The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Suicidal Empathy & Parasitic Mind - Fireside Chat at Galt's Gulch (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1018)

00:00:00.000 All right. This is so exciting. Such an honor to have you here. I know that Elon himself said you

00:00:11.680 are standing between us and civilizational collapse. It's an excellent book, and I hope

00:00:16.980 you all take advantage and pick up a copy. So, Gad, we had a conversation about this before,

00:00:24.600 But thinking back to your early childhood experience in Lebanon amidst the threats of

00:00:30.700 rising violence, virulent antisemitism, and social disintegration, do you think that that

00:00:37.040 experience inoculated you to an extent from suicidal empathy, or at least primed you to

00:00:45.000 recognize the phenomenon in a more clear-eyed way?

00:00:49.120 First, thank you all for being here.

00:00:50.920 Thank you for having me.

00:00:51.760 And for those of you who don't know, I was born in Lebanon in the mid-60s.

00:00:58.100 I was part of the last remaining group of Lebanese Jews that had steadfastly refused

00:01:03.440 to leave Lebanon.

00:01:05.320 And regrettably, the Civil War started in 1975, where it became impossible to be Jewish

00:01:10.320 in Lebanon, so we had to leave under imminent threat of execution.

00:01:14.880 So to your question, I saw what happens to a society that is deeply committed to organizing

00:01:21.740 colonizing itself along tribal lines, along identity politics, right? 0.52

00:01:27.140 Everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of your religious heritage.

00:01:33.320 So there's an internal ID card that you carry, and people don't care how tall you are or

00:01:37.740 what's your weight or what's your eye color, it's what's your religion.

00:01:41.160 And if you were Lebanese, it was written Israelite, not even Jewish.

00:01:45.480 And so if you were stopped at any militia checkpoint, it wasn't going to turn out well

00:01:50.060 for you in Lebanon.

00:01:51.060 So having seen what happens to a society steeped in this kind of tribal mindset,

00:01:56.920 to then see it seep its way into at least one of the two political parties in the United States

00:02:03.760 is probably not a good way to organize society.

00:02:06.860 So you describe suicidal empathy as a maladaptively irrational altruism,

00:02:14.380 a mind parasite that has hijacked the moral priorities of Western elites.

00:02:19.280 For someone encountering the idea for the first time, how do you distinguish healthy empathy from the pathological version?

00:02:30.320 Yes, great question.

00:02:31.140 So let me first explain that the book is not an attack on empathy.

00:02:37.380 As an evolutionary behavioral scientist, I understand that empathy is a perfectly rational virtue to possess.

00:02:44.700 we are a social species for you and I to have a meaningful conversation I need to put myself in

00:02:50.540 your mind and vice versa that's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind so there's nothing wrong

00:02:55.600 with well modulated empathy but like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago

00:03:01.180 too little of something is not good too much of something is not good much of life is about

00:03:05.780 finding that sweet spot the same applies for empathy too little empathy or no empathy makes

00:03:12.500 me a psychopath. If empathy is hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situation, and if it

00:03:19.840 targets the inappropriate targets, you get suicidal empathy. So example, if you are raped by someone

00:03:28.920 and your first reflex is to lie about the identity of the rapist, because you don't want to marginalize

00:03:36.880 the community from which he comes, that's not well-modulated empathy.

00:03:41.080 So you see it when it happens.

00:03:45.540 By the way, there's an endless number of such examples in the book.

00:03:50.280 So the one that I just sort of alluded to is about a case of a woman in Germany that

00:03:55.900 was gang-raped by Middle Eastern men who were speaking in Arabic and in Farsi.

00:04:01.720 And then when the police authorities tried to interview her, she said she lied and said that they were German because it might otherwise, God forbid, marginalize the Middle Eastern community.

00:04:13.560 That's probably not how our emotional system evolved to be empathetic towards our rapists.

00:04:18.700 Right.

00:04:19.560 Or what was your term for rapist? 1.00

00:04:22.420 Undocumented lovemaker. 1.00

00:04:23.740 Yes. 1.00

00:04:26.560 And there was another one for homebreakers?

00:04:30.000 or? Surprise house guests. So throughout your book, I get the feeling that the way you were

00:04:40.000 using the word altruism was different from the way that objectivists might understand the concept.

00:04:46.520 So I wanted to check at the outset of this conversation whether this was a difference

00:04:52.180 of semantics or a deeper one.

00:04:55.160 You seem to be using altruism interchangeably with benevolence,

00:05:00.160 kindness, generosity, as perhaps most of your readers would.

00:05:06.960 Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who coined the term altruism

00:05:10.840 in the 19th century meant something far more radical,

00:05:14.540 that fundamental moral duty was to live for others.

00:05:19.380 he insisted that self-interest always be subordinated to the needs of others in society,

00:05:25.900 personal desires, ambitions.

00:05:27.820 So do you see altruism as equivalent to benevolence,

00:05:31.780 which at least open objectivists would see as a self-interested virtue,

00:05:36.260 or do you see it more as a rejection of self-interest fundamentally?

00:05:41.320 Not quite either of these.

00:05:43.240 I'm using the term altruism actually in the way that evolutionists would use altruism.

00:05:47.340 So there are two types of altruism that evolutionary psychologists typically talk about, kin-based altruism.

00:05:55.540 So why would I jump into a river to save three of my children if all I care about is my survival from a Darwinian perspective?

