The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Discussing Suicidal Empathy at the Commonwealth Club (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1005)

00:00:00.440 All right. Big enough audience. I have to tell people to settle down.

00:00:05.020 Thank you all for coming tonight.

00:00:07.820 Really amazing program. Moderator Michael Schellenberger I've known for a long time.

00:00:12.000 This is going to be fantastic. Welcome to tonight's program

00:00:16.040 Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California. My name is Ken Broad. My wife

00:00:19.900 Jackie and I sponsor quite a few programs here. I love books.

00:00:24.260 And thank you. This is one

00:00:27.960 been looking forward to. I also want to give special thanks to Manhattan Institute for their

00:00:31.880 partnership tonight. They've helped bring a bunch of the audience here and grateful for that.

00:00:38.200 The program is being recorded so please make sure you turn off your phones. There's usually one that

00:00:42.120 makes noise so just double check it if you will. Also if you have any questions for the guest

00:00:47.000 speaker there'll be cards coming around you can fill those out they'll be collected. If you're

00:00:50.520 online. Please feel free to post a question that can be translated and brought up here.

00:00:59.320 If you're here in person, we have free books for you. If you either got one on the way in

00:01:02.360 or you can get one on the way out, we have an hour-long reception and book signing. There'll

00:01:06.920 be wine and other drinks, so please stay for that. It's a good chance to chat and catch up.

00:01:13.240 Now it is my pleasure to introduce Gad Saad. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist and

00:01:20.520 host of The Sad Truth, a popular podcast. He was here back in 2023 for his book on happiness.

00:01:27.220 So evolutionary psychology has very many manifestations from happiness to suicidal

00:01:32.980 empathy. So we'll hear more about the latter today. He often writes and speaks about idea

00:01:38.240 pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. That's basically what

00:01:43.360 this book is all about. He serves as the scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center, the

00:01:49.740 Study for American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, and that's after a long tenure at

00:01:54.300 Concordia up in Canada. His latest book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to Be Kind, is a wake-up call

00:02:00.880 for as to why empathy in politics can tragically lead to civilizational decline and collapse,

00:02:08.140 so sounds very ominous. Moderating tonight's program is Michael Schellenberger. He was here,

00:02:13.120 you may remember, a few years ago for San Francisco, which was a great book. He's founder

00:02:18.960 and president of Civilization Works, a non-profit, and he's CBR chair of

00:02:22.880 Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin, UATX.

00:02:27.320 Please join me in welcoming Gad Saad and Michael Schellenberger.

00:02:38.600 All right.

00:02:42.540 Gad Saad, welcome.

00:02:44.140 Thank you so much.

00:02:44.960 It's so wonderful to have you in my home area.

00:02:46.460 So good to see you again, Michael.

00:02:48.180 Congratulations.

00:02:49.000 Your book debuted as number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

00:02:52.960 Let's give it up for Gatsad.

00:02:54.820 Huge achievement.

00:02:58.120 Let's start before we get into the book.

00:03:00.420 Tell us a little bit why you wanted to write it.

00:03:02.360 A book is a huge undertaking, as I know from personal experience.

00:03:05.820 Why did you want to do this one?

00:03:07.280 So The Parasitic Mind, which was my 2020 book,

00:03:10.680 looked at what happens to human beings

00:03:14.080 when they are parasitized by ideological capture,

00:03:19.380 but specifically what happens to their cognitive system,

00:03:22.640 their thought processes when they're parasitized.

00:03:25.280 But we are both a thinking and a feeling animal.

00:03:28.180 So to complete the story of the narrative,

00:03:30.360 I also have to explain what happens when your affective system,

00:03:34.080 your feelings, are also hijacked.

00:03:36.500 So parasitic mind deals with cognitive system hijacking.

00:03:40.260 Suicidal empathy deals with the affective hijacking of your ability to think.

00:03:44.940 Well, let's get into the argument itself.

00:03:46.840 What is suicidal empathy?

00:03:48.800 Right.

00:03:49.260 So I'm definitely not arguing that empathy is a bad thing.

00:03:54.440 And the reason why I lead with that response is because even before the book had come out

00:03:59.920 and people had for sure not read it yet, they were already writing art hit pieces that Gadsad,

00:04:06.600 you know, the favorite intellectual of Elon Musk is trying to usher a world of darkness where

00:04:13.060 empathy no longer exists. I'm doing no such thing. As an evolutionary psychologist, I understand that

00:04:18.780 empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait. It's a wonderful thing. We are a social species.

00:04:24.180 For you and I, Michael, to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind,

00:04:27.980 vice versa. That's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind. So well-modulated empathy is

00:04:34.240 wonderful. But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago with his golden mean

00:04:39.360 or everything in moderation, too little of something is not good. Too much of something

00:04:44.080 is not good. Too little of something for empathy could potentially make you a psychopath. 0.69

00:04:48.780 If you have hyper activation of empathy and in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets,

00:04:55.940 you end up with suicidal empathy. And is empathy, can you say a little bit more about the definition?

00:05:01.320 Is it the same as caring or the same as caring and understanding?

00:05:06.500 How would you define it?

00:05:07.680 So early in the book, I actually get briefly into this.

00:05:11.200 So all of these terms, compassion, kindness, empathy, sympathy,

00:05:16.120 do have slightly granularly different definitions.

00:05:20.220 But for all intents and purposes for what we're talking about,

00:05:24.500 let's put them in the cluster of positive virtues

00:05:28.240 where you actually care about the other.

00:05:31.320 Empathy could come in two forms. Cognitive empathy, I understand what you're feeling.

00:05:38.520 Emotional empathy is I feel your pain. One is I understand your pain. One is I feel your pain.

00:05:44.060 So there are very arcane academic distinctions between all these, but I lump them into one big

00:05:50.180 sort of positive virtue. Let's start with a case, an example. Walk us through one of the big cases

00:05:56.620 in your book for an example of suicidal empathy? So I'll give you one that is relevant at the

00:06:01.380 civilizational level and another one at the individual level. But as you said, the book is

00:06:05.700 laden with endless such examples. So by far the most dangerous form of suicidal empathy

00:06:12.320 is open border immigration policies, because demography is truly destiny. If you let in people 0.99

00:06:19.900 in the millions who do not share any of the foundational values of the American ethos,

00:06:25.820 It's not surprising that given enough time, you will ultimately change the fabric of what American exceptionalism is.

00:06:33.460 So, example, I hail from Canada.

00:06:37.120 I moved to Canada in 1975, having escaped the Lebanese Civil War.

00:06:41.500 From 1975 to about the late 1990s, I experienced almost zero Jew hatred.

00:06:47.820 As the demographic realities began to very, very quickly change in Montreal, Jew hatred increased. 0.90

00:06:55.240 Now, where did many of those immigrants come from?

00:06:58.560 They came from largely Islamic societies where, based on many, many different types of polls,

00:07:03.840 you can have somewhere between 95% to 99% of the surveyed people from those societies

00:07:09.880 exhibiting endemic Jew hatred.

00:07:12.860 So it doesn't take a fancy professor to then predict that if you're going to let in millions

00:07:17.480 of people into your society that have Jew hatred as part of the fabric of their belief

00:07:23.020 systems, then you're going to get an increase of Jew hatred. So open border immigration policies 0.88

00:07:27.960 is probably the worst form of suicidal empathy. All immigrants are not equally likely to assimilate. 1.00

00:07:34.480 On the individual level, I'll give you one great narrative, but there are many others. 1.00

00:07:38.680 A Norwegian man was raped by a Somali immigrant. Because the Scandinavians are very kind and

00:07:47.580 they're enlightened and they don't believe in a harsh punishment, I think he served maybe

00:07:52.940 two or three years in prison, then he was going to be deported back to Mogadishu. Well, the guy

00:07:58.640 that he raped is so kind and empathetic that he felt this great existential angst that Muhammad, 0.90

00:08:05.500 his rapist, was now not going to be able to flourish in Mogadishu. Well, I'm here to tell 0.99

00:08:11.560 you that evolutionarily speaking, we haven't evolved the emotive system to empathize with

00:08:17.680 our rapists. And so in that case, or in the open borders case more broadly, who are the people

00:08:23.220 with the suicidal empathy? I mean, they walk amongst us. They're everywhere. They're your

00:08:30.800 professors. They're your policymakers. They're my physical therapist. I mean that literally.

