The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - May 31, 2026


Discussing Suicidal Empathy on Politics by Faith (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1001)

Topics
suicidal empathy crisis
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Aristotle Farsi Suicidal Empathy Arnold Toynbee Malcolm X Kind
Suicidal Empathy Video - Produced by the Wonderful Team of PragerU (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1000) Synopsis of the Three Weeks Since Suicidal Empathy Was Released (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1002)

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

154.84

Word count

1,418

Sentence count

72

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

America is the greatest country in the world, and yet we have a crisis of empathy. Is it a symptom of a dysregulated or over-regulated society, or is it the root cause of civilizational collapse? In this episode, I speak with the author of a new book about the problem, Dr. Gad Saad, who argues that we have too much and not enough empathy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 America is the greatest country in the world. Welcome to our special Compassion Collapse
00:00:12.880 America's Empathy Crisis. But I want to be clear, the crisis here is not that we're lacking
00:00:19.640 empathy, it's that we have too much of it. Or more accurately, maybe not properly aligned
00:00:26.780 or calibrated or well-balanced.
00:00:29.240 The expert on this issue,
00:00:31.100 the man who wrote the book about it,
00:00:32.540 the great Dr. Gad Saad.
00:00:34.900 His new book is called
00:00:36.600 Suicidal Empathy, Dying to be Kind.
00:00:41.660 He is also a scholar
00:00:42.660 at the Declaration of Independence Center
00:00:44.440 for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss.
00:00:47.240 Dr. Saad, I'm grateful you're here.
00:00:49.120 Is empathy even good?
00:00:51.060 Where did this concept come from?
00:00:52.380 Right, so empathy is a wonderful virtue,
00:00:55.800 precisely because we are a social species for you and I to have a meaningful conversation
00:01:01.900 I need to put myself in your mind and you need to do the same and putting yourself in my mind
00:01:07.100 that's called theory of mind or cognitive empathy so it is perfectly reasonable to presume that for
00:01:13.800 a social species we have evolved the capacity to empathize we we want our spouses to be empathetic
00:01:21.860 We want our best friends to be empathetic.
00:01:23.760 We want our physicians and therapists and veterinarians to be empathetic.
00:01:28.740 So unlike many of the people who are already writing, have been writing hit pieces on my
00:01:33.600 book for a while, even before they could read the book, I'm not attacking empathy.
00:01:39.320 I am attacking the dysregulation of empathy.
00:01:42.060 And I'll explain in a second how it becomes dysregulated.
00:01:45.400 but let me draw from our ancient wisdom of Aristotle in his Nicomachean ethics. He talked
00:01:53.420 about the golden mean Aristotle did, where he said that too little of something is not good,
00:01:58.220 too much of something is not good, and you really have to find that sweet spot. Now, in his case,
00:02:03.480 he was talking about courage. If a soldier is not at all courageous, if he's cowardly, that's a bad
00:02:08.940 thing but if he is so filled with dysregulated courage that he becomes a reckless martyr well
00:02:16.660 he's going to die very quickly and that's not good so there is some temperate level of courage that
00:02:21.220 is optimal for a soldier to exhibit well I argue that the exact same thing applies for empathy
00:02:26.360 no empathy typically will make you a psychopath too much empathy and now here there are three
00:02:32.780 parts to my framework for social suicidal empathy it hyper activates it it is hyper firing
00:02:39.780 in the wrong situation towards the wrong targets once you put those together you get
00:02:46.640 civilizational collapse when your book you quote scholars who say that civilizations die from
00:02:53.260 suicide not by murder that that speaks to the importance of this this isn't just like a minor
00:02:59.320 detail. It's a big deal. How does this lead to the suicide of a culture and of a country?
00:03:03.720 Well, right. And there are several who've made that point. But the one that you're referring
00:03:10.460 to, that maxim, civilizations die by suicide and not by murder, was from a British historian who
00:03:17.920 published a 12-volume set. His name is Arnold Toynbee, where he looked at what causes civilizations
00:03:26.160 to die and that's when he realized that usually it is a self-immolation that leads to now in my
00:03:33.580 case i'm arguing that the gaming of one of our most laudable virtues is in this case what's going
00:03:40.960 to lead us to the abyss of infinite darkness now how does it manifest itself in endless ways both
00:03:47.820 domestic and foreign policies if you care more about illegal migrants than you do about american
00:03:54.560 vets who've lost their limbs fighting for American freedoms, that's suicidal empathy. 0.98