00:06:04.460 But then if you realize that I share on average half of my genes with each of my children,

00:06:09.260 then from an evolutionary calculus perspective

00:06:12.260 my jumping and potentially killing myself in the river

00:06:15.600 to save those three children 0.68

00:06:17.000 would make perfect evolutionary sense.

00:06:19.800 Now reciprocal altruism is non-kind based altruism.

00:06:23.900 Why would I jump into a river to save a friend

00:06:26.740 or a random stranger?

00:06:28.660 And the argument there is that that form of altruism evolved

00:06:31.900 because it's a tit-for-tat strategy.

00:06:34.040 You literally see it in other primates

00:06:36.040 where they engage in reciprocal grooming. 0.99

00:06:37.840 I pick at the parasites from your back 0.99

00:06:41.020 and then you will reciprocate and do the same 0.99

00:06:43.400 so that's a form of altruism

00:06:44.740 so the way I'm using it is in the evolutionary sense of the word

00:06:47.620 your book describes an inverse morality

00:06:51.440 where the strong and successful are demonized

00:06:54.860 and the destructive are celebrated

00:06:58.600 is the real problem the bad ideas themselves

00:07:02.300 or the abdication of those who should be defending

00:07:07.520 reason and values.

00:07:10.580 All of that.

00:07:12.360 So we're leaving now

00:07:13.840 Canada and moving to the United States

00:07:15.980 and I'm probably speaking to most Americans

00:07:18.060 here, so let me say

00:07:19.440 the title that I'll be holding at Ole Miss.

00:07:22.460 It'll be the Distinguished Professor

00:07:24.300 at the Declaration

00:07:26.040 of Independence Center for the Study

00:07:28.100 of American Freedom. 0.98

00:07:29.840 Because it takes a Canadian... 0.99

00:07:31.980 Thank you. 0.87

00:07:35.620 It takes a Canadian to defend, apparently,

00:07:37.520 American freedoms. But the reason I raise that point is because in Canada, I think I saw above

00:07:43.600 me envy is equal to evil. Canada is very much rooted in the ethos of envy, right? It's unfair,

00:07:52.000 Professor Saad, that you write books that bring you a lot of book royalties, whereas other people

00:07:57.440 don't make enough money. Don't you think it would be empathetic if we levy 58, 60, 65% of your book

00:08:05.400 royalties away from you so that we can create a more equitable and empathetic society.

00:08:11.200 And so every single domestic and foreign policy that you see being enacted in the West is

00:08:18.400 ultimately rooted in this dysregulated empathy.

00:08:21.080 It's grotesque.

00:08:22.400 What is the relationship between the belief in human agency, the idea that we can act

00:08:29.760 to change our circumstances and that we bear responsibility for our actions, how does that

00:08:37.520 relate to one's relative vulnerability to suicidal empathy?

00:08:42.020 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:08:42.900 So, in one of the chapters, I talk about blank slate felons.

00:08:47.200 The reason why I use the term blank slate, for those of you who may know, one of the

00:08:52.000 idea pathogens that I talk about in the parasitic mind is what's called social constructivism.

00:08:56.400 We're born empty slate, tabula rasa, blank slate,

00:09:00.540 and then it's only socialization that makes us who we are.

00:09:03.580 There are no innate differences in potentiality.

00:09:06.100 We're all equal.

00:09:07.340 So if anything happens in our lives that is bad,

00:09:10.280 it's probably because it was an external agent that caused it.

00:09:13.780 We have no personal agency according to that framework.

00:09:17.980 Well, then, if you internalize that ethos, 0.68

00:09:21.160 well then it's not fair that say a felon of color who was born into a racist white supremacist

00:09:30.060 society so he's already been penalized now you're going to punish him if only because he's committed

00:09:36.640 137 different felonies don't you think you should be a bit more empathetic and give this guy a

00:09:42.260 second chance ergo 147th chance so blank slate felons are very much rooted in the fact that you

00:09:49.540 are removing from them their personal agency your book documents results ranging from coddling

00:09:56.260 violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior

00:10:03.700 what's the single policy domain where you think that suicidal empathy has done the most concrete

00:10:10.580 damage fantastic question and the answer is astoundingly clear open door immigration policies

00:10:18.260 So the idea is that every immigrant should be afforded the right to come and live out the beautiful experience called American exceptionalism.

00:10:29.260 It's unfair that you were born in that society, whereas the Guatemalan or whomever didn't get that chance.

00:10:36.100 If you are truly kind, hospitable, generous people, you would open the door.

00:10:41.580 Now, the problem with that, first of all, is that why is it that I have to go through a very rigorous process to actually get an EB1A visa where someone else can just walk in?

00:10:52.380 That means we're not equal under the law. 0.98

00:10:54.080 But more importantly, if you apply this sort of orgiastic open door policy framework to people who are coming from societies that are perfectly antithetical to our foundational values, it doesn't take a fancy professor to tell you that if you have the capacity to forecast into the future, we know what will happen. 0.98

00:11:18.860 That game has been played out. 0.98

00:11:20.180 So, for example, just so that you don't think I'm trying to speak obliquely, that's not something that I do.

00:11:24.820 I'm very direct in my language.

00:11:28.060 Millions of Muslims might be perfectly lovely people.

