00:00:00.000Of course, if I need to hijack and parasitize your capacity to reason, I then have to make sure that I zombify both of these systems.
00:00:10.460So the parasitic mind explained what happens when your cognitive system is parasitized, and now I complete the story by explaining what happens when your emotional system, in this case, as invoked by your empathy module, when it is hijacked.
00:00:28.260and so maybe I could explain a bit what suicidal empathy is. Empathy is a perfectly laudable
00:00:36.300virtue. We are a social species, and so in order for you and I to have a meaningful interaction,
00:00:42.740I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. One of the ways that we, the main way that we
00:00:48.460detect and diagnose whether a child is autistic is we give them a theory of mind test, which they
00:00:54.620invariably fail. So it is perfectly admirable if someone is empathetic. You want your veterinarian
00:01:02.880to be empathetic. You want your physician or therapist to be empathetic. You want your spouse
00:01:07.220and best friends to be empathetic. But like Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago,
00:01:14.320everything in good moderation. Too little of something is not good. Too much of something is
00:01:19.680not good. And much of life is spent finding that optimal sweet spot. And that exactly applies to
00:01:25.980empathy. If I'm not in the least bit empathetic, that's called being psychopath. If I am too
00:01:31.620empathetic, that can lead to suicidal empathy. So suicidal empathy is the misfiring of an otherwise
00:01:39.540adaptive virtue, not only in that it becomes hyperactive, right, it overfires, and it targets
00:01:46.920the wrong situations and the wrong targets so caring about the rapist is if he's a rapist0.74
00:01:55.200of color becomes more important than caring about the victim0.92