An Evening at the Reagan Library Discussing Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1003)
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
17
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Toxicity
47
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Hate speech
63
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Michael Goldstein talks about his new book, "Suicidal Empathy," and how it relates to anti-Semitism. Dr. Goldstein is a professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi and the author of the book.
Transcript
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We'll start really easy. I scrambled all those words up. What do you mean by suicidal empathy?
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So as you correctly said, empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait. So this is
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not an attack on empathy. We are a social species. For you and I to have a meaningful conversation,
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I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called theory of mind,
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which is part of cognitive empathy. But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years
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ago, too little of something is not good. Too much of something is not good. And much of life
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is about finding that sweet spot. The same applies to empathy. Too little empathy, you could be a
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psychopath. Too much empathy, if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, and if
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it faces the inappropriate targets, caring more about Guatemalan illegal immigrants than caring
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about American vets who might have lost their limbs fighting for the freedoms of the United
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States, then you have that cocktail of suicidal empathy.
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And was there a specific moment, a specific story that made you say, I need to write this
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So I've been a professor now for 32 years, and I hate to say this, but pretty much every
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single devastatingly bad idea that ultimately led to suicidal empathy was spawned regrettably
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on university campuses, because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas.
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Especially because, as Thomas Sowell also explained, when you have disciplines that
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are fully decoupled from the auto-corrective mechanisms of reality, you can stand up, pontificate
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about nonsense, and reality doesn't sort of slap you back out of your stupor.
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And this is, by the way, why some fields, the business school, the engineering school,
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are less likely to be parasitized by suicidal empathy
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because you can't build a bridge using lesbian dance theory.
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using queer indigenous ancestral knowledge.
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And because of that, there are some disciplines
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that are inherently more likely to have this kind of nonsense.
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So for me, it's been a long journey ending up in this book,
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Well, so being a professor, seeing this on college campuses, and we're going to
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talk about suicidal empathy a little bit more as we get into this, but when you're confronted
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with it, with students protesting or things that you're seeing on campus, how are you
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Luckily, in my classes, I didn't have too much of that stuff.
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Maybe in part because I was very disciplined to not bring any political discussions.
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If I'm teaching a course on evolutionary psychology or psychology of decision making, I don't
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have to tell the students what my thoughts are on Justin Trudeau.
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And so I wouldn't get, I wouldn't, and if you want to guess, they're not very, they're
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So I didn't experience it in my classrooms, but where I did experience the craziness is
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I'm now leaving, actually, Concordia and joining Ole Miss permanently as a distinguished professor.
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And one of the reasons I left, maybe the main reason, is because after October 7th, it became incredibly difficult for me.
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I'm a very outspoken defender of the Jewish people.
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My university, the one in Montreal, has been colloquially referred to as Gaza University for 25 years.
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And so it simply became infeasible for me to be there.
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And it turns out that the Mississippians, I call them the honorary Lebanese.
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Their culture of hospitality is like the Lebanese.
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So I think we're going to fit in very nicely there.
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So I actually want to ask a question about that. I'm actually also Jewish, and I found
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there were some sections in your book that you talked about the growing rise of anti-Semitism.
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And you even talked about how it's the one area where suicidal empathy almost doesn't seem to be
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going toward the Jews. It almost seems to be going against it. And as I was reading your book,
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I saw an article, so I'm going to read it. It was an Axios article, and the article was called
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Explosion of Antisemitism, and basically it was saying the same thing. The level of antisemitism
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is growing. There seems to be no empathy toward the Jewish race right now, and I was just curious
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why you thought that. So I think, I mean, there are several reasons, but one of which is the idea
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that the Jews are viewed as the oppressors and not the oppressed. So it literally, I mean,
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literally within one day of October 7th, the Jews had exhausted their possible well of empathy
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because already at my university, there were preemptive protests against Israel. Israel hadn't
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yet fired a single weapon and already the Jews were no longer deserving of empathy. But to the
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point about Jews and empathy, even the Israelis, by the way, suffer from suicidal empathy because
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the architect of October 7th, Yahia Sinwar, had been imprisoned for life as a terrorist.
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But while he was in prison, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
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And the Israelis thought that their Hippocratic oath, their desire to save even their worst
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avowed enemy, superseded their feelings of repulsion towards him.
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They saved him and that didn't buy them any empathy.
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He repaid them by being the architect of October 7th.
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There's a chapter in your book where a woman's being interviewed, right?
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And she's attending a pro-Palestinian rally.
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You describe her as a pink haired gay woman.
