Suicidal Empathy & Parasitic Mind - Fireside Chat at Galt's Gulch (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1018)
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
17
sentences flagged
Toxicity
70
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Hate speech
88
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Summary
Elon Musk is a world-renowned neuroscientist, philosopher, and author. His new book, "Suicidal Empathy," is a compendium of his experiences with antisemitism and anti-Semitism in the Middle East and North Africa, and how they shaped his understanding of the concept of suicidal empathy. In this episode, Dr. Musk and I discuss what suicidal empathy is, what it is not, and why it is so dangerous.
Transcript
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All right. This is so exciting. Such an honor to have you here. I know that Elon himself said you
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are standing between us and civilizational collapse. It's an excellent book, and I hope
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you all take advantage and pick up a copy. So, Gad, we had a conversation about this before,
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But thinking back to your early childhood experience in Lebanon amidst the threats of
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rising violence, virulent antisemitism, and social disintegration, do you think that that
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experience inoculated you to an extent from suicidal empathy, or at least primed you to
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recognize the phenomenon in a more clear-eyed way?
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And for those of you who don't know, I was born in Lebanon in the mid-60s.
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I was part of the last remaining group of Lebanese Jews that had steadfastly refused
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And regrettably, the Civil War started in 1975, where it became impossible to be Jewish
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in Lebanon, so we had to leave under imminent threat of execution.
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So to your question, I saw what happens to a society that is deeply committed to organizing
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colonizing itself along tribal lines, along identity politics, right?
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Everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of your religious heritage.
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So there's an internal ID card that you carry, and people don't care how tall you are or
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what's your weight or what's your eye color, it's what's your religion.
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And if you were Lebanese, it was written Israelite, not even Jewish.
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And so if you were stopped at any militia checkpoint, it wasn't going to turn out well
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So having seen what happens to a society steeped in this kind of tribal mindset,
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to then see it seep its way into at least one of the two political parties in the United States
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is probably not a good way to organize society.
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So you describe suicidal empathy as a maladaptively irrational altruism,
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a mind parasite that has hijacked the moral priorities of Western elites.
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For someone encountering the idea for the first time, how do you distinguish healthy empathy from the pathological version?
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So let me first explain that the book is not an attack on empathy.
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As an evolutionary behavioral scientist, I understand that empathy is a perfectly rational virtue to possess.
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we are a social species for you and I to have a meaningful conversation I need to put myself in
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your mind and vice versa that's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind so there's nothing wrong
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with well modulated empathy but like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago
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too little of something is not good too much of something is not good much of life is about
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finding that sweet spot the same applies for empathy too little empathy or no empathy makes
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me a psychopath. If empathy is hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situation, and if it
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targets the inappropriate targets, you get suicidal empathy. So example, if you are raped by someone
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and your first reflex is to lie about the identity of the rapist, because you don't want to marginalize
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the community from which he comes, that's not well-modulated empathy.
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By the way, there's an endless number of such examples in the book.
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So the one that I just sort of alluded to is about a case of a woman in Germany that
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was gang-raped by Middle Eastern men who were speaking in Arabic and in Farsi.
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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.
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That's probably not how our emotional system evolved to be empathetic towards our rapists.
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or? Surprise house guests. So throughout your book, I get the feeling that the way you were
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using the word altruism was different from the way that objectivists might understand the concept.
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So I wanted to check at the outset of this conversation whether this was a difference
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You seem to be using altruism interchangeably with benevolence,
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kindness, generosity, as perhaps most of your readers would.
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Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who coined the term altruism
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in the 19th century meant something far more radical,
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that fundamental moral duty was to live for others.
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he insisted that self-interest always be subordinated to the needs of others in society,
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So do you see altruism as equivalent to benevolence,
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which at least open objectivists would see as a self-interested virtue,
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or do you see it more as a rejection of self-interest fundamentally?
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I'm using the term altruism actually in the way that evolutionists would use altruism.
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So there are two types of altruism that evolutionary psychologists typically talk about, kin-based altruism.
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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?
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But then if you realize that I share on average half of my genes with each of my children,
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my jumping and potentially killing myself in the river
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Now reciprocal altruism is non-kind based altruism.
