The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Suicidal Empathy and the Decline of the West - on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Podcast (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_752)

00:00:00.000 If 10% of the people polled were rabid Jew haters, it would be a problem. 1.00

00:00:06.320 One out of 10 is a maniac. 0.99

00:00:08.420 Where is this Jew hatred coming from? 0.99

00:00:10.500 Maybe we went the wrong way with our immigration policy.

00:00:15.040 Bad ideas have consequences.

00:00:17.200 To your earlier question, we originally think of them as though

00:00:20.240 they're just in some esoteric department in the humanities.

00:00:24.060 Yes, they may start there, but then they break out of the lab

00:00:27.420 and they become our prime minister.

00:00:29.180 So beware.

00:00:44.460 World-renowned marketing professor Gad Saad has been a pioneer

00:00:48.600 in using evolutionary psychology to understand human behavior,

00:00:52.720 publishing innumerable scientific and scholarly papers.

00:00:55.660 He's been the associate editor of evolutionary psychology

00:00:58.820 and he's the author of some big books that have reached international audiences

00:01:02.740 around the world as bestsellers, including The Consuming Instinct

00:01:07.500 and The Parasitic Mind.

00:01:09.680 He's currently the visiting professor and global ambassador

00:01:12.440 at Northwood University.

00:01:14.340 And today he joins me to talk about his forthcoming book

00:01:17.380 about suicidal empathy and how this concept helps to explain

00:01:22.160 the progressive forces which are threatening basic Western values

00:01:25.900 and principles that we too often take for granted.

00:01:29.440 Professor Gad Saad, welcome to this program.

00:01:32.920 Sure.

00:01:33.160 Well, first, thank you so much for having me, Ayaan.

00:01:35.020 It's such a pleasure to be with you.

00:01:36.520 It's a delight to have you now on my podcast,

00:01:42.020 which I am relaunching.

00:01:43.060 But I just look back with a great deal of pleasure

00:01:48.240 on the conversation we had.

00:01:50.860 You are a very well-known figure now in the world of people

00:01:54.800 who are thinking about the things, the challenges that we have today.

00:01:59.280 You wrote a great deal about the things we are looking,

00:02:02.260 and there is this phrase that you coined, suicidal empathy,

00:02:05.820 which is the subject of your forthcoming book.

00:02:09.040 And I have a sense that it's going to cover a lot of what's going on today.

00:02:14.120 Can you please elaborate on that?

00:02:16.540 So suicidal empathy, let me kind of give the background to it,

00:02:21.300 the theoretical background, because I think it will be relevant

00:02:24.400 to your audience.

00:02:25.460 Take, for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder, right?

00:02:29.720 It makes perfect evolutionary sense for us to be scanning the world

00:02:35.100 for environmental threats.

00:02:36.320 So, for example, if I see somebody sneezing into their hands

00:02:38.940 and then they shake my hand, I will go to the bathroom

00:02:41.460 and I will wash my hands because I'm afraid to get germ contamination.

00:02:44.920 The problem arises with OCD when you're now stuck in an infinite loop

00:02:50.040 of doing that behavior, right?

00:02:51.640 So now I will wash my hands for eight hours.

00:02:54.900 I can't get to work.

00:02:56.100 My skin is falling off because I can't extricate myself

00:02:59.420 from this infinite loop of checking and redoing and redoing.

00:03:03.320 So what could be adaptive becomes maladaptive because it misfires.

00:03:08.840 It becomes hyperactive.

00:03:10.920 So this is the framework that I use for suicidal empathy.

00:03:14.980 Empathy in of itself is a perfectly appropriate evolutionary emotion to have.

00:03:20.760 We're a social animal.

00:03:22.020 So it makes sense that since we are a social species,

00:03:24.920 that we have compassion, kindness, generosity, altruism, empathy.

00:03:29.740 The problem with suicidal empathy is when it misfires.

00:03:36.120 So, for example, the empathy is directed to the wrong target, right?

00:03:40.900 It makes perfect evolutionary sense.

00:03:42.640 We both have children.

00:03:43.960 For you and I to, without any hesitation,

00:03:46.840 jump in front of a truck to save our biological child,

00:03:50.740 we're less likely to do it for a non-biological child,

00:03:55.740 not because we're evil, but because our minds have evolved

00:03:59.580 to have the cognitive and emotional systems

00:04:02.300 that ensure that we are behaving in a way that is evolutionarily appropriate.

00:04:07.340 So empathy is a great emotion, but very maladaptive

00:04:11.480 when it misfires in this wide number of ways.

00:04:14.520 And so what the book does is it goes through many public policies,

00:04:18.960 how we treat the homeless, how we treat criminality,

00:04:22.440 how we treat immigration.

00:04:23.900 So all of the things, as you said, that we're seeing,

00:04:26.740 and I argue that their root is this misfiring of empathy.

00:04:31.560 So tell me a little bit more about when it misfires.

00:04:36.060 Let's take the policy of crime, for instance.

00:04:38.720 Right.

00:04:39.380 So if you come from what's called a social constructivist perspective,

00:04:46.340 which, by the way, is one of the idea pathogens,

00:04:49.220 the parasitic ideas that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind,

00:04:52.220 my earlier book, social constructivism argues that we are all born tabula rasa,

00:04:58.620 empty minds, and it is only socialization that then leads us to do the things that we do in life.

00:05:05.380 Otherwise, we're completely empty slates.

00:05:08.140 If you subscribe to that view, then there is no such thing, for example, as innate evil

00:05:14.780 or differences across people in psychopathy or proclivity to be a criminal.

00:05:21.880 It must be because mommy didn't hug me enough, 0.96

00:05:25.360 or maybe mommy hugged me too much, 0.99

00:05:27.380 or maybe it's white supremacy, or maybe it's systemic racism.

00:05:31.380 There must be something outside of me that caused me to become the criminal that I am.

00:05:38.020 And so from that perspective, it is lacking in empathy for me as a society to punish the criminal.

00:05:46.020 He's already been punished by an unfair society.

00:05:50.220 And now we're going to doubly punish him by asking him to have personal agency and personal responsibility?

00:05:56.840 That's not very nice.