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And when it's explained to her that if she actually went to Palestine, as she is, she'd
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Why do you think people aren't even realizing what they're protesting for?
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It's more almost now they feel like they have a right to protest, whether they even understand
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So this is why I use the framework of neuroparasitology, and let me explain what that is.
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Parasitology is simply the study of host parasite interactions.
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So a tapeworm could be a parasite, but it parasitizes your intestinal tract.
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A neuroparasite is a parasite that needs to end up in the host's brain,
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So you often, those of you who follow me on social media or maybe who've read the book,
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When somebody is exhibiting that type of suicidal tendencies, I call them a wood cricket.
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A wood cricket, the actual insect, abhors water.
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But when it is parasitized by a hair worm that goes to its brain, the hair worm needs
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the wood cricket to jump in water, merrily committing suicide in order for it to complete
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So the pink-haired lesbian woman is behaving exactly akin to the wood cricket.
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So, how do you actually determine what is the right level of empathy?
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So, empathy, like most things, have to be tethered to an evolutionary calculus.
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So for example, I've done studies with one of my former doctoral students where we looked
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at how do people allocate their gift-giving budgets.
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If I give you $1,000, how will you allocate that budget?
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And it turns out that people, even unbeknownst to them, they may not know the evolutionary
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reasons, are very, very well calibrated to give their gifts in a way that makes evolutionary
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So, I give to close kin larger gifts than I would give to a second or third cousin.
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I give more to my siblings and my children than I would to a second cousin, meaning that
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there is an evolutionary calculus that is behind my allocation of investments.
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The trolley problem is a problem that you typically see in experimental philosophy.
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If a trolley is burling down towards three of your biological children and you could
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pull a lever and it could be diverted and kill five random strangers, what will you
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Well, the evolutionary logic is not that since three is smaller than five, kill your children
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because most of us would be much more willing to jump in front of a bus
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to save our biological children for obvious evolutionary reasons.
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And so empathy is also bound by an evolutionary calculus.
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Let me give you one example, but there are a million of these in the book.
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A woman was gang raped in Germany by a bunch of men
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When the cops tried to identify who the perpetrators were
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One of them was, what language were they speaking?
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that might marginalize the noble Middle Eastern community.
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So she lied and said that they were speaking German.
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has this phenomenon become more pronounced in recent years or are we just paying more
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attention to it it has become more pronounced because of the cocktail of parasitic ideas that
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have turned us into wood crickets and let me give you a specific example in one of my earlier books
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in the parasitic mind I talk about what I call idea pathogens that literally hijack our capacity
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to engage in critical thinking. So one such pathogen is called cultural relativism. Cultural
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relativism is the idea that it's wrong for you. It's culturally imperialistic of you
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to judge the beliefs and practices of another culture. If they wish to cut off the clitorises
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of five-year-old girls, shut up racist. If they wish to have child brides, shut up racist. If
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they wish to engage in honor killings, shut up racist. Well, if I internalize cultural relativism,
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it then renders me impotent in terms of saying, I don't want people who hold those beliefs to be
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let into my country. Therefore, I'm much more likely to become suicidally empathetic in my
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open border policies. So internalizing the parasitic idea leads to suicidal empathy.
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So I love all these terms you have. And so I'm going to give a couple more in your book.
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Yes. I think I know where we're going with this.
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There's a chapter, and you're using terminology, and I had to read the chapter a couple times because I had to keep going back to what you wrote.
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So he says, using suicidal empathy, they're no longer home invaders. They're surprise house guests.
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They're no longer rapists. They're undocumented lovemakers.
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Yes, yes, that was, that was, um, can you, this is really just a continuation of your
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last answer, but can you sort of talk about these shifts?
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So one of the reasons why I think, if I may say my satire is very successful is because
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I take an insane position and I push it to its extreme boundary.
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And then I kind of cross my hands and wait for reality to catch up to my satire.
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And that's, by the way, one of the reasons why dictators typically, when they try to
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eliminate people, the first ones they eliminate are not the ones with the big muscles.
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They eliminate the ones with the sharp tongues, the ones with the venomous pen.
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Because it's those guys that can attack my dictatorial positions.
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So satire, and by the way, to my great chagrin, many of my academic colleagues who are high
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falutin, who speak with a progressive lisp, who cross their legs like Justin Trudeau,
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they think that it is unbecoming of a professor to use some of the communication modalities
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that I use, but that's why they're imbeciles, because I'm in the business of trying to change
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So within my weaponry, my toolbox, I can use many different tools.
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Sometimes I can use humor, sometimes I can be as professorial as you can get.
