then what happens if you become convinced all white people are racist and therefore a threat to you.
Suicidal empathy, meanwhile, is rooted in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and mediated by mirror neurons within the premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobule. These neural mechanisms allow us to feel another’s pain as though it were our own. This is why you put your own head down when someone embarasses themselves on stage. The thing is, the ACC is richly interconnected with the limbic system, handling emotional responses as well as the emotional aspect of pain perception, as opposed to its physical intensity or location.
This makes it central to our experience of empathy—and empathetic suffering. Evolutionary biology suggests this was adaptive. It promoted communal care, cooperative child-rearing, and mitigated violence. Empathy was as essential to the survival of Homo sapiens as opposable thumbs.
So the amygdala and the ACC are engaged in a delicate dance of opposing forces—fear and empathy. But over millennia, these evolutionary gifts have been dragged into a new habitat. The tribe has grown too large, its faces too numerous, and the threats of our modern jungle too abstract. The amygdala now rings the alarm not for sabertooth tigers but for perceived slights on social media. As for suicidal empathy, once untethered from the intimacy of kinship, it becomes an overwhelming force. Functional MRI scans reveal prolonged empathetic distress can activate the same neural pathways as physical pain, leading to emotional exhaustion and, paradoxically, less compassionate behavior.
Perhaps the woke movement is so callous because its members are amygdala junkies, having convinced themselves the entire world is racist, sexist, and so forth, and thus out to get them. To turn Audre Lorde’s famous line on its head, the master’s tools are dismantling the master’s house.
There’s a cruel poetry to evolution. It gifts us faculties that ensure our survival but then nearly break us once we outgrow them. If we temper our instincts with reason, we can build kinder as well as safer societies, but if we continue down this path only hell awaits us—and the proof of this is everywhere we look.
These polar pathologies explain many of the problems facing the West today. Victimhood mentality explains why some some see racism lurking in every shadow, while suicidal empathy explains why others deny the cold light of reality to avoid being seen as racist. It’s why some Americans decry “rape culture” while some Brits remain silent about the literal rape culture under their noses. It’s why Palestinian activists claim “genocide” while endorsing an actual genocide of Jews. And it’s why our immigration policies are so reckless yet talking about it is so hard. If we don’t begin to address this, the tiger we fail to tame will eat us alive.
Suicidal empathy is a poor substitute for moral courage.
Here's another real thing that can happen. It happened to me. I lived with an anxiety/manic/anorexia issue without help or medication for 10 years from my early 20's to my early 30's. I would freak out if one single thing didn't stay on schedule, staying in a constant fight or flight mode. At 34, I had burnt through it all, went through menopause and can no longer produce cortisol in any worthy amount. I have to take medication forever, had to have a hysterectomy, and can't feel much anymore (no real anger, worry, or happiness) This kind of alertness will literally destroy you. We have to stop encouraging this.