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And the argument there is that that form of altruism evolved
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and then you will reciprocate and do the same
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so the way I'm using it is in the evolutionary sense of the word
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or the abdication of those who should be defending
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American freedoms. But the reason I raise that point is because in Canada, I think I saw above
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me envy is equal to evil. Canada is very much rooted in the ethos of envy, right? It's unfair,
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Professor Saad, that you write books that bring you a lot of book royalties, whereas other people
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don't make enough money. Don't you think it would be empathetic if we levy 58, 60, 65% of your book
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royalties away from you so that we can create a more equitable and empathetic society.
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And so every single domestic and foreign policy that you see being enacted in the West is
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ultimately rooted in this dysregulated empathy.
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What is the relationship between the belief in human agency, the idea that we can act
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to change our circumstances and that we bear responsibility for our actions, how does that
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relate to one's relative vulnerability to suicidal empathy?
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So, in one of the chapters, I talk about blank slate felons.
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The reason why I use the term blank slate, for those of you who may know, one of the
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idea pathogens that I talk about in the parasitic mind is what's called social constructivism.
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We're born empty slate, tabula rasa, blank slate,
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and then it's only socialization that makes us who we are.
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There are no innate differences in potentiality.
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So if anything happens in our lives that is bad,
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it's probably because it was an external agent that caused it.
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We have no personal agency according to that framework.
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Well, then, if you internalize that ethos,
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well then it's not fair that say a felon of color who was born into a racist white supremacist
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society so he's already been penalized now you're going to punish him if only because he's committed
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137 different felonies don't you think you should be a bit more empathetic and give this guy a
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second chance ergo 147th chance so blank slate felons are very much rooted in the fact that you
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are removing from them their personal agency your book documents results ranging from coddling
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violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior
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what's the single policy domain where you think that suicidal empathy has done the most concrete
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damage fantastic question and the answer is astoundingly clear open door immigration policies
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So the idea is that every immigrant should be afforded the right to come and live out the beautiful experience called American exceptionalism.
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It's unfair that you were born in that society, whereas the Guatemalan or whomever didn't get that chance.
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If you are truly kind, hospitable, generous people, you would open the door.
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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?
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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.
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So, for example, just so that you don't think I'm trying to speak obliquely, that's not something that I do.
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Millions of Muslims might be perfectly lovely people.
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By being from Lebanon, I know more lovely Muslims than probably all of you in this room combined.
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That doesn't take away from the fact that if Islam becomes sufficiently prevalent in a society,
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your personal liberties and freedoms are not going to increase.
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they're going to decrease. We have 1,400 years of data that supports that fact, and yet because
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people feel incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that all immigrants are not equally likely
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to assimilate, they then internalize the suicidally empathetic position that, no, Elon is an immigrant,
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he came in, you, Ghat Saad, are an immigrant, and you came in. Why are you a hypocrite railing
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against open-door policies? So by far, that's the worst form of suicidal empathy.
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You also compare and contrast in your book the Oslo syndrome with the Stockholm syndrome.
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So what are the differences and which one comes closer to approximating suicidal?
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So the Stockholm syndrome is you're kidnapped and then you suddenly eventually begin to empathize with your kidnapper.
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Now, in some cases, that could be a survival strategy.
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You're not actually truly supporting their cause, but it becomes a way for you.
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So, for example, when a serial killer takes you to the woods in the cabin, you might actually
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start trying to get him to humanize you so that he doesn't view you as an object.
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But the typical form of Stockholm Syndrome would be the case of Patty Hearst.
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Oslo Syndrome was when the Israelis kept thinking that if only we do this more and
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we acquiesce in this way more or that way more and the Oslo Accords eventually they will come
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around and want to coexist and live in peace well we know take that to the extreme Yahya Sinwar
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if any of you know who he was he was the architect of October 7th Yahya Sinwar was in prison
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for life because of all of his terroristic activities he was diagnosed with a brain tumor
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by Israeli surgeons, because they pursued the deontological principle of the Hippocratic Oath,
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which is even if it's my enemy, I am bound in curing him and treating him. They ended up saving
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his life. He was eventually released through a prisoner swap. And you would have thought that
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if the Israelis saved your life, that might have bought you some empathy chips. Well, he said,
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here's how I'm going to thank you. I'm going to be the architect of October 7th. And so in that
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sense, whether it be the Oslo Accords or later forms of social empathy, even the Israelis can
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be prone to this kind of distorted empathy. So one of the more difficult examples you share in
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your book was that of a Coloradan man who housed in his home a 20-year-old employee who was
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and what does it tell us about suicidal empathy?
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Don't let in young men to share the house with your young daughter.
