The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy - Hosted by Prof. Glenn Diesen (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_909)

00:00:00.240 Welcome back to the program. Today, I'm very pleased that we're joined by Dr. Gadsad, a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, to discuss his upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, and one of his previous books, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

00:00:27.760 So, thank you so much for coming on the program.

00:00:31.100 Lovely to be with you. Thank you.

00:00:33.600 So, when I saw the title of your upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, I thought of a remark by Elon Musk that empathy could be a huge or a big weakness for the West.

00:00:46.700 And, well, in my opinion, his comments was widely, I guess, misinterpreted, if not deliberately so, in terms of being criticized.

00:00:56.540 And I also noticed from Twitter or X that Elon Musk is obviously a fan of yours.

00:01:04.180 So, I thought it would be a good place to start about the thesis of your upcoming book, that is, why empathy can be both noble as well as a dangerous thing.

00:01:16.040 Right. Perfect. Thank you for that question.

00:01:17.440 So, empathy, when properly modulated, is a perfectly adaptive virtue to possess.

00:01:26.800 We are a social species.

00:01:28.980 Social species that need to interact with each other must have both cognitive and emotional empathy.

00:01:36.220 For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I have to put myself in your mind.

00:01:40.840 This is called theory of mind, and that allows me to then infer certain things, how I should speak to you, what can I assume about what you know or don't know.

00:01:50.160 By the way, autistic children, the way that you diagnose them as being autistic, there is no blood test, right?

00:01:57.160 There is no genetic marker.

00:01:58.720 What you do is you give them a theory of mind test, which they typically end up failing, and that's how you find out that they're autistic. 0.75

00:02:05.460 So, empathy is perfectly fine when it targets the right people in the right situation in the right amount, which, of course, although he didn't apply it to empathy, Aristotle had already explained this to us in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he talked about the golden mean, right?

00:02:23.260 Life is about identifying that sweet spot.

00:02:26.160 The problem with suicidal empathy, according to my thesis, is that it is a dysregulated, maladaptive form of an otherwise adaptive process.

00:02:38.040 And let me here just explain what I mean by that.

00:02:40.600 So, for example, if you take OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, right, you're constantly scanning for threats and then attending to those threats.

00:02:50.540 So, if I suffer from germ contamination fear, I will wash my hands for eight hours until my skin is falling off.

00:02:58.860 I won't make it to my job.

00:03:00.540 I'll get fired.

00:03:02.080 But scanning the environment for environmental threats when properly modulated makes perfect evolutionary sense.

00:03:10.220 If you and I meet in Oslo and I notice that you just sneezed in your hand and then you're about to shake my hand, I might very quietly and discreetly, after we shake hands, go to the bathroom and wash my hands.

00:03:22.980 But I wash them once and I move on with my day.

00:03:25.900 So, in the same way that OCD is a maladaptive mechanism of an adaptive process, same thing with suicidal empathy.

00:03:32.420 And, well, you make the point that in evolutionary biology, empathy is required for engagement and cooperation.

00:03:46.460 But how do you see ideology changing the function of empathy?

00:03:53.480 Well, it's coming from the left, if what you mean by ideology, in this case our political orientations, the left in general considers itself the party of compassion and empathy, right?

00:04:09.180 Barack Obama was the empathy in chief president, right?

00:04:14.440 He's the one who said we have a gap in empathy, we need to be more empathetic and so on.

00:04:21.020 And, again, that's perfectly fine as long as you're targeting it to the right people in the right amounts, right?

00:04:27.240 It makes perfect evolutionary sense for you and I if given the choice to risk our lives to defend our biological children more than we would random children.

00:04:40.780 This doesn't make us evil.

00:04:42.520 It doesn't make us diabolical.

00:04:44.100 It doesn't make us callous.

00:04:45.660 It makes us evolutionary beings that have evolved the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral systems that would confer upon us some evolutionary advantage.

00:04:56.380 And so what the left has done, to your question about ideology, is that they have taken ownership of empathy, but in the service of being empathetic, they've become orgiastically and suicidally empathetic, which is not a good thing.

00:05:11.320 So sacrificing their own in-group for an out-group.

00:05:17.860 Exactly.

00:05:18.720 So here is how I can demonstrate that I am ultra-progressive.

00:05:22.520 By the way, you're currently in Norway, yes?

00:05:25.580 Yes, that's correct.

00:05:26.220 Yes, you guys, I'm happy to tell you that this professor right here is hereby diagnosing all of Scandinavia, but certainly Norway and Sweden, as suffering from stage five suicidal empathy.

00:05:41.700 Stage four is the highest you could have reached.

00:05:43.860 You've exceeded the possible metrics, and we can get into that.

00:05:48.460 Look, here is what the left or the progressives do.

00:05:52.320 I am so progressive, I am so kind, I am so empathetic, I'm so compassionate, that what better way to demonstrate that than to engage in the highest form of costly signaling.

00:06:05.780 And by the way, costly signaling has a very specific term in evolutionary biology, which I can get into if you want.

