Dr. Gadsad discusses his upcoming book, Suicidal empathy, and one of his previous books, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. In this episode, he discusses why empathy can be both a noble and dangerous virtue.
00:00:00.240Welcome 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.
00:00:27.760So, thank you so much for coming on the program.
00:00:33.600So, 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.
00:00:46.700And, well, in my opinion, his comments was widely, I guess, misinterpreted, if not deliberately so, in terms of being criticized.
00:00:56.540And I also noticed from Twitter or X that Elon Musk is obviously a fan of yours.
00:01:04.180So, 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.
00:01:16.040Right. Perfect. Thank you for that question.
00:01:17.440So, empathy, when properly modulated, is a perfectly adaptive virtue to possess.
00:01:28.980Social species that need to interact with each other must have both cognitive and emotional empathy.
00:01:36.220For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I have to put myself in your mind.
00:01:40.840This 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.
00:01:50.160By the way, autistic children, the way that you diagnose them as being autistic, there is no blood test, right?
00:01:58.720What 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.
00:02:05.460So, 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?
00:02:23.260Life is about identifying that sweet spot.
00:02:26.160The problem with suicidal empathy, according to my thesis, is that it is a dysregulated, maladaptive form of an otherwise adaptive process.
00:02:38.040And let me here just explain what I mean by that.
00:02:40.600So, for example, if you take OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, right, you're constantly scanning for threats and then attending to those threats.
00:02:50.540So, if I suffer from germ contamination fear, I will wash my hands for eight hours until my skin is falling off.
00:03:02.080But scanning the environment for environmental threats when properly modulated makes perfect evolutionary sense.
00:03:10.220If 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.
00:03:22.980But I wash them once and I move on with my day.
00:03:25.900So, in the same way that OCD is a maladaptive mechanism of an adaptive process, same thing with suicidal empathy.
00:03:32.420And, well, you make the point that in evolutionary biology, empathy is required for engagement and cooperation.
00:03:46.460But how do you see ideology changing the function of empathy?
00:03:53.480Well, 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?
00:04:09.180Barack Obama was the empathy in chief president, right?
00:04:14.440He's the one who said we have a gap in empathy, we need to be more empathetic and so on.
00:04:21.020And, again, that's perfectly fine as long as you're targeting it to the right people in the right amounts, right?
00:04:27.240It 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.
00:04:45.660It makes us evolutionary beings that have evolved the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral systems that would confer upon us some evolutionary advantage.
00:04:56.380And 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.
00:05:11.320So sacrificing their own in-group for an out-group.
00:05:26.220Yes, 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.
00:05:41.700Stage four is the highest you could have reached.
00:05:43.860You've exceeded the possible metrics, and we can get into that.
00:05:48.460Look, here is what the left or the progressives do.
00:05:52.320I 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.
00:06:05.780And by the way, costly signaling has a very specific term in evolutionary biology, which I can get into if you want.
00:06:30.780Yeah, that is interesting how some of the culture has shifted.
00:06:36.620So in the past, protecting children would be, your own children especially, would be at the center.
00:06:42.380But 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.
00:06:54.920I'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.
00:07:13.620So take, for example, what's happened in Britain for the past 30 years, up and down Britain in every big city and small cities.
00:07:23.320There 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.
00:07:42.300They're Asian men because we want to use a euphemism to hide their real identity, right?
00:07:52.260Indian people from India are Asian, but that's not who the perpetrators are.
00:07:57.540They're largely Pakistani men of Muslim background who then justify why they do what they do because of their, quote, culture and religion.
00:08:07.020Well, the British government decided that in the hierarchy of important objectives to pursue, defending their children was substantially less important
00:08:19.860than protecting the noble reputation of these noble Pakistani men and therefore shut up and don't report the gang rape of your daughter.
00:08:32.060As a matter of fact, there are cases where a dad went into one of those homes.
00:08:36.180He was arrested for breaking an entry and so on.
00:08:39.920So that's why I use such powerful language like suicidal empathy.
00:08:44.820Another term that I use in the book is I call it civilizational seppuku.
