00:03:59.400excuse me i was uh i got in touch with the people of princeton and after my first year
00:04:06.140med school took a leave of absence to start a phd with thomas kuhn at princeton wow and uh
00:04:13.360princeton only required one year residence in terms of living in princeton and so after my
00:04:19.940first year i went back to med school and then would go back and forth doing independent taking
00:04:24.380clinical courses in med school and then taking a couple months of independent study at Princeton
00:04:30.240and wound up finishing both degrees and then started my residency in psychiatry.
00:04:36.220And, I mean, was your pursuit of your Ph.D. simply out of the truest, purest form of love
00:04:44.480of learning? Or, you know, if my psychiatry gig doesn't work out, I can fall back on this as a
00:04:51.280career? Well, I was a love of learning and to some degree, imagine doing both, being a clinical
00:04:59.360psychiatrist and doing some history as well, which I've been able to do some of. Right. Wow. Okay. So
00:05:06.060let's talk about psychiatry, as I think I mentioned to you offline, and then we'll get into
00:05:10.740some of your books. So this book, I don't, and if you don't know any of these books, it's not,
00:05:15.700I'm not testing you or anything. This book had a profound effect on me. I don't know if you
00:05:20.460remember it or know it house of cards uh it's not very uh complementary towards the mental health
00:05:27.600profession it's by a very well-known psychology of decision-making uh psychologist by the name
00:05:33.640of robin dawes and house of cards psychology and psychotherapy built on myth now the reason why
00:05:40.780that book was so important to me because you you may or may not know this uh ken after i finished
00:05:46.820my undergrad, I was trying to decide, you know, what, what do I want to do? I mean, I knew I was
00:05:50.620going to be a professor of some type, but I had actually toyed with the idea of maybe going into
00:05:55.500either clinical psychology or psychiatry, hence applying to medical school and so on. And then
00:06:01.460my feeling was that a lot of the mental health profession was built on a house of cards. And
00:06:08.360that, of course, there is a rigorous science behind some of the interventions, but a lot of
00:06:12.800it is pure quackery. And I've got a whole bunch of other books here, The Rise and Crisis of
00:06:19.580Psychoanalysis in the United States. Let me just mention a few others, Why Freud Was Wrong. And
00:06:25.900then I'll just point one other one to you, Out of Its Mind, Psychiatry in Crisis. So my first
00:06:35.180question to you is, am I totally off and having not pursued psychiatry because I was worried that
00:06:41.540it wasn't sitting on a strong scientific basis? Has this been your experience? Tell us what you
00:06:47.200think of this. Well, if you talk about the psychodynamics, there are some elements of
00:06:54.780Freudian psychodynamics that should be almost rigorous, and many others are not. But Freud's
00:07:04.720theory, part of why Freud was so closely embraced in the earlier part of the last century through
00:07:10.960the first half of the last century a bit more and it still has a certain degree of popularity
00:07:17.040is because uh his models were all inclusive and elegant and they combined not only a theory of
00:07:24.800pathology psychopathology uh but also a uh relating it to normal psychiatric psychological
00:07:35.120phenomena and uh using it to try to put together a therapeutic regimen uh and a lot of people found
00:07:45.360it very fascinating uh but but interested me more and i think there there is some
00:07:52.320um very stable very um concrete uh psychodynamic concepts not only Freudian you know and uh and a
00:08:08.400lot of Freudian issues have been he's been way off when he tried to apply things to history
00:08:13.200and to uh and to uh uh anthropology in a sense uh he he was way off the mark and even in terms
00:08:22.760of the psychodynamics and and beyond that there were questions of even if even if his system worked
00:08:28.480it's not a very efficient one you know and how do you address issues without going through all that
00:08:33.980and to some degree uh the psychodynamic interventions have been replaced by
00:08:39.360medication interventions right and uh and uh but uh at the same time if we look at the history of
00:08:48.440where he was coming from initially it it actually reflects impressively on developments at the time
00:08:57.080in in both neuroanatomy and neurophysiology that to really understand where he's coming from what
00:09:06.400he did with it is something else but to really understand that he's coming from i believe it
00:09:11.080it's important to look at the site the uh what where the field was at the time where
00:09:18.240neuropsychiatry was neurology and psychiatry i would say i mean and you'll tell me if i'm off
00:09:26.220base i mean his historically valid contributions if i summarize them in one sentence it would be
00:09:33.300that, you know, he put the unconscious mind on the map, and that was very important. Now,
00:09:39.120the specific contents of what he was saying, a lot of it has been disproved, right? It's sort
00:09:45.980of the old, you know, sometimes Dr. Freud, a cigar is just a cigar sort of idea that, you know,
00:09:51.260he was over applying some of his framework to... Absolutely. Right. But now if you have
00:09:59.200psychiatrists in training today, will they still go through, you know, a module or two
00:10:06.380on psychoanalysis and foreign theory, or is that completely off the curriculum?