00:06:11.120 But I'm going to sacrifice our women, our culture, our heritage, our religion, our traditions, our children. 1.00

00:06:22.820 I'm willing to sacrifice all to demonstrate the purity of my empathetic system.

00:06:29.680 And that's what you end up having.

00:06:30.780 Yeah, that is interesting how some of the culture has shifted.

00:06:36.620 So in the past, protecting children would be, your own children especially, would be at the center.

00:06:42.380 But now it seems that some of the, well, let's call it, yeah, the ideologies coming from the West, it does almost encourage one to look the other way, even if one's own kids might come to harm.

00:06:54.920 I'm thinking then perhaps more in the gender ideology, where you're supposed to, yeah, well, bow at the altar of these ideologies, even at the peril of your own children. 0.56

00:07:06.040 So it is unique.

00:07:09.380 It seems to go against the evolutionary biology.

00:07:12.300 Exactly.

00:07:13.620 So take, for example, what's happened in Britain for the past 30 years, up and down Britain in every big city and small cities.

00:07:23.320 There have been, I mean, there are different estimates that vary from 250,000 up to a million young British white girls that have been systematically raped, gang raped, groomed by predominantly men of a certain heritage.

00:07:42.300 They're Asian men because we want to use a euphemism to hide their real identity, right? 1.00

00:07:48.160 I happen to be Asian.

00:07:49.720 I'm from Lebanon.

00:07:50.960 Japanese are Asian.

00:07:52.260 Indian people from India are Asian, but that's not who the perpetrators are. 0.92

00:07:57.540 They're largely Pakistani men of Muslim background who then justify why they do what they do because of their, quote, culture and religion.

00:08:07.020 Well, the British government decided that in the hierarchy of important objectives to pursue, defending their children was substantially less important 0.79

00:08:19.860 than protecting the noble reputation of these noble Pakistani men and therefore shut up and don't report the gang rape of your daughter. 0.92

00:08:32.060 As a matter of fact, there are cases where a dad went into one of those homes.

00:08:36.180 He was arrested for breaking an entry and so on.

00:08:39.920 So that's why I use such powerful language like suicidal empathy.

00:08:44.820 Another term that I use in the book is I call it civilizational seppuku.

00:08:50.620 Seppuku is a form of Japanese honor ritual where you commit suicide to resolve the fact that you have lost face, right?

00:09:02.320 So you would see it, for example, in samurai culture that is very much rooted in a calculus of honor and shame.

00:09:09.140 Well, if I do something that is very shameful, the only way that I can have a road to redemption is to honorably kill myself. 0.82

00:09:18.220 Well, in this case, the way that the West has decided to redeem itself because it's such an evil empire built on slavery and Islamophobia and transphobia is to kill itself at the altar of suicidal empathy. 0.85

00:09:33.480 It's like you're describing German modern culture.

00:09:36.520 German, Swedish, it's everywhere.

00:09:41.260 But do you see this as being uniquely Western, though?

00:09:45.180 It is uniquely Western in its current manifestations.

00:09:48.700 In the book, I talk about other instances of cultural and historical instantiations of suicide, right?

00:09:59.640 But they're not rooted in the same mechanisms that lead to the current form of suicidal empathy, right?

00:10:07.860 So, for example, they have the Masada story of the Jews when they're on top of the Masada mountain.

00:10:15.140 Well, when they realize that they're probably going to all be killed, they engage in sort of a collective suicide, right?

00:10:24.040 There are cults who engage in collective suicides.

00:10:27.020 When various Hindu tribes were being taken over by Islamic conquerors, they would engage in a type of collective suicide because it's better to die honorably than to have the men killed and all of the children and women taken as sex slaves, as we saw with ISIS, say with the Yazidi. 0.61

00:10:48.200 So, there are previous instantiations of culturally sanctioned collective suicide, but it's never come in the manner that it has in the West.

00:11:00.800 That's a very unique phenomenon.

00:11:02.220 Well, yes, start off saying your book on, again, I have to emphasize it's upcoming for those who want to try to find it on the internet.

00:11:12.980 Suicidal empathy is upcoming, not yet, but it seems to build to some extent on your former book, well, one of your former book, The Parasitic Mind.

00:11:24.220 And I was wondering if you can explain how the two fit together, because The Parasitic Mind, I like the analogy, though, in terms of the ideas almost functioning as an infection that erodes common sense.

00:11:44.280 Yeah, exactly.

00:11:44.820 So, the way that they are connected together, and then I'll drill down into what I mean by the parasitic framework, the way that they're connected is as follows.

00:11:56.380 If I truly want to hijack a human mind, I need to hijack two systems.

00:12:04.240 I need to hijack and parasitize, zombify your cognitive system, your ability to think. 0.95

00:12:11.040 But I also need to hijack and parasitize your ability to feel, your emotional system, right?

00:12:18.680 We are both a thinking and feeling animal, right?

00:12:22.120 They don't go against each other.

00:12:23.940 It's not only reason that drives us.