00:08:50.620Seppuku is a form of Japanese honor ritual where you commit suicide to resolve the fact that you have lost face, right?
00:09:02.320So you would see it, for example, in samurai culture that is very much rooted in a calculus of honor and shame.
00:09:09.140Well, if I do something that is very shameful, the only way that I can have a road to redemption is to honorably kill myself.
00:09:18.220Well, 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.
00:09:33.480It's like you're describing German modern culture.
00:09:41.260But do you see this as being uniquely Western, though?
00:09:45.180It is uniquely Western in its current manifestations.
00:09:48.700In the book, I talk about other instances of cultural and historical instantiations of suicide, right?
00:09:59.640But they're not rooted in the same mechanisms that lead to the current form of suicidal empathy, right?
00:10:07.860So, for example, they have the Masada story of the Jews when they're on top of the Masada mountain.
00:10:15.140Well, when they realize that they're probably going to all be killed, they engage in sort of a collective suicide, right?
00:10:24.040There are cults who engage in collective suicides.
00:10:27.020When 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.
00:10:48.200So, there are previous instantiations of culturally sanctioned collective suicide, but it's never come in the manner that it has in the West.
00:11:02.220Well, 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.
00:11:12.980Suicidal 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.
00:11:24.220And 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.
00:11:44.820So, 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.
00:11:56.380If I truly want to hijack a human mind, I need to hijack two systems.
00:12:04.240I need to hijack and parasitize, zombify your cognitive system, your ability to think.
00:12:11.040But I also need to hijack and parasitize your ability to feel, your emotional system, right?
00:12:18.680We are both a thinking and feeling animal, right?
00:12:26.560We have evolved an emotional system that solves very clear evolutionary problems.
00:12:32.140So, 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.
00:12:48.560So, that's why there's the one-two punch of The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy.
00:12:53.140Now, let's drill down, if I may, on The Parasitic Mind.
00:12:58.680So, 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.
00:13:16.340What are the biological forces that cause us to be the consumers that we are in the real world, in the marketplace, okay?
00:13:23.560Well, that, to me, seemed like a very obvious thing to do.
00:13:27.680Of course, human beings are biological beings.
00:13:29.920Of course, consumers are driven by their hormones and so on.
00:13:33.260Well, to most of my social scientist colleagues, that was complete lunacy.
00:14:00.440It matters for the zebra and the giraffe and your dog.
00:14:03.440Surely, you don't think, Professor Saad, that it applies to human beings.
00:14:06.400So that was my first exposure to what I then ended up calling parasitic thinking.
00:14:12.220How could these supposedly intelligent people with many degrees before and after their names be such complete imbeciles, such deniers of reality?
00:14:21.580So that was the original place where I saw it.
00:14:24.140And then as my career progressed over the next three decades, I kept seeing further and more assiduous attacks on reason.
00:14:33.580So now I wanted to find a framework to try to explain all of these departures from reason.
00:14:41.240Now, as an evolutionist, one of the things that you do is you try to find what are called analogies and homologies with other species.
00:14:51.220So, for example, I can show you that the sex specificity of toy preferences are the way that they are.
00:14:57.760And 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.
00:15:08.680OK, so I was already trained to think, where can I see this in animal behavior?
00:15:14.820And so then I started searching the literature and then I came across the field of parasitology,
00:15:20.600which is simply the study of the interaction between parasites and hosts.
00:15:25.940So, for example, a tapeworm can parasitize your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite.
00:15:33.580So the subfield of parasitology called neuroparasitology is the specific parasites that hijack the host's brain, altering its behavior to suit its interests.
00:15:47.960So 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.
00:16:00.080It's an insect about this big that doesn't want to have anything to do with water.
00:16:03.520But 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,
00:16:15.060because then it could complete its reproductive cycle in water.
00:16:21.480I will now argue that human beings could not only be parasitized by actual physical brain worms,
00:16:29.420they could be parasitized by ideological brain worms.
00:16:34.100And so I describe all of those brain worms in the book, and then hopefully I offer a mind vaccine with zero side effects.