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So I'm not a one-trick pony, all possible modalities are up for grabs in order to change
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So in addition to calling types of people different names that are both eye-opening
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and funny and scary, you also have a chapter where you list a whole slew of what you call
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misguided inequalities. So an example that I wrote down was you call, you know, my truth is always
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greater than your truth. Another misguided inequality you list is socialism is greater
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than capitalism. Now, I found this quote from President Reagan, so I'm going to read it.
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We've been creeping closer to socialism, a system that someone once said works only in heaven where
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it isn't needed and in hell where they've already got it. What's your recommendations for writing
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this wrong. Specifically socialism? So I'm going to tell you a quote that I often use when discussing
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socialism. It comes from E.O. Wilson. I don't know if any of you know who that is. He's a Harvard
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biologist who recently passed away. He was an entomologist. He studied social ants. Now social
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ants have a unique social structure in that there is a reproductive queen and then there's a whole
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cast of indistinguishable worker ants and a whole cast of indistinguishable warrior ants,
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soldier ants. So when he was asked, when E.O. Wilson was asked, Professor Wilson, what are
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your thoughts on socialism slash communism? He gave one of the arguably greatest pithy answers
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that I've ever heard. He said, great idea, wrong species. Right? Meaning that social ants are,
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have evolved a social structure that is communistic but human beings are not communistic because we
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are a hierarchical species. Some of us are taller, shorter, better looking, worse looking, harder
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working, less hard working. So to impose a socio-political economic system as per socialism
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slash communism on a species that is hierarchical, you'll end up with always the same outcome. It's
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been tried a hundred times. It always fails. But rest assured, Bernie Sanders and occasional
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Cortex AOC is going to solve it for us. We're saved. Just out of curiosity, because
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you are a college professor, do you see a lot of college students supporting the idea
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of socialism? Yes. Yes. Because socialism is an idea that is very cute when I'm in grade
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one, right? Sharing is caring, right? But then there is this thing called growing up
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and reality, and you receive that first paycheck. If you're in Canada, by the way, if any of
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you dare complain about your taxes in California, come live in Quebec for a while. Let me just
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tell you what socialist utopia Quebec looks like. The highest marginal tax at the federal
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level is 33%. At the provincial level, it's 25.75%. So we're getting into the high 50s.
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Now the 42% that remains in my pocket, if I go out and spend it, I'm taxed both provincial
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sales tax and federal sales tax at 15%. So now I've already lost 58%. Now the money that's
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left, I've lost 15%, add carbon tax, Mother Earth tax, hugging the trees tax, and the
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rest of them, I end up with probably about 30 cents to the dollar.
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If I start working on January 1st, I work for free for the government until end of August,
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and starting in September, they allow me to keep my money.
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I said you know what I'm going to do it as an honorary American
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here at the Reagan Library, the Reagan Foundation Institute
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We do a lot of work on civility, really the goal of how do we disagree better, how can
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How can we encourage open debate without dehumanizing, thank you, those who disagree.
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Yesterday, we were in an area of Newport Beach called Crystal Cove.
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We were sitting down, I think you know maybe where I'm going to go with the story.
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My wife and I were sitting there, a gentleman sits down, and we're friendly, so we started
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start talking to him he's iranian muslim okay another friend of his comes along one of the
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very rare iranian christians and here are the lebanese jews we sat down around the table
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lebanese jew iranian christian iranian muslim had you know very intense conversation in completely
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good spirit we walked away shaking hands it's possible i think you know your morphology if you
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one of the reasons i think people resonate with my even when i'm dealing with very difficult
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subjects. I'm often smiley. They call me the happy warrior. So there is a way to interact with people
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even on very difficult subjects so that you walk away still feeling as though they're not your
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enemy. I recently had a chat with Joe Rogan who is a good friend of mine. This was I think my 12th
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appearance on this show. Usually we go all over the place. It's a very organic conversation. We
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he kept raising sort of anti-Israel talking points,
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have to do it with civility while being agreeable.
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So there is a way to be able to disagree in an agreeable way.
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Do you think any of this harsher disagreement has sort of stemmed from how fast social media is growing
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and the fact that you can somewhat be anonymous on social media?
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I mean, if I just look at the hate that I get, I get orgiastically more hate online than I do in person.
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I've only had once a person threaten me directly in real life,
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whereas I receive a gazillion death threats online
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But I don't want to throw away the potential of social media
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because, yes, there is a bad side to social media,
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the number of people that I've been able to reach,
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I could have never done so if I had been a stay-in-your-lane professor.
