When Empathy Isn't Helpful

Hi there,

I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day, minding my own business, lost in a book, when the guy across the room shot me a look like I had just ordered a cup of battery acid.

He pointed at my book and said, dead serious:
"What’s that about? It sounds horrible."

Honestly? Fair.

I get it. Against Empathy sounds like a manifesto for sociopaths. The kind of title that makes you look like you kick puppies for fun.

But the premise of the book isn’t about being cold-hearted or anti-human. It’s about questioning the unexamined assumption that more empathy always leads to better decisions. And in our current world, that's not a small question.

Empathy Weaponized

In 2014, Facebook ran a psychological experiment. They manipulated users’ feeds to test how emotions spread.

What they found: outrage, fear, jealousy—these things go viral.
— And when people felt more, they scrolled more.
— When they scrolled more, Facebook made more money.

This wasn’t a glitch. It was a business strategy built on emotional hijacking.
And empathy was the bait. And FB manipulated it intentionally.

At scale. For research…profit. Pretty awful. 🤮 

But according to a FB insider and whistleblower, I’m not surprised that FB’s business playbook is to make people feel bad. Because when people feel bad, they become passive. And passive people are far easier to manipulate and control.

So yeah, maybe the book title sounds harsh. But trusting our emotions to navigate a world that’s actively profiting from hijacking them? That’s the real horror show.

Pitfalls of Empathy

These days, empathy has been elevated to sainthood.

We think of empathy as the ultimate good and treat it like a superpower.
Feel more. Care more. Act better.

It’s prescribed as the cure to division, the moral compass of our time, the missing ingredient in politics, parenting, leadership, and everything in between.

But the truth is messier.

Because empathy isn’t a virtue. It’s a tool.
And like any tool, it can be misused, overused, or weaponized.

Bloom’s message is simple: don’t use empathy to make moral decisions.

He suggests that we abandon emotional empathy and replace it with something he calls rational compassion. What the difference?

- Empathy relies on feelings.
- Rational compassion balances thinking + feeling.

Simple, right? But simple is not always easy.

And he does make some interesting points backed by research:

• Empathy bias
  In one study, people preferred to donate to a single, identified sick child they saw in a photo than to a group of anonymous children suffering from the the same illness. (Small, Loewenstein, Slovic, 2007)

• Empathy-induced aggression

  In wartime studies, soldiers report stronger empathy for their own unit which correlated with excessive and disproportionate aggression towards the enemy.

• Empathy apathy & burnout
  Nurses and doctors who emotionally “merge” with patients show higher rates of compassion fatigue, depression, and job turnover. Feeling too much hurts them and leads to burnout and apathy.

• Empathy clouds decision-making
  Research shows psychopaths and con artists possess high cognitive empathy. They know exactly how to trigger empathy in others to lower defenses. Serial killer Ted Bundy would fake an injury, wear a cast, limp a little, then ask women for help loading books into his car. Their empathy made them override their reason.

• Empathy favors the short-term over the long-term

  Empathy-driven policies and laws misfire, like when emotionally-charged refugee or immigration stories lead to knee-jerk reactions.

The problem isn’t empathy itself because using it wisely helps more than it hurts. The issue is how easily it can be hijacked and how carelessly and unquestioningly we use it.

“Good” is a Moving Target

But, in my opinion, Bloom oversimplifies both the problem and the solution.

Because morality itself isn’t fixed.

We treat morality like it’s some universal truth.

It’s not.

What’s considered “moral” and “good” changes with the cultural tides that shift with time, technology, power, and context. History proves this.

— Slavery was moral. So was child labor. So was burning “witches.”
— Science once “proved” that Black people didn’t feel pain.
— That women needed hysterectomies to control their emotions.

All of it was rational. All of it was moral.

At the time.

What feels “moral” is usually just what feels normal.

Until it doesn’t.

Logic Has a Body Count

Logic is supposed to be the antidote to emotion, but it’s been behind some of the most horrifying decisions in history.

So, if we think logic will save us? Think again.

- The U.S. forcefully sterilized 70,000 poor people to “clean” the gene pool.
- Black men were intentionally infected, studied, and left to die. For science.
- Britain let 100 million Indians starve to death to defend free-market economics Logical.
- Thousands of civilian deaths got pre-approved as “collateral damage” with a formula. Also logical.

Each of these decisions was backed by experts, policies, data, and reason. But when logic is disconnected from humanity, it doesn’t purify morality.

It just sanitizes cruelty. And somehow, we still tell ourselves these decisions were rational.

The Real Problem Isn’t Empathy or Logic

Ultimately, it isn’t empathy vs. logic.

It’s dogma vs. discernment.

The real threat isn’t feeling too much or thinking too little.
It’s assuming we’ve arrived. That we’ve figured it out.

That we’re the generation who finally got morality “right.”

READER POLL

Final Thought

So yes, Against Empathy is a provocative title.

But it’s not wrong to question what’s been made sacred.

In a world where religions, political parties, governments, and Big Tech is looking to profit from emotional manipulation, trusting our feelings blindly is a risk we can’t afford.

Bottomline is, both empathy and logic are flawed. The goal isn’t to crown one king and cancel the other. The goal is to use both as best as we can: intelligently, imperfectly, humanly.

And accept the fact we will make big mistakes along the way.
But even still, we aim to be less wrong today than we were yesterday.

Because in reality, we’re building it all piece by piece together.
In dialogue. In tension. In motion.

In this messy undertaking, we don’t need more certainty.
We need more humility.

And maybe the most “moral” thing to do is:
Keep asking better questions. Stay in the conversation.

Stay open. Stay human.

✌️,

Shakila