00:11:31.840 By being from Lebanon, I know more lovely Muslims than probably all of you in this room combined.

00:11:38.800 That doesn't take away from the fact that if Islam becomes sufficiently prevalent in a society,

00:11:45.360 your personal liberties and freedoms are not going to increase. 1.00

00:11:49.480 they're going to decrease. We have 1,400 years of data that supports that fact, and yet because

00:11:55.580 people feel incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that all immigrants are not equally likely

00:12:01.740 to assimilate, they then internalize the suicidally empathetic position that, no, Elon is an immigrant,

00:12:08.360 he came in, you, Ghat Saad, are an immigrant, and you came in. Why are you a hypocrite railing 1.00

00:12:13.500 against open-door policies? So by far, that's the worst form of suicidal empathy. 0.99

00:12:17.440 You also compare and contrast in your book the Oslo syndrome with the Stockholm syndrome.

00:12:25.640 So what are the differences and which one comes closer to approximating suicidal?

00:12:31.800 So the Stockholm syndrome is you're kidnapped and then you suddenly eventually begin to empathize with your kidnapper.

00:12:39.580 Now, in some cases, that could be a survival strategy.

00:12:42.280 You're not actually truly supporting their cause, but it becomes a way for you.

00:12:47.100 So, for example, when a serial killer takes you to the woods in the cabin, you might actually

00:12:53.120 start trying to get him to humanize you so that he doesn't view you as an object.

00:12:58.300 But the typical form of Stockholm Syndrome would be the case of Patty Hearst.

00:13:05.680 Oslo Syndrome was when the Israelis kept thinking that if only we do this more and

00:13:11.740 we acquiesce in this way more or that way more and the Oslo Accords eventually they will come 0.86

00:13:17.840 around and want to coexist and live in peace well we know take that to the extreme Yahya Sinwar

00:13:25.600 if any of you know who he was he was the architect of October 7th Yahya Sinwar was in prison 0.67

00:13:32.300 for life because of all of his terroristic activities he was diagnosed with a brain tumor 0.55

00:13:39.400 by Israeli surgeons, because they pursued the deontological principle of the Hippocratic Oath, 0.90

00:13:46.140 which is even if it's my enemy, I am bound in curing him and treating him. They ended up saving

00:13:53.060 his life. He was eventually released through a prisoner swap. And you would have thought that

00:14:00.040 if the Israelis saved your life, that might have bought you some empathy chips. Well, he said,

00:14:07.860 here's how I'm going to thank you. I'm going to be the architect of October 7th. And so in that

00:14:14.100 sense, whether it be the Oslo Accords or later forms of social empathy, even the Israelis can

00:14:21.140 be prone to this kind of distorted empathy. So one of the more difficult examples you share in

00:14:27.640 your book was that of a Coloradan man who housed in his home a 20-year-old employee who was

00:14:34.960 a Venezuelan illegal immigrant.

00:14:38.580 So what was the painful lesson that he learned

00:14:42.660 and what does it tell us about suicidal empathy? 0.53

00:14:45.520 Don't let in young men to share the house with your young daughter.

00:14:51.360 So my wife and I, who's sitting in this audience, 1.00

00:14:55.440 we would have not fights but disagreements

00:14:58.220 whenever our children ask to go away to sleepover

00:15:03.620 at someone's house. And my rule was, and this is where we sort of disagreed because she was

00:15:09.520 a bit more, well, but they're nice people. I'm like, everybody is a pedophile molester in my 0.91

00:15:16.180 book while my children are under my dominion. I will never put my children at risk because it

00:15:23.980 would be wrong for me to presume that this really nice guy that we've known for years could

00:15:29.640 potentially molest my daughter or son. It's precisely how kids are molested, because Uncle

00:15:35.020 Joe is sweet, and Uncle Harry is a nice guy, and Coach Joe is a sweet guy, because you don't come

00:15:41.280 with a tattoo that says I'm a child molester. Therefore, I use an absolute rule, no sleep over.

00:15:48.680 So that Colorado man should have maybe listened to me, and then his daughter wouldn't have been 0.97

00:15:53.080 raped. All right, you write that prior to George Floyd's death, white murderers were twice as 0.99

00:15:59.620 likely to have their races mentioned as compared to their black counterparts.

00:16:06.500 After Floyd's death, this skyrocketed to seven times more likely.

00:16:12.820 What's going on here?

00:16:14.500 Well, I put that under linguistic empathy and so on, right?

00:16:18.500 So empathy or dysregulated empathy or suicidal empathy manifests itself in many, many ways.

00:16:24.660 So, for example, forbidden knowledge, which is also related to what you're asking, is

00:16:29.900 the idea that you shouldn't share certain statistics.

00:16:33.160 And by the way, at yesterday's address by Heather MacDonald, many of the examples that

00:16:37.500 she was discussing would fit under the rubric of forbidden knowledge.

00:16:42.280 Don't show any data that might be hurtful to a marginalized group.

00:16:47.440 So in this case, they're sort of doing the opposite. 0.81

00:16:49.740 We need to stick to the idea that whites are the ones who commit crimes and so on. 0.97

00:16:56.080 So we will cook it in any possible way so that we adhere to the narrative. 0.99

00:17:01.020 It's unbelievable.

00:17:02.020 And by the way, I first noticed this in academia, so I've been a professor now for 32 years.

