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I was asked recently to elaborate on a comment I made in an article about suicidal empathy.
The question was simple but sharp: Has empathy turned “woke” - hijacked and weaponised until it now polices feeling itself?
It’s a fair question, because empathy - our oldest moral ally - feels as if it’s been kidnapped. The friend that once walked beside civilisation, teaching us to see ourselves in others, now speaks through unfamiliar voices. It sounds like concern, but too often it serves control.
Governments deploy it to soften the edges of censorship. Corporations sell it in campaigns about belonging while treating staff as data points. Algorithms echo it back to us in carefully curated feeds that flatter our values but hide our voices. What once asked us to listen has been turned into a currency of compliance - an emotional credit score that rewards virtue on display and punishes dissent.
Across the world, people are being cautioned or even arrested for online words deemed “offensive.” Some of those words are reckless or cruel, yes, but many are simply raw reactions to cruelty - grief, anger, solidarity - the emotional noise of a conscience still alive. When empathy starts punishing those who feel too loudly, it’s no longer empathy we’re practising; it’s etiquette.
Outrage, protest and even unrest are not proof of hatred - they are proof that people still care enough to feel. Every major reform in history began as a breach of politeness. Empathy’s fiercest form isn’t sentiment - it’s resistance to indifference.
Yet modern culture too often mistakes calm for virtue and emotion for extremism. We’ve built a world where compassion must be grammatically correct before it’s heard. A society that edits its emotions to keep the peace soon forgets what peace was for.
Empathy was meant to be our ally - the force that kept humanity from cruelty. But somewhere along the way, it was taken hostage by ideologies that discovered how easily kindness could be turned into leverage. Now our oldest friend is being used to silence the very feelings it once defended.
The task, then, isn’t to abandon empathy; it’s to rescue it - strip away the slogans, free its voice, and let it do what it was born to do: remind us that we are human.
Empathy isn’t the villain. It’s the hostage.
And I want our friend back.