In this episode, Dr. Gad Saad joins us to discuss his new book, "Dying to be Kind." Dr. Saad previously appeared on Objectively Speaking to discuss the topic of "The Parasitic Mind" and how infectious ideas are killing common sense. Is suicidal empathy one of those infectious ideas, or is it an evolutionary impulse that s gone haywire?
00:02:57.780It's really great that you asked that question because most of the completely erroneous criticisms of my framework and my book stem from the following false accusation that I am arguing that empathy is bad.
00:03:13.660and i'm doing no such thing right as an evolutionary behavioral scientist i fully
00:03:18.340recognize that as a social species it makes perfect rational sense that we've evolved the
00:03:24.780capacity to empathize for you and i to have a meaningful conversation i need to put myself
00:03:29.520in your mind and vice versa that's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind we want
00:03:35.280our physicians our veterinarians our therapists our spouses our best friends to be empathetic
00:03:41.740So, within well-calibrated regions, empathy is wonderful, but like most things in life, the problem arises when there is too little or too much of something.
00:03:53.860This is exactly what Aristotle referred to in his Nicomachean Ethics when he talked about the golden mean.
00:04:00.560If a soldier is cowardly, exhibits no courage, that's not a good thing.
00:04:08.960if he exhibits so much courage that he becomes bold and reckless in his risk-taking while he's
00:04:15.320going to quickly die, there is some optimal level of courage somewhere between those two extremes.
00:04:21.100That's exactly how I define the difference between rational empathy and suicidal empathy.
00:04:27.300Suicidal empathy is when empathy is hyperactive, it misfires, it is invoked in the wrong situations
00:04:37.120towards the wrong targets. Put all those together, you end up with the suicidal manifestation
00:04:42.040of an otherwise adaptive mechanism. So throughout the book, I got the feeling that the way you were
00:04:49.480using the word altruism was different from the way objectivists might understand it. I wanted
00:04:56.080to check at the outset of this conversation whether it was a difference of semantics or a
00:05:01.020deeper one. You seem to be using altruism interchangeably with benevolence, kindness,
00:05:08.000generosity, and perhaps most of your readers would understand it. But Auguste Comte, the French
00:05:14.220philosopher who coined the word altruism in the 19th century, meant something more radical, that
00:05:20.640the fundamental moral duty was to live for others. He insisted that self-interest always be
00:05:27.600subordinated to the needs of others to the needs of society personal desires ambitions or happiness
00:05:33.680were only morally acceptable when they serve the greater social whole do you see altruism as
00:05:41.100equivalent to benevolence which at least open objectivists would see as a self-interested value
00:05:48.320and virtue or do you see it as a rejection of self-interest more fundamentally being altruistic
00:05:57.200could itself be a manifestation of self-interest.
00:06:01.580So they don't need to be pitted against each other
00:06:04.680if you understand the term altruism from an evolutionary perspective.
00:06:08.940And so let me explain that at a more granular level.
00:06:14.040Take, for example, the mechanism of mutualism.
00:06:18.120Mutualism is when two animals will engage in a dyadic relationship
00:06:23.420that might seem altruistic but in reality it serves the interest of both in a quote selfish
00:06:30.060manner so take for example cleaner fish so these are fish that have evolved the capacity to go into
00:06:37.720the mouth they're sort of they're sort of underwater dentists so this ominous looking fish
00:06:43.660that has this sort of jaws of death will open its mouth at a particular station and this smaller fish
00:06:51.560will go into the mouth of this larger predatory fish at first you would think my goodness he's
00:06:57.780committing suicide but they've evolved this mutualistic relationship because the larger fish
00:07:04.220needs that smaller fish to go in and clean out morsels and clean out parasites so therefore what
00:07:12.560might seem as though it is behaving altruistically in in one definition of that word it's actually in
00:07:19.560its own selfish interest. Now let's apply to the human context. Evolutionary psychologists argue
00:07:25.540that there are two types of altruism that have evolved that are perfectly consistent with a
00:07:31.780quote selfish perspective. If I jump into a river to save three of my biological children,
00:07:39.720each of those children share on average half their genes with me. So if in the service of
00:07:45.780jumping into the river and saving them, I end up dying, but I save three children, that would make
00:07:52.000perfect evolutionary sense if we understand that evolution operates at the gene level. But why
00:07:58.300would I ever jump into the river to save a friend who is not biologically related to me? Well, here
00:08:04.120we talk about what's called tit for tat, right? We've evolved reciprocal altruism whereby under
00:08:10.500certain condition, it would make sense for me to jump into the river to save Jag, even though she's
00:08:16.760not biologically related to me, under the understanding that in the future, there might
00:08:21.680be an opportunity for you to reciprocate in kind. So I use the term altruism in this very specific
00:08:28.200evolutionary sense. That's a really fascinating perspective. So going back to our conference,
00:10:17.060Because if you really internalize that parasitic idea, then the felon doesn't have personal agency, right?0.98
00:10:23.900So if, and especially, God forbid, if he's a felon of color, I hate that phraseology, but let's use it. So if he is a black man who is born, according to the suicidally empathetic, into an irredeemably white supremacist racist society, he's already been punished existentially.0.91
00:10:42.720So now you're going to hold him accountable for the 167 previous felonies that he's committed and he's been arrested for?0.90
00:10:51.660That just seems so mean and so lacking in empathy.