00:17:07.840 My academic work, as the person who introduced me mentioned, is to apply evolutionary biology

00:17:12.920 and evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior and economic behavior and so on.

00:17:19.180 It shocked me to no end to realize that most of my colleagues thought that what I was doing

00:17:26.300 was unbelievably heretical, right?

00:17:29.840 Biology was relevant to the mosquito, to the dog, to the zebra.

00:17:34.440 But surely, Professor Saad, you don't think that human beings are biological beings.

00:17:38.300 Well, of course, that's what I'm thinking.

00:17:40.880 You actually think that human beings operate in a plane that is outside of biology?

00:17:45.720 So that was my first inkling that there was some forms of knowledge that had to be either blocked or cooked

00:17:53.180 so that you always stick to a politically correct narrative.

00:17:56.940 It's unbelievable.

00:17:57.880 So a 23-year-old woman says she was attacked on a Manhattan subway by Rommel Burke, 32,

00:18:09.040 weeks before he allegedly killed a 75-year-old retired teacher by shoving him down the stairs.

00:18:15.120 When asked why she refused to report her assault, the woman confessed,

00:18:21.860 I regretted 100%, and I actually feel really bad that a man lost his life.

00:18:27.200 But she goes on to explain her motive.

00:18:29.940 Quote, maybe part of me was just like, I don't want to put another black man in jail, 0.97

00:18:35.060 but at some point, if you're a criminal, you're a criminal.

00:18:37.780 So this young woman is taking the scenic route to sanity, but she gets there in the end.

00:18:44.500 her compassion all of it was reserved for the man who tried to kill her for herself and for people

00:18:51.460 like her there is none to be spared so what explains this kind of yes yeah this example

00:18:59.620 did not make it into book because it happened after the book had gone into

00:19:03.300 press but i'll tell you examples that are actually more shocking than this one that are in the book 0.91

00:19:08.740 So a very enlightened, progressive, anti-racist ally white woman 1.00

00:19:15.260 who wants to smash the false narrative that black men could ever be violent 0.92

00:19:23.200 decides to go to Haiti to interact with black men 0.74

00:19:27.620 to show that she won't be harassed in any way 0.95

00:19:30.840 because that's just a false narrative promulgated by white supremacist society.

00:19:36.340 Well, she then gets slapped by this thing called reality,

00:19:39.720 whereby a Haitian man takes her to the rooftop 0.97

00:19:42.780 and violently rapes her all night. 0.98

00:19:46.000 As he is raping her, she is telling him, 0.99

00:19:49.540 and to her great consternation, he's not stopping the rape. 0.89

00:19:53.380 She's telling him, I am a Malcolm X scholar myself,

00:19:57.080 and I am a BLM ally, 0.97

00:19:58.900 and apparently that wasn't enough to stop him in a stride from raping her. 0.97

00:20:02.780 But then she writes an essay post the violent rape.

00:20:07.040 You can all go and read the essay.

00:20:09.100 It's referenced in the book where she says she's actually thankful for the experience of being raped violently 0.77

00:20:17.360 because it showed her all of the anger and hatred that he had in him because of white supremacy. 0.83

00:20:26.560 By the way, this is the white supremacy in the United States. 0.98

00:20:29.580 she's being raped in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 0.99

00:20:33.740 And that she served as the vehicle 0.99

00:20:36.760 of his rage against white supremacy

00:20:39.440 made the rape an ultimately something 0.97

00:20:42.200 that she was happy to have experienced.

00:20:45.060 That's what suicidal empathy is.

00:20:47.520 Wow.

00:20:49.120 So a couple of years ago,

00:20:50.640 I was assaulted during a speech

00:20:52.820 at Mercer College in Georgia 1.00

00:20:55.420 by a trans student who was a member

00:20:57.840 of Queers for Palestine.

00:21:00.460 How is this group

00:21:02.280 emblematic of suicidal

00:21:04.060 empathy? So here I'm going to,

00:21:05.960 some of you may already know this term

00:21:07.820 of mine, some may not, so

00:21:09.840 enjoy if this is the first time you're

00:21:11.900 hearing it. The wood cricket

00:21:14.100 is an

00:21:15.380 insect that abhors

00:21:17.740 water. It wants nothing to do with

00:21:19.800 water. When it is parasitized

00:21:22.200 by a hair worm,

00:21:24.200 the hair worm, in order for it to 0.99

00:21:25.920 complete its reproductive cycle, 0.72

00:21:27.460 it needs to get the wood cricket to jump into water, 0.90

00:21:31.640 merrily committing suicide and suicidal empathy. 1.00

00:21:35.680 Well, queers for Palestine are the human form of the wood cricket. 1.00

00:21:40.960 Because, and by the way, the other term you might have heard me use 1.00

00:21:44.620 when I can get spicy on social media is 1.00

00:21:47.140 some idiot Jewish guy will be doing the Jews for Hamas and all this stuff. 1.00

00:21:53.460 And I write back, I say, congratulations, you are my wood cricket Jew of the week. 1.00

00:21:59.600 Because to be able to, from the lofty ivory tower at Cornell, my alma mater, or Columbia, or Oberlin College, 0.96

00:22:12.980 to be able to take on such enlightened views while folks like me had to wear good running shoes

00:22:19.940 and outrun the ones who wanted to decapitate us,

00:22:23.600 it is very frustrating to see people espouse these positions

00:22:27.840 when they have no costs to bear for being wood crickets. 1.00

00:22:31.860 And so these Queers for Palestine are exactly that. 1.00

00:22:36.280 So Charles Dickens gave us Miss Jellybee in Bleak House, 0.99

00:22:41.020 a woman so consumed with her philanthropic mission to Africa

00:22:45.260 that her own children go hungry and her household falls apart.