00:05:59.340 We're a kind and tolerant people, and therefore, maybe we can rehabilitate him by having him take ceramic courses,

00:06:06.900 and then he won't in the future rape because he learned how to express himself through art. 0.99

00:06:13.020 It sounds as though I'm being facetious, but that's kind of the stupidity that you see. 0.99

00:06:17.400 So in this case, my empathy toward the criminal supersedes my empathy towards the endless prospective victims, 0.98

00:06:28.660 and that's what makes me progressive and tolerant.

00:06:34.040 You have idea generators and idea consumers in the generators of the suicidal empathy.

00:06:43.000 Can I see them as puppet masters that are manipulating the public, or do they really, truly believe in the ideas that they generate?

00:06:54.260 That's such a fantastic question because I often ask myself whether the ones who promulgate these ideas in the deep recesses of their minds,

00:07:04.540 whether when they put their heads on the pillow at the end of the night, whether they truly believe their nonsense or not.

00:07:10.240 And, you know, depending on the day, I'm either of one opinion or the other.

00:07:14.800 Now, maybe this is a cop-out, and maybe it's not a good answer, or it doesn't fully satisfy you,

00:07:20.300 but there's actually an evolutionary reason for self-deception.

00:07:25.800 It was proposed by Robert Trivers, who is a very well-known evolutionary biologist,

00:07:31.520 and he basically argued that in a social species like us, we are constantly involved in an evolutionary arms race

00:07:39.040 where I'm trying to get you to do things that serve my interests that may not be beneficial to you,

00:07:45.080 and then you evolve the capacity to read my cues to know whether I'm being duplicitous or not, manipulative or not.

00:07:53.680 Well, one of the ways that I can ensure that you can't read any signs of manipulation on me is if I first believe it myself.

00:08:02.860 So by me believing it, it removes any of the possible visual or auditory cues that might allow you to gauge the fact that I'm being manipulative.

00:08:13.280 So I think for some of them, they probably truly believe it, but for others, they're consequentialists,

00:08:20.100 and they say, I will be the puppet master, to use your term.

00:08:23.760 So I think it's a bit of both.

00:08:25.680 It's a bit of both.

00:08:27.040 And then I look at policy areas like homelessness or immigration,

00:08:31.620 and then I look at just the sheer amount of money that is spent via these NGOs,

00:08:37.480 and I can't help but see a vested self-interest in maintaining the scale of the problem just to keep taking that money.

00:08:48.680 So it's not altruistic.

00:08:50.700 It's not empathetic.

00:08:53.480 It's cynical, and it's profiteering.

00:08:56.700 Am I going to conclude that?

00:08:58.160 No, I think the more that I live, the more that I think I come around to your view that, you know, it's perhaps a cynical view,

00:09:07.200 but it's the old story.

00:09:08.680 The more I know people, the more I love my dogs.

00:09:12.140 So I think you're probably right.

00:09:14.120 I do think that, yes, there are many people who are doing it for the reasons that you just enunciated,

00:09:19.880 but I do think that there is a class of sort of lobotomized progressives who truly believe that there is no higher virtue than to be orgiastically empathetic, right?

00:09:34.860 The way that I measure how virtuous of a person I am is that anything that you throw at me, I will always be kind and forgiving, right?

00:09:45.580 So the sort of hashtag refugees welcome, right?

00:09:48.640 I'll tell you a great story, which will go into my forthcoming book, Suisala Empathy.

00:09:54.980 And actually, it involves someone from your original homeland of Somalia. 0.86

00:10:00.720 So in 2013, a Norwegian man was sodomized, was raped by a Somali.

00:10:08.680 I don't know if the guy was legally or illegally in Norway.

00:10:12.700 So they tried him.

00:10:15.040 He served a few years in prison.

00:10:17.440 And then when he came out of prison and was going to be deported back to Somalia, the gentleman who had been raped by him felt very, very bad about the fact that his sodomizer was now going to have a difficult life in Somalia.

00:10:38.980 And he'd have a much better life in Norway.

00:10:41.920 Well, I submit to you, Ayaan, that that is not an evolutionary reflex that I would have predicted as an evolutionary psychologist.

00:10:49.400 It makes a lot more sense for me to feel a sense of vindictiveness to the person who sodomized me than I would to feel, oh, I feel so bad for him.

00:10:59.100 He's going to go back to Mogadishu, where there aren't many employment opportunities.

00:11:03.360 So I think there is a subclass of people that have been fully parasitized by this orgiastic form of endless empathy.

00:11:11.380 There are a growing number of thinkers who are concluding that what you are describing is a warped form of Christianity.

00:11:20.080 When Christianity declined in the West, but people still have this, I would say, very strong impulse to worship or for spiritual fulfillment, it expresses itself in these odd ways.

00:11:32.740 What do you say to that?

00:11:33.600 Right. Well, I do think that wokeism in general is a form of quasi-religion.

00:11:39.220 And if you can draw a lot of very powerful analogies, right?

00:11:43.060 So in religion, as you know, it doesn't matter which religion.

00:11:45.880 It could be Islam, it could be Christianity, it could be Judaism, it could be a whole host of other religions.

00:11:50.680 There are revealed truths that are incontrovertible to evidence, right?

00:11:55.820 There is no way for me to engage the scientific method to demonstrate to you that your religious position might be incorrect because it's in my book and my book is right and therefore it becomes an infinite tautology.

00:12:09.240 Well, wokeism has similar things, right?

00:12:11.780 Where people are utterly impervious to any amount of evidence, right?

00:12:16.780 And it's that that allows us to then espouse, quote, woke revealed truths that are so insanely contrary to reality, right? 0.96

00:12:26.340 So the fact that, for example, in the 21st century, we're no longer able to confidently state whether it is men who bear children or women, whether it is men who menstruate or women, where, for example, a person who is going up for confirmation as a justice in the Supreme Court in the United States doesn't feel epistemologically confident to say, what kind of stupid question is that that you're asking me, what is a woman? 0.93

00:12:53.420 Of course, I know what a woman, of course, I know what a woman is, and she is that. 1.00

00:12:56.480 Well, the fact that that has happened demonstrates that then parasitic wokeism, exactly to your point, takes the form of a quasi-religion.

00:13:07.580 And this parasitic mind virus, is it infecting just the West or are there other societies in history or in the rest of the world that are, let's say, infected with this suicidal empathy?

00:13:23.420 That's a fantastic question.

00:13:25.240 And I actually remember your husband asking me a similar question.

