Discussing Suicidal Empathy on The Dana Loesch Show (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1010)
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
7
sentences flagged
Toxicity
13
sentences flagged
Hate speech
14
sentences flagged
Summary
Gad Saad is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of the bestselling book, "Suicidal Empathy" and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. In this episode, we discuss the phenomenon of "suicidal empathy" and how it manifests in everyday life.
Transcript
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My next guest, Gad Saad, who is the author of the bestselling book, Suicidal Empathy,
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He is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom
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He has a lot of thanks to his CV, and he joins us now via video.
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And not to say that I don't trust your judgment at all, because obviously I do, but I had
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to do a double take of this story because this is exactly what you wrote about. Suicidal empathy.
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They go after the victim because she gave a simple statement that's supported by statistics.
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Yeah. First, thank you so much for having me, Dana. Look, I'm the author of Suicidal Empathy,
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and I couldn't believe the cases that I was documenting in the book. And I had the same
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reflex as you, each time that I would discuss a new case in my book, I would double, triple,
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quadruple check to make sure that it wasn't satirical because it really defies reality.
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I'll give you even a worse example than the one that you mentioned, although the one that you
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mentioned is a perfect manifestation of suicidal empathy. A white woman, a white progressive woman
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goes to Haiti because she wants to demonstrate that the stereotype of black men ever committing
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violence is only something that you see in white supremacist United States. So she goes to Haiti
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to prove that point. Well, then she's slapped by this thing called reality where a Haitian man
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in Port-au-Prince takes her to a rooftop and rapes her all night. At the end of which she
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concludes, and the reason we know that she concludes this is because she writes a post-rape
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essay where she says the end result of the rape is that she's thankful for the experience because
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it demonstrated that the Haitian man was only raping her because of what he faced due to white
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supremacy. So her body was a justified vehicle of the black man's hatred of white supremacy.
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And he's in Haiti. So he's not even under the auspices of white supremacy, United States,
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but she was thankful for the experience. You're right. That is absolutely horrific. And I feel
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like we're rewiring an entire planet, an entire generation to accept this because this is, you
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know, as you say, suicidal empathy, your people think that, you know, instead of kill them with
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kindness, we're being killed because we're being kind. I'm not quite sure when this began. And,
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you know, I've read a lot of what you have written, especially on this topic, because I just know
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when I was growing up and I came of age in the 90s, when I was growing up, we did not have this.
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There was this phenomenon. This did not exist. At least at that point, you had consequence and
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you had cause and effect. And if you violated the law, then you were equal underneath the
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Constitution. It's not like that anymore. When did this start? Is this recent or have we been
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building? Yeah, no, great question. No, it's been building to a tipping point that then results in
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you seeing it everywhere and the way that it's been building is it's really the one-two punch
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of my earlier book parasitic mind and then suicidal empathy and let me explain how that is
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so we are both a thinking and feeling animal dana and so if i wish to parasitize hijack your ability
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to engage in critical thinking i need to do two things i need to hijack your cognitive system
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your thought processes that's what the parasitic mind explained but then i also need to hijack your
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affective system, your emotional system. And that's what I explain in Suicidal Empathy.
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But to your exact question, it's the parasitic ideas that were originally spawned on university
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campuses over the past 50 to 100 years that then laid the minefield for suicidal empathy to
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flourish. And so it has been something that's been building up for many decades, and we're
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now seeing the result of it. We are seeing the results of this. And I would think, because I
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keep hearing these stories about women being the most directly affected. We had a story of, we were
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talking about the UK grooming gangs, the report that came out, which is horrific. And they
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interviewed, and I'll play this for you, Gad, if we can get that video ready. I can't remember what
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cut that was. One of the fathers of this, one of these Pakistani rapists that was targeting these
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girls, he said that he didn't really think that his son bore a lot of responsibility for this.
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I'm going to have you listen to this and get your reaction.