00:12:26.560 We have evolved an emotional system that solves very clear evolutionary problems.

00:12:32.140 So, if I want to complete the story of how to fully turn you into a zombie, void of any capacity to pursue your evolutionary interests, then I have to explain how both your cognitive and emotional system is destroyed.

00:12:48.560 So, that's why there's the one-two punch of The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy.

00:12:53.140 Now, let's drill down, if I may, on The Parasitic Mind.

00:12:56.480 Let's back up a bit.

00:12:58.680 So, when I finished my PhD, my original goal, which I pursued in my scientific career, was to try to apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and consumer behavior and economic behavior in particular.

00:13:16.340 What are the biological forces that cause us to be the consumers that we are in the real world, in the marketplace, okay?

00:13:23.560 Well, that, to me, seemed like a very obvious thing to do.

00:13:27.680 Of course, human beings are biological beings.

00:13:29.920 Of course, consumers are driven by their hormones and so on.

00:13:33.260 Well, to most of my social scientist colleagues, that was complete lunacy.

00:13:38.220 That was complete heresy.

00:13:39.920 What kind of quackery is this?

00:13:41.740 How did you end up in the business school?

00:13:43.560 You should have been in some biology department.

00:13:45.560 What we know in the business school and in the social sciences and in the humanities is that humans are not driven by their biology.

00:13:53.780 What makes them human is that they transcend their biology.

00:13:58.340 Biology matters for the mosquito. 1.00

00:14:00.440 It matters for the zebra and the giraffe and your dog.

00:14:03.440 Surely, you don't think, Professor Saad, that it applies to human beings.

00:14:06.400 So that was my first exposure to what I then ended up calling parasitic thinking. 0.99

00:14:12.220 How could these supposedly intelligent people with many degrees before and after their names be such complete imbeciles, such deniers of reality? 0.99

00:14:21.580 So that was the original place where I saw it. 0.98

00:14:24.140 And then as my career progressed over the next three decades, I kept seeing further and more assiduous attacks on reason.

00:14:33.580 So now I wanted to find a framework to try to explain all of these departures from reason.

00:14:41.240 Now, as an evolutionist, one of the things that you do is you try to find what are called analogies and homologies with other species.

00:14:51.080 Right.

00:14:51.220 So, for example, I can show you that the sex specificity of toy preferences are the way that they are.

00:14:57.760 And it's universal and it's biological based by showing you that vervet monkeys and rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees exhibit the same sex specific toy preferences.

00:15:08.680 OK, so I was already trained to think, where can I see this in animal behavior?

00:15:14.820 And so then I started searching the literature and then I came across the field of parasitology,

00:15:20.600 which is simply the study of the interaction between parasites and hosts.

00:15:25.940 So, for example, a tapeworm can parasitize your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite.

00:15:33.580 So the subfield of parasitology called neuroparasitology is the specific parasites that hijack the host's brain, altering its behavior to suit its interests.

00:15:47.960 So the classic example that many people have heard me now use, and it's become globally viral when I call someone a wood cricket, the wood cricket detests water.

00:16:00.080 It's an insect about this big that doesn't want to have anything to do with water.

00:16:03.520 But when it is parasitized by a neuroparasite called a hairworm, well, then the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump into the water, commit suicide,

00:16:15.060 because then it could complete its reproductive cycle in water.

00:16:19.360 And so there I had my epiphany.

00:16:21.240 Aha! 0.94

00:16:21.480 I will now argue that human beings could not only be parasitized by actual physical brain worms, 0.75

00:16:29.420 they could be parasitized by ideological brain worms.

00:16:34.100 And so I describe all of those brain worms in the book, and then hopefully I offer a mind vaccine with zero side effects.

00:16:42.440 Well, in the social sciences, or then especially sociology, it is the argument of the sociological man that he is very much driven by biology,

00:16:55.580 that one of the key instincts in human nature, for example, that we organize in groups,

00:17:00.860 this is where human beings find meaning, security.

00:17:04.440 So, but still, if one starts to refer to human beings in terms of their instincts,

00:17:14.760 departing away from the idea that they will be a completely irrational being,

00:17:20.540 which again is at the foundation of sociology,

00:17:24.120 one still could meet some opposition if it seems to go against some of the current ideological dogmas of our time.

00:17:33.520 But what I find interesting is, it seems that one often comes across people who are very smart who believe in very strange things.

00:17:43.180 Do you see this being more prevalent, though, in the universities in terms of,

00:17:48.820 I mean, we're supposed to be dedicated to scientific methods, but there's still a lot of things which seems to contradict this.

00:17:58.240 Do you see anything special about academic institutions?

00:18:00.560 I will answer that last question in a second, but just to sort of add to what you said about sociology and the instincts,

00:18:07.820 I would venture that most sociologists actually never invoke evolved instincts as the mechanisms that drive social phenomena.

00:18:20.500 Now, there is a subfield that's very much evolutionary-based, not necessarily in sociology, called human ethology.