00:13:31.200 I had given a talk, it was during COVID, so it was the Stanford Classical Liberal Forum where I was talking about the parasitic mind, and he asked a question about a historical question.

00:13:42.940 Is this something contemporary or have parasitized minds always existed or something to that effect?

00:13:49.440 So apparently great minds think alike, and by great minds, I mean you and your husband.

00:13:54.660 I'm not referring to myself.

00:13:56.720 Look, the capacity for human minds to be parasitized is eternal.

00:14:02.760 It's nothing new to today.

00:14:05.040 What is specific about today are the specific idea pathogens, right?

00:14:11.260 Post-modernism did not affect those who were succumbing to the Salem witch hunts, right?

00:14:18.320 That was another form of parasitic idea.

00:14:20.960 So what is unique in the current reality is the constellation of all of the parasitic ideas that are unique to the contemporary time, all of which, by the way, Ayaan, as I know you know, but maybe some of your listeners and viewers don't, 0.55

00:14:38.780 all of those ideas were generated, promulgated, spawned on university campuses by professors, because as I often joke and to kind of channel George Orwell, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, right?

00:14:56.900 So post-modernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism, identity politics, and many other of these parasitic ideas were all spawned on university campuses from roughly about 100 years ago, say for cultural relativism, to about 50 years ago for post-modernism.

00:15:18.020 And they took hold of what is now three or four generations, but I think suppressed first by the events of the First World War, and then the Second World War, and then the world after that.

00:15:34.460 Now, after the Cold War, I think there was this general sense that all of these bad ideas are defeated.

00:15:40.880 And we didn't pay attention to the fact that they were hiding and incubating in universities in general, and especially in American universities.

00:15:49.400 And I think that there's this sense that it's not just the universities that are captured.

00:15:55.220 Universities graduate future leaders.

00:15:58.240 And so one institution that is, I think, highly relevant, that is captured via the universities, is one of the major parties in the United States, the Democratic Party.

00:16:12.460 And initially, I'm going back to, say, from the time of Obama, you know, let's elect a black president because we're making history.

00:16:22.020 That wasn't, at the time, I remember thinking, but that can't be a compelling argument.

00:16:28.440 But now, knowing what I know, and listening to you talk about the parasitic mind, I think, for Americans, that was a compelling argument.

00:16:38.100 And every time you invoke that terrible history in the brief period in America when they held slaves and during the segregation period, that you can invoke that and get this almost magical reaction.

00:16:55.340 And so we elected Obama twice.

00:16:59.880 His economic policies, his foreign policies, his social policies, in fact, I think, but I'm a minority in this, he amplified racial tensions.

00:17:09.880 I think that's what gave us 2016.

00:17:12.400 That's what gave us the rise of Donald Trump.

00:17:15.940 And in 2016, we had Trump and then all the opposition to him.

00:17:21.600 And then in 2020, Trump loses that election and we have the Biden-Harris administration.

00:17:31.800 And throughout, what I see or I saw was the Biden-Harris administration doubling down on this exploiting almost of that white guilt,

00:17:48.920 of this emotional past, just keep, you call a white man in America a racist, and it had almost this magical, like, it was like a spell.

00:18:03.560 It has worn off.

00:18:05.480 It's not there anymore.

00:18:06.640 And you can tell by this 2024 election.

00:18:09.260 If Trump wins, and if he wins by a wide margin, do you think that it's over, that the mind virus is cured, that we can go back to, I don't know, sort of the normal reservation of self-interest?

00:18:28.740 Yes.

00:18:29.540 Another fantastic question.

00:18:30.940 Before I answer that one, and I hate the fact that I'm going to answer it in a less than fully optimistic way.

00:18:37.940 But before I answer that, let me just say that one of the reasons why in the first chapter of the parasitic mind, I talked about my personal history in Lebanon 0.72

00:18:47.940 is because Lebanon is the perfect end result of what happens to a society that is fully organized along identity politics lines, right? 0.95

00:18:58.280 So to your point about politics, and we're going to elect the first black president, the Lebanese system is called the confessional parliamentary system, meaning that which position you can ascend to is determined by your religion.

00:19:17.020 So, you know, the president has to be, I can't remember if he's Maronite or Shia or Sunni.

00:19:26.120 I mean, there's basically three main roles.

00:19:28.200 There's the president, the prime minister, and the speaker of the house.

00:19:31.160 And then one of them has to be Maronite Christian. 0.84

00:19:34.340 One of them has to be Sunni. 0.82

00:19:35.680 The other one has to be Shia. 0.94

00:19:36.740 So if you were a Lebanese Jew, there was no way that you could ever ascend to those positions by decree, by confessional parliamentary decree.

00:19:48.100 So Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Balkans is exactly what happens to a society that follows perfectly, in quotes, the identity politic lines.

00:19:58.340 Now, to come to your question, I don't think that if Trump wins, the mind virus ceases to exist, because it took, to our earlier question, 50 to 100 years for that infestation to then make its way in every nook and cranny of society, right?

00:20:19.300 So it will be a doorstop.

00:20:22.260 So when Donald Trump first came to power, I was one of the first to say, this is great, but the fight is far from over, because then Donald Trump steps down, and then we can go back to the orgy of woke mind viruses, right?

00:20:37.020 So you need to have an eradication, an inoculation of these parasitic ideas everywhere, right?

00:20:44.800 So, you know, Justin Trudeau still exists, and he may still exist, even though Donald Trump might become the president in 2025.

00:20:53.820 So, so my point is...

00:20:55.520 I'm glad you mentioned, by the way, just in this context, I'm so glad you brought Canada up.

00:21:00.580 One strategy of educating the public on why this mind virus leads to rubble, it's just, it's pure nihilism, it leads to a destruction of everything we know, is to look at the societies that actually applied it.

00:21:17.760 So you take a country like yours, Canada, wealthy, first world country, and it's without, I would say, and with abandon, it applies this altruism, suicidal empathy, you know, mind virus, and in Canada, it's called multiculturalism. 0.56

00:21:36.860 It is.

00:21:37.620 And so now, 20 years ago, Canada was the envy of the world.

00:21:43.660 In 2024, Canada, like Sweden, is one of these basket cases, and you think, hey, we're all in North America, if you live in New York, or in California, or in any of the blue states in the United States, before you are sold on this, just go over the border, take a look at what's happening in Canada.