00:08:37.180 My physical therapist had asked me, as she was working on one of my knees, one of the downsides

00:08:42.940 of having been a soccer player is that you get arthritic issues with your knees earlier than

00:08:48.620 one would expect. So she asked me, oh, what's your latest book on? This was maybe about six

00:08:53.840 months ago. I said, oh, it's titled Suicidal Empathy. And then she said, well, what is that?

00:08:58.400 What is it about? So I gave an example of open borders and so on. And she just could not

00:09:03.500 understand that I could have such a cold, callous, dark heart that I wouldn't want anyone who wishes

00:09:11.380 to participate in this case in the canadian experiment to be allowed to come in i was a

00:09:16.480 mean person so they're everywhere there are professors there are policymakers they're justin

00:09:20.260 trudeau they're everywhere and so she under your definition she was someone that had if i'm

00:09:25.660 understanding correctly excess empathy meaning excess understanding and care for foreign migrants

00:09:33.280 is that right right so uh thomas soul talks about there are no optimal solutions there are just

00:09:40.300 trade-offs right i mean that should be a pretty obvious thing to most people right but if you

00:09:45.580 believe in what's called philip tetlock the psychologist from university of pennsylvania

00:09:49.400 talks about taboo trade-offs there are some issues that it it is wrong and callous of you

00:09:56.320 to to engage in a trade-off example trans people have taken on a holy status now so if a trans

00:10:05.520 person, a biological male, wishes to participate in female sports and ends up beating those

00:10:14.020 female athletes and steals the position on the podium, it is wrong of you, according to taboo

00:10:20.620 trade-offs, to argue that many women are now being disadvantaged by the fact that this biological

00:10:26.040 male, because he is deserving of all of your empathy. But we know from evolutionary theory

00:10:32.340 that all types of investments are tethered to an evolutionary calculus.

00:10:38.320 And let me give an example.

00:10:39.960 I did some studies with one of my doctoral students

00:10:42.180 where we looked at how do people allocate their gift-giving budgets.

00:10:46.040 Let's say I give you $1,000.

00:10:47.740 How would you allocate that $1,000?

00:10:50.100 Well, it turns out that people, unbeknownst to them,

00:10:52.960 they don't answer using an evolutionary language,

00:10:55.500 but they're very, very well calibrated in giving larger gifts

00:11:00.200 to people who are more evolutionarily important to them.

00:11:03.360 So I'm going to give my sibling or my child or my first cousin

00:11:07.960 much larger gifts than my third cousin,

00:11:10.760 meaning that there's an evolutionary calculus that shapes my investments.

00:11:15.140 Well, the same applies for empathy.

00:11:17.080 In a dream world where there are no trade-offs,

00:11:19.560 where there's the infinite well of empathy,

00:11:22.160 then I would orgiastically met it out to everybody.

00:11:25.540 But we don't live in such a world.

00:11:27.100 therefore, it makes a lot more sense for me to jump in front of a barreling truck towards me to

00:11:32.780 save my biological children than I would to save random children. That doesn't make me evil. It

00:11:38.960 makes me a Darwinian being. So in the case of the migrant, would you say that the people that 1.00

00:11:45.120 supported Open Borders lacked empathy toward you? And similarly, in the case of the trans athlete,

00:11:52.240 is that a case of people having empathy for the trans athlete, but not empathy for, say,

00:11:57.460 the female swimmers who would be displaced by him? Exactly. So if you remember when I first

00:12:01.360 defined what empathy was, I said it is hyper activated. It's hyper fires in the wrong

00:12:07.760 situations toward the wrong targets. And that answers your question. So only the trans person

00:12:15.240 is worthy of the empathy. Only the Guatemalan illegal immigrant is worthy of the empathy. 1.00

00:12:21.880 Now, what allows the suicidally empathetic to actually do this, in the last chapter of the book, I offer an inoculation against suicidal empathy. 0.99

00:12:31.580 So I talk about the myopia of first order effects, meaning that for the unicornia people who, you know, bathe in suicidal empathy, for them, the world is only one order effect. 0.75

00:12:45.660 So you open the door, you let them in, but then there are consequences downstream to that. 0.98

00:12:50.680 If you let in 20 million people who come from societies that are completely bereft of our 1.00

00:12:56.780 foundational principles, you have to be able to have the extrapolation to imagine what's going 1.00

00:13:02.080 to happen in 10, 20, 30 years. Many people say, oh, how were you able to predict all of this?

00:13:08.040 It's not because I'm a prophet. It's just because I'm able to take from where we are here and

00:13:12.840 extrapolate if we continue these trends where we'll end up being. And so the suicidal empathetic

00:13:18.720 don't do that. All that I need to do is worry about the myopia of first order effects.

00:13:23.900 Now you give an example of being insulted. I think you're bringing your daughter to a campus

00:13:28.420 and someone on campus insults you and also insults your daughter. It's an interesting case

00:13:34.140 because it sounds like you don't think she was being particularly empathic towards you.

00:13:38.660 Oh, I think you might be talking about the, it was a beach incident. It was one of our favorite

00:13:45.860 beaches in Newport Beach which is kind of like a second home to us is on the by the area called

00:13:51.140 the wedge where you actually have these big huge waves that come in actually right now there's a

00:13:55.260 huge swell and we were so my son was about five years old then he was he's now 14 so this was

00:14:02.060 about nine years ago so there's this woman sitting there with a plastic you know cup holder with a

00:14:09.940 lot of muffins in there. And all sorts of birds are coming and starting to nibble on that stuff. 0.82

00:14:17.460 Now, I'm not a Greta Thunberg type, but I was still feeling bad for these poor birds that are

00:14:22.920 probably, this is not very healthy for them. Anyways, at one point she gets up to leave,

00:14:26.820 and she leaves the entire mess on this pristine beach. And so I turned to her and say, oh, I'm

00:14:32.660 sorry, there's a trash can over there. You can just leave it there. And at the time I was much

00:14:39.120 heavier so first she insults my weight and then she turns to my son who had long hair five years

00:14:45.800 old and then says well if this is a boy he looks like a girl whatever so she what and then I called

00:14:51.460 her uh human pig now but here's the interesting part here's the empathy part there was a university

00:14:59.360 in southern california that was very keen on hiring me in 2016 we go out to lunch with some

00:15:07.240 of the people who would be deciding whether to hire me. Now, I have a pretty impressive dossier

00:15:12.320 that we can talk about. And the person who's sort of inducting the exchange says, well, something

00:15:18.640 came up that's very concerning to me, Gad. I said, oh, what is it? She goes, well, I watched your

00:15:23.600 recent clip with that story and I'm very perturbed by something. I said, what? She goes, well, you

00:15:31.640 know, you used very mean words. You called her a human pig. I said, oh, so your empathy didn't 1.00

00:15:37.840 get triggered for the fact that she was calling me a fat pig. It didn't get triggered by her 0.98

00:15:44.480 insulting a five-year-old child. The only thing that you focused on is that I seem to have used

00:15:50.240 the spicy term for what truly was a human pig. So that gives you a sense of what happens when

00:15:55.980 empathy misfires. So these cases you've given us are cases where empathy is selective. Empathy is

00:16:03.260 being directed at one person and not by somebody that's actually hurt by whatever policy is being

00:16:08.140 justified. So why are those cases of empathy rather than lack of empathy? Because from the perspective

00:16:15.140 of those people, it's a taboo trade-off. The other side is not deserving of your empathy.

00:16:22.540 If you're a good person, then you have to put yourself in the shoes of the trans people who have been marginalized. 0.97

00:16:31.380 So yes, maybe biological women are technically going to be disadvantaged,

00:16:36.320 but a good person would never argue that you are lacking empathy towards the biological women

00:16:42.940 because there's a hierarchy of victimhood, right?

00:16:45.000 One of the reasons, by the way, I mentioned this in my earlier book,

00:16:48.460 one of the reasons why it's pretty difficult to cancel me is because in true victimology,

00:16:54.900 I hold the top cards in victimology poker, right? I am a brown Jew, right, from Lebanon. So I'm not

00:17:04.680 Joe Silverstein. I'm Arabic speaking. I am a childhood war refugee. So when all of the

00:17:12.200 degenerates come after me trying to use all of that victimology poker stuff, I usually put out

00:17:18.100 my victimology card and they run away in those cases though I guess the question is you're

00:17:27.460 talking about people that are on the one hand behaving empathic towards some people but on the

00:17:32.640 other hand it seems like you're describing them behaving with a lot of cruelty and a lack of

00:17:37.740 interest in understanding the person so I guess that's why I'm trying to understand if it's a

00:17:42.020 if it's a split phenomenon where there's intense empathy directed towards one person but cruelty

00:17:47.860 and lack of interest at all in understanding them,

00:17:50.860 why would you label it empathy rather than, I don't know, something different?

