Suicidal Empathy
The Cult of Cold
The first step in getting people to accept cruelty is convincing them that kindness is dangerous.
Yesterday in the Oval Office, a man collapsed. An attendee at Trump’s announcement about lowering drug prices fell to his knees mid-event. Trump stood at the Resolute Desk. Arms at his sides. Blank face. Watching. Someone else rushed to help.
What Trump displayed in that moment has a name now. A justification. A whole intellectual framework.
Last week, Elon Musk posted to 200 million followers that Western Civilization is doomed unless “the core weakness of suicidal empathy” is recognized and actions are taken that are “hard, but necessary for survival.”
Empathy. The weakness. The thing that will destroy us if we don’t root it out.
What Trump displayed standing at that desk isn’t a failure of character according to this framework, but rather the philosophy in action, the hard choice and rational distance they’re teaching people to admire instead of recoil from.
This isn’t new behavior for Trump. In 2008, he told Howard Stern about an 80-year-old man who fell at Mar-a-Lago during a Red Cross charity ball and cracked his skull open on the marble floor, blood spreading across the beautiful stone while Trump turned away in disgust.
“This guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died. And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away... He’s bleeding all over the place... You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red... I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he OK. It’s just not my thing.”
Not his thing.
The framework is everywhere now. Empathy is emotional manipulation that clouds judgment. Use sympathy instead. Acknowledge suffering but maintain rational distance. Don’t set your house on fire to keep the neighbors warm.
The argument spreads through conservative platforms, gaining force with each iteration, building a case that caring about people who aren’t you will destroy civilization. Muslims praying in parks. Refugees at borders. Poor people needing healthcare. Black families getting food stamps. Homeless encampments. People who don’t look like us, don’t pray like us, don’t speak like us.
If we help them, if we let them in, the theory goes, they’ll replace us. Institute Sharia law. Drain resources. Commit crimes. Refuse to assimilate. Take what isn’t theirs. End Western civilization.
The images circulate. One hundred fifty Muslims in a British park. Migrants at the southern border. Tent cities in San Francisco. Pro-Palestinian protesters. EBT cards at the grocery store. Memes about welfare queens and replacement theory, about how they’re having five kids while you have one, about tolerance being suicide.
This is the fear underneath. Not healthcare costs. Not resource allocation. Replacement. The certainty that they will multiply, infiltrate, overwhelm, and eliminate us if empathy clouds judgment.
Empathy isn’t compassion. It’s suicide.
The Receipts
They say diversity and empathy for strangers destroys civilizations. Here’s what actually happened.
Rome granted citizenship to 40 million foreigners in 212 CE. Gauls, Syrians, Egyptians, North Africans became Roman overnight. The empire didn’t collapse from this mass inclusion. It lasted another 264 years, falling finally from massive wealth inequality, debased currency, and emperors so corrupt they couldn’t see collapse coming.
The Ottomans governed Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Jews, Serbs, and Bulgarians for six centuries. The millet system let each group govern itself. Jews ran Jewish courts. Christians ran Christian schools. The empire didn’t fall from this diversity in 1922. It fell because it couldn’t modernize, couldn’t reform a rigid sultanate, couldn’t compete with industrialized Europe.
Empires fall. They always do. But not from letting strangers in. They fall from wealth concentrating at the top while the bottom starves. From leaders so detached they can’t see reality. From rigidity when adaptation is required. From endless wars that bleed treasuries dry. From corruption so deep the institutions stop functioning.
They fall from invasion, yes. But through conquest and war, not from immigration and citizenship. Not from refugees at the border. Not from people praying in parks. Not from letting the circle expand.
The fear isn’t about what destroys civilizations. The fear is about what changes them.
What’s Underneath
A man bleeding on marble. Skull cracked. Dying.
What do you do?
Trump said get that blood cleaned up.
So what is that? Not rhetorically. What is the thing inside a person that looks at hunan blood and thinks about the floor?
They say don’t set your house on fire to keep neighbors warm.
But here’s the actual question underneath that metaphor: One hundred fifty Muslims praying in a park. What’s the mechanism? How does that prayer end Western civilization? At what percentage Muslim does the Magna Carta stop working? Does democracy dissolve when they kneel? At what number?
And when the answer is they’ll replace us, replace us at what? Being nurses? Teaching? Engineering? Driving taxis? Running businesses? Or replace us at being the ones who make the rules?