00:18:26.560 Ethology is the field of studying the evolutionary roots of instinctual behavior.

00:18:33.360 So, for example, Conrad Lawrence, who co-won the Nobel Prize in 1973,

00:18:38.980 demonstrated a mechanism called imprinting, right?

00:18:41.360 Where if you take ducklings that are about to hatch,

00:18:45.560 and the first moving thing that they see is Conrad Lawrence,

00:18:50.460 then they will be imprinted on him, because there's an evolutionary mechanism,

00:18:55.000 an instinctual mechanism that simply says,

00:18:57.720 whichever you see moving when you come out of the egg, that must be mama.

00:19:02.960 So, I could replace Conrad Lawrence by a German shepherd, German shepherd becomes mama. 0.78

00:19:08.580 So, in sociology, regrettably, there isn't much evolutionary-based thinking.

00:19:14.140 Okay, but notwithstanding that, to your question,

00:19:19.180 all of the parasitic ideas that I mention in the book,

00:19:23.040 every single one of them originally was spawned on university campuses.

00:19:28.940 Because as I explain, people think that I'm sort of joking.

00:19:33.120 It's only because I say it in a funny way. 0.99

00:19:34.920 But it uniquely takes professors to come up with some of the dumbest ideas 0.99

00:19:41.540 that are perfectly decoupled from reality, right? 0.97

00:19:45.020 Because many of those professors don't face the burden of the auto-correction of reality, right?

00:19:52.260 So, for example, in the business school where I'm housed,

00:19:55.100 or in engineering school, you're tethered to reality.

00:19:59.080 If you build an economic model of consumer choice using queer mathematics 1.00

00:20:04.540 or post-modernist mathematics, it's not going to predict anything.

00:20:08.760 If you build a bridge using post-modernist physics, the bridge will collapse.

00:20:13.660 So, therefore, those fields, because they are inherently applied,

00:20:17.780 where there is an auto-corrective mechanism called reality, 1.00

00:20:21.480 will have lesser infection of stupidity and parasitic ideas. 0.99

00:20:25.880 But sociology and the lesbian dance theory and queer studies and all the rest of it 0.99

00:20:33.500 don't have to face the burden of reality.

00:20:36.460 So, the professor can stand up in front of totally gullible, malleable young people 0.99

00:20:41.840 who just look at the professor saying,

00:20:43.940 oh, professor, you're so smart.

00:20:45.380 And then the professor says, hey, the science is settled now.

00:20:49.820 Men, too, can menstruate.

00:20:51.360 Well, imagine that in the 21st century, we have professors.

00:20:57.420 By the way, not just professors.

00:20:59.060 I've had heated exchanges with physicians who specialize in female reproduction.

00:21:07.180 They're called obstetrics and gynecology, right?

00:21:11.520 Who were chastising me for saying things like, no, no, only women menstruate. 0.99

00:21:18.620 So, if I can get a physician who specializes in female reproduction

00:21:24.360 to say that no, both men and women menstruate, that's a problem. 0.55

00:21:30.200 And so, it starts off in the university ecosystem.

00:21:33.720 But as I explained many years ago, when I first started screaming about all the lunacy

00:21:38.600 and nobody would listen, people would say to me, 0.99

00:21:41.960 okay, sure, there is stupidity on the university campus, but surely this is, who cares? 0.99

00:21:46.820 It's just in some esoteric department in some humanities. 0.99

00:21:50.560 I say, no, no, it starts off there, but the virus eventually escapes the lab.

00:21:56.400 And that's what you end up having.

00:21:58.420 You end up having politicians in Norway and Sweden and Canada and Denmark and Italy

00:22:04.980 and Spain and Britain that are parasitized by those things.

00:22:08.580 So, it starts in the university ecosystem, but then it infects everything.

00:22:12.640 It often surprises me how a topic, which there used to be consensus for, suddenly becomes,

00:22:22.420 well, there's a new consensus without the actual debate taking place, it seems.

00:22:26.320 So, for example, a decade ago, it was acceptable to say that one would be in favor of a traditional marriage.

00:22:34.200 Politically, in America, you had from the Clintons to Obama.

00:22:38.000 Now, they all said that they were in favor of this.

00:22:40.580 But then, within a few years, not only did everyone shift, but now you can't even argue in favor of it anymore,

00:22:48.180 unless you are a bigot.

00:22:50.460 And again, a few years ago, no one had heard about the concept that men could also bear children.

00:22:57.700 And now, of course, if you challenge it, you could, well, disappear from the intellectuals there for being a bigot.

00:23:06.160 So, it tends to go across all stairs.

00:23:08.300 So, if one would question the problem of changing demographics too fast with mass immigration,

00:23:15.620 one would be, of course, a racist.

00:23:17.520 If one challenges the traditional, well, supports the traditional marriage model, 0.99

00:23:22.700 one would be, you know, hateful of the homosexuals. 0.97

00:23:26.380 And, of course, you would hate the trans if you, you know, suggest that men can't give birth to children. 0.97

00:23:33.220 But how did it become like this?