00:22:50.760 Dickens calls this telescopic philanthropy,

00:22:54.300 moral energy directed at distant abstractions

00:22:57.640 while real obligations go unmet nearby.

00:23:01.500 That was in 1853.

00:23:03.500 Is suicidal empathy essentially a 21st century

00:23:08.460 civilizational scale version of Mrs. Jellybee?

00:23:12.140 And if Dickens could see it so clearly 170 years ago, why have we forgotten the lesson?

00:23:19.720 It's not quite the same manifestation of the same phenomenon because suicidal empathy results out of the parasitic ideas that I discussed in the parasitic mind.

00:23:31.820 And let me give a specific manifestation of that.

00:23:35.100 Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea.

00:23:38.460 It basically purports that we shouldn't judge the cultural values and beliefs and practices of another society.

00:23:45.700 That would be a form of cultural imperialism. 1.00

00:23:48.360 So if another culture wants to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, shut up, racist. 1.00

00:23:54.780 If another culture wants to engage in child brides, shut up, racist. 1.00

00:23:59.640 If another culture wants to do honor killings through stoning, shut up, racist. 0.97

00:24:03.640 Well, if I internalize that idea pathogen of cultural relativism, it then renders me impotent to then make a statement about, well, I don't want people who hold these types of values to become immigrants in my host society. 0.64

00:24:20.000 So the parasitic idea of cultural relativism lays the ground for that suicidal empathy. 0.73

00:24:25.380 So the reflex from Charles Dickens that you speak about is rooted in the same reflex, but the actual phenomenon is rooted in slightly different things. 0.52

00:24:33.640 So you argue that Jews are often placed outside the empathy hierarchy.

00:24:39.640 Why has that happened?

00:24:41.640 Why Jews? 1.00

00:24:42.640 Yeah. 1.00

00:24:43.640 Yeah, because Jews are the, in this case, in the logic of oppressor, oppressed.

00:24:48.640 They're no longer viewed as oppressed. 0.54

00:24:51.640 They are the oppressors, right?

00:24:52.640 This is what I call, by the way, for those of you who've heard of another one of my coined terms, 1.00

00:24:57.640 six degrees of Jew. 0.87

00:24:59.640 Are you familiar with this game? 0.93

00:25:01.640 So six degrees of Jews works like this. 1.00

00:25:03.860 I give you a calamity around anything, about anything. 1.00

00:25:07.540 An Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon. 0.97

00:25:10.840 You have six causal steps to blame the Jews for it. 0.95

00:25:15.480 And by the way, it usually takes many fewer than six steps to converge to the Jews. 0.96

00:25:20.720 And the reason for that, I have a psychological reason for it. 0.82

00:25:25.880 I mean, there are theological reasons why people hate the Jews. 0.85

00:25:28.860 Christians have their reasons.

00:25:30.020 Muslims have their reasons. 0.94

00:25:30.840 But the fact that there is a never-ending refueling of Jew hatred throughout the ages, I think stems from this. 0.84

00:25:39.760 And then you tell me what you think of it.

00:25:41.400 So in psychology, there is a phenomenon called the self-serving bias.

00:25:46.160 How do you attribute successes and failures in your life?

00:25:49.340 And most people attribute successes internally.

00:25:52.600 I did well on the exam because I'm smart and I studied hard.

00:25:55.640 And they attribute failures externally. 0.98

00:25:57.760 I did poorly on the exam because Professor Saad is a bastard and he's unfair, right? 0.99

00:26:02.640 Now, imagine if I can blame all internal and societal failings on the Jew, then that's 1.00

00:26:09.600 a perfect culprit. 1.00

00:26:10.520 Now, the next question will be, but why the Jew? 0.97

00:26:13.280 Why don't you blame Armenians or Haitians?

00:26:16.220 Well, because the Jews throughout history have held a very peculiar position, which

00:26:22.400 Amy Chua, the professor of law at Yale, basically calls market-dominant minorities. 0.94

00:26:30.580 This is a minuscule group of people within an ecosystem that consistently box above their

00:26:36.840 weight class.

00:26:37.720 Now, there are other groups that do that, but no group does it as frequently and as 0.99

00:26:42.400 often as the Jews.

00:26:43.360 Any society you go to, you end up seeing Jews much more statistically overrepresented 0.82

00:26:51.300 everywhere, right?

00:26:52.280 So I didn't get the small business loan for the restaurant that I so wanted to get.

00:26:58.120 Well, who controls the banks? 1.00

00:26:59.300 It's the Jews. 0.98

00:27:00.080 I didn't become the next superhero in the Avengers movie. 0.93

00:27:03.500 Who controls Hollywood? 1.00

00:27:04.680 It's the Jews. 1.00

00:27:05.640 My wife cheated on me. 1.00

00:27:07.380 Well, she probably consumed porn to get that idea in her head. 1.00

00:27:11.160 Who produces porn? 1.00

00:27:13.220 It's the Jews. 1.00

00:27:14.660 By the way, did you also know that in 2010, when in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 1.00

00:27:19.780 There was a bunch of shark attacks in Egypt that affected the tourism industry in Egypt.

