Emotional blackmail: How empathy became a tool of control

The sin of empathy.

When you write a book with that title, you need to be prepared to explain it. And sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

A friend recently sent me an image from the Mexico side of the southern border. It shows the word “Empathy” graffitied on the border wall. Presumably, the person responsible views the border wall as an affront to the modern virtue of empathy. In doing so, the person communicates the fundamental argument of my book.

For years, empathy has been pitched as sympathy 2.0. It’s compassion — but upgraded. In a famous viral YouTube video, Brené Brown describes the way that sympathy is cold and judgmental, standing aloof from suffering. Empathy, on the other hand, is a sacred space that fuels connection by staying out of judgment.

But pay attention to the fine print. What sounds like a simple call for human decency and kindness actually masks emotional blackmail. For, as the artist in Mexico said so clearly, empathy means no borders, no walls, no boundaries.

This was the warning issued in the early 2000s by Edwin Friedman, a rabbi and family systems counselor.

"Our focus on empathy is one of the major factors that has everybody stuck," Friedman said. "The concept of empathy has wound up encouraging everyone to lose their own boundaries, so it works against the very self-regulation that is necessary for it to be employed objectively."

In other words, empathy frequently becomes untethered from what is true and good, and it becomes a power tool in the hands of the sensitive. It elevates a person’s immediate feelings over healthy boundaries and thereby becomes a means of emotional manipulation.

Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a guilt trip knows how easily we can be steered by our empathy and compassion. In fact, if we’re honest, we’ve likely put those we love on a guilt trip ourselves. It’s easy to throw a pity party or to adopt a martyr complex to influence and steer those we love.

And of course, emotional blackmail is not new. I’m sure that Adam and Eve (and Cain and Abel) engaged in their share of emotional manipulation. One hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton asserted that the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. They “have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth, and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity, and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

Forty years later, C.S. Lewis warned that “Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful,” describing this noble virtue as a man-eating weed when it is transplanted from the rocky crags of justice to the swamp of humanitarianism.

In a world that demands all empathy and no borders, choose a better way.

But modern society has institutionalized this ancient human impulse, buttressing it with ideologies like critical theory and intersectionality.

The result? The Victimhood Olympics that we witnessed over the last decade, in which various “oppressed” groups competed to see who was the most oppressed.

In a society flooded by untethered empathy, victimhood confers invulnerability. Victims (real or imagined) cannot be questioned or challenged but must be affirmed, validated, and permitted to set the agenda for everyone else. What’s more, they are absolved from all responsibility for their actions, and they can count on the members of society to excuse all manner of behavior out of misguided compassion.

Of course, the man-eating weed of untethered empathy is very willing to selectively adopt the tenets of justice when it wants.

For example, the Biden administration facilitated the invasion of our country, abusing programs like Temporary Protected Status and expanding programs for asylum-seekers to flood the country with millions of migrants. And now, as the Trump administration seeks to undo this invasion, all of a sudden it’s vital that every illegal migrant receive an individual trial. Thus we see not only a corruption of compassion, but a corruption of justice and a bureaucratic and judicial tyranny that usurps the role of the nation’s duly elected officials.

This is the challenge for us as individuals and as a society: How can we actually be compassionate without giving in to the empathetic manipulation that dishonors God, destroys lives, and smothers justice? Because it is amazing how much cruelty can be done in the name of empathy. You can murder the unborn. You can castrate and mutilate children. You can facilitate an invasion. All in the name of empathy.

Resist any of these efforts and you will be called heartless, cruel, and ungodly, as Sunny Hostin did on "The View."

But true compassion, the kind that Christ calls us to, is not steered by false accusations and labels. True compassion weeps with those who weep while seeking their ultimate good. Because it is tethered to truth, goodness, and reality, it refuses to lie to appease the manipulators who would steer us by our kindness. It always reserves the right not to blaspheme.

So in a world that demands all empathy and no borders, choose a better way. Good fences make good neighbors. Firm boundaries enable true compassion.