00:17:55.400 Well, because they are exhibiting empathy towards the wrong target.

00:17:58.280 So I'll give you another great example.

00:18:00.740 You know, we are a storytelling animal,

00:18:03.600 so I can give you all of the fancy professorial stuff,

00:18:06.940 but oftentimes that one vivid anecdote, you know, brings it home for people. 1.00

00:18:12.220 So a white progressive woman who's much more enlightened than anybody in this room,

00:18:16.960 was an ally during the BLM era,

00:18:20.840 was an ally, anti-racist and all this.

00:18:23.160 And she wanted to go to Haiti

00:18:25.880 to demonstrate that this stereotype 0.88

00:18:28.640 that black men are ever violent 0.86

00:18:31.180 is simply untrue. 0.97

00:18:33.140 Because there's absolutely no evidence

00:18:35.320 whatsoever, apparently,

00:18:37.040 that any black man has ever committed 0.58

00:18:38.960 any violence anywhere. 0.99

00:18:40.600 This is a promulgated thing

00:18:42.720 from white supremacist society.

00:18:44.700 So she goes to Haiti.

00:18:45.980 I don't know exactly why she went to Haiti, but something happened to her.

00:18:50.500 She was slapped by this thing.

00:18:52.500 What is that word?

00:18:53.300 Oh, reality. 1.00

00:18:54.620 She was slapped by reality when a Haitian man, a black man in Port-au-Prince, 0.99

00:19:00.580 took her to the rooftop and was repeatedly raping her all night. 0.99

00:19:04.920 As he was raping her, she was pleading with him, 0.91

00:19:08.920 don't you realize that I am a BLM activist myself?

00:19:12.740 Don't you realize that I'm a Malcolm X scholar? 0.98

00:19:15.460 And to her surprise, that didn't stop him from continuing to rape her.

00:19:19.760 But then once the rape finished and she returned home, she wrote an essay, which I reference in the book,

00:19:26.100 where she said, all told, she's actually thankful for the experience. 0.95

00:19:32.740 She's empathetic with her violent rapist because when he raped her, 0.99

00:19:38.380 he was exhibiting all of the pent-up rage of the white supremacy that exists out there. 0.99

00:19:45.600 But he lives in Port-au-Prince, so it certainly can't be that the white supremacy of the United

00:19:50.280 States is what caused him. But facts don't matter when you're suicidally empathetic.

00:19:55.100 I live in the Berkeley Hills, which is a very nice neighborhood on the Berkeley side.

00:19:59.360 A lot of my neighbors have Black Lives Matter signs. But when they call 911,

00:20:03.480 one. They want the police to be there right away. The effect of a lot of the Black Lives Matter

00:20:08.480 policies was to defund the police and they were looking for abolition. Are they being empathic

00:20:14.800 towards black people that they view as victims of police? Well, again, it's the myopia of first 0.72

00:20:21.420 order effects, right? I feel good in the immediacy of that dopamine hit that's empathy based to say

00:20:27.940 down, down with the police. But I don't bother to look at what are the downstream consequences

00:20:33.560 of that community if the police no longer patrols. And it doesn't take us to predict what will

00:20:40.300 happen. Criminality will go up and it will harm exactly the people that you supposedly are so

00:20:46.380 empathetic about. That's precisely why I talked about the curse of the myopia of first order

00:20:51.840 effect. Dopamine hit now, that's empathy-based, and let the future sort itself out. Now, it seems

00:20:58.140 like part of empathy in your definition is a deep understanding of the other. Do my Berkeley

00:21:04.220 neighbors that want to defund the police have a deep understanding of black residents in Oakland

00:21:09.440 in high-crime neighborhoods? I don't think so. I mean, I don't know. I can't predict. But

00:21:14.440 look, all of the people that go on all of the university campuses with free, free Palestine

00:21:20.340 from the river to the sea, as you know, street interviewers will go up to those people, and

00:21:25.200 they'll ask them which river and which sea, and almost all of them can't tell you what it is,

00:21:31.320 right? So, you know, look, most people are cognitive misers, which is a fancy way of saying

00:21:36.440 they're intellectually lazy, but I feel really good to belong to a group, to have purpose and

00:21:43.360 meaning, and if now it means that the sartorial garb that I have to wear is the noble keffiyeh.

00:21:49.560 By the way, the keffiyeh is exactly what my childhood was like when I was wearing running shoes and running really fast so that the guys with the keffiyeh were not going to decapitate me.

00:22:00.600 It's now become a fashion statement at my alma mater of Cornell and Columbia.

00:22:06.360 So most of the people who do all of these things are not really well-armed with good information.

00:22:12.800 They're not really empathic then.

00:22:14.280 They're not empathic though.

00:22:15.340 But they'd like to pretend they are.

00:22:16.840 Right? Because one of the other terms I use is, as I stroke my luxuriant hair in the mirror of

00:22:25.080 moral preening, the reflection that comes to me is, I'm a good person. I'm an empathetic person.

00:22:31.540 So that's what they're doing. And so would you say then that suicidal empathy is not real empathy?

00:22:38.480 Well, I mean, to the people who are swimming in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy,

00:22:43.720 they do believe that they are being empathetic right so it's not they don't they're not saying

00:22:48.400 i'm pretending to be empathetic my my physical therapist truly believed that the noble and

00:22:55.820 compassionate thing to do would be to let in whomever wants to come to canada so it depends

00:23:02.620 i mean from my perspective she's not being empathetic she's being suicidally empathetic

00:23:07.680 but from her perspective she's a good person and i'm a cold callous human being you discuss one of

00:23:13.620 the major issues in San Francisco and other West Coast cities, which is our treatment of people

00:23:18.520 that are supposedly homeless. In my book, I argued that mostly the unsheltered homeless are

00:23:23.920 suffering from drug addiction, mental illness. The policies have been to allow them to remain

00:23:29.900 on the streets, live in tents. All of the women I've interviewed on the streets have been sexually 1.00

00:23:34.420 assaulted multiple times. I spend time interviewing those folks. I think I'm trying to understand 0.83

00:23:39.620 them are the people that want them to stay in the tents and smoke fentanyl and to remain there are

00:23:47.240 they truly empathic to the situation of the people on the street well and and their broken moral

00:23:52.700 compass i think yes but again it's a dysregulated form of empathy it is not fair for you to go

00:24:01.140 and whisk these people away and force them to go into treatment that seems lacking in empathy

00:24:07.660 What seems to make sense in their calculus is just let them be.

00:24:11.920 Let them be free.

00:24:12.700 That's their choice.

00:24:13.860 And by the way, I do cite your brilliant work in the book, so great job.

00:24:19.480 There is a phenomenon in psychology known as the self-serving bias.

00:24:25.260 Self-serving bias is the manner by which you ascribe causality to your life events.

00:24:31.180 typically people ascribe internal factors for their successes and external factors for their

00:24:39.120 failures right so i did very well on the exam because i'm smart and i studied hard or i did 0.81

00:24:46.200 very poorly on the exam because professor sad is a jerk right and and it's an ego defensive

00:24:51.720 strategy right it makes it allows most people to to be able to have a you know rosy glow about 0.97

00:24:56.860 their daily lives. What happens in many of these things, criminality, homelessness,

00:25:02.180 the suicidally empathetic ascribe no personal agency to the failures of those people, right?