00:16:42.440Well, in the social sciences, or then especially sociology, it is the argument of the sociological man that he is very much driven by biology,
00:16:55.580that one of the key instincts in human nature, for example, that we organize in groups,
00:17:00.860this is where human beings find meaning, security.
00:17:04.440So, but still, if one starts to refer to human beings in terms of their instincts,
00:17:14.760departing away from the idea that they will be a completely irrational being,
00:17:20.540which again is at the foundation of sociology,
00:17:24.120one still could meet some opposition if it seems to go against some of the current ideological dogmas of our time.
00:17:33.520But what I find interesting is, it seems that one often comes across people who are very smart who believe in very strange things.
00:17:43.180Do you see this being more prevalent, though, in the universities in terms of,
00:17:48.820I mean, we're supposed to be dedicated to scientific methods, but there's still a lot of things which seems to contradict this.
00:17:58.240Do you see anything special about academic institutions?
00:18:00.560I will answer that last question in a second, but just to sort of add to what you said about sociology and the instincts,
00:18:07.820I would venture that most sociologists actually never invoke evolved instincts as the mechanisms that drive social phenomena.
00:18:20.500Now, there is a subfield that's very much evolutionary-based, not necessarily in sociology, called human ethology.
00:18:26.560Ethology is the field of studying the evolutionary roots of instinctual behavior.
00:18:33.360So, for example, Conrad Lawrence, who co-won the Nobel Prize in 1973,
00:18:38.980demonstrated a mechanism called imprinting, right?
00:18:41.360Where if you take ducklings that are about to hatch,
00:18:45.560and the first moving thing that they see is Conrad Lawrence,
00:18:50.460then they will be imprinted on him, because there's an evolutionary mechanism,
00:18:55.000an instinctual mechanism that simply says,
00:18:57.720whichever you see moving when you come out of the egg, that must be mama.
00:19:02.960So, I could replace Conrad Lawrence by a German shepherd, German shepherd becomes mama.
00:19:08.580So, in sociology, regrettably, there isn't much evolutionary-based thinking.
00:19:14.140Okay, but notwithstanding that, to your question,
00:19:19.180all of the parasitic ideas that I mention in the book,
00:19:23.040every single one of them originally was spawned on university campuses.
00:19:28.940Because as I explain, people think that I'm sort of joking.
00:19:33.120It's only because I say it in a funny way.
00:19:34.920But it uniquely takes professors to come up with some of the dumbest ideas
00:19:41.540that are perfectly decoupled from reality, right?
00:19:45.020Because many of those professors don't face the burden of the auto-correction of reality, right?
00:19:52.260So, for example, in the business school where I'm housed,
00:19:55.100or in engineering school, you're tethered to reality.
00:19:59.080If you build an economic model of consumer choice using queer mathematics
00:20:04.540or post-modernist mathematics, it's not going to predict anything.
00:20:08.760If you build a bridge using post-modernist physics, the bridge will collapse.
00:20:13.660So, therefore, those fields, because they are inherently applied,
00:20:17.780where there is an auto-corrective mechanism called reality,
00:20:21.480will have lesser infection of stupidity and parasitic ideas.
00:20:25.880But sociology and the lesbian dance theory and queer studies and all the rest of it
00:20:33.500don't have to face the burden of reality.
00:20:36.460So, the professor can stand up in front of totally gullible, malleable young people
00:20:41.840who just look at the professor saying,
00:23:55.840So, there are two parts I want to answer.
00:23:57.640The first question would be, how could actually people internalize such absolute lunacy, right?
00:24:05.700And so, I try to offer an explanation in the parasitic mind.
00:24:09.640And I argue that each of those parasitic ideas starts off with a noble objective.
00:24:17.420And to tie it to my forthcoming book, oftentimes the noble objective is maximize empathy to that privileged group at all costs.
00:24:27.920So, if I have to murder and rape truth in the service of that empathy objective, so be it, okay?
00:24:34.360So, 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.
00:24:51.160Well, that very narrow definition of feminism, most of us would put up our hands and say, yeah, okay, sign me up.
