Pinchbeck argues that Allie Beth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy inverts the teaching of the Gospels by recoding compassion as sin and withdrawal of care as spiritual strength. He reads this through Herbert Marcuse's concept of surplus repression from Eros and Civilization, contending that people who have learned to amputate their own desires demand the same self-mutilation from others. Prompted by the Supreme Court permitting suspension of SNAP benefits to 47 million people, he sets Stuckey against Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, and the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff. He also draws on Joy DeGruy's Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and on the imperial economics behind migration.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that Stuckey has built a coherent theological system rather than committing simple hypocrisy, one that pathologizes empathy as a liberal disease and reframes abandoning the poor as tough love.
- The essay applies Herbert Marcuse's surplus repression to explain the psychology, holding that the superego crushes the vulnerable self and then projects the demand outward as a requirement that others suffer equally.
- Pinchbeck contends that arguments against illegal immigration are presented in a vacuum that erases the imperial policy producing migration, citing IMF structural adjustment, corporate extraction, and the deforestation and roughly seventy-eight-cents-a-day cacao labor behind chocolate production in Cote d'Ivoire.
- The essay argues that Matthew 25, the Sermon on the Mount and Luke's instruction to lend expecting nothing in return directly contradict the position, and that Meister Eckhart's mysticism dissolves the boundary between the self and the suffering other.
- Drawing on liberation theology's preferential option for the poor, Pinchbeck argues that a society allowing 47 million people to go hungry while billionaires accumulate wealth is blasphemous by the standards of the faith its rulers profess.
Full text
So I may be naive but I tend to believe that many more people than we imagine maybe even most people are actually kind of brilliant uh that there are potential geniuses but their uh spark was systematically snuffed out or extinguished when they were young. So many of us uh grew up in situations that really didn't support the cultivation of our unique essence or our singular gifts. And in a normative culture organized around material productivity and social control, people kind of learn from childhood on that they have to redirect the vast majority of their genius, their intellectual, intuitive and creative gifts toward suppressing their own expressiveness, repressing their life force, mutilating their own brilliance in a sense. And yeah, instead of becoming like poetic geniuses, they become geniuses at conforming. They become masters at the art of self- amputation and self-suppression.
In his book Aeros and Civil Civilization, Herbert Marcusa wrote about what he called surplus repression. And his idea is that we people internalize social hierarchy and domination so completely that they actually learn to police themselves more rig rigorously than any external authority would actually require of them. And there's almost a kind of weird kind of like dark pleasure or jewance to use Leanian term in the self-p policing. There's almost like a perverse satisfaction people get when their super ego is able to kind of like crush any stray thoughts and errant desires that that come up in them. The censoring mechanism becomes in a sense the connoisseur of its own cruelty and as well as its cruelty towards others who won't get in line.
So perhaps it is precisely this this force of surplus repression, this, you know, kind of compulsive almost like automatic self-negation that happens as we get older that shapes collapsing authoritarian societies like our own today. And this connection really struck me late last night when I learned the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump regime to stop play paying SNAP benefits to 47 million people, many at that big risk of hunger. Uh, I've also been reading Ali Beth Stookie's Toxic Empathy. This is a book by a right-wing Christian influencer trying to understand how people who claim to follow Christlike, you know, impulses such as the conservative judges on the Supreme Court can be so callous and seemingly just like spectacularly cruel to people who, you know, don't have all the privileges, all the wealth. I've also been reading a very compelling different book called post-traumatic slave syndrome by a psychologist Joy Dury.
So she's a mental health clinician and she looks at how centuries of slavery still shape the US. They shaped the psychology of black people in the US whose ancestors grew up in slavery. They shape, you know, the psychology of the white people who were involved in slavery. and it's still this sort of primary psychological and cultural condition from which we've never healed as a country. So she actually notes that uh racism has run like a poison through the blood of American society since the Europeans first landed on these shores and since that beginning America and Americans have invested much in denying it. America's that Americans denial of their blatant racism and the attending atrocities committed throughout the nation's history has become pathological.
Such denial has allowed this illness to fester for almost 400 years. Uh it is uh it is what keeps this country sick with this issue of race. So I think that's a very interesting perspective and we should remember it when we think about this white Christian nationalism and its toxic its idea of toxic empathy that liberals are somehow um plagiarized or infected by this toxic empathy. So what Stukie and her Christian nationalist allies have done is kind of ingenious in a dark way. They've constructed a theory, a theological model that transforms indifference into virtue. So toxic empathy in this framing is a sin of feeling too much for the suffering of others particularly people who are you know quoteunquote undeserving the poor the weak the dependent.