00:10:55.180Why don't you give him a second chance?
00:10:57.060And by second chance, we mean 165th chance because we are kind and compassionate people.1.00
00:15:14.640Well, let me contrast that with what I had to do to get my visa. Now, I'm known and Elon Musk is my big champion, but he's hardly the only one. There are many, many people in the most senior positions in the current administration that are huge champions of my work who would love for me to be nothing other than American.
00:15:37.220and therefore you would think that I've got an easy ticket to get into the United States.
00:15:44.400I've been a professor at Cornell, at Dartmouth, at UC Irvine, at Northwood University.
00:15:49.920Yet I had to go through an astoundingly laborious and costly process for me to get that paper
00:15:59.420that would allow me to be a resident of the United States.
00:16:02.600So by which logic would it be the case that Hector Gonzalez can get into the United States because poor boo-hoo-hoo Hector, but I have to actually go through another process, the legal process, so that I can have the privilege of living in the United States.
00:16:22.520either we are equal under the law or we're not. So this two-tier process whereby some people are
00:16:29.260holy and privileged and we don't have to worry about the law for them is not the way you want
00:16:34.220to organize society. So one of the things I thought was very interesting in your book was
00:16:39.100how you compare and contrast the Stockholm syndrome with the Oslo syndrome. What are the
00:16:46.060differences and which one comes closer to approximating suicidal empathy. Right, so that
00:16:51.780and interestingly they're both in one form or another Scandinavian. So the Oslo syndrome is
00:17:00.280something that arose when the Israelis in their negotiations with the Palestinians kept thinking
00:17:07.460you know if we give this and we give that and we're for a bit more applying this way and that way
00:17:12.780Then they'll come around to, you know, finally being willing to coexist with us.
00:17:18.500And although what I'm about to say is not necessarily within the tight rubric of the0.80
00:17:24.680Austal syndrome, the story with Yahya Sinwar would be a manifestation of the Israeli suicidal
00:17:31.540empathy, whereby he was imprisoned for life for all of his terroristic activities.0.61
00:17:37.500But then in 2011, I think, I can't remember the exact year, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.0.80
00:17:45.660And the Israeli surgeons, because they are bound by the deontological principle of the Hippocratic Oath,0.53
00:17:52.100thought, well, it doesn't matter if he's an avowed enemy who would like to eradicate all of us.0.53
00:18:00.680And then in a subsequent prisoner swap, he was released from his life sentence.
00:18:07.500And then the way he repaid the Israeli society and the Israeli surgeons who saved him was that he meted out all of his empathy by being one of the architects of October 7th.0.64
00:18:20.540So that's that would fit on the sort of the Oslo slash Israeli suicidal empathy.
00:18:25.760Stockholm syndrome is when a, for example, a kidnapped person starts feeling empathy and sympathy towards the, you know, their kidnappers.
00:18:37.320as in Hearst, if you remember the pictures.
00:18:43.460Now, in some cases, it's not really an actual manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome
00:18:49.940in that you start pretending to empathize with your kidnapper
00:18:56.280because it becomes a survival strategy.
00:18:59.100So there are recorded cases where a woman, for example,
00:19:03.080had been kidnapped by a sadistic sexual serial killer, but by forcing him to humanize her,
00:19:11.720by having an interaction with him and hence appearing as though she is empathizing with him
00:19:18.000and so on, that served as the mechanism by which she ended up freeing herself. So Stockholm and
00:19:24.000Oslo are not quite the same thing, but hopefully you got the distinction. Yeah, so it's a very
00:19:29.820Very interesting distinction. So one of the more difficult examples you share in your book was that
00:19:35.940of a Coloradan man who housed in his home a 20-year-old employee who was a Venezuelan illegal
00:19:43.120migrant. What was the painful lesson he learned and what does it tell us about suicidal empathy?