00:10:10.620No, what's very interesting is that, in a sense, going through a psychiatric residency today,
00:10:18.220they introduced some rudiments of doing psychotherapy, but it's so focused on
00:10:24.180uh psychopharmacology that you have many people leaving residences residencies and then seeking
00:10:32.020out uh psychoanalytic training in an analytic institute because they feel bereft of their
00:10:37.940preparation particularly those who went into it with some idea of having some interest in
00:10:43.860in psychology but an interesting element of talking about how his elements of his theory
00:10:52.740or no longer hold or people move past them actually has to do with his daughter and actually
00:10:59.380has to do with our subject because uh in my books when i talk about the uh the uh psychodynamics
00:11:10.020and the psychopathology of uh communities under chronic siege minority communities and so forth
00:11:16.740including jewish communities both in in the diaspora and in israel a lot of the concepts
00:11:24.580behind uh the oslo syndrome or behind uh the stockholm syndrome uh is anna freud's concept of
00:11:35.300the identification with the aggressor right which is an anna freud concept uh she developed it in
00:11:42.660the 2020 it was early 30s she published it but what's into another interesting element about that
00:11:48.180is she understood it as a universal concept that that it was universally applicable and what did
00:11:55.620she mean that in child development that children are uh criticized by their parents and you know
00:12:06.100just in teaching and parents teaching and they absorb that criticism and take it as uh i'm bad
00:12:13.940if i don't conform to it and i'm good if i do conform to it and they do so uh because they
00:12:22.820want to ingratiate themselves with their parents basically you know their parents are the authorities
00:12:27.060the parents are the adults around them and they want to ingratiate themselves and so she actually
00:12:34.020saw it as a root of of conscience you know absorbing the lessons derived from the parents
00:12:41.720as a root of people's conscience or as a root of what might say super ego but that in the context
00:12:48.220of her father's work was sacrilege in a sense it was rebellious rebellious in a very profound sense
00:12:56.260now i think there's a lot to say for her interpretations and of course to the degree
00:13:01.400that one accepts it surpasses it goes beyond what his idea that superego came from repressing
00:13:06.460sexual thoughts and so forth and uh and competition with the father and edible issues and these sorts
00:13:12.100of things but it's an interesting take on how the the area moved or moved past what he was thinking
00:13:20.260and she never developed in part because i thought she had some ambivalence about it she never went
00:13:24.720that much further with the idea but they uh the english psychoanalytic school uh object relations
00:13:32.700psycho psychodynamics did adopt to some degree her concept of this uh identification with the
00:13:40.040aggressor and its universal application being a source of uh superego for what i call that
00:13:45.820conscience. If I were to reframe what you just said in sort of my evolutionary lens,
00:13:54.760you might be aware that I apply evolutionary psychology to study human behavior. So here's
00:14:00.900a book, by the way, which actually was very influential on me, it's called Darwinian
00:14:05.460Psychiatry by Troisi and Maguire, where they basically argue that regrettably, most physicians
00:14:11.560in general, and certainly psychiatrists in particular, are not very well steeped within
00:14:16.680an evolutionary understanding of why these disorders might arise. And the general idea is
00:14:22.120that you take an adaptive mechanism that then misfires maladaptively, and that leads to the
00:14:29.680psychiatric disorder. So in the case of Freud's daughter, your original story of the attachment,
00:14:36.220I want to ingratiate myself to the parent, and hence, you know, I bond with them. That could
00:14:41.520easily be housed within an evolutionary framework. And then it misfires when the parental figure
00:14:48.280becomes my captor. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Okay. So are you,
00:14:56.600whether you or other psychiatrists, I mean, you've had a long career as a psychiatrist,
00:15:00.520How often do psychiatrists incorporate evolutionary principles within their therapeutic modalities?
00:15:11.320I think they don't incorporate that often or consciously or even we're being aware of it.
00:15:18.140But certainly the idea of what's maladaptive and what's adaptive is incorporated widely.