00:25:09.660 So for example, I call it a blank slate felon. So I'm switching from homelessness to criminality

00:25:16.060 for a second. Blank slate refers to tabula rasa, empty mind, right? This is an idea that comes from

00:25:21.900 social scientists that purport that you're born with empty minds, with equal potentiality, and

00:25:28.400 it's only various schedules of reinforcement and socialization that make you who you are. 0.98

00:25:33.560 Now, if you are born as a felon in a white supremacist, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, 0.96

00:25:40.640 Islamophobic society on stolen land, then does it make sense for us to punish you if you commit 0.99

00:25:48.040 some transgressions when you've already been punished by the fact that you are born into 0.99

00:25:52.960 such a dreadful society. So therefore, you're a blank slate felon, meaning that there is no

00:25:58.180 personal agency that is ascribed to why you became a criminal or homeless and so on. So if you

00:26:05.300 internalize that parasitic idea, then it does become mean for you to intervene. It's much better

00:26:11.760 to just give them a second and third and 30th chance. Tell us a little bit more about the

00:26:16.740 suicidal part of it. Is that metaphorical or in the sense that you're just saying it's

00:26:22.080 counterproductive? Or do you mean literally that people that are engaging in these sort of

00:26:27.140 empathic, suicidally empathic behaviors, that they're literally suicidal? I mean, in a sense,

00:26:32.680 it's a bit of both. I use it as a powerful rhetorical device, but I actually do literally

00:26:39.400 mean it that it will result in the annihilation of our civilization i use the term so seppuku 0.97

00:26:47.580 is a japanese practice where that comes from the culture of honor and shame so the samurai who are

00:26:54.620 supposed to be honorable if they were to ever engage in actions that would bring them shame

00:26:59.460 the only way they can expiate that shame would be to commit seppuku right self-disembowelment

00:27:07.120 that's your only road trajectory to redemption, to seek penance. Well, I argue that in a similar

00:27:14.640 fashion, if you have existential angst and shame at being on stolen land, Islamophobia,

00:27:22.340 transphobia, and so on, self-flagellation, self-flagellation all day, well then the only

00:27:27.520 way you can resolve that conundrum is to self-disembowel your entire society. Hence, 0.79

00:27:35.060 I call it civilizational seppuku.

00:27:37.480 So yes, it is a powerful poetic prose,

00:27:40.380 but there is a literal component to it.

00:27:43.900 Let's talk a little bit about the case of what's called gender-affirming care,

00:27:48.820 or we can say trans medicine, which is massively controversial.

00:27:53.480 71% of Americans, according to the New York Times,

00:27:56.040 are opposed to any hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries on people under the age of 18.

00:28:03.660 Describe how that's an example of suicidal empathy.

00:28:07.360 Well, I mean, I can specifically address what you said, but more generally,

00:28:11.040 the entire lunacy associated with the trance issue over the past 10, 12 years

00:28:16.740 is a grotesque form of suicidal empathy.

00:28:20.000 Let me explain why.

00:28:21.360 The most defining feature of a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic species

00:28:28.600 is that there are two phenotypes called male and female.

00:28:33.700 Until about 15 minutes ago,

00:28:36.220 the 117 billion people who had existed on Earth,

00:28:39.820 that's an actual real estimate,

00:28:41.760 seemed to very easily navigate

00:28:44.400 through the very difficult conundrum

00:28:46.480 of identifying who's male or female.

00:28:49.580 But 15 minutes ago,

00:28:51.340 after I came out of my Oberlin college class

00:28:54.380 in lesbian dance theory,

00:28:55.740 I no longer had the epistemological security confidence to know what is male or female.

00:29:02.120 This is why I had to put my pronouns because you couldn't look at me and know that I'm male

00:29:07.100 if you didn't put he him next to him.

00:29:09.580 My very sexy deep voice did not allow you to recognize that.

00:29:13.700 Now why am I saying this?

00:29:15.080 If I can get people to debate in the 21st century what constitutes male or female,

00:29:22.160 all other possible objective truths and realities are up for grabs because it's the most fundamental

00:29:28.940 marker of my personhood so all the trans activism stuff comes from that reflex whether it be the

00:29:36.020 gender affirming care but there's much there's even much worse than that actually this is in

00:29:40.540 California a violent felon six foot two six foot three hyper masculine guy who'd had many sexual

00:29:49.260 assaults on his record suddenly realized that he was linda or whatever his name was

00:29:55.880 well because california is so kind and empathetic they put him in a female prison where he just went

00:30:05.480 wild with all the female inmates inmates what thinking human being with a functioning prefrontal

00:30:13.260 cortex could arrive at such a policy well the suicidally empathetic can now you mentioned the

00:30:19.080 that it sounds like you don't think that the people behind that policy were empathic towards

00:30:25.820 the female prisoners. Well, of course not, right? I mean, again, the second that he says, he says

00:30:32.540 the magic words, I'm a trans woman, reality ceases to exist, right? It's a magic wand.

00:30:40.380 I am a trans woman, therefore you are a woman. By the way, you can go back to 2017 where I gave 0.51

00:30:47.500 testimony in front of the canadian senate and i actually used the word empathy and so on this

00:30:53.920 this is 10 years ago and i warned the canadian government that everything and i'm not saying

00:31:00.000 this to pat myself on the back oh i told you so but again it just takes for you to look for the

00:31:06.820 boundary condition and predict where the lunacy is going to go and so i said look i i'm a very

00:31:12.660 socially liberal person in the sense that I live and let live but that doesn't mean if you decide

00:31:19.060 you want to live as a woman that I have to erase and murder truth I can't walk into my classes on

00:31:26.820 evolutionary psychology and start saying oh no no men too can menstruate right so I can chew gum 0.97

00:31:33.340 and walk at the same time I can support your right to live your life as you see fit without

00:31:38.720 murdering and raping truth at the same time. Now, in some of these cases, for example, on

00:31:44.080 the ways in which I think you would say suicidally empathic people are affirming gender dysphoria,

00:31:51.520 affirming substance use disorder. You might say in Canada, they're affirming suicidality.

00:31:56.900 In those cases, it seems like, I mean, would you agree that one could be more empathic if one were 0.79

00:32:05.100 to side against the addiction or the gender dysphoria and for a healthier side of that

00:32:11.200 person? Of course. I mean, to your point, as you mentioned in your books, if I remember correctly, 0.94

00:32:16.060 right, most of, I don't know what, you tell me what the number is, what percentage of the people

00:32:20.000 who are homeless either suffer from mental illness or addiction or a combination of both?

00:32:25.580 What's the number? Approaching 100%. Oh, okay, exactly. At least unsheltered on the street.

00:32:29.900 Exactly. So if you are truly empathetic in the truly deontological sense of the term,

00:32:36.240 and if the goal, if the currency is to maximize that person's happiness,

00:32:42.300 whatever that might mean, would it make more sense to force them into whatever intervention strategies

00:32:49.080 gets them out of the hell that they're living in? Or is there an alternative calculus that says,

00:32:54.540 no you have no right to infringe on their freedom but by the way this relates very much to there's a

00:33:00.900 field in operations research it's called the field's called operations research where you try

00:33:06.060 to come up with mathematical equations to optimize some function depending on which metric you seek

00:33:13.240 to optimize will result in different optimal solutions right so in my case and yours we're

00:33:19.060 saying, we're trying to optimize their happiness. The women should not be sexually assaulted when

00:33:25.300 they're on the street. That would be our currency for maximizing their happiness. The suicidally 1.00

00:33:30.140 empathetic are saying, you have no right to infringe on their right to live their lives as

00:33:36.020 they see fit. That's what I'm trying to maximize. And that's why they end up with the suffering that

00:33:40.960 they get. Right. And it seems like in the case, for example, you would agree that more empathic

00:33:45.960 would be to stage the intervention with the addict on the street it would be to provide

00:33:50.240 counseling rather than puberty blockers to the gender dysphoric child and to provide counseling

00:33:56.480 and better medical care better pain treatment for example with the person that uh wants to 0.51

00:34:01.760 take advantage of what's called made in canada and commit suicide do you want to explain what

00:34:06.580 made is no please do well it's uh so i don't i haven't done a deep deep dive into some of the

00:34:12.640 numbers. And I usually don't like to speak on something unless I'm absolutely sure. But it's

00:34:17.580 a program that is rather liberal with making people open to getting euthanasia, right? So

00:34:28.460 someone says, I am depressed. And if they meet whatever condition I've made, then you can

00:34:34.680 potentially euthanize them. It's really quite astounding. And so, oh, I guess those are

00:34:39.800 questions yeah so so so to your point they're used i don't know if you saw the movie in 1980

00:34:47.140 by brian de palma called dressed to kill does anybody remember this movie you do do you know

00:34:53.780 why i'm about to go there oh so spoiler alert if you wish to watch that movie but it's from 1980

00:35:01.220 It's with Michael Caine, who plays a psychiatrist, who turns out to be the serial killer in the