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So my wife and I, who's sitting in this audience,
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whenever our children ask to go away to sleepover
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at someone's house. And my rule was, and this is where we sort of disagreed because she was
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a bit more, well, but they're nice people. I'm like, everybody is a pedophile molester in my
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book while my children are under my dominion. I will never put my children at risk because it
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would be wrong for me to presume that this really nice guy that we've known for years could
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potentially molest my daughter or son. It's precisely how kids are molested, because Uncle
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Joe is sweet, and Uncle Harry is a nice guy, and Coach Joe is a sweet guy, because you don't come
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with a tattoo that says I'm a child molester. Therefore, I use an absolute rule, no sleep over.
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So that Colorado man should have maybe listened to me, and then his daughter wouldn't have been
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raped. All right, you write that prior to George Floyd's death, white murderers were twice as
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likely to have their races mentioned as compared to their black counterparts.
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After Floyd's death, this skyrocketed to seven times more likely.
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Well, I put that under linguistic empathy and so on, right?
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So empathy or dysregulated empathy or suicidal empathy manifests itself in many, many ways.
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So, for example, forbidden knowledge, which is also related to what you're asking, is
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the idea that you shouldn't share certain statistics.
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And by the way, at yesterday's address by Heather MacDonald, many of the examples that
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she was discussing would fit under the rubric of forbidden knowledge.
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Don't show any data that might be hurtful to a marginalized group.
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So in this case, they're sort of doing the opposite.
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We need to stick to the idea that whites are the ones who commit crimes and so on.
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So we will cook it in any possible way so that we adhere to the narrative.
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And by the way, I first noticed this in academia, so I've been a professor now for 32 years.
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My academic work, as the person who introduced me mentioned, is to apply evolutionary biology
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and evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior and economic behavior and so on.
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It shocked me to no end to realize that most of my colleagues thought that what I was doing
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Biology was relevant to the mosquito, to the dog, to the zebra.
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But surely, Professor Saad, you don't think that human beings are biological beings.
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You actually think that human beings operate in a plane that is outside of biology?
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So that was my first inkling that there was some forms of knowledge that had to be either blocked or cooked
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so that you always stick to a politically correct narrative.
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So a 23-year-old woman says she was attacked on a Manhattan subway by Rommel Burke, 32,
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weeks before he allegedly killed a 75-year-old retired teacher by shoving him down the stairs.
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When asked why she refused to report her assault, the woman confessed,
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I regretted 100%, and I actually feel really bad that a man lost his life.
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Quote, maybe part of me was just like, I don't want to put another black man in jail,
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but at some point, if you're a criminal, you're a criminal.
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So this young woman is taking the scenic route to sanity, but she gets there in the end.
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her compassion all of it was reserved for the man who tried to kill her for herself and for people
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like her there is none to be spared so what explains this kind of yes yeah this example
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did not make it into book because it happened after the book had gone into
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press but i'll tell you examples that are actually more shocking than this one that are in the book
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So a very enlightened, progressive, anti-racist ally white woman
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who wants to smash the false narrative that black men could ever be violent
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decides to go to Haiti to interact with black men
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to show that she won't be harassed in any way
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because that's just a false narrative promulgated by white supremacist society.
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Well, she then gets slapped by this thing called reality,
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whereby a Haitian man takes her to the rooftop
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and to her great consternation, he's not stopping the rape.
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She's telling him, I am a Malcolm X scholar myself,
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and apparently that wasn't enough to stop him in a stride from raping her.
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But then she writes an essay post the violent rape.
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It's referenced in the book where she says she's actually thankful for the experience of being raped violently
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because it showed her all of the anger and hatred that he had in him because of white supremacy.
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By the way, this is the white supremacy in the United States.
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she's being raped in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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it needs to get the wood cricket to jump into water,
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merrily committing suicide and suicidal empathy.
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Well, queers for Palestine are the human form of the wood cricket.
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Because, and by the way, the other term you might have heard me use
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some idiot Jewish guy will be doing the Jews for Hamas and all this stuff.
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And I write back, I say, congratulations, you are my wood cricket Jew of the week.
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Because to be able to, from the lofty ivory tower at Cornell, my alma mater, or Columbia, or Oberlin College,
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to be able to take on such enlightened views while folks like me had to wear good running shoes
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and outrun the ones who wanted to decapitate us,
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it is very frustrating to see people espouse these positions
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when they have no costs to bear for being wood crickets.
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And so these Queers for Palestine are exactly that.