00:15:26.780right and a lot and and uh i would do without without explicit reference to evolution or
00:15:34.060evolutionary thinking i would talk about uh pathological behaviors being not pathological
00:15:44.120to them but maladaptive i said it doesn't serve it doesn't serve for what their aspirations are
00:15:51.380it doesn't serve in that i could say in evolutionary terms but i don't use that clinically
00:15:56.320Right. I got you. So one of the reasons why I, other than the sort of, I wasn't sure whether
00:16:03.300the scientific basis of a lot of these mental health interventions was valid or not. That's
00:16:09.220one of the reasons why I decided not to go into it. The other reason, more personal, and I discussed
00:16:14.060this in, I think in my happiness book, the one before suicidal empathy, I felt that I didn't have
00:16:22.240the right inoculation against all that I might be hearing as a therapist, meaning that I would
00:16:29.780likely be the guy who would jump off a ledge if I'm going to have to sit and hear how little Susie0.53
00:16:36.000was molested by, you know, her uncle. So, and therefore having that self-insight allowed me to
00:16:43.540make a good, I think, occupational choice, which is, yes, I would love to help people. Maybe I'll
00:16:49.020find another way to do it maybe therapy as a therapist wasn't for me so from your perspective
00:16:54.480how do you protect yourself against all the horror stories that you read when somebody sits on the
00:17:00.460proverbial couch well i think it's the same um it's not that different from other physicians
00:17:06.400i mean who have to deal with awful things often in their practice and yet somehow put it behind
00:17:13.780them when they leave the office. And can't entirely put it behind them, but cannot live
00:17:22.300with taking with them constantly, bearing with them constantly, some of the heartbreaking things
00:17:30.020that they're dealing with on a day to day business. And so I think to some degree, the
00:17:37.100medical training prepares you for that if you're if you're receptive to it.
00:17:40.880So, in other words, there's that kind of clinical detachment, although, I mean, in all fairness, it may be tragic that someone just had a ACL knee injury and now their career is over.
00:17:56.280That seems to have a different emotional valence to it than little Susie having been molested for seven years by her, you know, creepy uncle.
00:25:21.460I was going to say, there is an expression in French, which I'll say it in French, and then I'll translate.
00:25:27.440Si tu ne sais pas pourquoi tu bats ta femme, n'ai pas peur, elle, elle le sait.
00:25:31.840If you don't know why you're beating your wife, don't worry, she knows why, right?
00:25:37.860And so that is exactly speaking to that, right?
00:25:40.520Meaning that the abused, you know, person in the domestic violence situation is always able to internalize why it was her fault that this created is abusing her all the time.
00:25:56.000Absolutely. Absolutely. And you can see that if you work with just expanding on that example,
00:26:03.780If you work with, for example, with children or daughters of alcoholics, daughters of alcoholics, whose whole childhood was spoiled by their fathers, you know, coming home drunk half the time, abusing the child's mother, abusing the children.
00:26:24.480and uh what the child would in in uh incorporate which uh interpret what was going on as a
00:26:35.100rejection of her but somehow she failed to win the father from his alcohol and what one sees1.00
00:26:43.400often with and such and such women as adults is that they are attracted to alcoholics
00:26:51.340and uh the question we pose why why when they went through this hell as a child would they
00:26:58.900then be attracted to alcoholics so again some of the literature says it because that's what
00:27:02.740they're familiar with that's what they know i think a more basic interpretation is that they're
00:27:08.920trying to win at something that they formerly lost that that somehow they believe going forward
00:27:14.540in life having their life turn out right requires that they win at this very basic task very basic
00:27:23.640challenge that they failed as a child they failed to win over their alcoholic father to give up his
00:27:29.300bottle for love of her and so they're now going to find an alcoholic partner and do it again and
00:27:35.760only this time they hope to win right and uh so uh the the child again the the abused child
00:27:47.400hopes by considering himself or herself bad that becomes a good the abuse will the abuser
00:27:57.000the parents will change and treat him differently and in the uh in the case of chronically besieged
00:28:05.680populations you see the same thing that they take on often or segments subject segments not the whole
00:28:12.640population but parts of them take on that uh that abuse and and reform it recalculated recalibrated
00:28:24.720as somehow a reflection of my being not doing so i'm not doing something wrong if i only do it right
00:28:31.760then i will no longer be besieged so uh for example what the israelis and you might say well
00:28:41.260why would israel respond that way when it won its wars when it was doing okay when it was prospering
00:28:46.980in so many ways and uh the reason is that yes but they wanted especially the elites they were
00:28:56.380they wanted peace they wanted the worst and they wanted to be accepted and uh and that wasn't in
00:29:03.820their control so israelis israel has demonstrated capacity to deter aggression at times a capacity
00:29:14.300when deterrence failed to defeat aggression but that does not count add up to peace they've not
00:29:21.420been accepted by their neighbors now you see some in some states some acceptance you see the the
00:29:27.180abraham accords and so forth but in terms of the real power dynamics in the middle east if there's
00:29:34.860genuine peace if genuine peace ever comes it's not going to be on the israelis timetable it's
