Modern compassion is loud, immediate, and collective. It is expressed in slogans, hashtags, yard signs, and ritual affirmations that signal moral alignment at scale. What it is less often is personal, costly, or binding. We have become very good at expressing care, but very bad at assuming responsibility.
The danger here is not insincerity. Most people who participate in these displays mean well. The danger is structural. When compassion is industrialized — centralized, abstracted, and detached from consequence — it begins to drift. It no longer asks what can realistically be done, who must pay the cost, or where responsibility lies. Instead, it satisfies the moral needs of the compassionate while leaving the suffering largely untouched.
Two stories — one associated with the political left, one with the right — reveal this problem with uncomfortable clarity.
#Bring Back Our Girls
In April 2014, the Islamist militant group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria. The girls were taken from their boarding school in the middle of the night and carried into territory controlled by an insurgent group already infamous for mass killings, forced conversions, and sexual slavery.
The horror of the act was undeniable. The victims were children. The perpetrators were clear and the injustice absolute.
Within weeks, the phrase “Bring Back Our Girls” spread across the world. It appeared on signs, hashtags, social media profiles, and news broadcasts. Celebrities amplified it, political leaders echoed it, and most memorably, the First Lady of the United States held a sign bearing the slogan inside the White House, elevating the campaign to a global moral symbol.
The outrage was genuine and the compassion sincere. But the "action" was almost entirely symbolic.
The campaign imposed no cost on its participants. It created no durable responsibility and it bound no one to outcomes. Our government offered intelligence cooperation and advisory support, but the moral intensity of the messaging far exceeded the willingness to assume real operational risk or long-term obligation.
The result was predictable. The slogan traveled the globe, but the girls did not come home.
Some eventually escaped. Others were later released through negotiations. Many have never been recovered, and Boko Haram continued its campaign. The hashtag faded.
This is not an argument that the United States or any other nation could simply have “fixed” the problem. That debate is endless and beside the point. The failure lies elsewhere. If a problem is too complex or constrained to be meaningfully addressed, it should not be transformed into a mass moral performance. Doing so substitutes expression for responsibility. It produces moral heat without force and then dissipates.
The campaign centered the moral experience of the observer, not the lived reality of the victims. Compassion became something one declared, not something one bore. It created a way for participants in the campaign to feel better without really doing anything.
Support Our Troops
Now for something near and dear to conservatives. After September 11, 2001, “Support Our Troops” became a near-sacred phrase in American life. It expressed real gratitude for service and sacrifice. In its origins, it was a serious moral sentiment.
Over time, it hardened into a slogan, one that required very little of the people who used it.
Less than one percent of Americans served in the post-9/11 wars. There was no draft. No shared national sacrifice. No war tax. Military service became concentrated among a small, repeat-serving population and their families (including my own: my husband, brother, and son served in the Navy, Army, and Marines after 9/11), while the broader public expressed support symbolically while carrying on largely untouched.
Though public affirmation flourished, restraint did not. The wars continued, but without clear objectives or endpoints. Deployments stacked. Families absorbed the strain. Veterans returned to systems ill-prepared to deal with the physical and psychological aftermath, resulting today in an explosion of mental health issues and homelessness.
Worse, the same institutions proclaiming support increasingly treated the military as a testing ground for civilian social priorities. Progressive administrations imposed policies informed by ideology, not military necessity. Discipline and cohesion were strained. Bodily autonomy — already constrained by the nature of service — was further eroded in the name of administrative certainty and moral urgency; in the most egregious case, troops were required to accept an experimental vaccine, an illegal order, or separate from the service.
Here again, the pattern holds. Symbolic compassion insulated decision-makers while the cost remained concentrated among those with the least power. Public honor substituted for institutional responsibility.
Gratitude flowed upward. Consequences flowed downward.
The Pattern
The distance between “Bring Back Our Girls,” “Support Our Troops,” and what follows may seem vast. It isn’t. In each case, compassion was expressed at scale, detached from cost, insulated from responsibility, and unmoored from limits. In the first, global moral outrage substituted for the assumption of risk. In the second, ritualized gratitude substituted for restraint and care.
Different victims. Different politics. Same moral architecture.
In both cases, compassion was transformed from a personal act into a public performance, something declared rather than borne. Responsibility flowed upward into systems, while consequences flowed downward onto the vulnerable. Those closest to the suffering paid the price. The rest of society retained its moral self-image.
This is what industrialized compassion does. It resolves the feeling of moral obligation without resolving the reality of suffering. And when suffering persists, as it always does, the system, bureaucratized and depersonalized, must protect its legitimacy. It cannot admit limits without confessing failure.
So it redefines compassion.
What Compassion Actually Is
Compassion is one of the most used moral words in modern life, and one of the least examined. We invoke it reflexively, attach it to policies, and treat disagreement as evidence of its absence. But compassion is not a mood, a posture, or an identity. It is a practice, and a demanding one.
At its core, compassion is the voluntary assumption of responsibility for another person’s suffering. Not the elimination of suffering at any cost. Not sympathy at a distance. It is responsibility assumed freely, borne personally, and carried over time.
Real compassion is always costly.
Cost is not incidental; it is how compassion proves itself real. Time spent, energy expended, comfort surrendered, risk accepted — these are not unfortunate side effects. They are the signal that someone has moved from feeling to presence.
Without cost, compassion becomes management, or worse, theater.
Just as importantly, real compassion has limits. This is not a moral failure. It is a human reality. Every person has finite resources. Every act of care requires prioritization. To help here is not to help everywhere; choices with real consequences must be made. These tradeoffs are not hardness. They are honesty.