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So Charles Dickens gave us Miss Jellybee in Bleak House,
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a woman so consumed with her philanthropic mission to Africa
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that her own children go hungry and her household falls apart.
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And if Dickens could see it so clearly 170 years ago, why have we forgotten the lesson?
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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.
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And let me give a specific manifestation of that.
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It basically purports that we shouldn't judge the cultural values and beliefs and practices of another society.
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That would be a form of cultural imperialism.
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So if another culture wants to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, shut up, racist.
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If another culture wants to engage in child brides, shut up, racist.
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If another culture wants to do honor killings through stoning, shut up, racist.
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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.
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So the parasitic idea of cultural relativism lays the ground for that suicidal empathy.
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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.
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So you argue that Jews are often placed outside the empathy hierarchy.
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Yeah, because Jews are the, in this case, in the logic of oppressor, oppressed.
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This is what I call, by the way, for those of you who've heard of another one of my coined terms,
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I give you a calamity around anything, about anything.
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An Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon.
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You have six causal steps to blame the Jews for it.
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And by the way, it usually takes many fewer than six steps to converge to the Jews.
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And the reason for that, I have a psychological reason for it.
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I mean, there are theological reasons why people hate the Jews.
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But the fact that there is a never-ending refueling of Jew hatred throughout the ages, I think stems from this.
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So in psychology, there is a phenomenon called the self-serving bias.
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How do you attribute successes and failures in your life?
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And most people attribute successes internally.
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I did well on the exam because I'm smart and I studied hard.
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I did poorly on the exam because Professor Saad is a bastard and he's unfair, right?
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Now, imagine if I can blame all internal and societal failings on the Jew, then that's
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Now, the next question will be, but why the Jew?
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Well, because the Jews throughout history have held a very peculiar position, which
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Amy Chua, the professor of law at Yale, basically calls market-dominant minorities.
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This is a minuscule group of people within an ecosystem that consistently box above their
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Now, there are other groups that do that, but no group does it as frequently and as
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Any society you go to, you end up seeing Jews much more statistically overrepresented
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So I didn't get the small business loan for the restaurant that I so wanted to get.
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I didn't become the next superhero in the Avengers movie.
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Well, she probably consumed porn to get that idea in her head.
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By the way, did you also know that in 2010, when in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt,
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There was a bunch of shark attacks in Egypt that affected the tourism industry in Egypt.
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After a thorough investigation, the Egyptian authorities concluded that there's very good evidence
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that those sharks were Jewish Zionist sharks.
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And by the way, I'm not being facetious, I'm not being satirical.
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That's what the Egyptian authorities decided.
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So this is why the Jews are not worthy of empathy, they're diabolical.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For those in the grips of suicidal empathy, what's the cure?
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How do we encourage them to withdraw the sanction of the victim?
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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.
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I mean, it may or may not surprise you to know that I'm actually a very empathetic guy.
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But I stand proudly and say that if having to choose between saving my biological children or saving random children in Rwanda,
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I will choose every single time to save my biological children, as would anybody else in this room.
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That doesn't make us callous and void of empathy.
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It simply makes it that empathy has evolved according to certain evolutionary-based calculus.
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All right. Right on time. Let's give us a round of applause.
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All right, guys, we're going to start with some questions.
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Just as a reminder, please keep your questions short and concise
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We're going to start right here, and then we'll go over to you.
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Hi, my name is Audrey, and I wanted to thank you for coming today.
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My question is whether there's a difference between sexes with empathy levels,
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who provide greater nurturance to the children.
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Not that fathers, by the way, are not super dads.
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human dads are actually very vested in their children, just not as much as women. And the
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evolutionary reason is very simple. There is no such thing as maternity uncertainty. There is such
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a thing as paternity uncertainty. So it makes sense that women would be more vested in their
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children and hence more empathetic in general. Having said that, it's then not surprising to
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recognize the fact that suicidal empathy is more likely to afflict women than men.
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are the ones that are members of the invertebrate castrati class.
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But I know I say that in the way that is unique to me,
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it's typically not the incredibly brawny Navy SEAL
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It's the guy who crosses his legs like Justin Trudeau,
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who's very kind, who cries when he fills up the gas tank
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because he is using the juice of the rape of Mother Earth and so on.
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So there is a prototypical exemplar of the person
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That's the university from which I am now escaping to Ole Miss.
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I was wondering if you could offer some advice to young Canadians such as myself
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who want to fight for truth and want to fight against these ideas
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So, I've often said this, but it's worth repeating the answer to your question.