00:29:40.380going to be on the arab's timetable the hours are by far the dominant you know there's a population
00:29:45.580of uh of hundreds of millions compared to you know seven eight seven million eight million
00:29:52.940jews in israel and it's going to be on their timetable and the trouble particularly for israel's
00:30:02.060elites was trouble accepting that and wanting to somehow believe they had more agency than in fact
00:30:10.460they did have wanted to convert so how did they do that they say they said well we israeli we've
00:30:16.700made mistakes earlier in the conflict we were quote bad so to speak and if only we make concessions
00:30:24.220then we can win over the other side it was again delusional uh but this is what they signed on to
00:30:31.180in oslo and it was catastrophic so i i definitely think that your your explanation is is veridical
00:30:39.020but maybe I can add an extra layer to it. And you can tell me what you think of it.
00:30:44.220So in one of the chapters in suicidal empathy, which I titled, you know, cultural theory of
00:30:50.580mind. So theory of mind, as you as you well know, you're a psychiatrist is the idea. It's part of
00:30:56.040cognitive empathy, right? For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself
00:31:00.160in your mind to know of your intentions, your desires, your objectives, and vice versa. And
00:31:05.660that allows us to kind of oil our sociality. And so I expand this principle, instead of it being
00:31:12.940from between a dyadic relationship between two individuals, I expand it to two cultures. And I
00:31:18.920argue that a culture can lack cultural theory of mind in the following sense. It presumes that the
00:31:26.360key objectives that it is trying to maximize and that animate its behavior are exactly shared by
00:31:34.880the other, when in reality, it is not. And therefore, it has cultural blindness, or to use
00:31:40.920my term, it has a lack of cultural theory of mind. And so I think the Israelis, and certainly,0.76
00:31:47.820as you mentioned, maybe some of the elites will say, look, we want our children to live in peace,
00:31:53.020they want their children to live in peace. So we're both trying to maximize some scenario where
00:31:58.540there will be peace. And therefore, since we share that mechanism, and that's how we then
00:32:04.080succumb to Oslo syndrome and so on. Whereas in reality, that's not true, right? If one side says
00:32:10.460my ultimate objective in life, both in the here and in the afterlife, is to eradicate the pesky1.00
00:32:17.720Jews, then it doesn't matter how much land concessions you give me. Your existence is an1.00
00:32:25.000affront to my canonical teachings. So could that be built on top of your Oslo syndrome? Once you0.73
00:32:32.060combine oslo syndrome with lack of cultural theory of mind we end up with the predicament we have
00:32:37.420exactly but the and but the cultural theory of mind that you're talking about the
00:32:43.360the projection of you know my way of evaluating things onto the onto the other uh is a dynamic
00:32:52.780in itself but in a sense in these contexts it's reinforced by the dynamic of wishful thinking
00:32:59.480it's not just projection it's wishful thinking that that that goes on here and uh but otherwise
00:33:06.300i i agree in um in uh suicidal empathy you mentioned that the most odious kind of uh
00:33:16.420when you talk about the uh the the wood uh the wood cricket and the parasite which is odious0.73
00:33:24.540the most odious kind is the jewish wood cricket who embraces uh the anti the vehemently anti-israel
00:33:34.780dynamic and to ingratiate itself with with with the wider wider society and that's one of but0.71
00:33:42.620then uh that's one of these responses maladaptive you know evolutionarily maladaptive responses to
00:33:50.420besiegement and uh and another is just to flee without siding with the enemy so to speak but
00:33:58.880another major one again is to reform we're going to reform to ingratiate ourselves with with the
00:34:04.840enemy and uh and that is potentially catastrophic as it was you know in oslo so if someone comes to
00:34:12.520you at the individual level level not israel but an individual who is succumbing to i am being
00:34:20.060beaten by my husband because i'm doing something wrong your intervention strategy would it be
00:34:25.540sort of the typical cognitive behavior therapy let's analyze how your cognitions are wrong
00:34:31.300and therefore we can change your behavior would that be your approach to kind of sort of speak
00:34:37.160forgive the the obnoxious pun slap them back into reality it would be part of it may be part of it
00:34:44.100also may pursue the idea of why why are you choosing this interpretation why when you're not
00:34:51.900you're different that the woman in that kind of a situation is uh is different from the child
00:35:01.120stuck in an abusive situation with abusive parents in that she could typically extricate
00:35:08.740herself now you may argue the big child financially whatever for other reasons may be difficult but
00:35:16.280is capable of extricating herself so the question is why would she choose uh to uh to say i am bad
00:35:24.500and i have to become good to ingratiate myself with this with his husband and so he'll stop
00:35:29.200beating me if i only become good enough rather than simply leaving and so there in that kind
00:35:35.980situation you would look i would look for uh pre-existing reasons for is this a recapitulation
00:35:43.980of what she was going through as a child with an abusive father perhaps right so then i would
00:35:50.300get into some of that i wouldn't just go for the sort of short-term therapy of okay you know this
00:35:56.700is wrong you have to do something different here and get yourself out of this bad situation
00:36:02.500I would look at it and see if there were deeper explanations for it.