00:24:58.360I don't believe that there should be institutionalized misogyny.
00:25:01.320But 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.
00:25:18.220As a matter of fact, all such differences must be socially constructed.
00:25:23.320So, change the social construction and then you have true equality.
00:25:27.780So, 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.
00:25:40.500Which then links back to another distinction, I argue.
00:25:45.000Here I'm going to use two, not competing, but two forms of ethical systems.
00:25:51.760There's what's called deontological ethics and then there is consequentialist ethics.
00:25:56.780Deontological ethics are absolute statements.
00:26:00.060So, for example, if I say, it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement regarding honesty.
00:26:07.560If I were to say, it's okay to lie if it is to spare someone's feelings, right?
00:26:14.100So, 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?
00:26:26.040Then 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.
00:26:36.440And so, you might say, oh, no, you've never looked more beautiful.
00:26:38.940I might be slightly lying, but I'm doing it for a consequentialist and justifiable reason.
00:26:44.280Now, 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.
00:27:08.240So, 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.
00:27:17.060I believe in presumption of innocence in the justice system, but not for Brett Kavanaugh, who might become a supreme justice.
00:27:40.960Because you would think that there would be too many internal contradictions after a while.
00:27:45.800That 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?
00:27:55.780They say we have to protect the workers, their main salaries.
00:27:59.820But still, we can't oppose mass migration, which would push the salaries of workers down.
00:28:08.700When does these contradictions fail to, well, when does something crack?
00:28:14.340Because 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.
00:28:27.080But surely, at some point, they must notice that they're turning on each other, I would assume.
00:29:04.300So, 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.
00:29:15.080But, let's be optimistic, for many people, they will eventually wake up out of their logical inconsistent nightmare.
00:29:23.220But, 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.
00:30:14.060By 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.
00:30:33.540But then we had to have Malcolm Gladwell come and tell us simpletons that, no, this is not true.
00:30:41.700It'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.
00:30:56.300That's because the winds were favorable for him.
00:31:00.360He 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.
00:31:09.600But then this really mean orange Godzilla came along, right?
00:31:23.840And he said, yeah, I guess I wasn't saying really the truth back then, but I felt very intimidated to say that.
00:31:33.160So 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,
00:31:50.640because to not do so would imply that some of my cool kids in Manhattan might not invite me to a party.
00:31:57.420So 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.
00:32:07.320Well, the way you describe it there, that is, you have these experts who suddenly emerge, and you have to trust the science.
00:32:17.100There'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.
00:32:27.700Instead, instead, we pursue scientific method, you have to explain your method, how knowledge has been created.
00:32:35.440But do you see any parallels here, though, between the religious dogmas and the, I guess, ideological dogmatism within the parasitic mind?
00:32:48.300Because I fail to see that when you make a grand statement like this, that there are no biological differences.
00:32:57.900I'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,
00:33:10.080and we'll just skip it without having any scientific approach to this.
00:33:16.860So how, is this essentially a return to a religious dogma?
00:33:21.880How is it going to put it in that context?
00:33:24.200No, I put it in, I mean, the template is exactly the same, right?
00:33:29.820What'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?
00:33:41.520So if you are a young Earth creationist who says that the Earth is 6,000 plus years old,
00:33:49.180and 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,
00:34:02.100you don't suddenly go, oops, I guess that screws my young Earth creationist.
00:34:07.100There 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.
00:34:16.560And so to your point, that's exactly what happens with the parasitic wokesters, right?
00:34:21.080I mean, if I can, to your point, if I could take the most fundamental definitional marker of our personhood,
00:34:31.400which is that we are a sexually reproducing species comprised of two phenotypes called male and female,
00:34:39.920if I can take that and argue that that is absolutely false, as Malcolm Gladwell explained to us morons in the back room,
00:34:54.040I mean, as a matter of fact, I would argue that some of the positions espoused in religion,
00:35:01.380some of them are less ridiculous than some of the positions espoused by all of these parasitic ideas.
00:35:08.500And that's why, in my view, again, the neuroparasitic framework is so powerful,
00:35:14.500because nothing, there is no epistemology that could explain how someone could hold such views.