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I think that the judge has gone over the board,
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in that question and answer. He doesn't think that his son is responsible, a 13-year-old girl,
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and he questions her virtue as a way to, I guess, you know, defend his son. This is not just one
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example in the UK, as you know. There are thousands of these examples, and their families are defending
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them. Exactly. Well, so look, one of the important features of life is to know to whom you should
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ascribe causality, right? So many people, when they are successful in something, they say,
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I did well on the exam because I studied hard and it was because of me, I'm intelligent. And if I
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did poorly on the exam, I ascribe it to external factors. It's because Professor Saad is a mean,
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an unfair jerk. Now, so what this guy is doing is he's basically saying that the description of
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causality of this rape of a child does not lie with his son. He doesn't have personal agency,
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And by the way, you see that often in Islamic thinking, right?
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So the reason why you need to erase the identity of women by putting them in what I call,
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sarcastically, freedom veils is because if you don't do that, that might be very tempting
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And so if you walk around like the non-Muslim woman that you are showing all of your beauty,
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then maybe it makes perfect sense for the Muslim men to justifiably rape you.
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It's grotesque. It is. And it's I like how you put it, too. It's somehow this person doesn't have the agency, but we all have agency and we get blamed for having agency that they then take from us.
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It's it is a very wild scenario. And the United States, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be that far behind France, the UK, Spain, even some of these.
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there was a woman who was beheaded by an Islamist in Florence, of all places, just last week in
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Italy, like right there with the tourists at the height of tourist season. She has her head cut
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off in the street. The United States isn't that far behind because of this suicidal empathy,
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as you call it, and your amazing book, which people should go out and get. We have it baked
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into our justice system at this point with restorative justice, where we're doing the
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same thing here in the United States with criminals. And as you know, you've seen these
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cases. But is it too ingrained at this point to, I guess, the lack of a better way to say it, to
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reset? Because this is a really, it seems beyond just a logical discussion. And especially with
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the left, it is very hyper emotional that I don't know if that conversation to reverse this could
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ever be had with them. So I have good news and I have bad news relating to your question. Let's
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start with the good news. The good news is this is not an intractable problem in that there is a
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template. There is a set of autocorrective procedures that we could implement to completely
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reverse the problem. So that's the good news. And this is actually good news because imagine,
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God forbid, you go to see your physician and he or she says, here's the disease you have. There
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are no cures for it. You've got three weeks left. Get your stuff in order. So this is not the case.
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So we could celebrate the fact that in the abstract, we could implement a cure for this
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I see absolutely no evidence that the West has an iota of testicular fortitude to implement
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So now to go back to the physician example, it's as if your physician says, well, there
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is a solution for this and we can give it to you.
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And then you answer, well, no, the disease doesn't exist.
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And if the disease exists, it's really a Zionist plot and so on and so forth.
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If we can get people to actually, in unison, stand up and say, basta, no more.
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I worry and fear, Dana, that it's going to be a long, drawn out, bloody conflict.
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I do too, especially, and you talked about this.
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It doesn't seem as though people recognize altruism anymore.
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I mean, there is a difference between being a welcome mat and then being altruistic.
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There's a very, I mean, there's a significant difference and it seems as though no one recognizes it.
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And so that's the perfect segue to actually explain the difference between adaptive empathy and suicidal empathy.
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As a matter of fact, as an evolutionary psychologist, I perfectly recognize that being a social species, we are expected to be empathetic.
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We want our spouses to be empathetic, our best friends, our physicians, our therapists.
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So empathy within well-calibrated ranges is perfectly rational.
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The problem, as Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, is that too little
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And life is about finding that middle sweet spot.
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As applied to empathy, if I exhibit no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath.
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path. But if I have my empathy mechanism on hyperdrive, if it hyperfires in the wrong
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situations towards the wrong targets, I end up with suicidal empathy.
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There you go. And the book as well, which everyone should go out and get if you haven't already,
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Suicidal Empathy, Gad said, it's a pleasure to have you. I would love to have you back. And even
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when you're able to have a longer conversation, because I would love to just pick your brain about
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so many issues, but I appreciate the time that we had today. Thank you so much.
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I would love that. Thank you so much, Dana. Cheers.