Empathy gets path pathized as a liberal disease a sentimentality that enables dysfunction and rewards victimhood. So in this kind of moral vision, cruelty gets rebranded as trough tough love and withdrawing care is almost seen as an act of like spiritual strength or spiritual hygiene. It's better to abandon the poor so they can be saved, you know, in a way quotequote from themselves. And in the book, Stuki even looks at a very sympathetic case, this woman, Marabel, a Mexican woman. I guess the Washington Post did a story on this. She crossed the border illegally in 2002. She got married here. She applied for asylum. Eventually, she was approved to work and live in the US.
Uh she would check with immigration authorities every year. There are a lot of cases like this, though. She was raised four children in Fairfield, Ohio, including she has a three-year-old daughter with epilepsy. And uh you know, Stukie admits that this woman built a good, quiet life with her family, their home, the community, place that they loved raising their children. But when Trump returned to office, Marabel got arrested without warning. She was deported back to Mitaka, Mexico, which is an area plagued by, you know, gang violence and so on. And now she only gets to speak to her children on video chats. She can't touch them. She can't she can't help her daughter and so on.
So then Stuki has to, you know, kind of justify this inhuman behavior, this cruelty. And she does it by invoking a handful of highly publicized crimes, murders committed by undoated undocumented immigrants in the US, even though we know that native born Americans commit far more crimes per capita. So then Stuki warns, you know, kind of Trump-like ominously about cartels, drugs, you know, sex slaves exploiting our quote unquote poorest border. And she concludes it includes, you know, quote, we can feel for people like Marabel while still keeping in mind the big picture. Mass illegal immigration enabled and encouraged by our leaders wres unnecessary and preventable havoc on our nation.
Okay. I mean, there's a lot of I would raise questions we could raise uh about that statement. I mean, what her, you know, kind of overview conveniently ignores is kind of the actual big picture elements of it. The US has depended since the 60s or 50s on, you know, massive influxes of both legal and illegal immigration which we needed to fill low-wage jobs, you know, agriculture jobs, industrial jobs. Nativeorn Americans refused to do it. And uh we also at the same time through our economic policies were destabilizing countries across the global south through the international monetary funds structural adjustment programs through our trade policies and the ways that our corporations would kind of corrupt governments and then extract resources from them.
Uh yeah, so we can see that our consumption of the lion's share of global CO2 and other resources has accelerated the environmental collapse in these regions forcing mass migration. So, for instance, I live in, you know, New York City in the East Village and there was a refugee processing center that in an abandoned school on my quarter last year and um yeah, there was a lot of African men lining up there every day. And I found out that a lot of them come from Ivory Coast and then I discovered that apparently um the Ivory Coast is the largest producer of chocolate in the world. It's I think it's way more than 50% of the world's chocolate is produced there. and Nestle's and Hershey's are the main companies that I'm sort of corrupted the the government there.
Uh they've um deforested 50% of the country is now deforested. And uh for the workers who work in the cacao plantations, they make an incredibly bad like 78 cents a day. And meanwhile with the deforestation, they can't, you know, live in a self-sufficient way. So, you know what happens is that families will choose one of their able-bodied young men and get you raise enough money to fly them to Central America or South America. They'll just walk north for it could be months, even a year if it's from Brazil, try to get across the border because if they can get a job in the US making like 10, 12, $15 an hour delivering for like Door Dash or something, uh that's obviously, you know, so much money for them they can send back to their families.
So and that that example of chocolate and Ivory Coast you know that's like repeated in all these countries all over the world which we really you know created markets um for and profit centers for our corporations and we've really yeah created a lot of this uh problem. So, you know, when we make this when when people like Stuki and Trump and everybody make these arguments against illegal immigration, they present them in this kind of hermetically sealed way, like this vacuum that just erases the the centuries of imperial policy that produced these crises in the first place. So, I don't I don't want to say that Stuki is consciously a hypocrite. She might be, but I think it's actually more disturbing. what what she's put together is a sort of coherent ideological system that has kind of inverted traditional Christian morality.