00:27:27.880 After a thorough investigation, the Egyptian authorities concluded that there's very good evidence 0.79

00:27:34.260 that those sharks were Jewish Zionist sharks. 0.67

00:27:39.380 And by the way, I'm not being facetious, I'm not being satirical.

00:27:42.440 That's what the Egyptian authorities decided. 1.00

00:27:45.360 So this is why the Jews are not worthy of empathy, they're diabolical. 1.00

00:27:48.500 All right, we've got about two and a half more minutes, and we want to get to audience questions, so one last one from me. 1.00

00:27:55.680 In Atlas Drugged, Ayn Rand observed that the sanction of the victim is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the sin of creating value.

00:28:09.380 Of course, this conference, Gulls Gulch, is named after the place where, in the novel, the productive people have withdrawn that sanction and refuse to continue to be sacrificial victims.

00:28:23.260 For those in the grips of suicidal empathy, what's the cure?

00:28:27.700 How do we encourage them to withdraw the sanction of the victim? 0.54

00:28:31.420 Well, I can only speak to how I can do it, and that is to come to these kinds of events, to hopefully inoculate people against the reflex of suzal empathy, to write the books to allow me to do that.

00:28:43.420 Again, empathy is a wonderful virtue.

00:28:46.100 I mean, it may or may not surprise you to know that I'm actually a very empathetic guy.

00:28:50.820 But I stand proudly and say that if having to choose between saving my biological children or saving random children in Rwanda,

00:29:00.280 I will choose every single time to save my biological children, as would anybody else in this room.

00:29:05.880 That doesn't make us callous and void of empathy.

00:29:09.280 It simply makes it that empathy has evolved according to certain evolutionary-based calculus.

00:29:15.360 So embrace that and live a good life.

00:29:17.660 All right. Right on time. Let's give us a round of applause.

00:29:20.820 All right, guys, we're going to start with some questions.

00:29:27.480 Just as a reminder, please keep your questions short and concise

00:29:30.740 so we can get to as many as possible.

00:29:31.980 We're going to start right here, and then we'll go over to you.

00:29:35.860 Hi, my name is Audrey, and I wanted to thank you for coming today.

00:29:39.900 My question is whether there's a difference between sexes with empathy levels,

00:29:47.360 and if you've seen that ever

00:29:49.200 and if there's like an evolutionary reason

00:29:51.400 for that having arisen.

00:29:53.860 So in terms of well-modulated empathy,

00:29:56.900 not suicidal empathy,

00:29:58.860 the research is unequivocal.

00:30:00.420 Women do score higher on empathy than men.

00:30:03.060 And there are basic evolutionary reasons. 0.95

00:30:06.380 They tend to be the ones

00:30:08.320 who provide greater nurturance to the children.

00:30:11.240 Not that fathers, by the way, are not super dads.

00:30:13.900 In the mammalian context,

00:30:15.220 human dads are actually very vested in their children, just not as much as women. And the 0.84

00:30:21.500 evolutionary reason is very simple. There is no such thing as maternity uncertainty. There is such

00:30:26.340 a thing as paternity uncertainty. So it makes sense that women would be more vested in their

00:30:31.040 children and hence more empathetic in general. Having said that, it's then not surprising to

00:30:36.380 recognize the fact that suicidal empathy is more likely to afflict women than men.

00:30:43.020 and the typical men who are afflicted from it

00:30:46.200 are the ones that are members of the invertebrate castrati class.

00:30:51.240 So they're both void of a spine 0.99

00:30:55.280 and void of this thing called testicles. 0.98

00:30:59.580 But I know I say that in the way that is unique to me, 0.99

00:31:03.120 but I really do mean it in that

00:31:04.720 it's typically not the incredibly brawny Navy SEAL

00:31:10.240 who is sent to kill some bad guy in Waziristan

00:31:13.820 that suffers from suicidal empathy.

00:31:16.480 It's the guy who crosses his legs like Justin Trudeau,

00:31:19.520 who's very kind, who cries when he fills up the gas tank

00:31:23.440 because he is using the juice of the rape of Mother Earth and so on.

00:31:27.820 So there is a prototypical exemplar of the person

00:31:31.880 who is a suicidal empathetic person.

00:31:33.780 Okay, thank you.

00:31:35.260 Okay, name and where are you from?

00:31:37.040 Hi, I'm Massimo.

00:31:38.160 I just graduated from Concordia.

00:31:39.620 So, greetings from Montreal.

00:31:40.880 From Concordia.

00:31:41.980 That's right.

00:31:42.780 Wow.

00:31:44.000 That's the university from which I am now escaping to Ole Miss.

00:31:50.980 I was wondering if you could offer some advice to young Canadians such as myself

00:31:55.800 who want to fight for truth and want to fight against these ideas

00:31:59.540 which are holding our country back.

00:32:02.100 Right.

00:32:03.520 So, I've often said this, but it's worth repeating the answer to your question.

00:32:08.400 Probably of all fan emails that I receive, this is the typical structure.

00:32:14.900 Dear Professor Saad, tons of very nice words.

00:32:18.480 And then the last sentence is, and if you decide to read this email on your show, finish the sentence for me, please don't mention my name.