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So there are good and bad to everything, including social media.
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I mean, there is, and in the last chapter, the whole chapter is about inoculation against
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suicidal empathy. Maybe I can give you a few specifics, and then I can maybe blow it up to
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30,000 feet above. Many of the people who succumb to suicidal empathy are stuck in what I call the
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myopia of first order effects, meaning that they don't recognize that the world is comprised of
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like a butterfly effect, right? There are sequences. So it's nice when people knock
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at the borders of a country to let them in, all of them, because that gives me an immediate
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dopamine hit, right? It's an empathy-based dopamine hit. I could stroke my luxuriant
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hair in the mirror of moral preening and say I'm such a good person, right? But there are
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downstream consequences of that, and hence the myopia of first order effect. For example,
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if you let in millions of people that come from cultures that couldn't be any more antithetical
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in their foundational values to our foundational values, it shouldn't surprise you that you're
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going to have a rise of Jew hatred, of homophobia, you're going to have Dearborn, you're going
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to have Patterson, New Jersey. You're going to have Minnesota. And as the demographic
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realities change, the inherent fabrics of American exceptionalism will disappear, right?
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The United States is not the United States because you have beautiful Pacific Ocean.
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It's because there is a set of values that are part of the American ethos that is truly
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unique in the history of world societies. Don't lose that. And it's a sad state that
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But it takes a Lebanese Jewish Canadian to have to remind you of that.
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So what practical habits can ordinary citizens adopt to remain compassionate while also thinking
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Always remember that like anything in life, as I mentioned earlier, it's not a linear
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It's not more empathy is always better than less empathy.
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So once you start getting into the diminishing returns of that curve, you're exhibiting maladaptive
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And so it's difficult because it's on a case-by-case basis.
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But for example, the trans activism stems from a misguided form of empathy, whereby
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the transgender person, a.k.a. a woman with a penis, is afforded greater empathy on the
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podium than all of the biological women that otherwise have just been cheated out of a
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And the reason for that is because your empathy calculus has become hijacked.
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That unique person called the transgender person is worth more empathy than all of the
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it's not an orgiastic never-ending empathy it has to be tethered to a biological reality
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so i have additional questions but i want to ask them at the end so we're going to turn to the
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audience but just out of curiosity um what are your most popular classes that you currently teach
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well you so in all of my courses whether it be consumer psychology or psychology of decision
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making or whatever it is i always apply evolutionary psychology to explain the biological underpinnings
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of why we do the things that we do and that's really where the students minds are blown away
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because most students especially i'm housed in i mean at old miss it'll be a different department
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but historically i've been housed at the business school i apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary
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psychology to study consumer behavior and most students in the business school or in the social
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sciences in general have never applied biology to study human behavior which is quite extraordinary
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right every single other species on earth you would never dare study that species without
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invoking its biological heritage there's only one species called homo sapiens that you could study
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anthropology sociology economics psychology without ever exploring the biological imperatives
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that make us human. And so usually the most successful classes are the ones where the
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students are really learning about evolution and psychology.
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We're going to turn to all of you in the audience. We do have staff members with microphones.
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Please do wait for a microphone to be brought to you so that the people watching at home
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can hear your question. There's someone coming. Hold on one second.
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like is when it ultimately does commit suicide.
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I think my concern, my question is, do you see a way that Western civil nation comes out of this before the actual suicide?
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So this genre of question, I usually answer with both.
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The good news is that there is an actionable solution that the West can implement to auto-correct what I call civilizational seppuku.
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Seppuku, for those of you who don't know, seppuku is in the Japanese culture, certainly the samurai class, where it's an honor culture.
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Nothing is worse than losing face, you know, living a shameful life.
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The only way that you could then redeem yourself is if you self-disembowel, right?
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And so I argue that the West is committing civilizational seppuku, right?
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We're transphobic, Islamophobic, bigoted, patriarchal.
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So the only way that we can resolve this problem is to commit civilizational seppuku.
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So the good news is that there are very easily accessible autocorrective procedures.
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Don't let in people who don't share your foundational values.
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Not everybody has the God-given right to be in America, right?
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If you sit and chant death to Jews, death to the infidels all day long, then you don't belong here, okay?
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I see zero evidence that the West is willing to implement even one millimeter of autocorrection.
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As a matter of fact, what I'm seeing is a doubling down and tripling down in the suicidal empathy.
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Now, the United States, since we're here in the U.S. and certainly in this austere environment,
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You'll be happy to know that I've already assigned Canada as stage five suicide.
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Which is higher than the heretofore known stage four, which is the highest level.