00:23:35.180 Not just that they believe in it, but also that all dissent is now seen as hatred.

00:23:41.240 Is this also built into the empathy aspect?

00:23:43.320 So, if you care enough, then you will, I guess, go after any dissent and police your own speech as well as others.

00:23:52.760 So, how does this work?

00:23:53.680 Yeah.

00:23:54.100 So, a couple of things.

00:23:55.840 So, there are two parts I want to answer.

00:23:57.640 The first question would be, how could actually people internalize such absolute lunacy, right?

00:24:05.700 And so, I try to offer an explanation in the parasitic mind.

00:24:09.640 And I argue that each of those parasitic ideas starts off with a noble objective.

00:24:17.420 And to tie it to my forthcoming book, oftentimes the noble objective is maximize empathy to that privileged group at all costs.

00:24:27.920 So, if I have to murder and rape truth in the service of that empathy objective, so be it, okay?

00:24:34.360 So, for example, equity feminists came along and said, hey, we want, there should not be in society any institutional reasons why men and women are not treated equally.

00:24:51.160 Well, that very narrow definition of feminism, most of us would put up our hands and say, yeah, okay, sign me up. 1.00

00:24:57.340 I'm an equity feminist. 1.00

00:24:58.360 I don't believe that there should be institutionalized misogyny.

00:25:01.320 But then a more virulent form of feminism comes along and says, in the service of achieving equality, let's accelerate that objective by now arguing that there are no innate differences between men and women. 1.00

00:25:18.220 As a matter of fact, all such differences must be socially constructed.

00:25:23.320 So, change the social construction and then you have true equality.

00:25:27.780 So, what started off as a noble goal, which is for us to achieve equality across the sexes, gets metamorphosized into complete rape and murder of truth in the service of that goal.

00:25:40.500 Which then links back to another distinction, I argue.

00:25:45.000 Here I'm going to use two, not competing, but two forms of ethical systems.

00:25:51.760 There's what's called deontological ethics and then there is consequentialist ethics.

00:25:56.780 Deontological ethics are absolute statements.

00:26:00.060 So, for example, if I say, it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement regarding honesty.

00:26:07.560 If I were to say, it's okay to lie if it is to spare someone's feelings, right?

00:26:14.100 So, if you're, I often joke, but I am being true, I'm being serious, that if you ever hear the following question from your spouse, do I look fat in those jeans?

00:26:26.040 Then put on your consequentialist hat and potentially lie because you want to have a happy marriage and you want to protect the feelings of your spouse.

00:26:36.440 And so, you might say, oh, no, you've never looked more beautiful.

00:26:38.940 I might be slightly lying, but I'm doing it for a consequentialist and justifiable reason.

00:26:44.280 Now, for many, many things in life, it makes perfect sense for all of us to be consequentialists, but here's the big but, for certain fundamental foundational principles that define the West, that define the scientific method, that define civilized society, those principles are on a bedrock of deontological principles.

00:27:08.240 So, it's not, I believe in freedom of speech, but not when it applies to Donald Trump because he's a really mean existential threat.

00:27:17.060 I believe in presumption of innocence in the justice system, but not for Brett Kavanaugh, who might become a supreme justice.

00:27:25.380 It doesn't apply to him.

00:27:27.140 So, once you apply a consequentialist ethos to a deontological principle, you end up with problems.

00:27:33.900 And so, put all that together and it answers the question that you asked.

00:27:39.240 How durable is this, though?

00:27:40.960 Because you would think that there would be too many internal contradictions after a while.

00:27:45.800 That is, if the people say we have to support women's rights, do you see the same people arguing that we have to have men into female locker rooms?

00:27:55.780 They say we have to protect the workers, their main salaries.

00:27:59.820 But still, we can't oppose mass migration, which would push the salaries of workers down.

00:28:08.700 When does these contradictions fail to, well, when does something crack?

00:28:14.340 Because it does seem to be some logical inconsistencies, which one could shame for a while by portraying the opponent as being bigoted or hateful or not having enough empathy.

00:28:27.080 But surely, at some point, they must notice that they're turning on each other, I would assume.

00:28:34.000 Right.

00:28:34.640 That's a great question.

00:28:35.760 So, the fact that there are such blatantly obvious logical inconsistencies is precisely why the neuroparasitic model is so apt. 0.82

00:28:49.100 Because it is rewiring.

00:28:51.760 It is lobotomizing you, right?

00:28:54.520 If you remember, lobotomy is a surgical procedure where you actually go in and you scramble the person's temporal lobe, right?

00:29:02.380 So, that's what's happening.

00:29:04.300 So, it's not clear to me that if you're fully parasitized, really beyond redemption, that any amount of logical inconsistencies are going to wake you up.

00:29:15.080 But, let's be optimistic, for many people, they will eventually wake up out of their logical inconsistent nightmare.

00:29:23.220 But, usually, they do so not because they're intellectually honest, but because the winds have changed in a way that makes it no longer advantageous for me to be so pure in my insanity.