What we're really witnessing is the culmination of a long theological project, one that has weaponized Christian rhetoric to kind of sanctify inequality and authoritarian lawlessness. Stuki in her audience may believe they're enacting compassion by refusing to enable uh weakness. Uh but instead they've really performed a kind of psychologically alchemical act. They've taken their own surplus repression, their sense of self-throttling, and they've contorted that, turned it into a moral system. And having mastered the sort of um, you know, unfortunate art of denying their own needs and impulses, suppressing their own vulnerabilities and desires and eccentricities, uh, they now, you know, kind of, uh, demand the same kind of sacrifice from others.
It's like the super ego has crushed the vulnerable self and then it starts to project that logic outward. It's as if they're saying you must suffer as I have suffered. You must make yourself small as I have made myself. And you know once when of course we know this white Christian nationalism ideology goes totally against the core teaching of the gospels. If you go back to you know Christ's original teachings maybe not what came later in the New Testament by the church fathers or whatever. So you go back to Matthew, you know, Jesus says, you know, I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty, you gave something to drink.
I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me. When his followers asked when they saw him in these conditions, Christ replied, truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. So the instruction from the gospels is very clear. You're supposed to feed the hungry and help the poor. And the hungry person that you help is Christ himself. It is this sort of messianic being or force.
So, you know, withholding this food from 47 million people, it's not tough love. It's a total rejection of charity, compassion, divide and justice, just everything that's expressed directly in the gospels. And um yeah, so the you know, the teaching of the gospels directly negates this toxic empathy kind of stick uh of Stuki and other you know, Christian white nationalists and supreme courts, Zealots who somehow believe Trump is sent by God to bring about the rapture for the white people. Uh you know, the sermon on the mount is a foundational text of Christianity and also could not be any clearer. Uh talks about, you know, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs of the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they'll be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. That's from Matthew. Later from the same sermon, give to everyone who begs from you. Do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. Uh in Luke, it gets even more explicit. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much again. Uh you know, the whole point is to lend to your enemies. Love your enemies, do good, and lend expecting nothing in return. So then you have like you know the Christian mystical tradition which could be considered the heart of you know the Christian faith also points in the opposite direction like somebody like Meister Iikhart for instance you know he preached a radical dispossession of the self and and and its and its greed and so on.
Instead of promoting you know cruelty and miserliness he thought Christians should seek to become you know open to divine love which is kind of infinite. uh he he said the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. So the moment you truly see another person, you're seeing with God's eyes, which means you're seeing yourself. You're seeing the Christ. You the hungry person is not an other. Their hunger is your hunger. It's it's Christ's hunger. So the mystics recognize that sight separation is really itself the wound or or or the sin in a way. And you know, love and charity don't calculate or withhold.
Love is to dissolve the boundaries between self and the suffering of the other. So once again, you know, the calculated cruelty of the Supreme Court of this uh toxic empathy woman is very immoral, completely untenable and completely goes against the faith that they profess. There's another tradition within Cath Catholic Catholicism uh which is very popular in the global south um is liberation theology which insists that God actually makes a preferential option for the poor not because poverty is virtuous in itself but because God's love innately flows towards those who are under the boot who are crushed by systems of domination and you have people like Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Bof and their comrades who really understood that the gospel is taking a side with the oppressed against the oppressor, with the hungry against those who hoard and so on. And yeah, so if you're going to follow Christ in this interpretation, you would work selflessly for the overthrow of exploitation structures, structures that produce starvation, homelessness, and unnecessary despair. And yeah, I mean we should recognize that a society which is willing to allow 47 million people to go hungry while billionaires accumulate obscene wealth is not just unjust.
It is absolutely blasphemous according to the Christian faith. It desecrates the image of God and every human being. So you know it's pretty extraordinary how these white Christian nationalists have abandoned uh the mystical core the essential meaning of their own faith. And um you know the imperative we're stated again and again in the gospels is to dissolve the ego and serve the least among us. And that's been replaced by a technological theology of merit. A Calvinist Hall of mirrors where you know kind of wealth and privilege signal divine favor and poverty poverty and wallet and deprivation uh represent a moral failure. And yeah, the Supreme Court's cruelty may be draped in in cold legalizes, but it's it's clearly the the a deep betrayal of Christianity.
It's a Christianity without a Christ. It's a faith that destroys rather than heals.
Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.