00:36:05.900Do you typically see, and maybe I'm romanticizing what I'm about to say, but you see a woman who's coming to see you and you point out that all of her failed romantic relationships seem to be linked to her making the wrong common choice of ideal partner.
00:36:27.640And now there is maybe an epiphany that she has.
00:36:32.360Do you see, I mean, not literally, but do you see in that patient the elucidation of
00:36:40.080their patterns or is it such a long and laborious process therapy that it's kind of very difficult
00:36:46.860to identify when you had that aha, Archimedes break breakout moment?
00:36:52.820well it it does take time because ideally you know one a psychiatrist working with a patient
00:37:03.640as you described uh gets a fairly good idea of the dynamics underlying the patient's issues
00:37:12.740fairly quickly maybe a few sessions but that's very different from being able to convey that
00:37:21.500to a patient right because it that doesn't account for the patient's emotional investment
00:37:28.860in their in their psychopathology and you have to go through the process of of
00:37:38.460detaching the patient from that investment which is a long process you know it's it's uh it's again
00:37:46.380like um in this situation with say the on a macro scale you know uh with israel israelis embracing
00:38:00.380uh the the indictments of their haters you know so to appease them uh if you tell if you just want
00:38:08.300to say this you know what you're doing is crazy it makes no sense they're not just going to buy it
00:38:14.700they're they're going to argue with you because they're invested in it there's a very there's a
00:38:21.820a joke sort of with regard to uh the naivety of first-year residents in psychiatry who think they
00:38:32.060could disabuse people of their delusions just by telling them so a man comes into an emergency room
00:38:39.420and uh says and he goes to the tree the triage nurse finally uh invites him into our office
00:38:48.180and he says uh actually i just want you to transfer me to the morgue because i'm dead
00:38:54.520and i don't know how to get there just sent me to the morgue and the uh triage never said hmm
00:39:01.100and goes to find the uh first year psychiatrist who's in the er over the over the overnight to
00:39:08.960attend to people who come in to need that need intervention and uh so the psychiatrist is down
00:39:17.900with them and he says i don't know why you called it they called you to come see me i just want to
00:39:23.240go to the morgue they just take me there and uh and he's trying to think how's he going to
00:39:30.420get this patient past his delusion you know this abuse him of his delusion so he comes to
00:39:37.540thinks he has a bride and he says do dead people bleed and the guy says of course not but why are
00:39:43.260you telling me riddles why are you asking me riddles just get me out of here to the to the
00:39:47.540to the morgue and he said would you mind if i stick your finger then and he said i don't care i'm dead
00:39:54.480i won't even feel it so the the resident gets a needle and sticks his finger and the man looks
00:40:04.900at it and says my god dead people do bleed i saw that coming yes okay yeah so uh so you have to go
00:40:15.680through all the um the get past the investment in the maladaptive behavior before your interpretations
00:40:24.080will have any impact and that's the main you know it's funny because in your case you're describing
00:40:30.520describing someone's unwillingness to change their opinion despite all of the evidence to
00:40:35.860the contrary but in a therapeutic context well I was maybe two or three years ago I was on a
00:40:42.240British show hosted by a British psychiatrist actually and at the end of the show the last
00:40:48.880question he asked me he said Professor Saad in all your years as a behavioral scientist what is
00:40:55.120the singular phenomenon that has most surprised you about human human beings and surprisingly
00:41:02.220i've never been asked that question before so i was stumped for a minute and thought and then i
00:41:06.720said well it's probably the inability for someone to change their opinion once it's deeply anchored
00:41:14.720irrespective of how much evidence i show them to the contrary so you've just validated that
00:41:21.540in the therapeutic context yes yes incredible okay so let's move on from this this guy right
00:41:28.460here the oslo syndrome i mean it seems to me that we flow very naturally from this one to this one
00:41:35.140tell us a bit about this book which was this is a quite recent one yes yes yes it came out
00:41:40.960lately last year right and it's uh it sort of looks at the same dynamics but in the context of
00:41:48.900the maladaptive response of Jewish communal institutions, legacy institutions, to the
00:42:00.220erratic rise in anti-Semitism in America and what lies behind that, the failures to respond
00:42:10.300effectively to the rise in anti-Semitism, particularly anti-Semitism on the left.