00:29:41.720 Let me give you an example.

00:29:43.580 You ready? 1.00

00:29:44.780 Malcolm Gladwell, a gigantic moron, okay, who has spent an entire career. 1.00

00:29:52.260 Okay, good for him. 1.00

00:29:53.480 He writes books that, you know, are, you know, just rehashing of what guys like me do in the lab.

00:29:59.740 That's great.

00:30:00.420 Good for you.

00:30:01.420 But then he came out very forcefully against the idea that there is such a thing as evolved sex differences between men and women.

00:30:12.000 This is crazy.

00:30:13.220 Nobody thinks that.

00:30:14.060 By the way, until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people, that's an actual estimate, the 117 billion people that had existed on Earth as Homo sapiens seemed to perfectly understand the very difficult problem of what constitutes male or female.

00:30:33.540 But then we had to have Malcolm Gladwell come and tell us simpletons that, no, this is not true.

00:30:41.700 It's actually grotesque to not allow women that used to play in the National Football League yesterday and were called Bubba, but today they're called Linda, to not allow them into the bathroom with your 15-year-old daughter. 0.95

00:30:54.380 That's crazy.

00:30:55.300 The science is settled.

00:30:56.300 That's because the winds were favorable for him.

00:31:00.360 He needed to be invited to the really cool kids party, the really progressive parties in New York, and they had decided that you had to say that.

00:31:09.600 But then this really mean orange Godzilla came along, right?

00:31:14.540 Donald Trump, he changed things.

00:31:17.140 The winds are changing.

00:31:18.860 So Malcolm Gladwell came out recently, about two months ago.

00:31:22.900 I don't know if you saw it.

00:31:23.840 And he said, yeah, I guess I wasn't saying really the truth back then, but I felt very intimidated to say that. 0.53

00:31:33.160 So imagine how cowardly you must be, how duplicitous you must be to say, I am willing to sacrifice thousands, if not millions of actual women at the altar of trans activism, 0.89

00:31:50.640 because to not do so would imply that some of my cool kids in Manhattan might not invite me to a party. 1.00

00:31:57.420 So yes, there is an autocorrection, but usually it comes not because you woke up and decided to be honest, but because it's become too costly for you to be a moron. 0.96

00:32:07.320 Well, the way you describe it there, that is, you have these experts who suddenly emerge, and you have to trust the science. 0.84

00:32:17.100 There's a bit of a contradiction there, though, because the whole point of the Enlightenment would be that we do not need to listen to the high priests anymore in terms of how the world is.

00:32:27.700 Instead, instead, we pursue scientific method, you have to explain your method, how knowledge has been created.

00:32:35.440 But do you see any parallels here, though, between the religious dogmas and the, I guess, ideological dogmatism within the parasitic mind?

00:32:48.300 Because I fail to see that when you make a grand statement like this, that there are no biological differences.

00:32:57.900 I've heard politicians say this as well, then, you know, this is a huge leap from what all cultures have pretty much had a consensus on,

00:33:10.080 and we'll just skip it without having any scientific approach to this.

00:33:16.860 So how, is this essentially a return to a religious dogma?

00:33:21.880 How is it going to put it in that context?

00:33:24.200 No, I put it in, I mean, the template is exactly the same, right?

00:33:29.820 What's the definition of religion is that there are revealed truths, and those revealed truths could not be put through the epistemological test of the scientific method, right?

00:33:41.520 So if you are a young Earth creationist who says that the Earth is 6,000 plus years old,

00:33:49.180 and then I show you a bunch of dinosaur fossils, skeletal remains, or a bunch of rocks that are dated using carbon dating to 200 million years ago,

00:34:02.100 you don't suddenly go, oops, I guess that screws my young Earth creationist.

00:34:07.100 There is a way by which I can pivot so that nothing that you could ever show me in the scientific record would ever disprove my position.

00:34:16.560 And so to your point, that's exactly what happens with the parasitic wokesters, right? 1.00

00:34:21.080 I mean, if I can, to your point, if I could take the most fundamental definitional marker of our personhood,

00:34:31.400 which is that we are a sexually reproducing species comprised of two phenotypes called male and female, 0.93

00:34:39.920 if I can take that and argue that that is absolutely false, as Malcolm Gladwell explained to us morons in the back room, 0.98

00:34:51.560 well, then it is a religion, right? 0.95

00:34:54.040 I mean, as a matter of fact, I would argue that some of the positions espoused in religion, 0.97

00:35:01.380 some of them are less ridiculous than some of the positions espoused by all of these parasitic ideas. 0.79

00:35:08.500 And that's why, in my view, again, the neuroparasitic framework is so powerful, 0.61

00:35:14.500 because nothing, there is no epistemology that could explain how someone could hold such views.

00:35:22.420 It has to be that you've been ideologically lobotomized.

00:35:26.060 I wanted to ask how this spreads, because, again, as you point out, people haven't been convinced of these new dogmas based on represented evidence.

