Discussing Suicidal Empathy on Politics by Faith (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1001)
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Summary
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
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America is the greatest country in the world. Welcome to our special Compassion Collapse
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America's Empathy Crisis. But I want to be clear, the crisis here is not that we're lacking
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empathy, it's that we have too much of it. Or more accurately, maybe not properly aligned
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precisely because 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 you need to do the same and putting yourself in my mind
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that's called theory of mind or cognitive empathy so it is perfectly reasonable to presume that for
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a social species we have evolved the capacity to empathize we we want our spouses to be empathetic
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We want our physicians and therapists and veterinarians to be empathetic.
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So unlike many of the people who are already writing, have been writing hit pieces on my
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book for a while, even before they could read the book, I'm not attacking empathy.
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And I'll explain in a second how it becomes dysregulated.
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but let me draw from our ancient wisdom of Aristotle in his Nicomachean ethics. He talked
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about the golden mean Aristotle did, where he said that too little of something is not good,
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too much of something is not good, and you really have to find that sweet spot. Now, in his case,
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he was talking about courage. If a soldier is not at all courageous, if he's cowardly, that's a bad
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thing but if he is so filled with dysregulated courage that he becomes a reckless martyr well
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he's going to die very quickly and that's not good so there is some temperate level of courage that
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is optimal for a soldier to exhibit well I argue that the exact same thing applies for empathy
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no empathy typically will make you a psychopath too much empathy and now here there are three
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parts to my framework for social suicidal empathy it hyper activates it it is hyper firing
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in the wrong situation towards the wrong targets once you put those together you get
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civilizational collapse when your book you quote scholars who say that civilizations die from
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suicide not by murder that that speaks to the importance of this this isn't just like a minor
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detail. It's a big deal. How does this lead to the suicide of a culture and of a country?
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Well, right. And there are several who've made that point. But the one that you're referring
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to, that maxim, civilizations die by suicide and not by murder, was from a British historian who
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published a 12-volume set. His name is Arnold Toynbee, where he looked at what causes civilizations
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to die and that's when he realized that usually it is a self-immolation that leads to now in my
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case i'm arguing that the gaming of one of our most laudable virtues is in this case what's going
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to lead us to the abyss of infinite darkness now how does it manifest itself in endless ways both
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domestic and foreign policies if you care more about illegal migrants than you do about american
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vets who've lost their limbs fighting for American freedoms, that's suicidal empathy.
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If you care more about the illegal migrants who rape your women and children than you
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care about protecting your women and children, that's suicidal empathy.
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If you care about socialism more than capitalism, because socialism is empathetic, it creates
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So it's a very kind culture where everybody is equal in their being poor, that's suicidal
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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.
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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?
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What explains that depth of it, even to your own personal detriment?
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Do they think they're noble or good or what drives this?
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So the case that, I mean, there are several cases that fit the general description that
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And so let me, you know, explain them in a bit more granular detail.
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So a woman is gang raped in Germany by a bunch of guys who are speaking Arabic and Farsi.
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And when the police comes and they're trying to identify some relevant markers of the gang
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rapists who were speaking in Arabic and Farsi when they were gang raping her, she lies and says that
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they are speaking in German because if she says that they were speaking in languages that are
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typically spoken by guys from the Middle East, then that might create greater bigotry towards
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Middle Eastern men in Germany. It is an even more incredible story. So a white liberal progressive
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woman who's much kinder and much more empathetic than than us here on this in this conversation
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goes to Haiti to demonstrate that the the sexist stereotype of men of black men ever committing
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violent violence is simply wrong and so she goes down to Haiti and then she is slapped by this
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thing called reality where on top of a rooftop a Haitian man is violently raping her all night
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And as he's raping her, she explains to him that she herself is a BLM supporter.
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She herself loves Malcolm X, and yet that still didn't stop him from raping her.
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At the end of this essay that she had written post the rape, she concludes that she was
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very thankful for the experience, the rape, that's what she's thankful for, because that
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taught her that the anger that he exhibited towards her stemmed from white supremacy. So
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when a Haitian man rapes you in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that is a manifestation of how evil white
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supremacy is in the United States. Now, I'll cede the floor to you in a second. The reason why she
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is able to engage in such hallucinatory conclusions is that there is nothing more
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important to her than to stroke her luxuriant hair while admiring her reflection in the mirror
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of moral preening. So the rape is okay because it didn't allow her to be a bigot.
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Wow. My last question for you. We see this happening in the West. What do other countries
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around the world? We can do third world countries or however you want to delineate them or define
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them, differentiate them, discriminate. How do other countries view this concept of empathy?
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well i'll explain i'll answer this question using an analogy if you look at eating disorders it
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turns out that hippocrates 2000 plus years ago had identified very similar realities to what
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to anorexia nervosa today and one of the conclusions is that anorexia nervosa only
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happens in cultures of plentitude, right? Ethiopian women who recurrently face famine do not typically
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suffer from anorexia nervosa. It's only when you have the luxury of actually, quote, suffering from
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these psychiatric disorders that you're able to exhibit some of this lunacy. So now you can see
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how I link it to your question. Ethiopians and people in Syria don't typically suffer from
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suicidal empathy. It takes a society that is so bored with its largesse that it could turn inward
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and kill itself. Great. Dr. Gad Saad, his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to be Kind, top
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seller right now, well-deserved. I want to give a proper shout out to Ole Miss. He's a scholar at
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the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. Dr. Saad, congratulations
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on this book. I look forward to reading all your others to come. Thank you so much. Take care.
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Coming up next, we're going to bring in the Bible here.
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We're going to go to Galatians 1.10 and Romans 14 right here on Politics by Faith.