Around the world, virtues such as compassion and kindness are gathering dust, like old hymn books in a long-deserted church<\/p>\n
Towards the end of the summer, the Tory-Reform defector Robert Jenrick authored an op-ed piece for the Daily Telegraph<\/a> about the seemingly impossible economics of rising benefits bills because of mental ill-health. In his capacity as Reform\u2019s Treasury spokesman, his task was to big up its plans to cut 25% of so-called welfare spending by 2030, and thereby tackle what he called the state\u2019s \u201csuicidal empathy\u201d.<\/p>\n Straight away, I wondered where this most opportunistic politician had borrowed that phrase from, and instantly found out: a book with the same title<\/a>, published this year by the Canadian academic Gad Saad, whom the dust jacket describes as having particular expertise in \u201cthe use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour\u201d. It comes with an endorsement from Elon Musk. \u201cWestern civilisation is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognised and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival,\u201d says the world\u2019s richest man. \u201cAll of Gad\u2019s books, including this one, are great.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Around the world, virtues such as compassion and kindness are gathering dust, like old hymn books in a long-deserted church Towards the end of the summer, the Tory-Reform defector Robert Jenrick authored an op-ed piece for the Daily Telegraph about the seemingly impossible economics of rising benefits bills because of mental ill-health. In his capacity … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}