00:35:42.200 But we also know that a lot of the way that human beings change their position is based more on the instinctive,

00:35:49.440 that is, we adjust to the group.

00:35:50.800 So if you look at how the abortion debate, for example, went.

00:35:54.600 In the past, everyone thought abortion was immoral.

00:35:57.260 Now everyone thinks opposing abortion is immoral.

00:36:00.960 And it's not as if we had a long discussion.

00:36:03.060 It's more the group shifted, and they communicate in the language of morals, and people follow the group.

00:36:10.820 This is how human beings, a bit like animals, work in packs.

00:36:16.260 But what is extraordinary here, though, is how quickly this all spread.

00:36:22.860 And people kind of really dug into these things, because the more people seem to be challenged, the deeper they dig in.

00:36:31.100 How can you explain the spread?

00:36:34.220 Because this seems to go at the heart of even the language you use, the parasite, the spreading.

00:36:40.660 How can you explain this?

00:36:43.220 Because this is something that took me very much by surprise, how quickly it went, just like wildfire.

00:36:51.820 Yeah.

00:36:52.180 So let me first address the sort of the herd mindset that you invoked.

00:36:58.380 So whenever I start pretty much most of the courses that I've ever taught, where I'm going to talk about evolutionary psychology and consumer psychology and psychology of decision making,

00:37:10.080 I will often start with some of the most famous studies, some of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology.

00:37:18.640 And I would argue that the most astounding finding, which is going to address your herd mentality point, is the series of Solomon Asch experiments.

00:37:34.340 By the way, before I, I mean, I'm going to explain it nonetheless, just for your audience that might not know.

00:37:39.940 But are you familiar with Solomon Asch?

00:37:42.580 No.

00:37:43.140 No, no.

00:37:43.920 Okay.

00:37:44.420 So Solomon Asch in the 50s wanted to demonstrate the unbelievable ability for people to conform to things that they would have to be blind to conform to, right?

00:38:02.920 So he devised a very clever methodology to test this.

00:38:09.260 So he would bring in people into the lab, sit them together, and he would say, he'd come up with a cover story.

00:38:16.120 Oh, I'm testing something about visual apparatus, whatever.

00:38:19.320 It's nonsense.

00:38:21.280 But the real point is this.

00:38:23.660 On one, here I'm going to show you one line of a certain length.

00:38:28.320 Let's call it X.

00:38:29.260 And then here I'm going to show you three lines, A, B, C, one of which is the same length as X.

00:38:37.500 You follow?

00:38:38.100 So maybe line B is the same as X.

00:38:41.080 Line A is very, very much smaller.

00:38:44.240 Line C is much bigger.

00:38:45.960 So short of you being legally blind or congenitally blind, there is no way you can get the wrong answer.

00:38:55.200 So now I'm going to bring in eight people to the lab.

00:39:00.600 The first seven that I'm going to ask are going to be confederates. 0.90

00:39:06.420 Confederates means they're pretending to be participants, but they're really in on the experiment.

00:39:13.020 Only the eighth guy at the end is the real participant, but he doesn't know that the other seven are not real participants.

00:39:20.240 So now I'm going to ask the first person, number one, please tell me which of lines A, B, C is the same length as X.

00:39:31.200 And he's going to give the wrong answer, but an astoundingly wrong answer.

00:39:36.200 It's A.

00:39:37.900 And then number two says A.

00:39:40.620 And number three says A.

00:39:42.540 So now the weight of the hurt is growing on you.

00:39:46.860 Yes? 0.98

00:39:47.200 Now when the eighth guy comes, instead of him saying, are you guys insane? 0.99

00:39:53.760 Are you blind? 0.99

00:39:54.620 What are you talking about? 0.92

00:39:55.920 Guess what?

00:39:57.200 At a much higher number than you should have expected, resoundedly, defeatedly, he goes, A.

00:40:07.360 The weight of the pressure has gotten him.

00:40:10.480 Now look, I could explain this study to a 10-year-old, and he or she will fully understand it.

00:40:19.200 That's the brilliance of Solomon Ash or any real powerful experiment in the behavioral sciences.

00:40:27.380 I don't need to have a convoluted experimental design to be able to demonstrate something that is so profoundly powerful about the human condition.

00:40:37.800 So, now to ask you a question.

00:40:40.500 So, if I can get people to not believe their lying eyes, then it's only a short hop and a skip to get you to believe all of the other nonsense.

00:40:52.660 Because the worst thing, to your point, is for me to be ostracized from the group.

00:40:58.300 Also now known as the Malcolm Gladwell effect, as I call it, right?

00:41:03.060 I do not want to stop receiving invitations in the progressive cool literary club of Manhattan.

00:41:11.400 And if you tell me that men can menstruate, yes, boss, men can menstruate. 0.65

00:41:16.860 That's the line.

00:41:18.120 And so, now to your second part of your question.