Here’s what’s underneath. Not fear the house will burn. Fear it will change. Different faces. Different prayers. Different languages. Different skin. Different accents. Different food. Different everything.
Western civilizations built their empires by incorporating and colonizing half the world, then act shocked when half the world shows up. This fear has nothing to do with civilization. It’s about hierarchy. About who belongs on top and who belongs outside.
That fear dressed as philosophy about civilizational survival.
Civilizations don’t die from diversity. They die from rigidity. From people so afraid of change they’d rather watch the structure collapse than let anyone new help hold it up.
The child is sick at the border. Refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. The man bleeding on the floor.
And the response is but what about the house?
Democracy, freedom, rule of law—these expand to include more people. They don’t shatter when the circle widens.
Hierarchy is what’s being protected. The certainty that some people belong on top and some people belong outside. That project requires training people to feel nothing when the ones outside suffer.
Empathy built the house. The radical idea that strangers can become neighbors. That the circle can expand without destroying what’s inside. That cooperation across difference made civilization possible in the first place.
They’re not saving the house. They’re locking the doors while it burns.
Still Human
Calling empathy sentimentality is the con. Real empathy doesn’t ignore facts—it refuses to use facts as an excuse to ignore suffering.
Name one civilization that collapsed from caring too much. Then look at the hundred that fell because people with power convinced everyone else that cruelty was realism.
The oldest trick? Dress up callousness as sophistication. Make people feel smart for being cold. Make them ashamed of the recoil when something is wrong.
Empathy built civilization through cooperation and mutual aid. The capacity to see another person’s pain as real and act on it. The feature that let humans survive.
Suicidal empathy means caring about people who aren’t you.
Rational sympathy means acknowledging suffering but deciding it obligates nothing.
Here’s the ask: accept that legal status matters more than a sick child. That 150 people praying threatens your existence. That the man bleeding on marble is just a stain. That the recoil saying “this is wrong” needs correction.
They call empathy suicide while locking doors of a burning house. They warn about strangers destroying us while bankrupting nations for tax cuts and endless war. They say caring makes you weak while displaying what strength without empathy produces: disgust at blood, indifference to collapse, philosophy justifying the turned back.
Being troubled by what should trouble you isn’t weakness. Noticing what’s wrong isn’t being too sensitive. Caring about strangers while they bomb them isn’t naive.
That capacity, to feel the recoil when something is wrong, to care about people you’ll never meet, separates humans from the thing standing blank-faced at the desk.
When did caring about people who aren’t you become suicide?
And who benefits when you stop?
Notes & Sources
Oval Office collapse (date/what happened)
People (live-stream recap; IDs Dave Ricks speaking; WH press secretary update): https://people.com/trump-press-conference-ends-as-man-suffers-medical-emergency-11845060 People.com
Entertainment Weekly (event context; White House medical unit; “good condition”): https://ew.com/white-house-guest-collapses-interrupting-oval-office-press-conference-11845235 EW.com
Musk on “suicidal empathy”
Musk’s post on X (wording anchor): https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1986103240187064654 X (formerly Twitter)
Coverage quoting the post (timestamped context): https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/elon-musk-having-post-election-213350324.html Yahoo
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “get that blood cleaned up” story (2008 Stern)
GQ summary (pulls the key quotes from the Stern interview): https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story GQ
Audio/video clip of the anecdote:
Historical “Receipts”
Rome – Constitutio Antoniniana (212 CE) Primary/translation hub (Constitutio text overview): https://www.constitutio.de/en/constitutio-antoniniana/the-text-of-the-edict constitutio.de Scholarly excerpt (Ostia Antica project): https://www.ostia-antica.org/caracalla/laws/constitutio.htm ostia-antica.org
Ottoman Empire – Millet system (confessional autonomy) Oxford Bibliographies entry (scholarly overview): https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/abstract/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0231.xml Oxford Bibliographies Barkey, “The Ottoman Millet System” (journal abstract; research lead): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449057.2015.1101845 Taylor & Francis Online
Austria-Hungary – Collapse (1918; war/famine/national councils) 1914–1918-Online (peer-reviewed encyclopedia): https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/austria-hungary/ 1914-1918-Online (WW1) Encyclopedia “Dissolution of Austria-Hungary” (synthesis of immediate causes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Austria-Hungary Wikipedia
Good job showing how the "Cult of Cold" leads to real suicide and empathy leads to abundant life. Which all the major religions have been telling us forever.
I'm not a fan of Oz, but at least he jumped in to help.