00:22:02.780 That's a teaching moment.

00:22:04.920 Just tell us a little bit, as explicitly as you can, the decay and the way in Canada.

00:22:10.940 Yes, it's exactly right.

00:22:14.220 You want to see what happens to the United States if you keep going down that path.

00:22:19.320 As you said, Ayaan, just come up north and see what happens with us.

00:22:22.500 So let me give you a few very explicit examples.

00:22:27.680 I left Lebanon in 1975 after the first year of the Civil War.

00:22:32.780 There was, even though progressive and tolerant Lebanon, it was endemic, it was embedded within society to have Jew hatred.

00:22:42.720 And I discuss many of these examples in the book.

00:22:45.720 And then I came to Canada, and for the next 30 plus years, I would experience very, very sporadic, once every few years, some instance of anti-Semitism.

00:22:57.440 Fast forward to the last few years, I think it's less dangerous to be Jewish and certainly a high-profile Jew in Lebanon than it would be in Canada.

00:23:10.200 Why?

00:23:10.480 Well, because exactly to your point about multiculturalism, we are a post-nation state. 0.85

00:23:16.800 We don't have Canadian cultural values, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained to us.

00:23:22.340 By the way, multiculturalism was really the product of his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

00:23:29.920 So, well, today, because of immigration, you let in millions of people within a very, very short time period that are defined from their home societies by their endemic Jew hatred. 0.81

00:23:44.860 So, you could take, for example, Pew survey results, where you poll people from Pakistan, from Lebanon, from Egypt, from Syria, from all of those countries that are now.

00:23:54.780 Somalia.

00:23:55.620 Exactly.

00:23:56.620 Somalia, Pakistan, everywhere, all those Islamic countries.

00:24:01.280 And when you poll them, this is a Pew, right?

00:24:03.920 So, this is very nonpartisan, probably a bit more to the left.

00:24:07.560 If you get endemic Jew hatred at the rate of 95% to 99% of the people polled, right? 0.82

00:24:16.940 I mean, if you had just, let's kind of process that information.

00:24:21.260 If 10% of the people polled were rabid Jew haters, it would be a problem. 0.99

00:24:27.400 One out of 10 is a maniac. 1.00

00:24:29.700 Yeah. 0.98

00:24:29.760 What if you're getting 95% to 99% that are saying that the Jews are this and that and so on?

00:24:35.980 Now, you let in millions of those people.

00:24:39.360 Does it take a fancy professor to tell you what's going to happen to the reality in the streets in terms of Jew hatred?

00:24:46.740 Because now all of the Canadian politicians are, you know, scratching their heads and are saying, where is this Jew hatred coming from?

00:24:53.640 Maybe we went the wrong way with our immigration policy.

00:24:58.340 But, I mean, did you really need me to be warning you for 25 years that this is what's going to happen?

00:25:03.600 So, that's one.

00:25:04.120 Let me give you one, another personal one.

00:25:07.660 Diversity, inclusion, equity is something that's now all over the place.

00:25:11.340 Well, in Canada, at my university, you can't apply for research grants if you don't fill out a diversity, inclusion, and equity statement, right?

00:25:22.520 Now, imagine the position that it puts me in.

00:25:25.560 Because on the one hand, I'm the guy who stands up on top of the mountain screaming against how non-meritocratic, how anti-scientific diversity, inclusion, equity is.

00:25:35.120 Then when I have to apply for a grant, when nobody is looking, I'm going to be inauthentic and play the game.

00:25:41.420 I can't do that.

00:25:42.840 That's not how my brain is made.

00:25:46.060 So, therefore, it's now been probably six, seven years that I haven't applied for research grants because I'm unwilling to play along with the game.

00:25:55.500 Well, what does that do?

00:25:56.800 I no longer have research funds to conduct my research.

00:26:00.060 I can't bring in doctoral students to work with me.

00:26:03.260 I can't support master's students.

00:26:05.800 So, bad ideas have consequences.

00:26:08.540 To your earlier question, we originally think of them as though they're just in some esoteric department in the humanities.

00:26:15.400 Yes, they may start there, but then they break out of the lab and they become our prime minister.

00:26:21.080 So, beware.

00:26:22.420 And is there, you're a psychologist, and one of the, I'd say, one of the things that correct human behavior is pain.

00:26:36.700 When you implement these policies and people, a society becomes poorer, more violent, more unstable, the core identity breaks down, as that's the result of multiculturalism as is applied in Canada. 0.92

00:26:50.300 Does that lead, that pain, does it lead to a reflection on what happened and a course correction?

00:27:00.340 When is it not too late to course correct?

00:27:03.540 You know, about two weeks after October 7th happened, I put out a tweet that, unbeknownst to me, I didn't think it would be so viral, had gone completely viral.

00:27:16.280 I can't remember what the numbers were, but I think it was viewed 10, 20 million times.

00:27:21.600 It was a tweet where I didn't exhibit my usual kind of optimism and playfulness.

00:27:28.240 And even when I'm dealing with very difficult subjects, I try to be sarcastic or satirical or humorous.

00:27:33.060 Here, it was a very, very dire, somber one.

00:27:36.720 And that, I think, had caught the attention of a lot of people because they were saying, well, if the happy warrior seems like he's lost hope, then maybe we need to wake up.

00:27:44.380 So, to your point, I think the thing that makes me most pessimistic is precisely that our ability to auto-correct seems to have been shut off, in part because of the parasitic ideas, in part because of suicidal empathy, right?

00:28:00.660 I mean, you would think that if a physician gives me a pill to reduce my blood pressure and then my blood pressure doesn't go down, there's an auto-corrective mechanism that says, hey, it didn't work, let's auto-correct.

00:28:13.060 But if irrespective of the amount of evidence that is thrown at me, I'm going to double down, well, then we're dead, right?

00:28:21.380 I mean, if the doctor tells you that you've got pancreatic cancer and your response is, well, there is no such thing as cancer. 0.92

00:28:28.780 And if there is cancer, it's probably because of the Jews who are holding back the cure for cancer. 1.00

00:28:33.700 Well, then you're going to die of pancreatic cancer. 0.89

00:28:35.920 So, I think that's what the West is facing right now, stage four pancreatic cancer.