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Probably of all fan emails that I receive, this is the typical structure.
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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.
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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
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situation that we're in? So my point is that don't diffuse the responsibility to fight for
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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
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I'm really curious in those who weaponize suicidal empathy,
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specifically domestically and examples in your book,
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because I know Queers for Palestine comes to mind.
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They would kill them and throw them off buildings,
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but they see them as an effective tool against Israel.
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Is there examples of that domestically here in the United States
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with certain groups who hate you know the western civilization but who use suicidal empathy to you
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know fight western civilization uh yeah well i mean the the the the love fest between the islamists
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and the uh socialists exists in a sense because of that feedback loop where there is kind of this
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pragmatism we both hate the west eventually we're going to probably have to decapitate each other
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Of course, the socialists don't realize that in the decapitation game, the Islamists are probably better at that game.
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But anyways, so a lot of it, you're exactly right.
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You weaponize suicidal empathy to ones who are susceptible to succumb to that.
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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.
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You know those street interviewers that just go up to someone and just start asking them questions?
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So there's this young man, I forget his name, who goes, I think it's in Manchester, at a free, free Palestine rally.
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He goes, well, do you know what they do to gay people there?
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So you would know what they would do to you if you went to Gaza?
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Just because they would kill me doesn't mean that they're not worthy of my support.
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I'm from Alberta, Canada, but I grew up in Israel.
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And Oslo Mansion, like you said, it's a problem very familiar to me.
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terrorists had better lives in prison than I had in the army or in my uni dorms
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and then they would get released and then they go again to do more terror
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attacks and related to the same cricket mention that you said now what do you
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think needs to happen for someone to wake up and realize I need to get rid of
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the parasites and I've been taken advantage of yeah and wake up like what
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needs to happen it's it's not easy you know I I hate to say this because I I
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I always want to end these things on a positive, optimistic note.
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But I think one of the frailties of the architecture of the human mind
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once the monster literally bites your ass.
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So example, there are some very high-profile Jewish billionaires
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who for 25 years have ignored the increasing, festering Jew hatred
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I'm a big fan of your work I wanted to ask you that I believe one of the
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reasons why we're also in the precarious situation with these social ills that
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empathy is providing is actually because we're misusing our emotions I think we
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should probably introduce another term that I think is far more useful when
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we're trying to feel for others which is sympathy because empathy is trying to
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replicate an action that can't be done we only live our own lives not lives of
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other people so is it perhaps more prudent for us when we're trying to get
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rid of this social ill to also just utilize different emotions which are
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more in our control and our ability to replicate so i'm going to answer in a
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slightly different way often you hear the debate about you know man is a
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cognitive animal not an emotional animal right reason versus feeling and that
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dichotomy is a false one we are both a thinking and feeling animal the
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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
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20 minutes from my walk home, and I see four young men loitering, I will get an emotional response,
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an affective response, an autonomic response. My blood pressure will go up, my breathing will
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become more shallow. Well, that emotional response is perfectly adaptive. It's perfectly
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evolutionarily rational. If I try to solve a problem on my calculus exam using my affective
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system rather than my cognitive system, I probably won't do well on the exam. So it's
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not that our emotions are bad and our thinking is right. It's that we often will use the
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wrong system in the wrong occasion. So one example from politics. Most people
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judge their favorite politicians using an affective based calculus when they
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should be using a cognitive based calculus. So for if there are any Obama
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supporters here but I assume in this audience probably not. But most people
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who love Obama never say I love Obama because I appreciate his fiscal policy
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imagine that these glasses were the cork of a wine bottle.
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And so the expression in Arabic is getting drunk
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that you don't actually need to drink the wine to get drunk.
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You just, you take a whiff and I'm already getting tipsy.
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Well, that's what happens when you use your affective system.
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He's disgusting, he's vile, he's cantankerous,
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is not that you shouldn't engage in emotional processing,
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it's that you should invoke it at the right time.
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All right, let's see if we can do this in two minutes.
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Very quickly, the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy,
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I'd like to get your thoughts on when that combines very
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leads to an empathy-driven solution that often is
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care about these people therefore the government must x y and z can i get your thoughts on that
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and perhaps how we can guard against those in future so it it wasn't as quickly as you
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might have intimidated intimated in that it took about 50 to 100 years for these parasitic ideas
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to be spawned on university campuses to then escape the humanities departments at the social
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sciences to then become Justin Trudeau, to then become Jacinda Ardern, to just to then become
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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
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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.