00:35:11.120 movie, because he is trying to have a sex change operation, but whenever he has a patient that

00:35:19.360 comes into his office that sexually arouses him, that creates conflict in him, because he wants 0.98

00:35:25.280 to become a woman, but he's getting aroused as a man would, and so then he goes out and kills that 0.99

00:35:30.180 person. Now, why am I saying that story? Because in the 1970s and 80s, if you were someone, an adult, 0.86

00:35:37.020 a 50-year-old adult, who said, I wish to have an operation to become a transsexual, the battery of

00:35:44.480 things that you had to do before the doctors would agree to it was astoundingly higher than what it 0.53

00:35:50.920 is today. Well, what changed? How could it be that today a three-year-old can say, mommy, I'm not John,

00:35:57.780 I'm Linda and you have to agree to that. So the three-year-old is sufficiently cognitively developed

00:36:03.780 to be able to affirm that statement but if somebody who is 17 years old 364 days old

00:36:11.660 meaning one day shy of his 18th birthday commits a heinous crime well we can't punish him he's just

00:36:18.800 a child. So this from this side of the mouth an almost 18 year old child is not responsible for

00:36:25.560 his actions. He's just a child. But from this side of the mouth, a three-year-old is sufficiently

00:36:30.540 cognitively and emotionally developed to affirm whatever his new gender is. It's insane. 0.58

00:36:35.940 So the decision to decide that defunding the police is empathetic and not increasing the 0.91

00:36:43.620 police, or the decision to block someone's puberty rather than talk back to the dysphoria,

00:36:50.560 or the decision to affirm someone's suicidality rather than to provide counseling and pain,

00:36:54.840 it sounds like you're arguing that that by the time you get there there's you've been already

00:37:00.800 in the grip of an ideology of a parasitic ideology is that correct exactly right and

00:37:06.640 to that point and so the the link between the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy let me give

00:37:12.640 a concrete example so the parasitic mind talks about a bunch of parasitic ideas that all of which

00:37:19.980 were spawned on university campuses and i always remind people the reason for that is because it 0.97

00:37:26.400 uniquely takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas possible 0.57

00:37:31.120 and thank you and the reason for that is because they can pontificate from their humanities 0.77

00:37:40.420 departments and some of the social sciences without there being the auto corrective loop

00:37:45.680 of reality slapping you back into shape.

00:37:49.340 So that's the reason, by the way,

00:37:51.200 why engineering schools and business schools

00:37:54.120 are less likely to be parasitized by these ideas.

00:37:57.120 Because in engineering, you can't build a bridge 1.00

00:37:59.680 using lesbian queer physics. 1.00

00:38:03.260 And in, say, the economics or in the business school, 1.00

00:38:06.960 you can't build consumer choice models

00:38:09.400 using postmodernist mathematics, right?

00:38:11.760 Those endeavors would fail.

00:38:14.240 So, but now coming back to the issue of parasitic mind, cultural relativism is a parasitic idea.

00:38:20.140 It purports that who are you to judge the practices and beliefs of another society? 0.98

00:38:26.440 If they wish to engage in the cutting off of clerises of five-year-old girls, shut up racist. 0.99

00:38:33.560 If they wish to engage in honor killings, shut up racist. 1.00

00:38:36.660 If they wish to have child brides, shut up racist. 1.00

00:38:39.700 Now, if I internalize the parasitic idea of cultural relativism, then it renders me impotent 0.99

00:38:46.200 if I'm the one who's making immigration policies. Why? Because then I am likely to become suicidally

00:38:53.380 empathetic in terms of open borders, because I'm not armed with sufficient epistemological

00:38:58.780 assuredness to say, no, I don't want 20 million of people who hold those beliefs to come into my

00:39:05.560 society because I've been rendered impotent by cultural relativism. So to your point,

00:39:12.940 once I am in the grips of those parasitic ideologies, that's what allows me to swim

00:39:18.400 in the warm waters of suicidal empathy. So is it fair to say that your view is that suicidal

00:39:22.900 empathy is pretty significantly downstream from a lot of ideological work that had already occurred?

00:39:29.780 Yes, it's the consequence of internalizing all of those dreadful parasitic ideas.

00:39:35.800 And it might be worth telling the audience here why I use the term parasitic.

00:39:41.740 So that came to me.

00:39:44.380 So I was looking for a biological metaphor that might explain why people's thinking could be so hijacked.

00:39:54.140 And so I fell across the field of parasitology.

00:39:57.160 Now, parasitology is the scientific study of host-parasite interactions, but parasites can go in different parts of your body.

00:40:08.080 So a tapeworm parasitizes your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite is one that needs to end up in the host's brain, altering its circuitry to suit its interests.

00:40:21.500 So the classic example I give, but I could give a million others, is the wood cricket.

00:40:27.160 The wood cricket is an insect that wants nothing to do with water.

00:40:31.660 But when it is parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump

00:40:38.340 into water, commit suicide in order for the hair worm to complete its reproductive cycle.

00:40:45.780 So to your earlier question, it's part metaphor and poetic prose, but it's actually literal

00:40:51.900 Because instead of the wood cricket jumping into water, we are taking our civilization and jumping off the abyss of infinite darkness. 0.58

00:41:01.260 Now, does that case apply to my neighbors who want to defund the police in black neighborhoods, but not in our lily white neighborhood? 0.84

00:41:09.700 Right. Well, that's what I think we both know him, what Rob Henderson would call luxury beliefs, right? 0.82

00:41:16.720 It's I can hold on to these ostentatious luxury beliefs as long as I can get all of the social

00:41:25.320 rewards for holding those beliefs, but actually never having to incur any of the costs and

00:41:32.340 consequences. So yes, in the black neighborhoods, defund the police. But in my gated community, 0.95

00:41:38.380 I want big guys with big guns. So even the impulse to de-civilize or unmake civilization in the form

00:41:46.000 of undoing law and order is itself selective i think is what you're saying it is it's a form of

00:41:51.680 real degeneracy in terms of moral hypocrisy right i mean uh toxic masculinity right so in in all of 0.85

00:42:00.600 the uh feminist courses many of the traits that women typically fantasize about in their ideal 0.90

00:42:09.520 male becomes a form of pathology right you shouldn't interfere intervene when in a subway

00:42:16.360 as what was named daniel kenny or i mentioned yeah penny all right i mean he was he was taken

00:42:22.860 to trial for doing what most people would have thought was a heroic act now those same women 0.98

00:42:28.640 who are taking those uh feminist courses if they were being accosted in a dark alley and being 1.00

00:42:35.100 gang rape, they would probably be praying for a toxically masculine male to come and save them. 1.00

00:42:40.740 So it's, again, it's a form of degenerate luxury belief systems.

00:42:45.140 And suicidal empathy is, would you describe it as a falsifiable theory? And if so,

00:42:51.460 what would falsify it in your view? If you don't succumb to suicidal empathy? I mean,

00:42:56.860 I can't think of a experimental methodology where we could run two societies. One society,

00:43:04.680 i you know infuse it with suicidal empathy and another one i would anything that is not tethered

00:43:11.140 to an evolutionary calculus has to be a manifestation i mean in the case of empathy

00:43:17.020 to suicidal empathy right so again let me give you another example the trolley problem in

00:43:22.620 experimental philosophy is a problem that is often used to study how people make moral judgments and

00:43:28.700 trade-offs. If, for example, I tell you there's a trolley that's about to barrel and kill three

00:43:35.280 of your biological children, or I tell you if you press the lever, it could be diverted and it'll 0.95

00:43:42.520 kill five random people, I'm almost willing to bet that every single person in this room 0.99

00:43:48.960 would say that I would pull the lever to kill the five strangers, even though five is a greater 1.00

00:43:54.900 number of death than three. The reason being that people have evolved the calculus to care more 0.99

00:44:02.020 about their kin than about some random strangers, right? That's why I don't get as concerned about

00:44:09.200 the random Rwandan kid who might be suffering as I would my own biological child. That doesn't make

00:44:15.940 me a callous, cold-hearted human being. It makes me someone who's tethered to a well-known

00:44:22.040 evolutionary calculus so to answer your question i can't come up with a popperian falsification

00:44:29.340 paradigm on the spot but when i see suicidal empathy i recognize it i guess the question is

00:44:35.520 would there is it possible that some evidence might emerge that would lead you to decide you

00:44:42.360 no, it's not suicidal empathy, it's something else?