00:32:29.620 So then I write back to them, dear so-and-so, thank you for your lovely words.

00:32:33.740 don't you think that the last sentence in your email is precisely why we are in the current

00:32:39.280 situation that we're in? So my point is that don't diffuse the responsibility to fight for

00:32:46.180 these foundational principles to a few people. Regrettably, I have to be here with armed security

00:32:52.460 because I have had to bear the costs of being someone who doesn't modulate one syllable from

00:32:59.780 the truth. But many

00:33:01.800 people who share

00:33:03.860 exactly my views, also

00:33:05.940 known as truth, reality,

00:33:08.240 are completely

00:33:09.540 swimming in a wonderful

00:33:11.920 infinity pool of cowardice.

00:33:14.420 If all those people

00:33:16.240 were to somehow have

00:33:18.020 the fire

00:33:20.200 of courage lit under their

00:33:21.960 feet so that they could speak out,

00:33:24.200 we would get rid of this problem by next

00:33:26.120 Tuesday. The problem comes

00:33:28.040 from the fact that few of us do it.

00:33:30.700 Thank you.

00:33:34.660 Hi, I'm Zach Abner from Austin, Texas.

00:33:37.280 I'm really curious in those who weaponize suicidal empathy,

00:33:40.980 specifically domestically and examples in your book, 0.71

00:33:43.720 because I know Queers for Palestine comes to mind.

00:33:46.200 Hamas despises these people. 0.99

00:33:47.980 They would kill them and throw them off buildings, 0.99

00:33:49.340 but they see them as an effective tool against Israel.

00:33:52.220 Is there examples of that domestically here in the United States

00:33:54.800 with certain groups who hate you know the western civilization but who use suicidal empathy to you 1.00

00:34:01.280 know fight western civilization uh yeah well i mean the the the the love fest between the islamists

00:34:09.440 and the uh socialists exists in a sense because of that feedback loop where there is kind of this 0.80

00:34:15.760 pragmatism we both hate the west eventually we're going to probably have to decapitate each other 0.76

00:34:22.080 Of course, the socialists don't realize that in the decapitation game, the Islamists are probably better at that game. 0.97

00:34:30.000 A lot of practice. 0.99

00:34:31.040 Sorry?

00:34:31.400 It had a lot of practice.

00:34:32.420 Yeah, that's right.

00:34:33.060 It had a lot of practice.

00:34:34.000 But they use swords of mercy and kindness.

00:34:37.160 So it is peaceful when they decapitate you.

00:34:39.740 But anyways, so a lot of it, you're exactly right.

00:34:43.700 You weaponize suicidal empathy to ones who are susceptible to succumb to that.

00:34:49.660 By the way, there's a great, using the example of Queers for Palestine, there's a great exchange that I quote in the book.

00:34:58.980 You know those street interviewers that just go up to someone and just start asking them questions?

00:35:03.220 So there's this young man, I forget his name, who goes, I think it's in Manchester, at a free, free Palestine rally.

00:35:12.120 And he asks this woman, do you support Gaza?

00:35:16.460 She goes, yes. 0.85

00:35:17.540 He goes, well, do you know what they do to gay people there? 1.00

00:35:19.660 She goes, yes, I know what they do.

00:35:21.080 I am queer myself.

00:35:22.460 He goes, oh, you're queer?

00:35:24.040 So you would know what they would do to you if you went to Gaza?

00:35:27.700 She goes, yes.

00:35:28.380 What do you think they would do to you? 1.00

00:35:29.880 They would kill me. 0.97

00:35:30.700 And you still support them? 0.99

00:35:31.920 I don't care.

00:35:32.860 Just because they would kill me doesn't mean that they're not worthy of my support.

00:35:37.060 That's what a wood cricket says. 1.00

00:35:39.680 Wow.

00:35:40.560 Thank you.

00:35:41.520 Hey, I'm Archie.

00:35:42.700 I'm from Alberta, Canada, but I grew up in Israel.

00:35:45.940 And Oslo Mansion, like you said, it's a problem very familiar to me.

00:35:49.660 terrorists had better lives in prison than I had in the army or in my uni dorms

00:35:55.120 and then they would get released and then they go again to do more terror

00:35:58.900 attacks and related to the same cricket mention that you said now what do you 0.85

00:36:04.240 think needs to happen for someone to wake up and realize I need to get rid of

00:36:08.560 the parasites and I've been taken advantage of yeah and wake up like what

00:36:13.160 needs to happen it's it's not easy you know I I hate to say this because I I

00:36:17.140 I always want to end these things on a positive, optimistic note.

00:36:21.860 But I think one of the frailties of the architecture of the human mind

00:36:25.380 is that people only respond to a problem 1.00

00:36:29.080 once the monster literally bites your ass. 1.00

00:36:32.700 Until then, there is no monster. 1.00

00:36:34.600 So example, there are some very high-profile Jewish billionaires 0.66

00:36:39.840 who for 25 years have ignored the increasing, festering Jew hatred

00:36:46.580 on campuses that guys like me

00:36:49.060 were standing on top of the mountain

00:36:50.480 screaming and warning.

00:36:52.780 But when it hit their favorite alma mater,

00:36:56.660 it came to their home, 1.00

00:36:58.560 it bit their ass, 1.00

00:37:00.140 that's when they woke up. 0.99

00:37:01.220 And so I don't think I've solved that problem.

