Toxic Compassion is the prioritisation of short term emotional comfort over everything else. Over truth, reality, actual long-term outcomes, flourishing, everything. It optimises for looking good, rather than doing good.
People would rather claim that body fat has no bearing on health and mortality outcomes. Even if this causes them to literally die sooner or have a worse quality of life.
Parents would rather allow children to access social media every night instead of dealing with the discomfort of taking it away. Even if it ruins their brain development, social skills and self esteem.
Campaigners would sooner shout Defund The Police in response to what they perceive as unfair treatment. Even if this results in more crimes being committed against people from minority backgrounds.
"What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good, while doing evil" ~ Elon Musk
The tradeoff is between appearing good and actually doing good. Telling people what they want to hear and avoiding distress prioritises the former. The net effect is often wildly negative. It's the toddler who wants to eat ice cream every night. Sure that might be what they want in the moment, but it'll be wildly unhealthy over the long term.
The opposite is Performative Empathy. Saying whatever is required to look good, even if you don't actually care. You can be the least virtuous, meanest, most dishonest human on earth, but if you say the right things on social media, you look like a saint. No one stress tests the words coming out of people's mouths. Which means that appearing good becomes more important than doing good.
Performative empathy is more rewarded than genuine empathy. Posting about mistreated groups is more incentivised than helping mistreated groups. But that many (maybe even most) of the people who proselytise about how virtuous and caring they are, and how it's everyone else who is evil, uncaring and the enemy are allowing morality to stand on the shoulders of limited scrutiny.
"It's like 'look at how good I am'. Well if the 'look at' comes before the 'how good I am' it really wreaks havoc on the claim?"
Beware the people who prioritise saying good things, they might not be doing good things.