00:19:48.700Well, it basically says that I'm going to shut off the module in my brain that calculates
00:19:57.740statistical regularities and hence risk navigating through risk so let me let me give another example
00:20:05.680of that and then i'll come back to that coloradan example i've always said that my children i mean
00:20:13.020now they're older they're they're teenagers but when they were young never ever ever a sleepover
00:20:21.060party. Never. Why? Because the one who's going to abuse your child doesn't come with horns. He
00:20:28.840doesn't come with a tattoo that says potential child molester. He is your uncle or their uncle
00:20:35.660and your brother and your grandfather and the really sweet neighbor. I can't tell who is
00:20:41.980potentially the molester of my children. Therefore, I never put my children in a situation where they
00:20:49.480could be victimized. Therefore, I calculated the statistical probabilities and the payoffs
00:20:56.080of all of the possible states of the world, and I decided that I'm going to act accordingly.
00:21:02.520Well, what the Coloradan man said is, I'm not going to succumb to this idea that men are dangerous
00:21:10.700because very few men rape, and I'm not going to suddenly marginalize the noble illegal migrant
00:21:17.920from Venezuela or whatever, because he's probably just a young guy who's hardworking. So I'm willing
00:21:24.220to bet the bodily integrity of my teenage daughter in my utopian statistical calculation. Oops,
00:21:33.220I guess it didn't work out. And I guess she had to pay with a very beautiful rape. That's exactly1.00
00:21:38.700what suicidal empathy looks like. Very difficult. All right. Alan Turner asks, are there particular
00:21:45.020institutions or mediums where idea pathogens are particularly effective or maybe virulent,
00:21:52.460for example, universities or social media? Well, every single parasitic idea that I describe in
00:22:00.080the parasitic mind, which then leads to suicidal empathy, every single one was spawned on university
00:22:08.100campuses. Because as I like to remind people, and Orwell already had that prescient insight,
00:22:15.220you know, many decades ago, it uniquely takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest0.99
00:22:20.860ideas. And the reason for that, it's not because inherently professors are dumb. Clearly they're0.99
00:22:27.420not, right? The reason why they are prone to spawning these parasitic ideas is because many
00:22:35.980of them are fully untethered to the autocorrective mechanisms of reality to slap them back and out
00:22:44.980of their stupor right so if i am a humanities professor or in some of the activist field of0.98
00:22:50.400the social sciences i could pontificate all sorts of nonsense up is down left is right men are women0.74
00:22:56.840war is peace america is slavery islam is peace because i can pontificate those things and i
00:23:05.620don't bear any costs for that. As a matter of fact, I'm likely to be rewarded with a chaired0.87
00:23:11.320professorship and tenure the more outrageous my comments are. That's why many of the applied
00:23:18.160disciplines are less likely to be parasitized. So for example, the business school and the
00:23:24.820engineering school, while they too can have parasitic ideas flourishing in their midst,
00:23:29.880they're less likely to be so because it's difficult to build a predictive consumer choice1.00
00:23:36.100model using lesbian dance theory mathematics. It's very difficult to build the bridge in1.00
00:23:42.940engineering school using queer architecture because there is this thing called reality1.00
00:23:48.880that will slap you back out of your idiotic stupor. So to answer that question, it all starts1.00
00:23:57.660from academia. Then we train the next generation of degenerate imbeciles to become our journalists,1.00
00:24:05.640our filmmakers, our playwrights, our prime ministers, Justin Trudeau. But patient zero1.00
00:24:14.980is always at the university ecosystem. All right. Zoltan, you asked sort of a similar question.
00:24:21.300And let us know if that answer that he just gave spoke to what you were inquiring after.
00:24:28.360So, God, you write that prior to George Floyd's death, white murderers were twice as likely to have their races mentioned as counterparts as compared to their black counterparts.
00:24:42.700After Floyd's death, this skyrocketed to seven times more likely.
00:24:48.900So that's what I call, it's a mixture of linguistic empathy, epistemological empathy, and so on. Meaning that sometimes, according to the suicidally empathetic, you need to cook the manner by which you convey information because there is some higher noble goal.