00:28:41.400 But I'd like to be able to wake up every day and feel as though your voice and mine still matters.

00:28:47.740 And that's why it's important to do the shows that we're doing, why we're having this conversation, because I don't think it's ever too late to wake people up.

00:28:54.680 The problem is that had we solved the problem 10 years ago, it would be a much less violent solution than the one that we will solve in 20 years.

00:29:04.680 So, there will be an auto-correction.

00:29:06.860 People will wake up.

00:29:08.440 But the longer you wait for them to wake up, the less likely that it will be through reason and more likely that it will be a repeat of the Lebanon that I escaped. 0.99

00:29:16.580 What makes me optimistic now is this unexpected groundswell against the Democratic Party.

00:29:26.340 I don't even think that the election we are seeing now is so much for Trump as it is against wokeism, against the mind virus.

00:29:35.460 I mean, every time you say common sense, people go, duh.

00:29:39.560 So, there is this return, A, to common sense, and B, and now I'm talking about America, not Canada.

00:29:48.640 America makes me more optimistic because it's grounded in Christianity. 0.98

00:29:54.900 It's grounded in the principle of free market and political freedom.

00:29:59.860 And I think that when you take these freedoms away from Americans, they are tolerant for a long time.

00:30:07.200 And then they reach a level of intolerance.

00:30:10.800 There's also the Second Amendment.

00:30:12.320 A lot of Americans are armed.

00:30:14.320 It's quite frightening, actually, because if things do get out of hand in America, it's unlike any other place in the world where you could have...

00:30:24.640 It's probably one of the most awful things to have a civil war in America.

00:30:28.080 But instead of having a civil war, we're having rallies.

00:30:33.520 We have, I think it's one of the most optimistic things, the tech community is rising to this challenge led by Elon Musk.

00:30:45.320 And they're reclaiming their freedom.

00:30:49.000 People want back their freedom.

00:30:50.700 Doesn't that make you optimistic?

00:30:52.360 I'm not saying that the victory of the Republican Party in this election is magically going to turn things around.

00:31:01.480 But it makes me optimistic that there is this huge, which I didn't see it five years ago in 2020.

00:31:10.480 I didn't see it 2021.

00:31:12.020 I mean, we were really getting into this grim place where we thought, okay, so Western civilization is just going to die without even a whimper.

00:31:20.420 You know, and now this.

00:31:23.920 Right.

00:31:24.120 No, I think the term in our previous conversation, you used tech bros, which I really like.

00:31:29.860 I am optimistic by the tech bros.

00:31:31.600 And since our last conversation, just a few days ago, you probably know, I don't know if we would put him as a tech bro or not, but Jeff Bezos, by simply refusing to allow the Washington Post to make an explicit endorsement of Kamala Harris, in a sense, I mean, he's not as forthright in his positions as Elon Musk.

00:31:56.040 But wink, wink, we could assume that we have a sense of how he's starting to lean.

00:32:01.380 He's also waking up.

00:32:02.800 So, of course, that makes me optimistic because for a moment, Ayan, close your eyes and imagine. 0.82

00:32:09.420 Actually, yesterday was the two-year anniversary of X, right?

00:32:12.080 Imagine the world we would be in today if Elon had not bought X.

00:32:19.260 And I remember the day, I mean, probably within a couple of days of when it was announced that he had bought it.

00:32:23.820 I had put out a clip on my channel, on my show, where I said that of all of the things that Elon has done or will ever do, I guarantee you none of them will come close in their historical importance as him having bought X.

00:32:41.240 And I certainly doubled down on that position because my voice, your voice, many of the free thinkers' voices would have been completely in the abyss of, you know, invisibility were it not for him.

00:32:54.500 So that, to your point, I definitely feel optimistic that a lot of these incredibly influential, wealthy guys are coming around to reason.

00:33:03.100 So that's good.

00:33:04.180 I almost died of excitement when he bought Twitter.

00:33:08.040 I agree.

00:33:08.900 It is possible to do that.

00:33:11.020 And it's possible.

00:33:11.800 He's just such a remarkable man.

00:33:13.600 I did so once in, not even a generation, once in a century figure.

00:33:19.260 If I can, sorry, forgive me for interrupting.

00:33:21.400 I mean, I haven't mentioned this too much publicly, but, you know, Elon and I know each other well.

00:33:25.240 And he invited me down to meet him at his, how we spent about four hours together in Austin in May.

00:33:33.920 And I have to tell you, it's just unbelievable.

00:33:37.580 It's almost surreal, right?

00:33:39.000 I mean, I walk into this house.

00:33:40.800 We sit down.

00:33:42.120 We hug.

00:33:42.840 We start having this incredibly intense conversation, both professional stuff, you know, parasitic mind and all this kind of stuff, but also very personal stuff.

00:33:53.260 He's just a lovely guy.

00:33:55.540 So when I see, now that I've gotten to know him, when I see all the stuff that the unhinged people write about him, it pisses me off.

00:34:04.760 Maybe it's my Middle Eastern mentality of you always defend a friend or whatever, but it genuinely pisses me off because you really see how unhinged they are. 1.00

00:34:13.980 The guy is such a sweet soul, never mind all his intelligence and all that.

00:34:20.220 Yeah, it's absolutely amazing what Elon's doing, more power to him.

00:34:24.260 He's amazing.

00:34:25.060 I have met him and he is, I mean, we talk about authenticity.

00:34:29.980 I don't think I've met someone more authentic and more himself than Elon Musk.

00:34:36.120 And there's so many things I love about Elon, but one of the things that I think sets him apart from anyone else is, okay, he takes in all of these problems and listens and then says, okay, let's fix it.

00:34:49.060 And it's literally what he is doing now.

00:34:51.300 He is not a politician.

00:34:52.980 He wants us to be left alone by government and all these people.

00:34:56.280 And obviously in the tech broad circles that he runs in, he then shows leadership and says, okay, let's take back America and he's going to execute it.

00:35:06.100 We're going to take back America because of Elon Musk.

00:35:08.560 And they threaten him with everything that they threaten people that they don't like.

00:35:13.460 It was a character who wanted to put it on X, owned by Elon Musk, that Elon Musk should be put, that President Biden should put Elon Musk in prison.

00:35:26.880 Is this the character who we can confuse as Rachel Maddow because he wears similar glasses to Rachel Maddow?