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Some of the Scandinavian countries are at stage five.
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Now you're at stage two only because there are certain inoculations that you have.
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First Amendment, Second Amendment, and a few other things that makes it a bit more difficult
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for you to swim in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy.
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But if you don't listen to guys like me, you will end up in the very laudable stage five
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If it's okay with you, I'd like to consider you and think of you as a quintessential
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And by the way, thank you for your body of work.
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My question has to do with, I think it's understandable to think of this as a divided
00:29:03.420
If you consider a metric, the 80-20 metric on various issues, and I think what has happened,
00:29:13.240
like the camel's nose under the tent, what I consider the industrial derangement complex
00:29:21.820
has come into the tent and has taken over the sensibilities of this country and has
00:29:28.260
created the sense that it is a divided country.
00:29:32.880
Like I said, it's easy to think that, if you saw hearings today, you see the House of Representatives
00:29:39.120
50-50, Senate 50-50, but I do wonder whether it's really 80-20.
00:29:47.100
I think unless you address this industrial derangement complex, how do you actually make
00:30:00.240
The good news is it's even more than 80-20 in that the silent majority abhors all this
00:30:08.040
The problem is, you know, I've always said that we need to update the seven deadly sins
00:30:12.800
to add an eighth one, which is pathological cowardice, right?
00:30:16.780
So most people are so cowardly, are so cowed into the herd mentality that you have professors
00:30:23.360
who will say things like yes yes of course men too can menstruate yes yes evolutionary biologists
00:30:29.680
say that right so imagine that i receive emails from just regular adults dear professor saad i'm
00:30:37.680
just wondering is it true that men now can menstruate so the fact that in the 21st century
00:30:44.800
a functioning human being needs to write to me to receive the professorial imprimatur that no
00:30:51.760
men cannot menstruate, suggests that something has gone wrong parasitically, right?
00:30:57.300
But again, to come back to your point, it's not 80-20.
00:31:02.940
The only reason why all the parasitic monster ideas are flourishing is precisely because
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00:31:10.880
So let me give you, and I've mentioned this on many occasions, but it's worth repeating,
00:31:15.240
probably the template of the most common email that I receive is the following one.
00:31:20.300
Dear Professor Saad, many, many compliments, and it ends with the following last sentence.
00:31:27.820
If you choose to read this email, finish the sentence for me.
00:31:36.140
I usually write back and say, dear so-and-so, thank you very much for your lovely words.
00:31:42.080
Don't you think your last sentence is exactly the reason why we are in the current predicament
00:31:48.580
So the reality is most people privately come to me and say, go on, thank you.
00:31:54.740
But then I say, but why don't you stand up with me?
00:31:57.780
And there's always a justification for why you shouldn't put your neck out, right?
00:32:05.300
I have to leave Montreal because of the death threats.
00:32:08.000
I have to always have armed security because of the death threats.
00:32:11.380
My children and wife can never be shown in public because I don't want the threats to go to them.
00:32:18.160
Because what most people do is they say, Ghat Saad can handle it.
00:32:23.680
But if we all stand up and in unison say, enough of this stuff, the problem will be solved by next Tuesday.
00:32:39.980
So along those lines, I was wondering if you could just speak to maybe the dangers or maybe the thoughts of somebody who works in an empathetic field, but the calculus is totally skewed and it's causing a reverberation of like isolation and not wanting to be a part of society and wanting to move away.
00:33:03.940
not from the cause of like not being bold or courageous, but from the fact that you
00:33:11.620
So I can maybe answer that using my own personal experience.
00:33:15.460
So in the university ecosystem, the epistemology that should drive our behavior,
00:33:21.160
epistemology means philosophy of knowledge, right?
00:33:23.820
What should be driving our behavior is what's called the epistemology of truth,
00:33:27.860
We use the scientific method to try to approximate the truth out there to better
00:33:33.940
better understand the world. Well, the epistemology of truth has now been taken over within the
00:33:40.980
university ecosystem by what's called an epistemology of care. And that I'm sorry to say
00:33:47.140
for all of the lovely ladies that are in this room stems from the feminization of the university,
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00:33:53.380
right? So when I now sit in departmental meetings at my Canadian university, not Ole Miss,
1.00
00:33:59.780
Ole Miss is full of brawny, masculine, sexy men. But at my home university in Canada,
00:34:12.460
whenever a departmental meeting was run by a woman, I felt as though I had regressed
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00:34:17.780
back to kindergarten class. How's everybody doing? How's everything going? Why are you
0.50
00:34:22.780
speaking to me in this tone? As if I'm a three-year-old child. But it's because they are a lot more
00:34:28.020
caring than us toxic masculine men. We only care about pursuing the truth, but truth takes
00:34:35.460
a back seat to empathy. Now, how does that manifest itself in the practice of science?