00:42:16.420I mean, if you look at anti-Semitism in America, there are four basic sources of it.
00:42:26.880You have far-right anti-Semitism, white supremacist and neo-Nazi-type anti-Semitism, and you have far-left anti-Semitism,0.96
00:42:40.220yeah and then you have islamist anti-semitism which is increased with greater uh uh muslim0.94
00:42:48.540immigration and you have a black radical anti-semitism and jews have been jewish
00:42:57.660organizations jewish institutions have been more responsive to the first the far-right anti-semitism
00:43:04.780for historical reasons you know they've chosen to interpret uh anti-semitism because of their
00:43:12.140experience in europe as uh mainly a right-wing thing or much more right-wing thing than left
00:43:19.100even though there's much in their experience that goes against that but but that's uh there have
00:43:24.300been there's a experiential basis for it and and it doesn't apply in america there's social workers
00:43:30.860social scientists excuse me who've written about this that even though that if you pull american
00:43:36.220jews they think that the left is less anti-semitic than the right right when if you whereas if you
00:43:41.980really get look at american opinion over the years uh that distinction does not hold up
00:43:49.740in actual uh surveys of american well and sorry before you go on just to interject a personal
00:43:56.460story. I, you know, spent many years in Canada within a university ecosystem where I faced a
00:44:05.100lot of anti-Semitism towards the end of my career, some of it coming from Islam, a lot of it coming
00:44:09.900from academic leftist progressive types. Then I moved to a red state, Mississippi, where I feel
00:44:17.420a lot safer as a Jew than I did in Montreal, Canada, to your point.
00:44:22.100And your experience is reproduced by a lot of people, and a lot of people are going to Southern schools now for college because they want to escape the totally left-dominated, biased, bigoted, anti-Semitic campuses in the North, the elite campuses and so forth.
00:44:43.320You were talking about the four types that the Jews...
00:44:48.100Yes, okay. So with this bias within the community to be more sensitive, especially the legacy organizations, to be more sensitive to anti-Semitism from the right than to these others, and it's not simply that Jews have discerned this to be a pattern, but somehow part of the sense of vulnerability that goes along with being an abused or besieged minority is that
00:45:18.100there's an impulse to uh to see political affiliations uh connections to want to see
00:45:26.020them as transcendent they're going to last they're forever you know so other minorities
00:45:31.380where they're in the same boat as us of course they're going to stay you know allies of ours
00:45:37.460and so forth and so but whether you're talking about antisemitism from the left or antisemitism0.92
00:45:46.020from black radicals there's a and a chosen blindness to it because they want to believe0.55
00:45:52.580otherwise right and uh and the uh the experience vis-a-vis uh uh black radicals say is is interesting
00:46:03.860one uh the henry henry lewis gates who is uh you're familiar with him perhaps uh
00:46:10.020Louis Gates, Jr. is chairman of African and African-American studies at Harvard.
00:47:46.440It's almost verbatim what the Soviets were saying,
00:47:49.780that you can divide all the world into colonizers and colonized,0.57
00:47:54.840abusers and abused, and everything's a zero-sum game in social dynamics.
00:48:00.660So if you have one group in a society doing better,
00:48:03.380it's because they're doing so at the expense of the other group.
00:48:07.180And within this context, Jews who have been generally successful in America
00:48:13.620were labeled as doing so unfairly because, again, they're a successful group.0.98
00:48:18.500And so they must be doing so at the cost of of others.
