There is a manner of kindness that does not strengthen, but weakens. It is the kindness that opens every gate without looking to see who comes through it, or what they bring. Gad Saad has named this “suicidal empathy”: a compassion so wide and so little guided that it begins to work against the very people who practice it. It appears often in our own age, when many in the West extend welcome and accommodation without end to ways of life that have long refused the same welcome in return—ways that do not hold free speech, equal rights for women, or the separation of religion from the power to compel as things worth keeping.
Most who call themselves libertarians have little love for war. They do not wish to see the state go forth to pick fights in distant lands, nor do they believe force should be the first answer to every quarrel. The Non-Aggression Principle, as Murray Rothbard set it down, is simple enough: one may not begin the use of force against another; yet one may answer force that has already been begun. This is sound. The trouble is that many see aggression only when it comes with armies and banners. Other forms they treat as mere social questions, or as failures of feeling.
Of the Many Shapes That Aggression May Take
War, for the purpose of self-defense, is any long and ordered effort to bring others under coercion. The clash of armies is the plainest shape it takes. It is not the only one.
Long ago, Sun Tzu taught that a man must know the true nature of the contest he is in. To “know the enemy and know yourself” is not merely to count spears. It is to understand what the other side seeks and by what means they mean to gain it. He wrote also that all warfare rests upon deception. Sometimes the face of peace, or of friendship, or of moral concern, is itself part of the design. He who will not look past the surface has already fallen behind.
In our own time, two officers of the Chinese army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, set down a book called Unrestricted Warfare. They argued that the old bounds of war have largely fallen away. It is no longer enough to speak only of armed force used to bend another’s will. There are many other tools—economic, cultural, legal, and of the mind—that may be used to the same end. They noted that the side which understands it is already in a struggle holds a clear advantage over the side that still pretends there is none.
Campaigns of idea and of population may work in this way when their aim is to replace the rules and customs that protect the rights of the individual with a different order. Patterns have been seen in Europe and elsewhere: when a group is small, it may remain quiet; when it grows larger, parallel ways of life appear, special rules are demanded, and pressure is laid upon the older norms of the place. History is full of lands whose character was changed by conquest, by pressure, and by the slow shift of who lived there. The notion that some traditions divide the world into lands already under their law and lands still to be brought under it is not new; it is written in old texts and in the record of events.
This does not mean that every person of a given background is part of some single design. It does mean that some beliefs and customs reject the foundations on which a free society stands—the rights of the individual, open inquiry, one law for all, and the freedom to leave or to speak against what is taught. When many come who do not share those foundations, and when the institutions of the land refuse to ask for any real joining to them, the ground on which liberty rests begins to wear away. This is not a neutral thing. It is pressure against the order of rights—the kind of non-military pressure the Chinese officers described.
Where Libertarians Often Look Away
Many libertarians are steady in opposing wars begun by the state in foreign lands. They grow less steady when the pressure is slow, or comes from no single government, or is clothed in the language of kindness. The free movement of people is often treated as a simple good. In pure thought it has its appeal. In the world as it is, it meets the fact that not every culture or teaching is equally at home with an order of rights.
Suicidal empathy appears when that kindness is given without much care for whether it will be returned. To support a movement that openly rejects the freedoms one enjoys oneself is one clear example. To treat every newcomer as a guest while setting aside evidence that some part of the movement seeks to change the rules is another. In the words of Sun Tzu, it is a failure to know the enemy. In the language of Unrestricted Warfare, it is a failure to see that tools of culture and of population may be used with purpose.
Under the Non-Aggression Principle, the right to defend oneself is not limited to the moment the first blow is struck. It includes the right to refuse entry, to set conditions on association, and to guard the customs and institutions that liberty requires. Owners of private property and members of free associations already do forms of this. To apply the same clear sight to questions of who may come and on what terms is not a turning away from liberty; it is the same principle applied to a form of aggression that does not always wear a uniform.
Reciprocity: The Ground on Which Liberty Stands
Reciprocity is not a soft ideal. It is the practical condition that makes the Non-Aggression Principle able to work, and that separates free association from one-sided demand. In a free society, people deal with one another on the basis of mutual recognition of rights. Each refrains from beginning force; each keeps the right to leave, to speak, to refuse association, and to hold what is his. Trade and peace rest on that mutual restraint. Where reciprocity is present, differences may usually be handled without coercion. Where it is absent, the relation ceases to be voluntary and becomes a demand that one side accept limits the other side will not accept for itself.