00:44:48.600 I mean, yes, if it meant that you internalizing that form of empathy

00:44:55.660 would not have devastating consequences downstream.

00:44:59.960 So there might be other ways by which empathy might be dysregulated

00:45:05.220 that doesn't lead to something as deeply problematic as walking off the abyss.

00:45:11.160 I can't off the top of my head think of some, but the reason why I picked the specific examples that I picked

00:45:16.580 is because there can't be, in my view, an alternative narrative that can explain these phenomena.

00:45:23.280 What would be the impulse that could explain why? Here's another example.

00:45:29.240 A woman is gang raped in Germany by a bunch of men who are speaking Arabic and Farsi.

00:45:35.880 when the cops come to find out who those perpetrators might be she decides to lie

00:45:43.240 as to what they were speaking and says they were speaking in german because if she were to say that

00:45:50.260 they were speaking in arabic and farsi that might marginalize the immigrant community and she's just

00:45:57.860 a good person who would never allow that to happen what could be the explanation for that

00:46:03.340 other than suicidal empathy.

00:46:05.240 I don't know.

00:46:05.780 I was asking if there would be some evidence

00:46:08.260 that would emerge that would lead you to decide that.

00:46:10.380 I think any form of empathy

00:46:14.160 that goes contrary to either my survival instinct

00:46:18.720 or the survival instinct of my civilization

00:46:21.780 is by definition suicidal empathy.

00:46:24.560 You discuss narcissism in the book,

00:46:28.340 which is known as a cluster B personality disorder

00:46:31.840 in Europe, in Britain, and they don't distinguish between narcissism and psychopathy and borderline

00:46:38.400 personality disorder. They just have a kind of cluster B characteristics. And one of them

00:46:44.100 is the selective empathy. It's empathy, as you've been describing, towards one group of people

00:46:51.120 and not towards another. Is your view that suicidal empathy is a symptom or

00:46:57.120 emerges from a kind of narcissism or a cluster B personality disorder?

00:47:03.540 Yeah, so I can't say that in every case of suicidal empathy,

00:47:07.120 what you just said would be true.

00:47:08.420 But the reason why I do discuss narcissism early in the book

00:47:11.980 is because I can, so Narcissus was so imbued with self-love that,

00:47:18.460 but in his case, it was his physical beauty, right?

00:47:20.640 He's looking at himself in the reflect.

00:47:22.480 That's why, by the way, I came up with the term

00:47:24.860 looking at my reflection in the mirror of moral preening. In this case, I'm not looking at myself

00:47:31.480 admiring my morphological features. I'm looking at myself seeing a truly good person, a moral

00:47:39.520 person, a person who would not snitch on his rapist if it meant that that might marginalize

00:47:47.140 the immigrant community so that has to have an element of narcissism and so in that sense

00:47:54.140 some suicidally empathetic are empathetic people are narcissists but not all so in that case in 0.90

00:48:00.400 in i think in the narcissism case the idea appears to be that the narcissist is not even genuinely

00:48:07.180 empathic toward the person they want to be empathic toward they're actually projecting

00:48:12.060 yes a picture onto that person so it's it sounds like what you're saying is that for suicidal

00:48:18.340 empathy is selective empathy and that it involves an act of cruelty towards one group of people

00:48:24.240 but that it's not even empathic toward another group of people right the case well but to your

00:48:29.840 point about the the link between narcissism and psychopathy and so on i talk in the book about

00:48:35.300 how some serial killers use an empathy ruse

00:48:41.120 to lure potential victims, right?

00:48:44.500 Ted Bundy was very known to use a crutch,

00:48:48.180 I mean, literally, actual crutches with a fake cast

00:48:51.860 to then ask women, hey, can you help me with the books?

00:48:54.540 In the movie Silence of the Lambs,

00:48:58.200 the serial killer tries to,

00:49:01.880 he ends up kidnapping the senator's daughter

00:49:04.780 he uses again a ruse whereby he's trying to trigger her empathy to help him move this sofa

00:49:12.900 into the van great scene yeah exactly now terrifying exactly now in that case what's

00:49:18.080 happening you could and you could i don't know if you remember the the woman in in silence of the

00:49:22.660 lambs you could see her survival instinct kicks in when he says no no could you go inside the van

00:49:28.460 and so that i can give it to you that way something she got a bit the the the hairs on her neck going

00:49:34.280 up, but she suppressed it because she's kind and empathetic. So listen to your instincts and gut

00:49:39.880 sometimes. We've evolved those capacities. So it sounds like in some ways what you're

00:49:44.400 describing is a psychopathology. You could say it's a kind of a lack of understanding of the

00:49:49.700 person. It's selective. And even the person that they're supposedly empathic towards,

00:49:54.380 they're not really understanding of that person. So why suicidal empathy and not suicidal

00:49:58.780 psychopathology or psychopathy. But suicidal empathy, to your point, is a psychopathology.

00:50:05.380 So, and let me give the evolutionary explanation for it. So, if you and I were to meet at a party

00:50:13.060 and I noticed that prior to you coming to shake my hand, you're incessantly sneezing into your

00:50:20.100 hand, and I've coded that. So, when Michael comes up to me to shake my hand, I will surreptitiously,

00:50:27.300 quietly discreetly go to the bathroom and wash my hands so I don't catch your cold. Now that

00:50:32.760 mechanism whereby I scan the environment for potential environmental threats and

00:50:39.320 acted accordingly is a perfectly appropriate evolutionary response. Yes? OCD, obsessive

00:50:46.900 compulsive disorder, is the maladaptive pathology of an otherwise adaptive process. Meaning the OCD

00:50:55.320 person who suffers from germ contamination fear will spend eight hours in the bathroom assiduously

00:51:03.360 cleaning their hands until their skin is falling off. They can't extricate themselves from the

00:51:09.900 hyperactivation of that mechanism. The only difference between the two mechanisms is how

00:51:16.900 modulated and well calibrated the response is. I saw you sneezing, my warning flag went up,

00:51:23.560 I tended to the issue, and then the warning flag went down. The OCD person, it's an infinite loop.

00:51:32.220 Same thing is happening with empathy. Empathy within well-regulated zones is perfectly adaptive

00:51:39.020 and rational. When it is outside those zones, it is a psychopathology.

00:51:44.340 It seems like there's at least two separate groups of people that you might be describing

00:51:50.000 is suicidal empathy, but correct me if I'm wrong. One group might be people that are just a little

00:51:54.740 bit more innocent. They're not super political. They saw the George Floyd death and they felt

00:52:02.860 sad about that. They'd certainly seen a lot of the abuse of African-Americans in American history

00:52:07.700 and people say, we need to do something about this. Then it seems like there's a set of folks

00:52:12.680 like the people that really created Black Lives Matter who have a very clear ideology. Some of

00:52:18.040 them said they're marxists um does your uh does your view does your theory account for both of

00:52:23.960 those groups of people because it seems like one of them has a more genuine empathy for african

00:52:29.480 americans whereas another one feels like they're just much more motivated to destroy western

00:52:34.040 civilization so the the physical therapist that i mentioned earlier would be part of the naive gang 0.70

00:52:42.220 The Davos degenerates would be part of the latter group.

00:52:46.600 So no, so the latter group is using suicidal empathy

00:52:52.560 to get to some ulterior motives.

00:52:55.320 But many, many people are actually, as you said,

00:52:58.240 just lobotomized and innocent and naive,

00:53:00.660 and they're just good people.

00:53:01.900 So it covers both types.

00:53:04.320 It sounds like also you're saying that the motivation

00:53:06.800 for both types in many of these cases

00:53:08.660 is to be seen as a moral person.

00:53:12.300 And that the deepest motivation in that person

00:53:16.640 is to get recognition and status as someone that's not racist

00:53:21.000 and someone that really cares about black people or trans kids

00:53:23.840 or depressed people or whatever it might be.

00:53:26.340 Right, and I give you a great example that speaks to exactly what you just said.

00:53:29.580 In my first book many years ago,

00:53:32.560 it was an academic book titled The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.

00:53:35.360 At one point, I'm talking about the evolutionary roots of signaling behavior, which speaks to what you're saying.

00:53:41.320 I'm signaling to the world that I'm a moral person.