00:34:40.400
Well, I talk in the book about forbidden knowledge. Forbidden knowledge is the idea that if you're
00:34:47.500
going to do a research program, that ultimately the results might end up hurting the feelings
00:34:55.000
of a marginalized group, then truth takes the back seat against not doing the research.
00:35:01.620
So, for example, if you want to make sure to never flourish in academia, do research
00:35:16.540
So, if you do studies on sex differences and the results show that women are better on
0.97
00:35:22.860
a task than men, then publish those findings with pride because you're breaking the antiquated
00:35:30.100
sexist stereotypes. But if, God forbid, you find that men actually do something, anything
00:35:37.980
better than women, as you should expect in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic
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00:35:44.580
species, then you better bury those in the drawer because if you publish those results,
1.00
00:35:52.880
So that's the problem, which is the university ecosystem,
00:35:56.860
which should only be about meritocracy, individual excellence, truth,
00:36:02.220
has been completely hijacked by an epistemology of care.
00:36:06.700
So I don't know in your case what you'd have to do.
00:36:38.000
It depends on whether you're saying it to a man or a woman.
0.99
00:36:47.000
question I've always wanted to ask you is, is suicidal empathy something modern? Because
00:36:51.960
you said that it's caused by idea pathogens, by internalizing them. And the granddaddy
00:36:56.780
of these idea pathogens, as you said, is postmodernism. So my question is before postmodernism, before
00:37:04.480
the objectivity of truth or lack thereof, did we have suicidal empathy?
00:37:10.160
Not suicidal empathy in the precise way that I'm defining it, but I'll answer your question
00:37:14.600
in a more general way. The capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is not a current
00:37:21.800
feature. The difference is in the specific parasitic ideas that are prevalent today,
00:37:28.300
right? Viruses have always existed, but Ebola is different than shingles, even though they're
00:37:33.660
both viruses, right? So there used to be a time in the Northeast where neighborhoods were organized
00:37:40.500
as follows. I think that my neighbor Linda might be a witch. Let's throw her into water. And if she
0.84
00:37:46.700
swims, then we know she's a witch. And if she drowns, oops, I guess she wasn't a witch, right?
0.89
00:37:52.820
And that was a very reasonable way to organize the neighborhood. But then we grew out of that
00:37:58.120
parasitic idea. So what is unique about the current time period are the specific parasitic
00:38:03.740
ideas that lead to suicidal empathy. So postmodernism, for example, by the way,
00:38:09.520
The reason why you correctly said it's the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, because it literally negates the truth itself, right?
00:38:19.340
There are no objective truths according to postmodernism.
00:38:24.320
And that's what allows then up is down, freedom is slavery, men are women, my truth is more important than the truth.
00:38:32.460
So that's why I call it the most nihilistic form of intellectual terrorism.
00:38:38.140
So suicidal empathy is a current manifestation,
00:38:42.920
but the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized
00:38:49.040
I also had one more question, now that I have the microphone.
00:38:53.240
So you talk about suicidal empathy as like a macro phenomenon,
00:38:57.560
like an intercivilizational, like an intersocial phenomenon.
00:39:00.960
Is it possible to have suicidal empathy towards your loved ones,
00:39:07.520
I mean, you can, but I won't answer it for kin.
00:39:12.320
I'll answer it just at the individual level rather than the civilizational level.
00:39:16.660
I mean, there is truly a hallucinatory number of examples in the book that you really are hard to believe.
00:39:26.720
A woman, a white woman, much more enlightened than all of us in this room because she's extremely progressive.
00:39:32.620
She knows that the stereotype that black men ever commit violence is simply untrue.
00:39:40.920
In the natural state, there is absolutely no evidence that any black man has ever committed any violence.
00:39:47.600
So she goes to Haiti to demonstrate that reality.
00:39:53.520
And then in Haiti, she is faced with something called, or what is it called?
00:39:58.520
Where a Haitian man who doesn't subscribe to her very progressive things that she learned
0.99
00:40:06.740
at Oberlin College is raping her violently on top of a rooftop.
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00:40:12.520
As he's raping her, she's saying, but don't you realize that I'm a huge BLM ally myself?
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00:40:22.440
And she was very surprised that that didn't stop him in his tracks from raping her.