00:35:34.420 Is it Keith Oberman?

00:35:35.460 Is that who you're referring to? 0.99

00:35:36.360 I'm referring to Keith Oberman and I saw that and I just remember feeling that you are describing that Lebanese, but in my case, that Somali burst of flame and I couldn't help myself but tweet that he was insane and a loser. 1.00

00:35:49.100 But to get back again to the optimism, there was another little video that someone tweeted quoting Van Jones, who works for CNN, and we know Van Jones a little. 0.97

00:36:02.980 And he goes, if you call all white people racist and all men toxic and all billionaires evil and they leave, you shouldn't be mad that they're leaving.

00:36:14.720 And I don't know, it's just a small grain of something, but isn't that, aren't they waking up? 0.97

00:36:26.340 I think so.

00:36:27.380 I mean, so I so appreciate your reflex to always want to infuse optimism because I think I'm the same way.

00:36:36.540 But that's always, in my case, tempered by the fact that I inhabit the most parasitized ecosystem possible, which is academia.

00:36:48.420 So maybe, right, right.

00:36:50.420 So maybe I'm overestimating the number of lobotomized people because, you know, I love receiving fan mails from the trucker and the corrections officers, precisely to your earlier point, because they are wedded to common sense and reality. 0.54

00:37:04.200 I take a lot more pleasure from a trucker saying, I listen to your show when I'm driving from Kansas to Oregon than I do from a Stanford professor telling me how smart I am, because the former, that means that my message is resonating.

00:37:19.280 But, you know, as we said earlier, the people who are educated become our leaders, and I don't see much auto-correction taking place within academia yet.

00:37:30.900 Very, very minuscule.

00:37:32.140 So I'll give you an example.

00:37:33.740 When the Jeff Bezos thing happened a few days ago, I started seeing on my feed from fellow professors, all of them posting how they're no longer subscribing to the Washington Post, right?

00:37:48.920 Because I don't, they're basically saying, I don't want to be a part of a newspaper that wouldn't support the candidate that I support.

00:37:57.660 Now, imagine that you feel proud of having that reflex.

00:38:03.680 You're a professor.

00:38:05.200 Does the concept of a free, you know, journalism mean anything?

00:38:10.880 Journalistic integrity?

00:38:12.200 No, because they are some of the most parasitized people.

00:38:15.660 And here, I think the person that I most resonate with, and I think you'll understand why, who is one of my intellectual heroes would be Thomas Sowell, because he's a guy who was calling out this nonsense when you and I either weren't born or we were in diapers.

00:38:31.980 And so I wish the world were inhabited with professors like Thomas Sowell and less like the ones that I hang out with.

00:38:40.820 I think that's also something we have to fight for, and that is either, I don't know, to what degree we can rescue the existing universities and existing departments or start new ones.

00:38:54.000 And here, I think, again, online, the internet helps.

00:38:57.000 You've seen the work that Jordan Peterson is doing and others.

00:39:00.520 And then the explosion in independent media, and that is, I think, why there is this push for censorship.

00:39:07.480 We keep talking about misinformation and disinformation.

00:39:10.560 It's just all sorts of excuses to censor us from top down, because the only way, really, that the far left, and I'm not talking about the Democrats, the moderates within the Democratic Party, but the far left within the Democratic Party, the only way they can come to power and hold on to power.

00:39:30.520 It's through repression, through force, through censorship, and through this shameless lying.

00:39:39.280 I mean, they'll accuse you of lying, and then they lie.

00:39:42.720 They say that Trump is going to be the next Hitler, but they use the justice system to go after him and go after everyone they don't like.

00:39:52.740 And then they lie about it.

00:39:55.060 They lied about Biden's senility.

00:39:59.240 And then they came around and pretended it never happened, that they never called him sharper, none of these things, and they just flipped it.

00:40:07.140 Who the hell do they think the American people are?

00:40:09.560 And then they brought Kamala Harris, and they said, oh, she's Wonder Woman. 0.97

00:40:12.500 So one day she's Wonder Woman, and the next day they're sitting there on these panels and saying, one guy likened her to a duck-billed platitude.

00:40:22.720 It's the same person.

00:40:23.940 Within three months.

00:40:26.060 So they just, and they say there are no conspiracies.

00:40:29.020 There's a conspiracy unfolding before our very eyes between these far left groups within the Democratic Party and the media, and they think that they can hide it.

00:40:38.500 And unfortunately for them, they can't hide it because of X, because of Substack, because of all of us making these videos and putting them on YouTube, even because of TikTok.

00:40:51.680 I know TikTok is not a great platform, but still, it's free enough, and it's a challenge enough to the mainstream media.

00:41:00.020 And so we break through the conspiracy theories.

00:41:02.720 I think there's a lot to be optimistic about if we are willing to fight.

00:41:07.220 And one thing that worries me is that one election victory can get people to be complacent again to say, oh, you see, I've seen this fight after 9-11-2001.

00:41:17.200 People were awake, understood the threat of or tried to understand the threat of radical Islam. 0.83

00:41:22.360 And then over time, they just went back to sleep.

00:41:25.200 And there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are converting to Islam through the Muslim Brotherhood and other activists, Islamist programs.

00:41:33.900 So there is always that, I don't know, the impulse to fall asleep again.

00:41:39.360 Yeah, I agree.

00:41:41.540 And I've actually often argued that, regrettably, the architecture of the human mind is such that you will ignore a problem until it literally comes to your doorstep, right?

00:41:54.160 So what are you talking about Islam is dangerous? 1.00

00:41:56.780 That's not true.

00:41:57.540 Well, it becomes true when now it is affecting how your children are being taught at school.

00:42:03.240 So, for example, we just had a scandal in Quebec where 11 teachers were caught in a school infusing the official Quebec government-sanctioned pedagogy with all Islamic stuff. 0.73

00:42:17.940 Well, I mean, I had been warning about this for 25 years.

00:42:20.560 Nobody listened because it wasn't yet.

00:42:22.880 So people don't have what I call the imagination to extrapolate, right?

00:42:28.000 Because to extrapolate into some ugly future is scary.

00:42:32.880 So I'd rather bury my head in the sand, as the proverbial metaphorical ostrich does, than to actually deal with it.

00:42:40.780 But eventually, it will come for you.