Ayn Rand spoke of something like this as the “trader principle”: people dealing with one another by exchange for mutual benefit, not by sacrifice or by taking. Rothbard’s principle of non-aggression assumes the same mutuality—force is forbidden because each person has an equal claim not to be forced. Once a group systematically rejects these terms—by seeking power to limit speech, to apply a separate law, to deny equal rights, or to treat the liberties of the host society as things to be used rather than respected—the ground for peaceful association is gone.
This is why reciprocity serves as a clear line for self-defense. One who comes and accepts the rules of the place is not an aggressor. An ordered effort to replace those rules with an order that does not reciprocate is a form of aggression against the existing framework, even if it moves slowly and begins without arms. Suicidal empathy is what follows when that line is ignored—when the refusal to reciprocate is taken as a reason for still more accommodation, rather than as a sign that the relation is no longer free. At that point, openness does not enlarge liberty; it hands power to those who reject the conditions under which liberty can endure.
Of Reason, Rights, and the Refusal of Self-Sacrifice
This is not a call for the gathering of peoples by blood, nor for the state to run a program of the nation. Libertarians look first to individuals and to groups that form by choice. The line that matters is between those who accept the basic rules of a free society—reciprocity, non-aggression, the right to leave, free speech—and those who do not. Customs and teachings that systematically reject those rules are not the same as those that accept them. To pretend otherwise is not compassion; it is a refusal to hold all to the same standard.
Ayn Rand’s critique of altruism as a duty of self-sacrifice is of use here. She held that when altruism is made into an obligation to place the claims of others ahead of one’s own life and rights, it becomes a means of subordinating the capable to the demands of others. A society that steadily places the unearned claims of those who reject its foundations above the rights of those who uphold them is not practicing compassion; it is practicing a kind of moral reversal. Ludwig von Mises taught that cooperation among men depends on clear sight of individual interests and on the rejection of collective stories that ignore what moves people. Friedrich Hayek warned of the “fatal conceit” of those who would remake society according to pure ideas while setting aside the institutions and knowledge that have made liberty possible. All of them, in their different ways, pointed to the danger of setting reason and the rights of the individual beneath the claims of feeling or of the group.
Empathy is a real capacity of men, yet it must be held in check by reason and by a true reading of what people do and why. Too little of it brings cruelty. Too much of it, aimed at the wrong objects, brings weakness. Libertarians already know this distinction with those who break the law: the feelings of the aggressor are not set above the rights of the one harmed. The same logic applies to projects of idea and of population that treat the liberties of a free society as things to be taken rather than as mutual limits. The refusal to intervene abroad rests on the belief that force should be kept for defense. To apply that belief at home requires the willingness to see when slower pressures amount to aggression against the conditions of liberty.
The Final Say
Libertarians need not set aside the Non-Aggression Principle, nor need they support every war that is offered to them. They must apply the principle with consistency. Self-defense requires that one see the threat as it is. Aggression may come as the invasion of armies, but—as both Sun Tzu and the authors of Unrestricted Warfare understood—it may also come as long pressure through culture, through the movement of peoples, through information, and through institutions, all aimed at bringing a society to accept conditions that undermine the rights of the individual. Reciprocity is the practical test that separates free association from one-sided demand. Suicidal empathy is what follows when that test is refused and every denial of reciprocity is met with still greater accommodation.
In the end, it comes to this: whether one is willing to notice when the contest is not confined to a battlefield, and when the other side has declined to keep the same rules. To know the enemy, as Sun Tzu said, includes knowing that much. All else is hope that the matter will settle itself while the ground on which liberty stands grows thinner.
Paul Baratelli
References
Saad, Gad. Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. Broadside Books, 2026.
Rogan, Joe. “#2497 – Gad Saad.” The Joe Rogan Experience, 12 May 2026.
Sun Tzu. The Art of War.
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare. 1999.
Rothbard, Murray N. For a New Liberty. 1973.
Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness. 1964.
Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action. 1949.
Hayek, F. A. The Fatal Conceit. 1988.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689.
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