00:25:10.660So after St. George Floyd, you know, died, then we had to all do our part to be allies to Black Lives Matter.0.91
00:25:23.100And so one of the ways that journalists did that is they highlighted the fact when exactly as you said, it was a white murderer versus a black murderer.
00:25:34.480Now, related to this concept is what I call forbidden knowledge.0.96
00:25:39.560Let's suppose you have data that suggests that blacks are much more likely to kill whites than vice versa or just commit murders in general per capita.
00:25:52.660Now, that may be an unassailable, incontrovertible fact, as it is, but sharing that information becomes part of forbidden knowledge because there is a higher goal in this case, which is don't further marginalize the communities of color.
00:26:10.380Now here, there's a very important distinction to be made. And I don't think I had mentioned it during our wonderful chat in San Diego. The difference between deontological and consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics are absolute statements of, say, truth.
00:26:28.960So for example, if I say it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement. If I say it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, that would be a consequentialist statement. Now for many things in life, it makes perfect sense for us to be consequentialist.
00:26:44.640But when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, journalistic integrity, presumption of innocence in the justice system, those things by definition have to be deontological.
00:26:56.900If you apply a consequentialist ethos in a deontological sense, you really violate some of our foundational principles.
00:27:05.520So what these journalists are doing is they are violating a deontological principle, which is always tell the truth.
00:27:13.500Don't massage it for some greater noble goal.
00:27:16.940so um one example from the headlines a 23 year old woman uh says she was attacked on a manhattan
00:27:25.760subway by uh a ramelle burke 32 weeks before he allegedly killed a 76 year old retired teacher by
00:27:35.340shutting him down station stairs when asked why she refused to report on her own assault she
00:27:42.060confessed, I regretted 100%. And I actually feel really bad that a man lost his life. But she goes
00:27:48.960on to explain her motive, quote, maybe part of me was just like, I don't want to put another black0.93
00:27:54.220man in jail. But at some point, if you're a criminal, you're a criminal. So this young woman0.98
00:27:59.140was taking the scenic route to sanity, but she eventually gets there in the end. Her compassion,
00:28:06.520all of it was reserved for the man who tried to kill her for herself and for people like her,
00:28:12.060there was none to be spared. So what explains this kind of psychology? And maybe also, you know,
00:28:18.820talk about differences between the sexes in terms of vulnerability to suicidal empathy.
00:28:26.400Let me take the first part first. Well, okay, I'll take the second part very quickly.
00:28:31.180Even for well-modulated, well-calibrated empathy, women score higher on empathy than men,0.90
00:28:37.080and there are very clear evolutionary reasons for that and so it doesn't uh it wouldn't surprise0.95
00:28:42.040anybody that when it comes to the miscalibrated version the pathological the suicidal version of
00:28:47.480empathy they're more likely to be afflicted with it now that doesn't mean that there aren't
00:28:52.040many men who are also afflicted with suicidal empathy but usually they don't have the morphology
00:28:57.240of navy seals and we can talk about that if you want later usually they you know they they cry
00:29:02.280while watching Bridget Jones' diary, they have a fula, they hug the tree, they cry when they fill
00:29:08.400up the gas because it is through the rape of Mother Earth that I am filling up my gas. So
00:29:13.340they're very kind and compassionate men. But leaving that aside, what is the mechanism that
00:29:18.540explains that woman? Well, I'm going to give you two other examples that are a lot more hallucinatory0.83
00:29:23.700than the one that you gave. The one that you gave actually happened after I had finished writing
00:29:28.220suicidal empathy. But there are two examples that I discuss in the book that are much, much worse.
00:29:32.720One, a woman is gang raped by several men in Germany. Those men were speaking Farsi and Arabic.
00:29:39.820But if she were to tell the cops that they spoke Farsi and Arabic, then that might marginalize the
00:29:48.200noble Middle Eastern community. So she lies to them and says that they were speaking in German
00:29:54.000because she wanted to protect those communities.
00:29:56.860Now, in this case, the other woman wasn't victimized.
00:29:59.980She was going to be victimized, and then she ended up doing what she did.0.98
00:30:02.840In this case, she was gang raped, and her reflex was to protect the gang rapists.
00:30:09.640But there's even a worse example of that that I discuss in the book, Jag.