00:03:58.980 If you care more about the illegal migrants who rape your women and children than you 0.96
00:04:05.080 care about protecting your women and children, that's suicidal empathy.
00:04:08.620 If you care about socialism more than capitalism, because socialism is empathetic, it creates
00:04:15.660 the redistribution of income.
00:04:17.760 So it's a very kind culture where everybody is equal in their being poor, that's suicidal
00:04:23.640 empathy.
00:04:24.020 So what basically I do in the book is I first describe the framework and then I exactly demonstrate the endless ways by which it is eroding our society.
00:04:34.820 I mean, you write about some extreme examples that boggle the mind, like like a woman who will get raped by a migrant, but then not want to get the migrant in trouble or something like what?
00:04:47.080 What explains that depth of it, even to your own personal detriment?
00:04:52.580 Do they think they're noble or good or what drives this?
00:04:55.820 Exactly.
00:04:56.440 So the case that, I mean, there are several cases that fit the general description that
00:05:01.400 you just described.
00:05:02.340 And so let me, you know, explain them in a bit more granular detail.
00:05:07.360 So a woman is gang raped in Germany by a bunch of guys who are speaking Arabic and Farsi.
00:05:13.900 And when the police comes and they're trying to identify some relevant markers of the gang
00:05:19.900 rapists who were speaking in Arabic and Farsi when they were gang raping her, she lies and says that
00:05:26.820 they are speaking in German because if she says that they were speaking in languages that are 0.50
00:05:32.040 typically spoken by guys from the Middle East, then that might create greater bigotry towards
00:05:39.160 Middle Eastern men in Germany. It is an even more incredible story. So a white liberal progressive
00:05:47.880 woman who's much kinder and much more empathetic than than us here on this in this conversation
00:05:53.620 goes to Haiti to demonstrate that the the sexist stereotype of men of black men ever committing
00:06:02.460 violent violence is simply wrong and so she goes down to Haiti and then she is slapped by this 0.97
00:06:08.240 thing called reality where on top of a rooftop a Haitian man is violently raping her all night 0.83
00:06:16.100 And as he's raping her, she explains to him that she herself is a BLM supporter. 0.98
00:06:21.920 She herself loves Malcolm X, and yet that still didn't stop him from raping her. 0.92
00:06:27.780 At the end of this essay that she had written post the rape, she concludes that she was 0.91
00:06:35.140 very thankful for the experience, the rape, that's what she's thankful for, because that
00:06:42.020 taught her that the anger that he exhibited towards her stemmed from white supremacy. So 0.55
00:06:49.080 when a Haitian man rapes you in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that is a manifestation of how evil white 0.99
00:06:57.320 supremacy is in the United States. Now, I'll cede the floor to you in a second. The reason why she 0.98
00:07:04.180 is able to engage in such hallucinatory conclusions is that there is nothing more
00:07:11.660 important to her than to stroke her luxuriant hair while admiring her reflection in the mirror
00:07:18.820 of moral preening. So the rape is okay because it didn't allow her to be a bigot. 1.00
00:07:25.060 Wow. My last question for you. We see this happening in the West. What do other countries
00:07:31.800 around the world? We can do third world countries or however you want to delineate them or define
00:07:35.300 them, differentiate them, discriminate. How do other countries view this concept of empathy?
00:07:40.520 well i'll explain i'll answer this question using an analogy if you look at eating disorders it
00:07:49.740 turns out that hippocrates 2000 plus years ago had identified very similar realities to what
00:07:57.420 to anorexia nervosa today and one of the conclusions is that anorexia nervosa only
00:08:03.500 happens in cultures of plentitude, right? Ethiopian women who recurrently face famine do not typically
00:08:13.380 suffer from anorexia nervosa. It's only when you have the luxury of actually, quote, suffering from
00:08:19.520 these psychiatric disorders that you're able to exhibit some of this lunacy. So now you can see
00:08:24.740 how I link it to your question. Ethiopians and people in Syria don't typically suffer from
00:08:31.240 suicidal empathy. It takes a society that is so bored with its largesse that it could turn inward
00:08:38.020 and kill itself. Great. Dr. Gad Saad, his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to be Kind, top
00:08:47.300 seller right now, well-deserved. I want to give a proper shout out to Ole Miss. He's a scholar at
00:08:51.480 the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. Dr. Saad, congratulations
00:08:56.500 on this book. I look forward to reading all your others to come. Thank you so much. Take care.
00:09:00.920 Coming up next, we're going to bring in the Bible here.
00:09:03.420 We're going to go to Galatians 1.10 and Romans 14 right here on Politics by Faith.
00:09:09.060 Spread the word.