A compassion that denies limits is not more humane. It is less. By pretending care can be infinite, it detaches itself from real bodies and real consequences. It floats free of responsibility and begins to demand enforcement.
Here the confusion sets in.
We increasingly treat compassion as a right to an outcome, rather than a gift borne by another. Suffering becomes an entitlement claim, and compassion an obligation to be met by the system. Once this shift occurs, compassion is no longer something one does. It is something one demands.
And demands require power.
The Industrialization of Niceness
Niceness is not a virtue. It is a social strategy.
At the personal level, niceness smooths interactions. It avoids conflict and signals goodwill. There is nothing wrong with it in its place. The problem begins when niceness is mistaken for moral seriousness and scaled up. When niceness is industrialized, it stops functioning as a lubricant and becomes a governing ethic.
Industrialized niceness prioritizes emotional comfort over truth, harmony over clarity, and offense-avoidance over problem-solving. Discomfort becomes a moral emergency. Conflict becomes harm. At scale, this shifts how societies understand compassion.
Instead of asking, Who will take responsibility? industrial niceness asks, How do we make this stop? Instead of tolerating tragedy, it demands remediation immediately, cleanly, and invisibly. And because individuals cannot supply that relief, the demand transfers to institutions.
This is how compassion becomes bureaucratic.
Centralized systems are good at administering services and enforcing rules. They are bad at moral judgment. They cannot accompany suffering. They can only process it. As a result, they drift toward solutions that are legible, efficient, and final. And here is the key problem: systems cannot admit limits without admitting failure.
A family can say, “I can’t do everything.” A friend can say, “I will stay, but I am exhausted.” A system cannot say these things. Its legitimacy depends on the promise that suffering can be addressed if only the right policy is applied. Limits become intolerable, not practically, but morally.
So niceness redefines the terms. Care becomes access. Dignity becomes choice. Compassion becomes outcomes.
And suffering becomes something that must be eliminated, as in the case study of Canada's assisted dying policies.
MAID: Compassion After Limits Are Denied
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program is often discussed as a response to rare, extreme cases. That description no longer fits.
Today, roughly five percent of all deaths in Canada result from MAID, a proportion that has risen steadily year after year. What began as an exceptional measure for the terminally ill has expanded to include chronic illness, disability, and non-terminal suffering. The trajectory is unmistakable.
This did not happen because Canadians became cruel. It happened because a system committed to eliminating suffering, but unwilling to acknowledge limits, ran out of options.
Accompaniment — simply having another human being present to share the burden of illness — is strongly associated with better patient well-being, emotional stability, and even resilience in the face of decline. For most of human history, families, churches, and local communities provided this presence as a matter of obligation rather than convenience. Today, that work is widely described as impossible: too time-consuming, too emotionally taxing, too disruptive to modern life. Because accompaniment is unpleasant, inefficient, and unscalable, it has been quietly offloaded to institutions — not because they do it better, but because they allow individuals and communities to avoid it altogether.
As care became centralized, prolonged, and scarcer, and as families, churches, and local communities weakened (largely as a result of being seen as not so necessary because The Government Should Take Care Of This), accompaniment grew harder to sustain. Suffering that could not be cured began to look like failure. Dependency became “loss of dignity.” Persistence became “cruelty.” Death was reframed as relief. And over time, the attitude toward assisted suicide has relaxed, making it not just a reluctant solution to an insoluble problem, but a tactic that can be used when resources are strained enough that solvable problems are just too expensive to address.
MAID is not the opposite of industrialized niceness. It is its conclusion.
When compassion is defined as the obligation to make suffering stop, the continued existence of the sufferer becomes the problem to solve. The system does not hate them. It thanks them, reassures them, and offers a clean exit, politely, legally, and with full moral confidence.
It is efficient. It is gentle.
And it is fatal.
The Same Pattern, Reappearing
The throughline is not malice. It is avoidance: avoidance of cost, limits, and responsibility.
In each case — kidnapped girls, honored troops, suffering patients — compassion became performance. Responsibility centralized. Consequences localized. Reality managed rather than borne.
By the time a society reaches MAID, the moral groundwork has already been laid. Death is not introduced as cruelty, but as consistency, the final answer in a culture trained to believe suffering must never be tolerated and anything is preferable.
A More Demanding Kind of Compassion
The problem is not that we care too much. It is that we have learned to care without bearing responsibility, and to confuse moral expression with moral action. We have taught ourselves that compassion is something to be declared collectively, rather than practiced personally, something enforced by systems rather than carried by people.
Real compassion is personal and individual, not procedural. It cannot be bureaucratized without distortion. It exists between particular people, in particular circumstances, binding one human being to another in ways no institution can replicate.
Because it is personal, real compassion does not promise universal solutions. It accepts limits, tradeoffs, and unfinished obligations. It recognizes that some forms of suffering cannot be solved without distortion and that continued responsibility is often more honest than symbolic resolution.
This kind of compassion cannot be scaled up without breaking. It resists slogans and abstraction. It exacts a personal cost that cannot be outsourced, and that very cost is the safeguard. When societies abandon this model, they do not become more humane. They become more efficient at avoiding discomfort and eventually, more willing to erase, by any means, whatever suffering cannot be made tidy.
The way forward is not harder hearts or less mercy. It is adult compassion, bounded, personal, and accountable. Compassion that can say “I will help,” but also “I cannot do everything.”
Responsibility cannot be centralized without corruption. Care cannot be bureaucratized without coercion. And compassion, once detached from the individual willing to bear its cost, ceases to be compassion at all.
If we cannot recover that understanding, we will continue to mistake the quiet displacement of responsibility — and its human cost — for progress and call it kindness as we do.
Editor’s Note: If you love PJ Media's cultural content like this essay, support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member