00:37:03.480 If I would solve that problem,

00:37:05.060 maybe I would be booking a flight to Stockholm

00:37:06.920 to receive the Nobel Prize.

00:37:10.180 Inshallah. 0.90

00:37:12.540 Good day to you, Mrs. Ed.

00:37:13.900 My name is Marcos Reynard.

00:37:15.080 I'm from Puerto Rico.

00:37:16.000 I'm a big fan of your work I wanted to ask you that I believe one of the

00:37:21.100 reasons why we're also in the precarious situation with these social ills that

00:37:24.760 empathy is providing is actually because we're misusing our emotions I think we

00:37:31.760 should probably introduce another term that I think is far more useful when

00:37:35.560 we're trying to feel for others which is sympathy because empathy is trying to

00:37:39.700 replicate an action that can't be done we only live our own lives not lives of

00:37:43.840 other people so is it perhaps more prudent for us when we're trying to get

00:37:49.120 rid of this social ill to also just utilize different emotions which are

00:37:53.200 more in our control and our ability to replicate so i'm going to answer in a

00:37:57.520 slightly different way often you hear the debate about you know man is a

00:38:03.600 cognitive animal not an emotional animal right reason versus feeling and that

00:38:08.600 dichotomy is a false one we are both a thinking and feeling animal the

00:38:13.280 challenge is to know when to invoke the right system in the right situation. That's the challenge

00:38:19.620 of life. So, for example, if I'm heading down a dark alley to take a shortcut that will shave off

00:38:26.760 20 minutes from my walk home, and I see four young men loitering, I will get an emotional response,

00:38:33.900 an affective response, an autonomic response. My blood pressure will go up, my breathing will

00:38:38.880 become more shallow. Well, that emotional response is perfectly adaptive. It's perfectly

00:38:43.540 evolutionarily rational. If I try to solve a problem on my calculus exam using my affective

00:38:50.900 system rather than my cognitive system, I probably won't do well on the exam. So it's

00:38:55.780 not that our emotions are bad and our thinking is right. It's that we often will use the

00:39:03.600 wrong system in the wrong occasion. So one example from politics. Most people

00:39:08.640 judge their favorite politicians using an affective based calculus when they

00:39:14.380 should be using a cognitive based calculus. So for if there are any Obama

00:39:18.900 supporters here but I assume in this audience probably not. But most people

00:39:22.920 who love Obama never say I love Obama because I appreciate his fiscal policy

00:39:29.580 or his immigration policy.

00:39:31.120 He's tall, he has a mellifluous voice,

00:39:34.520 he has a radiant smile.

00:39:36.260 And so in Arabic, there's an expression,

00:39:38.460 may I take this for a second?

00:39:39.700 There's an expression in Arabic,

00:39:41.860 imagine that these glasses were the cork of a wine bottle.

00:39:46.740 And so the expression in Arabic is getting drunk

00:39:49.640 by smelling the cork of the wine bottle.

00:39:51.700 Meaning that you are of such weak constituency

00:39:54.940 that you don't actually need to drink the wine to get drunk.

00:39:58.100 You just, you take a whiff and I'm already getting tipsy.

00:40:01.820 Well, that's what happens when you use your affective system.

00:40:05.620 Oh my God, Obama, he is just so lovely, right?

00:40:08.920 I never said I love him for, or the other way,

00:40:12.780 people don't say I hate Donald Trump

00:40:15.740 because I abhor his monetary policy. 1.00

00:40:19.860 He's disgusting, he's vile, he's cantankerous, 1.00

00:40:23.020 he speaks like a brute. 1.00

00:40:24.780 It's always affective based.

00:40:26.600 So the problem with emotional processing

00:40:29.360 is not that you shouldn't engage in emotional processing,

00:40:31.960 it's that you should invoke it at the right time.

00:40:34.900 All right, let's see if we can do this in two minutes.

00:40:38.100 Quick.

00:40:38.680 Thank you, Professor Saad.

00:40:39.780 Topher Fields from Australia. 0.95

00:40:40.700 Very quickly, the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy,

00:40:43.880 I'd like to get your thoughts on when that combines very

00:40:46.280 rapidly in society.

00:40:47.440 So a fear-driven mind virus that then

00:40:50.100 leads to an empathy-driven solution that often is

00:40:53.960 tyranny dressed up as empathy.

00:40:55.580 care about these people therefore the government must x y and z can i get your thoughts on that

00:41:00.460 and perhaps how we can guard against those in future so it it wasn't as quickly as you

00:41:06.460 might have intimidated intimated in that it took about 50 to 100 years for these parasitic ideas

00:41:13.500 to be spawned on university campuses to then escape the humanities departments at the social

00:41:20.140 sciences to then become Justin Trudeau, to then become Jacinda Ardern, to just to then become

00:41:26.060 Mamdami. So I don't think the solution is going to be as quick as now we have Donald Trump,

00:41:33.580 parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy have been extinguished. It's going to take a complete

00:41:39.580 eradication of these parasitic ideas. Now, God willing, I'd like to think that it won't take 50

00:41:44.460 to 100 years, but it won't be a short temporal window. Thank you. Thank you so much everybody.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 09, 2026

Suicidal Empathy & Parasitic Mind - Fireside Chat at Galt's Gulch (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1018)

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