00:53:43.820 And I reference Maimonides, the very famous Jewish philosopher and rabbi and the physician to the sultan at the time,

00:53:52.780 who talked about eight levels of tzedakah.

00:53:56.460 Tzedakah is a Hebrew word for, you know, piety and charity.

00:54:00.160 and he said the highest level of tzedakah is when the altruist and the beneficiary of the

00:54:08.740 altruistic act don't know each other's identity meaning that you can't get any social strokes

00:54:17.300 from having done the altruistic act and the reason why he places it as the very rare eighth level

00:54:23.200 is because human beings do want to be patted on the back for their good acts that's why you don't

00:54:28.880 have the anonymous cancer wing you have the joe belinsky can't right and even by the way when it

00:54:36.560 is anonymous donation guess what the people that matter to me they will know that i was very

00:54:42.940 philanthropic so there's almost never a case where people are genuinely altruistic and philanthropic

00:54:50.060 without gaining some sort of social credit so you're right so some people argue that

00:54:54.780 suicidal what you call a suicidal empathy other people might call it wokeism you might call it

00:54:59.320 radical left that its power has declined significantly from let's say 2020 2021 what's

00:55:05.320 your view is suicide is there less of the suicidal empathy today than there was a few years ago or is

00:55:10.060 it as bad as ever not in canada it's it's worse it's doubling and tripling down now some people

00:55:16.480 are having a bit of um sort of an optimistic bend because uh donald trump was able to through

00:55:24.600 a few executive orders push back against some of the lunacy right here's an executive order men

00:55:30.340 can no longer participate in women's sport and we've solved that problem but i don't think that's

00:55:36.460 going to resolve the issue because it took these parasitic ideas between 50 to 100 years to first 0.81

00:55:43.420 be spawned on university campuses then to proliferate into every nook and cranny of society

00:55:48.860 so it's not going to be in a short period that we're going to eradicate these so no i wouldn't

00:55:54.240 set up the celebration party that wokeism is dead. There's a lot of questions here about

00:55:59.280 what is the remedy? How does suicidal empathy end or become reduced? And the questions are

00:56:07.120 sort of a mix of both at the individual level, but also at the societal level.

00:56:12.020 So I'll answer it this way. I'm often asked on a related note, am I optimistic or pessimistic

00:56:18.140 about the trajectory as relating to suicidal empathy? And my answer is really, it's a bit

00:56:23.160 of both. And let me explain why. I'm optimistic in that there is a clear set of autocorrective

00:56:30.780 policies that we could enact that would solve the problem. So that's the positive part. The

00:56:36.980 negative part is I see no evidence that the West is going to implement those autocorrective

00:56:44.240 procedures anytime soon. So there is a solution, but you're unwilling to implement it. So this

00:56:49.820 would be akin to you going to see your physician and god forbid he or she says you've got stage

00:56:56.220 three cancer but here is a very clear intervention strategy that we can use to solve your problem

00:57:02.820 and you'll go into remission and you go la la la i don't want to hear it as a matter of fact cancer 0.70

00:57:06.840 is a zionist plot it doesn't exist well if you do that then you're going to die so my feeling is

00:57:13.460 that the west is hearing that we're suffering from stage four cancer but i don't want to implement 1.00

00:57:19.520 anything and I'm going to double and triple down. So I'm not optimistic. One of the questions asked

00:57:24.300 about Christianity and the roots of suicidal empathy in Christianity, Jesus famously said,

00:57:30.120 you have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemies. And I say to you

00:57:34.760 that you should love your enemies. Is loving your enemies suicidal empathy? If it's a deontological

00:57:41.220 rule, and let me explain here. So in ethics, there are two ethical systems that are often

00:57:48.820 pitted against each other. Deontological statement would be, it is never okay to lie. That would be

00:57:54.860 a deontological statement. It's an absolute statement, a Kantian imperative, right? On the

00:57:59.960 other hand, if I say it is okay to lie, if I'm trying to spare someone's feelings, I'm using

00:58:05.940 consequentialism. I often joke that if you wish to have a long-lasting marriage, if you ever hear

00:58:13.360 the following question, do I look fat in those jeans? Then very quickly put on your consequentialist

00:58:20.520 hat and say, no, you've never looked more beautiful. I might be slightly lying, but I care about my

00:58:26.220 spouse's feeling. So in this case, my lie is justified. Now for most things, we are all

00:58:32.420 consequentialists, but there is a set of foundational principles that have to be deontological. Freedom

00:58:38.220 of speech, freedom of inquiry, presumption of innocence have to be deontological. Otherwise

00:58:43.600 they're not absolute statements by which we organize society. So when it comes to

00:58:50.140 what was, or was it, oh save, love your neighbor, love your enemy, it can't be that under all

00:58:56.960 circumstances I have to turn the other cheek and love my enemy. By the way, the Israelis suffered

00:59:03.680 from suicidal empathy. To your question, or to your point, when Yahya Sinwar, who was the architect

00:59:11.080 of October 7th, he was in prison for life for terrorist activities. Then he was released on a

00:59:17.680 swap of prisoners, and that led him to be the architect of October 7th. But while he was in

00:59:23.740 prison many years ago, the Israeli physicians diagnosed him as having a brain tumor, and if

00:59:31.580 they didn't intervene, he would die. So their Hippocratic oath took precedence over maybe some

00:59:39.700 other calculus that they could have used. They saved his life. Apparently that didn't buy them

00:59:45.600 any empathy, because the way that he chose to repay them for saving his life is to serve as

00:59:51.960 the architect of October 7th. So no, I think that some features of Christianity, you're exactly

00:59:58.340 correct would be a manifestation of suicidal empathy. There's actually a book called Toxic 0.70

01:00:03.440 Empathy that very much places the dysregulated empathy within a Christian ethos. And has 0.96

01:00:11.980 suicidal empathy increased, decreased? What is the history of suicidal empathy? Pick your time

01:00:19.660 period. 2000 years, 60 years. So the architecture of the human mind is that it could always be

01:00:27.120 parasitized by bad ideas. And the classic example I give is a few hundred years ago in the northeast

01:00:33.660 of the United States, this was a very reasonable way to organize our neighborhood. I think that

01:00:38.580 Linda is a witch. So I'm going to throw her into a body of water. And if she ends up swimming, 1.00

01:00:44.120 then I know she's a witch. If she ends up drowning, then oops, I guess we were wrong. She's 0.75

01:00:48.120 not a witch. And those folks thought that that was a perfectly reasonable thing. And they grew

01:00:53.480 out of that parasitic idea. So the fact that the architecture of the human mind can be parasitized

01:00:59.220 is an inerrant feature of the frailties of the human mind. What makes it specific to this time

01:01:05.400 period, hence to your question, is that it took a specific cocktail of parasitic ideas,

01:01:11.240 post-modernism, cultural relativism, identity politics, social constructivism, and so on.

01:01:17.260 That cocktail of ideas laid the groundwork for suicidal empathy to come in.

01:01:23.140 So this is a unique feature that is prevalent in the last 40, 50 years.

01:01:28.620 And I'll just say one thing to that sort of temporal question.

01:01:33.480 Early in the book, I talk about the British historian, Arnold Toynbee,

01:01:38.220 who did a mammoth 12-volume study of why civilizations die.

01:01:43.780 And his final conclusion was, civilizations do not die by murder, they die by suicide.

01:01:51.160 What I'm arguing in the book is that in the current time period, the suicide is being

01:01:56.220 committed via dysregulated empathy.

01:01:58.740 You mentioned before that the people that are engaging in suicidal empathy are moral

01:02:05.800 relativists.

01:02:07.040 Is that really the case, though?

01:02:08.560 because it seems like for example the trans the male uh trans swimmer that wants to swim on the

01:02:14.160 female team um is that a case of moral relativism because it seems like what's being said is that

01:02:19.080 the concerns of the of the biologically female athletes are not as uh valued as the feelings of

01:02:27.740 the the male the trans identified male so i don't know if i would use the term moral relativism but 0.89

01:02:33.000 I would use post-modernism as the driving force behind all those subsequent forms of lunacy. This 1.00

01:02:40.620 is why in the parasitic mind, I argue that post-modernism is the granddaddy of all parasitic

01:02:46.340 ideas, because it purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective

01:02:52.100 truth that there are no objective truth. So already it breaks down. And I tell a great story,

01:02:56.920 which it's been a while that I haven't mentioned, so maybe if I can take time to mention here.