00:48:24.740And and you saw Jews embracing and embracing this.
00:48:30.560And he Gates writes about Jews wonder what happened to the old black Jewish alliance when they're seeing so much anti-Semitism coming for blacks.
00:48:44.620and he says it's it's actually because of that alliance that alliance and what's he mean in fact
00:48:51.560there's still much black jewish cooperation there are many black pastors with congregations that
00:48:56.860are very pro-israel pro-jewish and i'm happy to work with the jewish more than happy to work with
00:49:01.880jewish community but there's this other not only nation of islam body but these uh the groups that
00:49:11.680come out of the racism that they're indoctrinated in the universities and the colleges is leftist
00:49:17.680or leftist islamist you know red green alliance type racism who are who see any jewish success0.56
00:49:26.340as coming at the cost of of black success but more specifically they're using that in a kind
00:49:34.220of conflict between two elites and they're using it against the integrationist elite by saying
00:49:39.680their ally with the jews and the jews are bad so the integrationist leads are bad so they have an
00:49:44.800investment in anti-semitism that has nothing to do with jews actually it's just a tool to use against0.91
00:49:51.840the other another black elite yeah and and you could say the same in the uh not not the white
00:49:59.040supremacist anti-semitism but the anti-semitism in the left on the far left among whites is the0.76
00:50:08.160same thing jews are uh successful and that's and that's unfair and uh and they um0.77
00:50:20.000and they're allied with the integrationist jews they're also they're allied with the0.74
00:50:23.920integrationist whites and so those whites who adhere to what the universities are pushing0.96
00:50:31.600attack them, attack the integrationist whites, because they're allied with the Jews. So they0.96
00:50:40.040use anti-Semitism, again, for this internal conflict between, you can say, two white elites,
00:50:45.320so to speak. Yeah. So at the start of your current response, you mentioned four groups
00:50:55.000or four sources of Jew hatred. And what's defining those four sources are just different groups.
00:51:01.360There's the neo-Nazis, there's the Islamic folks, there's whatever, the progressive academics.
00:51:07.940I'd like to propose one, which you sort of hinted at one point when you talked about oppressed and oppressor and so on.0.78
00:51:13.040I'd like to propose another source of Jew hatred that is very much rooted in psychological mechanisms0.91
00:51:19.440that explains why Jew hatred is an inerrant, never-ending hatred that has existed through time and space.0.83
00:51:27.740And since I have obviously a psychiatrist with me here, I want to get your opinion on it. So in psychology, one of the first effects that you learn when you take, say, an advanced social psychology course is the self-serving bias, right? The idea that how you attribute successes and failures internally seems to follow a certain pattern.0.59
00:51:49.400People tend to attribute successes internally. I did well on the exam because I'm smart and I
00:51:55.260studied hard and they attribute failures externally. I did poorly on the exam because
00:52:00.740Dr. Levin is an unfair jerk. Okay. So I'm, so I fail because the outside, I succeed because I'm1.00
00:52:07.240great. Well, now let's apply that mechanism to Jew hatred. Imagine if I can give a source for0.99
00:52:14.860all individual and collective failures, and it's the Jew. Well, that is catering to already a1.00
00:52:21.240predisposition that the architecture of the human mind has, which is to attribute all of its failures
00:52:25.980externally. But it still doesn't answer why it should be the Jew that is responsible for my0.95
00:52:31.900individual and collective failures. And I think there is an explanation which is sort of hinted0.78
00:52:37.020at when you said Jews are a small minority, but they've succeeded a lot in the US. That statement
00:52:42.400holds across all ecosystems, right? It's what Amy Chua called market dominant minorities of which
00:52:48.840the greatest exemplar is the Jew. And anywhere you go, one recurrent reality happens. The Jews1.00
00:52:55.340are a minuscule minority and they are punching several weight classes above their weight, right?1.00
00:53:02.500So how many Nobel prizes do Jews have? Who are the leading philosophers? Who are the leading1.00
00:53:07.080scientists, who are the leading filmmakers, and on and on and on. Well, if I am someone who is not
00:53:14.000part of that group, and I failed because I didn't get my role, despite many auditions, well, who
00:53:21.500controls Hollywood? Well, it's the Jews. So put all those together, and it manifests itself across0.98
00:53:28.740time and space, then it becomes maybe easy to explain why the Jew is hated. What do you think
00:53:34.800of this explanation and could it parsimoniously explain all jew hatred i think i think it's very
00:53:42.600cogent i think there's a success you know is uh and the particular success is a tool i do think
00:53:50.200building on this old history though this whole ingrained history that sort of talk about it's just
00:53:55.640beneath a shallow surface it's there you know because once once you unleash it then you talk
00:54:02.320about how unfair it is and how you know they've always been killers of prophets or they've always0.98
00:54:08.640been killed the deicides or they've always they rejected muhammad so of course they're awful0.96
00:54:14.600and these these kinds of things that's all that's all in the background as well but you're right0.98
00:54:19.820you're right the success amplifies the success often becomes the immediate excuse but you know
00:54:26.520Except, yes, but I mean, there are other,
00:54:56.520And by the way, maybe once a month, I'll probably tag President Trump and I'll say, what are you waiting for to give this guy the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
00:55:08.660Like, he's still around. Do it, President Trump.