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00:40:28.160
At the end of the rape, she then wrote a few days or weeks later, she wrote an essay, which
00:40:33.980
is referenced in my book, where she says that now in its totality, since the rape is in
00:40:40.180
the rear view mirror, she's actually very thankful for the experience.
0.99
00:40:50.780
He was using her as the vehicle to express his rage at white supremacy.
1.00
00:41:00.000
So a Haitian man in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, raped a white woman because he was responding
0.99
00:41:08.400
to the white supremacy found in the United States.
0.96
00:41:12.560
That's suicidal empathy at the individual level.
00:41:19.280
Saad. I'm listening to you and finally start to understand a little more about
00:41:27.200
this phenomenon. Being Jewish myself, I also hear you talk about evolution and
00:41:33.320
how evolution plays a role in the development of this suicidal empathy.
00:41:38.360
Being Jewish myself, I mean we Jews, we have lived through 3,000 years of
00:41:44.600
people wanting to eliminate, et cetera, et cetera.
00:41:47.680
Shouldn't we recognize something and change?
0.92
00:41:51.500
Why did 1 3rd of the New York Jews vote for Mamdami?
0.96
00:42:04.840
I typically reserve it for Jews when I call them wood cricket
0.99
00:42:10.020
The granddaddy of wood cricket Jews is Gabor Mate.
1.00
00:42:16.640
For those of you who don't know who that is,
1.00
00:42:18.540
Gabor Mate, and the reason I'm answering with his exemplar
00:42:22.940
is because he captures exactly what you're asking.
00:42:29.200
and I put it in quotes because every single ailment
00:42:32.120
that you have is ultimately rooted in some pain
00:42:37.080
Well, by that measure, I went through the Lebanese Civil War.
0.99
00:42:40.100
I should be a psychopath killing everybody, right?
0.88
00:42:45.360
So Gabor Mate says that he himself, as a Holocaust survivor,
00:42:53.700
Gabor Mate was a Holocaust survivor in that when he was six months old,
00:42:58.700
he was taken from his Jewish family and placed in another family.
00:43:02.420
Six months old infants are not conscious of their experiences.
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00:43:07.080
So in no conceivable, meaningful way are you a Holocaust survivor.
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00:43:11.900
If he's a Holocaust survivor, then I am a Holocaust survivor by virtue of having been a spermatozoa in my dad's testicles in the 1940s.
00:43:22.680
So really, my victimology score is very, very high because not only am I a Lebanese Civil War refugee, child war refugee, I'm also a Holocaust survivor, even though I wasn't born during the Holocaust.
0.92
00:43:35.760
Now, the reason why he uses that rhetorical trick is because then that gives him the imprimatur to say, here I am, Jewish myself, a Holocaust survivor, and I can tell you that the Nazis are not nearly as diabolical as the Israelis.
00:43:54.940
That is the, because if Gabor Mate was at that Nova dance festival, and if they were coming to do unbelievable things to him, he would have been praying for those really evil Nazis called the IDF to come and save him.
0.93
00:44:17.140
I respect the radical Islamist guys a lot more than I do the Gabor Mate.
1.00
00:44:22.520
So there's a special place in hell for those Jews.
0.98
00:44:35.880
because I have two additional questions I want to get to before we wrap up.
00:44:38.680
So I'll let the two of you figure out who we're going to next.
00:44:50.880
Shalom, Professor Saad. Thank you so much for your visit.
00:44:57.480
We, myself and my wife, have a bit of a story also.
00:45:00.660
Came from Israel, moved to Canada, stayed there for about 14 years,
00:45:11.160
We actually visited Montreal, and we've communicated,
00:45:17.040
But the whole story of Canada at that time, we had to move to the U.S.
00:45:27.500
We practically escaped Canada to come here and to thrive here.
00:45:32.860
So viva la freedom of the United States of America.
00:45:38.040
I think what you're about to do, moving to the new university
00:45:46.340
for your new position obviously we've read all your books podcasts and all thank you so thank
00:45:52.900
you shukran i think what you're doing is keeping the memory of those recent days
00:46:00.800
uh atrocities and i i myself consider the corona uh with justin trudeau in canada what
00:46:09.020
You remember what I'm talking about as something of a memory to be tattooed in the days of
00:46:19.440
history, and we thank you ever so much for doing what you're doing and speaking the way
00:46:36.240
Okay, just first of all, whoever booked you, give them a big pat on the back.
00:46:44.000
Okay, we talk about the country, but I think the film industry, and I'm a film fan, and
00:46:53.340
There seems to be, films are not for art anymore.