00:42:42.500 And I often use the example of Bill Ackman, how he's woken up now with the Harvard stuff.

00:42:50.360 Well, it's great.

00:42:51.420 I mean, he's a very eloquent man, very intelligent man, very successful man.

00:42:55.540 So you want him on your side.

00:42:57.420 But I often say, but why didn't you wake up three weeks earlier or three years earlier?

00:43:03.620 Well, because he was busy doing other things.

00:43:06.320 And so it is the few that have the capacity to extrapolate that stand up on top of the mountain and keep screaming until the others catch up.

00:43:14.880 But to my earlier point, they will catch up.

00:43:18.680 But then the retaliation, Second Amendment, will be a lot more violent than if we were able to solve the problem five years ago or 10 years ago.

00:43:27.540 So before we finish, there are two questions that I want to ask.

00:43:32.300 One is about your personal life.

00:43:36.360 And the second one is you fight bad ideas with good ideas.

00:43:42.260 And so I'll end with your personal life.

00:43:45.340 Let me ask the bad ideas first.

00:43:47.620 We've talked about the ideas that underlie multiculturalism, suicidal empathy. 0.80

00:43:55.120 We haven't really discussed Islamism at great length, but it's a bad idea. 1.00

00:44:01.200 Wokism is a bad idea. 0.98

00:44:02.300 You have this proliferation of bad ideas and bad actors and a lot of bad money that advances it.

00:44:09.220 What are the good ideas that we have that make it make an effective combat possible?

00:44:22.500 So certainly an absolutist stance when it comes to freedom of speech.

00:44:28.000 So freedom of speech cannot be a consequentialist principle.

00:44:32.360 It's not, I believe in freedom of speech, but the second that you say, but you are sinking into consequentialism, right?

00:44:40.320 I'm Jewish with my own very tragic personal history, but yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to say that the Holocaust never happened. 0.52

00:44:48.920 By definition, there's almost nothing that could be as offensive, as historically egregious, as insulting as to deny the Holocaust, but that's the price that I have to pay to live in a free society. 0.59

00:45:01.160 So no consequentialism when it comes to deontological principles that we have to adhere to.

00:45:07.300 There is no, I believe in journalistic integrity, but not when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop, because if that story spread, then Orange Himmler would have come into power.

00:45:20.980 And therefore, for that one particular case, it's okay if we ignore that.

00:45:25.660 No, that's what made the West great, is it had this foundational set of deontological principles that were inviolable.

00:45:32.140 So that's number one.

00:45:33.720 Meritocracy and individual dignity over collectivism and grievances certainly has to be returned to, right?

00:45:41.740 It doesn't make sense that chaired professorships are granted as a function of whether I am non-binary or two-spirited.

00:45:52.060 I mean, by the way, this is not God's satire.

00:45:54.880 University of Waterloo, which is often referred to as the MIT of Canada, it's the top engineering school of Canada.

00:46:03.140 It's the top computer science, one of the top computer science programs in Canada.

00:46:06.900 They put out a call for Canada research chairs, which is the highest chaired professorship that you can have in Canada, and it was restricted to two-spirit people, non-binary, trans women, and so on.

00:46:25.240 So Alan Turing, one of the most famous computer scientists who's ever lived, would have been denied that, even though he was gay, he would have been denied that chaired professorship at the University of Waterloo because he wasn't two-spirit or non-binary.

00:46:41.540 So meritocracy is the game that we play.

00:46:45.400 We don't do grievance stuff.

00:46:47.060 That would be number two.

00:46:47.840 The scientific method is the only epistemology that we use when we are adjudicating between competing hypotheses.

00:46:56.840 There is no Somali way of knowing. 1.00

00:46:59.160 There is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing.

00:47:02.060 That's why science is so beautiful, because it frees us from the shackles of our personal identities.

00:47:08.620 There is no Lebanese way of doing psychology.

00:47:10.840 Yes, there might be an element of Lebanese culture that makes us more hospitable than another culture, but there is no way to study scientific issues other than through the scientific method.

00:47:23.080 So, I mean, there are others, but to summarize, absolutist defense of First Amendment, meritocracy, and individual dignity over tribalism and collectivism, the scientific method, and if we return to these, we'll be in good shape.

00:47:41.600 And accountability.

00:47:43.100 And accountability.

00:47:44.600 Yeah, and, you know, personal ending, it's all in there.

00:47:47.680 It's all embedded in there.

00:47:50.380 I had the pleasure of meeting Brigitte Gabriel.

00:47:54.080 I haven't seen her for ages now, but when I lived in Massachusetts, we met a few times.

00:47:59.020 She's Lebanese.

00:48:00.300 She speaks of Lebanon with such great love.

00:48:03.840 And then she obviously talks about what happened to Lebanon and how the Islamists there spread, hijacked the whole process, and introduced it to what it is now. 0.87

00:48:16.280 What makes Haa Hesfi? 0.73

00:48:17.900 She was Christian.

00:48:18.940 She's Christian.

00:48:20.060 Lebanese.

00:48:21.160 You're Jewish Lebanese.

00:48:22.400 What makes it different?

00:48:23.520 What was it like to grow up there?

00:48:25.760 Why did you leave?

00:48:27.640 Can you go back?

00:48:29.540 Sure.

00:48:29.860 Do you want to emphasize that?

00:48:31.760 Sure.

00:48:32.160 Thank you.

00:48:32.560 I've gotten, I've had the pleasure of also, I mean, not meeting in person, unfortunately, but she's come on my show recently.

00:48:39.920 And boy, is she a firecracker in the nicest sense of the term. 1.00

00:48:44.220 I mean, you're a honey badger.

00:48:45.700 She's a honey badger. 1.00

00:48:46.820 If the world were made up more of honey badger, we wouldn't be in the problems that we are.

00:48:50.520 So, yes, I'm a huge fan of Brigitte.

00:48:52.780 There are incredible similarities in our stories in that there is a common enemy that was happy to eradicate both of our existence.

00:49:02.640 Now, there is a slightly worse element, not to play oppression Olympics or victimology poker here, but being Jewish is worse in the Middle East than being Christians. 0.99

00:49:14.920 Not that it's a fun amusement ride if you're a Christian, and certainly today there's the dwindling communities of Christians is going the same way that the Jews went, and we could have predicted this from history. 1.00

00:49:28.000 But I think that there is a unique difference, which is, and I'll answer more generally how it was to grow up in Lebanon.