00:55:11.200Do it. Do it. Maybe one day he'll listen to me.
00:55:13.560But anyways, he he answered what the explanation I just gave.
00:55:19.340He actually answered it once with one word.
00:55:22.000So I think it was Peter Robinson, with whom he's often chatted about at the Hoover Institution, asked him, you know, so what's it going to take Dr. Saul for for people to stop hating the Jews?
00:55:36.320And he paused for a second and said, fail. Right. That that perfectly captures the explanation we've been talking about.
00:55:44.200right? I hate the Jews until they become losers and fail, in which case I'll start looking for1.00
00:55:51.200some external culprit for my failures. Until then, if those bastards are going to keep succeeding1.00
00:55:57.720well above their numbers, I'm going to hate them. Does that make sense? Okay, let me, last question1.00
00:56:05.500and then I'll let you go. Although, as I often tell to all of my wonderful guests, I could keep
00:56:10.720you here for another five hours if i brought the west as a patient on the couch of dr levin
00:56:20.620are we dead or is there a way for us to save the west as a patient dr levin well it's uh
00:56:31.220there's no simple way but you know reagan had this um made a statement about the the
00:56:40.720freedoms we enjoy is only we only have for one generation in a sense we're only one generation
00:56:47.240away from losing and i believe he was referring particularly to the education system yeah uh
00:56:55.480you know you have to educate for uh uh for freedom you have to and it's it's just the opposite look
00:57:03.560at how our university has been corrupted look at how k-12 is filtered down to um and not we're
00:57:14.060talking about antisemitism to a large degree there too but the whole pushing uh the ideas of uh all
00:57:22.260in fact as i read uh suicidal empathy thinking again and again of uh how much in the model of
00:57:33.060the uh of uh the wood cricket and the parasite that affects the mind of the wood cricket and
00:57:39.320and as it commits suicide uh how many of these people's beliefs these maladaptive beliefs
00:57:46.300that you and you have a long list of them how much of them uh how much is the role of the parasite
00:57:53.260played by the education system yeah all of it i would say i mean i mean literally in the parasitic0.68
00:58:00.260mind that you know the precursor to suicidal empathy i discuss all of these parasitic ideas
00:58:06.780and i argue that every single one of them were spawned on university campuses exactly exactly
00:58:14.280yeah and uh and so the core the task is how do we reform how do we change that if we don't change
00:58:21.700the educational system we're still be continuing to fight an uphill battle and uh and that is a
00:58:29.940major a major uh task and a major undertaking i mean the current administration is unlike the
00:58:39.300previous years at least challenging the antisemitism on the campuses to some degree
00:58:43.140to some degree but there's a lot and the utility of a college education being questioned because
00:58:51.900this has been so uh it's changed so much from uh education to indoctrination people get degrees
00:58:58.600that they can't make a living with and so forth.
00:59:01.180And hopefully it'll make some changes,
00:59:06.940but the elite colleges will keep going.
00:59:27.300and, you know, in the Northeast at University of Pennsylvania and Cornell, my alma mater and so on.
00:59:32.720Well, the main reason, I mean, there were many reasons why I decided to come to Old Men,
00:59:37.800but the main one is that I'm housed at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom,
00:59:44.160where all of the students that are walking around are perfectly enlightened, rational, rooted in reality.
00:59:51.540And I'm like, having spent 32 years within, this is my 33rd year, within the university ecosystem, I'm sort of like walking in disbelief that there could be such bright undergrads and graduate students who are not parasitized.
01:00:07.440And so I think that we can still save the universities, but it is going to take a lot of work.