There is nothing empathetic about St Jacinda

Elites fall over themselves to appear ‘understanding’, but this cult of kindness has a truly sinister side

Among the overused words I’d ban are “amazing”, “iconic” and “empathetic” – the latter deployed like a talisman by St Jacinda Ardern, outgoing PM of New Zealand.

Compassion is a real word. It means to suffer with; it is active. When people say they are empathetic, they mostly mean that they passively listen. They put one in mind of the empaths in Star Trek, those bland aliens with the dubious skill of reading people’s feelings. Whenever a Klingon pointed his phaser and said: “I will destroy you all,” the empath would whisper: “Captain, I sense he is… angry.”

But empathy has caught on among our dizzy elites, from Justin Trudeau of Canada to Harry Sussex of California, most of whom believe that our culture is angry and destructive because it is confrontational. Empathy is the answer to populism: if only we took time to hear one another’s pain, we could heal it. Hashtag, be kind.

Of course, this is idiotic on countless levels. For one, the whole point of a democracy is that we debate, and if we take our ideas seriously, we are apt to get heated about them. The empaths confuse process with outcomes, assuming that an empathetic society will inevitably be a liberal one, and they have a very clear idea about who should be listened to and who should not. The day that an empath sits down with a truck driver with “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles and says: “Tell me, Skullcrusher, how you really feel?”, I’ll take this phenomenon a little more seriously.

Finally, implicit in the lionisation of empathy is a criticism of those who don’t empathise – or fail to put on a show of it – questioning their very humanity. The cult of kindness has a sinister edge.

We’ve been running the empathy experiment now for several years, typically in post-colonial societies like Canada and New Zealand. The latter historically pioneered suffrage, populism and neo-liberal economics, and under ultra-kind Jacinda, was the model of a fortress society during Covid, saving thousands of lives.

It also wrecked the economy, contributing to the many problems that persuaded her to leave office before being voted out. Like Ireland, that other empathetic utopia, where asylum seekers sleep in tents, New Zealand has a serious homelessness problem. From a socialist point of view, St Jacinda has been a flop – she avoided wealth taxes and the Kiwis have yet to significantly reduce emissions. One could argue empathy is a mask for business-as-usual.

Indeed, the striking thing is how unempathetic empathetic government turns out to be. In Canada, pretty boy Trudeau accused opposition MPS who emphathised with anti-lockdown demonstrators of “standing with those who wave swastikas” and triggered never-used emergency powers to clear the protests. Canada has gone big on euthanasia since passing the Medical Assistance in Dying law in 2016. The acronym is Maid: even killing people is rebranded to sound nice. It’s certainly cheaper, say critics, than providing the benefits on which disabled people can live with dignity.

It has gradually become easier and more popular to take one’s life, the relevant conditions likely expanding to include mental ill-health. In one case, a 61-year old man with a history of depression was put to death without his family being informed. The only medical condition he’d put on his Maid form was “hearing loss”.

New Zealand legalised assisted dying in 2017. It has also made it illegal for young people to smoke.

It seems an excess of kindness can lead to unkindness, especially if it is decoupled from common sense, but also from traditional morality, which argues that the kind thing to do is that which is right, even if it is unpopular or expensive. Feelings do not trump facts, nor that universal principle of justice that some of us call “God”.

But the empath, supported by a consensus that is terrified of appearing unkind, pushes their decency to the point of parody. In last week’s episode of The Apprentice, the task was to create a cartoon for two-to-four year-olds. You would imagine they’d go for something fun about dinosaurs – but no, both teams swiftly agreed it had to be about diversity and inclusion and set about making videos so insulting that one of them bordered on a hate crime.

Set in a playground, a girl in a wheelchair complained that she couldn’t climb the slide, so a boy offered to play pat-a-cake with her instead. The suggestion that a physically able male should “rescue” a disabled female was patronising enough, but the animators also forgot to draw their characters hands and feet, making it unclear that they were clapping. Hence when the girl asked for help, the boy appeared to start slapping her about the face – the kind of tough love that went out with Mary Whitehouse.

We are all capable of hypocrisy. When someone says at a party, “I’m a great listener,” you just know they’re going to yak on about themselves for hours. And so it was inevitable that as soon as Trudeau set out to be a diversity champion, photos emerged of him in blackface, or that when the Duke of Sussex had finished his therapy, trying to be a better person, he would unveil his transformation by blowing up his family.

The lesson is not only to listen to what people have to say but judge them by what they actually do.