01:03:01.200 in 2002

01:03:04.200 and it actually will relate a bit

01:03:07.120 to the trance issue that you just mentioned

01:03:08.800 in 2002 one of my doctoral

01:03:10.980 students had just defended his

01:03:12.980 doctoral dissertation and so we were going

01:03:15.080 out to celebrate

01:03:16.360 it was going to be myself, my wife

01:03:19.160 we didn't have kids then, myself, my wife

01:03:21.320 the doctoral student who just

01:03:23.160 finished and he was bringing a date

01:03:25.200 along and he calls me

01:03:27.080 before we were going to go out

01:03:29.060 to the dinner, kind of nervous

01:03:31.020 And he says, oh, I just want to give you a heads up that the lady that I'm bringing for tonight's dinner is a graduate student in cultural anthropology, postmodernism, and women's studies. 0.98

01:03:40.900 To which I answered, ah, so the holy trinity of bullshit. 0.97

01:03:46.000 And I said, oh, no, no, I got you. 0.99

01:03:47.880 This is your night.

01:03:49.140 I'm going to keep quiet.

01:03:50.400 Don't worry.

01:03:50.880 It's going to be a fun evening, which, of course, was an abject lie.

01:03:54.200 So about halfway through the evening, I turned to this woman, who is a relativist.

01:03:59.460 And I said to her, oh, you're studying postmodernism. 0.64

01:04:02.660 There are no truths, right?

01:04:04.340 She goes, yes.

01:04:05.400 I said, well, I study evolutionary psychology.

01:04:08.020 I think that there are human universals.

01:04:09.700 So can I propose what I think is a universal truth and then we can discuss it?

01:04:15.020 She goes, absolutely, go ahead.

01:04:16.060 Now, this is 2002. 0.51

01:04:19.440 I said, is it not true that within Homo sapiens only women bear children? 0.95

01:04:25.840 She looks at my simple mind. 1.00

01:04:29.200 Can't believe that a professor could be that idiotic. 1.00

01:04:31.580 She goes, absolutely not. 1.00

01:04:32.960 I said, it's not true that only women bear children? 0.93

01:04:35.240 How so? 0.99

01:04:35.960 She goes, well, because there is some tribe 0.94

01:04:38.340 off some Japanese island

01:04:40.440 where within their folkloric mythological realm,

01:04:43.840 it is the men who bear children.

01:04:45.520 So by you restricting it to the materialistic realm, 0.58

01:04:48.240 that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant.

01:04:51.540 So after I recovered from the mini stroke I had 1.00

01:04:54.320 listening to this bullshit. I then said, okay, well, maybe it was too corrosive of me to come 0.99

01:04:59.240 up with such a controversial example as only women bear children. So how about I come up with another 0.98

01:05:04.180 one? Is it not true since time immemorial that sailors have relied on the premise that the sun

01:05:09.660 rises in the east and sets in the west? There she used a variant of postmodernism. It's called

01:05:17.280 deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida, language creates reality. So she said, well, what do you

01:05:22.540 mean by east and west and what do you mean by the sun that which you call the sun I might call

01:05:28.780 dancing hyena I said well the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west she goes I don't

01:05:34.400 play those label games the reason why I've repeated this exact story 1,000 times is because it

01:05:39.900 perfectly captures the exemplar of a parasitized mind this person was not an escapee from a

01:05:47.480 mental asylum although you couldn't tell the difference she was a graduate student in fields

01:05:53.820 that actually result in crazy making and so this i prefer rather than the term moral relativist i

01:06:01.740 just prefer the term relativist and it's a form of nihilism and intellectual terrorism you meant

01:06:07.340 we we described before how really the suicidal empathy is downstream from a particular ideology

01:06:13.120 and it's been underway for a long time.

01:06:15.880 What is the ideology downstream from?

01:06:19.260 That suicidal empathy, it results into suicidal,

01:06:22.640 all of those parasitic ideas that I discussed.

01:06:25.320 But where do the parasitic ideas come from?

01:06:27.140 Oh, okay, I see, I see.

01:06:28.580 Why are they so much stronger now than in, say, 1940?

01:06:33.160 Great question. 0.85

01:06:34.460 So in the parasitic mind,

01:06:36.840 I try to offer an explanation 0.97

01:06:39.380 for why someone could be captured by such nonsense.

01:06:44.700 And here is the explanation I offered.

01:06:47.960 Every single one of those parasitic ideas starts with a noble goal.

01:06:53.480 If in the service of that noble goal,

01:06:56.600 you have to murder and rape truth for that higher noble goal, so be it.

01:07:01.120 So it's a form of consequentialism when it comes to truth.

01:07:04.820 So let me give you an example. 1.00

01:07:06.300 Equity feminism is a great idea. 0.86

01:07:08.560 It basically says that there should be no institutional legal reasons why men and women should not be treated equally under the law.

01:07:16.160 Based on that very narrow definition of feminism, you and I would probably put up our hands and say, yeah, we're equity feminists.

01:07:22.180 Radical feminists come along and say, that's not enough. 1.00

01:07:26.020 If we wish to truly squash and eradicate the patriarchal status quo, we have to promulgate 1.00

01:07:33.640 the idea that men and women are indistinguishable in their potentialities, hence social constructivism.

01:07:41.060 We're born tabula rasa, there are no innate differences between men and women.

01:07:45.440 So in their desire to, quote, create equality, if they have to promulgate complete nonsense,

01:07:52.860 so be it.

01:07:53.540 So for each of those parasitic ideas, I can offer a similar narrative. It starts off with a noble goal. So for example, cultural relativism started regrettably as a Jewish person by a Jewish professor, anthropologist named Franz Boas at Columbia.

01:08:09.240 he believed that biology as applied to human affairs can lead to downstream nefarious

01:08:19.340 consequences. Eugenics, social Darwinism, later on the Nazis used the Darwinian argument to

01:08:26.700 support their ideology. And so what if we create a new worldview where biology ceases to matter

01:08:34.280 in explaining human phenomena.

01:08:36.200 Hence, cultural relativism stemmed from that reflex.

01:08:39.500 So each of these parasitic ideas stem from a noble reflex,

01:08:43.600 and in the service of that noble reflex, we rape and murder truth. 0.91

01:08:47.300 Now, some of the, it seems like, for example, the Black Lives Matter ideology, 0.81

01:08:51.600 doesn't that stem from a, is that coming, in your view, from a noble truth, 0.57

01:08:56.620 or is it coming from a real hatred of Western civilization?

01:08:59.940 Or is that hatred of Western civilization coming from a good place?

01:09:02.980 Well, they would argue the hatred of Western civilization is a noble pursuit, right?

01:09:08.260 Because they would argue that we are irrevocably damaged.

01:09:12.220 That's why, by the way, so between parasitic mind and suicidal empathy, I wrote a book on happiness.

01:09:19.960 And in my, you know, going over the literature, I found an unequivocal finding, which is that

01:09:28.360 conservatives score consistently much higher on happiness than the progressives.

01:09:35.380 And I offered a speculative, but I think plausible explanation.

01:09:39.360 The conservative wakes up in the morning, and by definition of the word conserve, there

01:09:44.540 are things worth conserving.

01:09:45.920 It may not be a perfect society, but we have freedom of speech.

01:09:49.100 we have individual dignity, blah, blah, blah.

01:09:51.560 The progressive wakes up in the morning

01:09:53.980 with great existential angst.

01:09:58.500 I live on stolen land,

01:10:00.440 Islamophobia, transphobia, and so on.

01:10:02.620 Just around the corner lies unicornia. 0.96

01:10:06.660 If only I could burn down the current system,

01:10:09.860 then I can create a much better

01:10:11.820 socially engineered society.

01:10:13.520 So there you go.

01:10:15.000 Gadzad, thank you for a wonderful evening.

01:10:16.680 Thank you so much.

01:10:17.460 Cheers.

01:10:19.100 So, our thanks to Gad Saad, author of Suicidal Empathy, Dying to Be Kind, and to Ken and Jacqueline Broad, Family Fund, and the Manhattan Institute for supporting tonight's event.

01:10:37.400 Thanks, everybody, for coming.

01:10:39.780 Thank you so much.

01:10:41.860 That was great.

01:10:42.480 Great job.

01:10:43.080 Thank you.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 15, 2026

Discussing Suicidal Empathy at the Commonwealth Club (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1005)

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