00:41:21.180 So, then how does it spread so quickly? 1.00

00:41:22.920 Because there is no epistemological doorstop that says, hey, are you a moron? 1.00

00:41:29.020 What are you talking about? 1.00

00:41:30.240 We are in a fully sanitized echo chamber where everybody is equally cowardly.

00:41:38.400 By the way, those people are also called professors because academia is astoundingly leftist.

00:41:45.740 Depending on the field, it slightly varies.

00:41:48.320 But if you're in sociology, you are much more likely to run into a horse with wings than you are likely to run into a conservative sociologist.

00:41:59.960 But why should that be?

00:42:01.120 Well, because we've created these beautifully sanitized echo chambers.

00:42:04.440 And so, take the fact that our minds have evolved to be fully parasitized by the herd instinct.

00:42:13.800 Don't create any auto-correction within the beautiful echo chamber.

00:42:19.220 And it will spread like the L.A. wildfires.

00:42:24.440 This is, well, Sigmund Freud, he refers to this as a group psychology, though.

00:42:30.180 And he always, well, he made it clear that this would overwhelm the rational individual.

00:42:37.480 So, even if you would have all the rational competencies, if the group says something different, then it will overrun it.

00:42:48.840 So, indeed, the concept of political propaganda has been organized around this theme, that how to get the instinctive to overrun the rational individual.

00:43:01.320 Just as a very quick final question, though, because my first instincts then would be, if it's about this radical feminism or identity politics, any of this woke stuff or the gender politics.

00:43:14.640 My first thought was, ah, let's, you know, one can just be kind, go along with it, and why do all the hassle?

00:43:21.760 But you see this in a wider context in terms of Western decline.

00:43:26.600 I was wondering if you can explain that.

00:43:30.060 Well, because, look, what makes us human, I mean, there are many things that make us human.

00:43:34.720 One of which is the fact that we've evolved the most complex machine known to the universe.

00:43:43.160 It's called the human mind.

00:43:45.240 And so, the most dangerous force in nature, as I constantly remind people and post on social media, is a parasitized mind, right?

00:43:57.500 There was a little guy with a little mustache about 80-some years ago who came up with the idea that I really know what is the cancer that's killing the great German nation. 0.91

00:44:13.560 They're called Jews. 0.98

00:44:15.260 And now, to your point about propaganda, I'm also a very good orator, and I know how to speak with a lot of passion and basically mesmerize people. 0.99

00:44:23.680 And so, I'm going to now convince them that, hey, let's get rid of the Jews. 1.00

00:44:27.660 And people say, yeah, okay, sign me up. 0.99

00:44:29.120 It sounds great.

00:44:29.900 So, all of the great calamities throughout history and the most likely thing to bring the extinction of humankind, if I am to be hyperbolic, is not going to be Greta Thunberg's climate extinction.

00:44:43.680 It's going to be disasters that were caused by faulty human minds, right?

00:44:49.360 So, yes, it sounds like, to our earlier point, you know, who cares what they believe in the humanities?

00:44:55.520 It's just some small thing.

00:44:56.960 It's never going to go anywhere.

00:44:58.160 Why do you keep screaming about this?

00:44:59.800 Well, the people who are trained in the humanities and social sciences become our leaders.

00:45:06.280 They have real power over my life and yours, right?

00:45:10.200 In Canada, we are sitting on the most expansive amount of natural resources, whereby if we simply mine that, we would not need to levy a dollar of income tax from any citizen.

00:45:28.380 But our greater overlords decided that to extract the devil's juice, it would be the rape of Mother Earth, because a demonic goblin called Greta Thunberg explained to the rest of us that we need to be kinder to Mother Earth.

00:45:47.000 So, bad ideas have real consequences.

00:45:50.220 They result in wars with millions of deaths.

00:45:53.080 They can result in endless poverty, right?

00:45:55.960 Look at all of the endless war on poverty.

00:46:00.260 Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, yet we haven't eradicated various forms of poverty or drugs. 0.98

00:46:07.300 So, it's not true that these dreadful ideas are just some cute, esoteric stupidity that happens on university campuses. 0.98

00:46:18.820 They impact real people in real ways. 0.97

00:46:21.860 Our former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is a walking manifestation of every single parasitic idea and reflex of suicidal empathy that I cover in my two books.

00:46:36.100 Did that result in me having a better life in Canada?

00:46:39.980 No.

00:46:40.600 This is why I'm now at the University of Mississippi.

00:46:43.400 So, those who tell you, come on, you're exaggerating with all of this woke nonsense, nothing could be further from the truth.

00:46:52.680 There is nothing more dangerous in nature than a bad mind.

00:46:58.260 Well, Dr. Saad, thank you so much for taking the time.

00:47:01.100 It's truly fascinating work.

00:47:03.260 And, yeah, I really recommend that book, The Parasitic Mind.

00:47:07.740 And, again, Saad, that's Elon Musk, apparently.

00:47:10.680 So, thank you again.

00:47:12.360 Thank you, sir.

00:47:12.960 Thank you.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 01, 2025

The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy - Hosted by Prof. Glenn Diesen (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_909)

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