00:49:35.180 I'm answering now the comparison between Brigitte and I.

00:49:37.400 And so in Lebanon, one of the ways that you would most likely to be killed early in the war is they would set up roadblocks, different militia groups, and they would ask you for your papers.

00:49:51.360 In Arabic, it's called Hawiye, which basically is like an ID card, like a passport that has your religion very conspicuously clearly on it.

00:50:01.320 Well, if you were Christian, you might not make it out of some roadblocks, and you might make it or not make it, depending on who's stopping you. 0.57

00:50:11.600 There weren't many roadblocks that you were going to make it out of if you were Jewish.

00:50:15.800 So in that sense, there was an added horror to being Jewish in Lebanon. 0.92

00:50:20.460 How was it for me to grow up in Lebanon?

00:50:22.480 Look, there is an element to what people, the lore of Lebanon, the Paris of the Middle East.

00:50:29.600 It was where all the jet setters were.

00:50:32.960 I remember as a young boy, you know, how the women dress. 1.00

00:50:36.600 I never saw a hijab in Lebanon.

00:50:38.280 There was no such thing.

00:50:39.260 I see more hijabs in the first hundred meters that I walk in Montreal than I did in my entire life growing up in Lebanon. 0.99

00:50:48.060 And that's, I'm being literal.

00:50:49.500 I'm not being hyperbolic.

00:50:50.540 Okay, so there was a beauty to Lebanon.

00:50:54.900 Lebanese culture is incredibly hospitable.

00:50:57.680 In French, you say bon vivant.

00:50:59.120 We're good livers, right?

00:51:00.540 We live well, right?

00:51:02.280 You eat well.

00:51:04.220 You have close friendships.

00:51:05.900 There's generosity and hospitality.

00:51:07.800 All those things are beautiful about Lebanese culture.

00:51:11.240 Being Jewish was a bit more of a problem because even before the civil war started, Ayan, the writing was really on the wall. 0.98

00:51:18.880 That's why much of my extended family had already left Lebanon.

00:51:23.160 We were part of the last remaining group of a few hundred Jews that had stayed in Lebanon because my parents were very well connected.

00:51:30.180 They lived the good life.

00:51:32.800 And therefore, maybe they were succumbing to the same thing that we talked about earlier, which is, oh, it's not going to happen here.

00:51:38.620 I'm sure it'll all work out.

00:51:40.120 Well, it didn't.

00:51:40.920 But I could see that even as a young boy.

00:51:43.540 So, for example, when I was five years old, I tell these, I'll mention very quickly a couple of stories from my Lebanon upbringing.

00:51:50.020 When I was five years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser died, who was the pan-Arabist Egyptian president revered by all the Arabs because he was trying to unify all the Arabs into sort of one common block.

00:52:03.080 Well, when he passed away, I wasn't quite six years old yet.

00:52:07.200 As you know, often happens in the Middle East, people take to the street.

00:52:11.340 They start screaming and lamenting and all this kind of stuff, shouting. 0.99

00:52:15.060 And they were all coming down my street screaming, death to Jews, death to Jews. 0.99

00:52:19.840 I remember as a five-year-old, I looked at my mom. 0.99

00:52:22.440 I said, well, why are they screaming death to Jews?

00:52:24.480 What do we have to do with this? 0.84

00:52:25.500 And she said, shh, keep your head down, keep quiet.

00:52:27.520 So, that was maybe the first clear memory I have of what it was to be Jewish in Lebanon.

00:52:33.700 One other quick story about Lebanon.

00:52:36.420 The day that we left Lebanon, Ayaan, I mean, literally the day when we got out and we cleared the airspace of Lebanon, the pilot said we are now outside of Lebanese airspace.

00:52:50.540 So, my mother puts a pendant around me with a Star of David and says, now you can wear this proudly and not hide your identity.

00:52:59.880 But now listen to this.

00:53:01.700 About two, three weeks after October 7th.

00:53:05.240 Now, this story happened in 1975.

00:53:07.480 Now, we're moving to 2023.

00:53:08.940 My wife comes to pick me up with one of our children who had just played a soccer match in the east end of Montreal, which has a particular demographic group that's not very friendly towards the Jews.

00:53:22.180 As she came to pick me up, I was working at a cafe on my laptop.

00:53:25.800 As we got into the car, my son, who was almost the exact same age I was in 1975, looks at me and said, daddy, if you wore a Star of David and came to watch me play soccer where we just came from, you'd be dead.

00:53:41.440 So, 45 years ago, I escaped Lebanon and my mother puts a Jewish symbol on me. 0.65

00:53:47.380 45 plus years later in Montreal, Canada, it's dangerous to wear that good symbol.

00:53:53.180 So, I want to end on an optimistic note.

00:53:55.300 I do think that the silent majority is with us, but I implore everybody, don't diffuse the responsibility onto others.

00:54:05.740 It's not only Ayaan who should be speaking about these issues.

00:54:09.580 Every voice matters.

00:54:11.300 Make your voice matter.

00:54:12.700 Speak out.

00:54:13.500 And hopefully, we will turn things around really quickly.

00:54:16.720 And ironically, it's now the Jewish state that is liberating. 0.57

00:54:22.660 Indeed.

00:54:23.300 Liberating Lebanon and possibly even the people of Iran from the grip of those people who were threatening Jewish minorities back then. 1.00

00:54:34.180 And now you see a lot of, and some people say it's not there, but I mean, it's really hard not to see it.

00:54:39.040 A lot of Arabs and Druze and Persians celebrating the military campaign that Israel is waging in retaliation of October 7, 2023.

00:54:53.040 Indeed.

00:54:53.640 You're exactly right.

00:54:55.180 Do, instead of just complain.

00:54:56.900 Do something about it.

00:54:58.080 Exactly.

00:54:58.860 Thank you so much, Ayaan.

00:54:59.720 Thank you again.

00:55:00.420 It's been such a pleasure.

00:55:01.980 Likewise.

00:55:02.280 Nice to have you again.

00:55:03.880 Yeah.

00:55:04.780 Thank you.

00:55:05.300 Thank you.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 13, 2024

Suicidal Empathy and the Decline of the West - on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Podcast (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_752)

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