00:35:22.420It has to be that you've been ideologically lobotomized.
00:35:26.060I 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.
00:35:42.200But we also know that a lot of the way that human beings change their position is based more on the instinctive,
00:36:52.180So let me first address the sort of the herd mindset that you invoked.
00:36:58.380So 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,
00:37:10.080I will often start with some of the most famous studies, some of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology.
00:37:18.640And I would argue that the most astounding finding, which is going to address your herd mentality point, is the series of Solomon Asch experiments.
00:37:34.340By the way, before I, I mean, I'm going to explain it nonetheless, just for your audience that might not know.
00:37:39.940But are you familiar with Solomon Asch?
00:37:44.420So 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?
00:38:02.920So he devised a very clever methodology to test this.
00:38:09.260So he would bring in people into the lab, sit them together, and he would say, he'd come up with a cover story.
00:38:16.120Oh, I'm testing something about visual apparatus, whatever.
00:39:57.200At a much higher number than you should have expected, resoundedly, defeatedly, he goes, A.
00:40:07.360The weight of the pressure has gotten him.
00:40:10.480Now look, I could explain this study to a 10-year-old, and he or she will fully understand it.
00:40:19.200That's the brilliance of Solomon Ash or any real powerful experiment in the behavioral sciences.
00:40:27.380I don't need to have a convoluted experimental design to be able to demonstrate something that is so profoundly powerful about the human condition.
00:40:40.500So, 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.
00:40:52.660Because the worst thing, to your point, is for me to be ostracized from the group.
00:40:58.300Also now known as the Malcolm Gladwell effect, as I call it, right?
00:41:03.060I do not want to stop receiving invitations in the progressive cool literary club of Manhattan.
00:41:11.400And if you tell me that men can menstruate, yes, boss, men can menstruate.
00:41:30.240We are in a fully sanitized echo chamber where everybody is equally cowardly.
00:41:38.400By the way, those people are also called professors because academia is astoundingly leftist.
00:41:45.740Depending on the field, it slightly varies.
00:41:48.320But 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.
00:42:01.120Well, because we've created these beautifully sanitized echo chambers.
00:42:04.440And so, take the fact that our minds have evolved to be fully parasitized by the herd instinct.
00:42:13.800Don't create any auto-correction within the beautiful echo chamber.
00:42:19.220And it will spread like the L.A. wildfires.
00:42:24.440This is, well, Sigmund Freud, he refers to this as a group psychology, though.
00:42:30.180And he always, well, he made it clear that this would overwhelm the rational individual.
00:42:37.480So, even if you would have all the rational competencies, if the group says something different, then it will overrun it.
00:42:48.840So, indeed, the concept of political propaganda has been organized around this theme, that how to get the instinctive to overrun the rational individual.
00:43:01.320Just 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.
00:43:14.640My first thought was, ah, let's, you know, one can just be kind, go along with it, and why do all the hassle?
00:43:21.760But you see this in a wider context in terms of Western decline.
00:43:26.600I was wondering if you can explain that.
00:43:30.060Well, because, look, what makes us human, I mean, there are many things that make us human.
00:43:34.720One of which is the fact that we've evolved the most complex machine known to the universe.
00:43:45.240And so, the most dangerous force in nature, as I constantly remind people and post on social media, is a parasitized mind, right?
00:43:57.500There 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.
00:44:15.260And 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.
00:44:23.680And so, I'm going to now convince them that, hey, let's get rid of the Jews.
00:44:27.660And people say, yeah, okay, sign me up.
00:44:29.900So, 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.
00:44:43.680It's going to be disasters that were caused by faulty human minds, right?
00:44:49.360So, yes, it sounds like, to our earlier point, you know, who cares what they believe in the humanities?
00:44:59.800Well, the people who are trained in the humanities and social sciences become our leaders.
00:45:06.280They have real power over my life and yours, right?
00:45:10.200In 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.
00:45:28.380But 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.
00:46:21.860Our 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.
00:46:36.100Did that result in me having a better life in Canada?