00:47:02.320
They don't make it for art anymore, but there doesn't seem to be any financial penalty.
00:47:09.220
Films are making less, and they just double down, and there's no stopping it.
00:47:13.320
You'd think there would be a financial penalty that would correct this behavior.
00:47:18.300
So in Suicide Empathy, I talk about the evolving nature of companies with their customers.
00:47:28.940
So the first 100 years ago, the relationship between companies and customers was what's called production-centric.
00:47:36.940
So if you were a car manufacturer, the only thing you were tasked with doing is producing cars.
00:47:43.140
Hence the famous saying by Henry Ford, the customer can have the car in any color that he wishes as long as it's black.
00:47:52.880
Meaning that I don't care about customer preferences.
00:48:04.200
I have to produce products that meet the demand,
00:48:08.440
but while also adhering to the heterogeneity of consumer preferences.
00:48:12.480
Some like red cars, some like blue cars, some like black cars.
00:48:15.660
The third social contract, say starting in the 60s,
00:48:20.320
was I need to meet consumer demands while maintaining consumer heterogeneity.
00:48:28.640
So that's where the green marketing movement comes in, right?
00:48:31.580
You shouldn't harm the environment while producing cars.
00:48:34.980
The fourth step to your question is now as a company,
00:48:42.540
I also have to be an active ally in fighting against social justice.
00:48:48.240
And that could take precedence over the fiduciary responsibility
00:48:52.580
of maximizing profits for shareholders, to your point.
00:48:57.380
So there's a great example that I discussed in the book
00:49:11.460
So Jaguar, do you remember where you just see
1.00
00:49:14.520
a bunch of trans stuff sashaying everywhere?
1.00
00:49:42.860
And he's exactly, he's the front blurb of the book.
00:49:46.920
I think what's happened to a lot of these companies,
00:49:48.780
art takes a backseat to social justice. Profit takes a backseat to social justice.
00:49:54.300
And there's a field in applied mathematics called operations research. That's when you're trying to
00:50:00.060
find a mathematical equation to maximize something, to optimize something. Well,
00:50:06.000
those film companies are not optimizing the value of art, they're optimizing social justice.
00:50:13.500
so just a final few questions before we wrap up and head to the book signing
00:50:20.020
I know there's a lot of different takeaways in this book but if you wanted readers to take
00:50:25.660
one thing away what would that be please please please do not be suicidally empathetic you may
00:50:33.860
not see the end of our civilization within your lifetime or that of your children but there is a
00:50:40.580
great quote by and I actually mentioned it very early in the book by a esteemed British historian
00:50:47.480
named Arnold Toynbee. He published a 12 volume set study of how all civilizations eventually die
00:50:58.860
and his concluding maxim is civilizations do not die by murder they die by suicide and in my case
00:51:09.380
I'm saying that the specific way that we are committing suicide is through dysregulated
00:51:14.940
empathy. So be kind. I'm a very kind and empathetic person, but within the bounds of evolutionary
00:51:21.420
theory. So be careful. Don't be kind to those who are not worthy of your kindness.
00:51:33.260
So my final question, obviously, we're here at the Reagan Library. I toured you and your
00:51:39.020
lovely wife around earlier. We stopped at President and Mrs. Reagan's grave site, the memorial site.
00:51:43.760
Just a few days ago was the 22nd anniversary of President Reagan's passing. And in preparation
00:51:49.420
for today's event, I was on your X page, and you actually posted a small tribute to the president
00:51:54.980
on the day he passed. What does Ronald Reagan mean to you? He embodies all of the great things that
00:52:02.400
when I was a young boy, I think my wife alluded to it earlier. When I was a young boy in Beirut,
00:52:07.060
Lebanon, I didn't speak English yet, I would see those spaghetti westerns. I don't know if any of
00:52:12.020
you know him. Sergio Leone. And he's still alive, by the way. Clint Eastwood would play many of the
00:52:20.780
roles, right? The larger-than-life character who comes and renders justice in the town against all
00:52:26.820
the bad people. And I would look at him in the mind of the little boy that I was who didn't speak
00:52:31.420
English, and I would say, I want to be that guy. Well, I think Ronald Reagan was that guy in real
00:52:38.120
life. And so in that sense, he exudes what I saw in Clint Eastwood, but in the president.
00:52:51.220
So I know that with your purchase of your ticket, you got a copy. So we will now head to the
00:52:56.720
bookstore. Come on up and he'll sign the books for you. If you haven't read it, I highly,
00:53:01.420
recommend that you do. It's a fantastic book. Thank you so much for joining us here at the