00:30:14.960A white woman, white progressive woman, who is a lot more enlightened than us here on this chat,0.90
00:30:22.320wanted to demonstrate that black men are inherently non-violent and it's only the white supremacy of
00:30:31.680America that creates this false narrative that black men ever commit violence because we otherwise
00:30:38.760can't come up with a single example throughout all of recorded history of any black man ever0.81
00:30:45.060committing violence anywhere okay so she goes to Haiti I don't know why it was Haiti but she goes0.51
00:30:52.220to Haiti, to Port-au-Prince, to actually demonstrate that in sort of the natural habitat
00:30:58.360away from white supremacist America, they're all just lovely and kind and peaceful. Well,
00:31:05.120there's this little thing called reality that ended up slapping her, both metaphorically and0.97
00:31:10.880literally, when a Haitian man took her to the rooftop and raped her violently all night.
00:31:17.660But at the end of that experience, when she came back to the United States and wrote an essay, which was published, so you can go and see the reference in my book, her conclusion, Jag, you ready for this?
00:31:32.360Yep. She was thankful for the experience of being violently raped because she recognized that this otherwise perfectly peaceful, perfectly noble black guy was expressing his pent up hatred of white supremacy in Haiti.0.88
00:31:54.040right so while living in Haiti he was very angry at the white supremacy in the United States0.94
00:32:01.680and so he used the vehicle of this white woman to express his rage so she was ultimately thankful
00:32:09.800for that experience well I'm here to tell you as your resident evolutionary psychologist
00:32:14.740that women have not evolved the emotional calculus to empathize with their rapists but
00:32:21.720you asked, why is that? How does that happen? So here I'm going to use a term that has gone viral
00:32:29.520when I call someone a wood cricket. Why do I use that term? A wood cricket abhors water. It wants0.87
00:32:37.620nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a hair worm, and it's a neuroparasite, the
00:32:44.860hair worm goes to the wood cricket's brain, and then the hair worm needs the wood cricket to
00:32:50.360merrily jump into water, commit suicide, because the only way that the hairworm can complete its
00:32:57.140reproductive cycle is in water. And therefore, once that hapless wood cricket has been parasitized,
00:33:03.440it has lost the ability to invoke its survival instinct. That's precisely why I use the
00:33:11.360neuro-parasitological framework to explain these phenomena, because hashtag queers for Palestine,
00:33:17.720hashtag juice from Mamdani are literally human manifestations of the wood cricket.
00:33:25.480Well, a lot of these examples seem absolutely insane, which kind of goes to some of the
00:33:31.640questions that we're getting here. Is this actual delusion or is it to what extent is it like
00:33:38.000virtue signaling? I'm part of your tribe. It's a bit of both. So early in the book,
00:33:44.020in chapter one of suicidal empathy i talk about various precursors to suicidal empathy one of
00:33:50.940which is narcissism so i want to be able to stroke my luxuriant hair while admiring myself in the
00:33:59.400mirror of moral preening i am such a good person i'm such an enlightened person right so nazis
00:34:06.340Seuss died while admiring the reflection of his morphological beauty, what these narcissists are
00:34:14.980doing, to your point, to your question, is that they are admiring themselves because they're just
00:34:19.800better people that have transcended the earthly calculus that you and I might abide by. So that
00:34:25.760would be one example. But of course, there is an element also of that where you actually have
00:34:31.540internalize truly, you're not just engaging in virtue signaling. You truly believe that you are
00:34:36.640a good person if you internalize those suicidally empathetic values. And let me give you a personal
00:34:42.260example. A few months ago, I had some knee issues, which often arises to people of my age who've been
00:34:48.900soccer players in their earlier lives. And I was going to a physiotherapist for some, you know,
00:34:54.560some help with my knees. And at one point, I hadn't, I was still working on the book at that
00:35:00.000point it hadn't come out yet she said oh are you working on anything these days i said yeah i have
00:35:04.740a book coming out soon oh what's it about suicidal empathy oh give me what's what is that about so
00:35:10.660then i gave her the example of the open border policies as the ultimate manifestation of
00:35:15.780suicidal empathy well she was aghast with horror she she could not she could simply not believe
00:35:22.040that someone could have such a callous heart as what I was expressing. So why wouldn't you want
00:35:30.560millions of people from Afghanistan and Waziristan to come to Canada, just like you were given a
00:35:37.740chance to come to Canada to escape the Lebanese civil war? I don't think when she was expressing
00:35:43.260sort of her disappointment at my dark callous heart, she wasn't engaging in virtue signaling.
00:35:49.720she genuinely believed that it was simply wrong to not allow anyone who wanted to come to Canada
00:35:57.220to refuse them entry. So it's a bit of both. Well, that example of this sort of endless
00:36:03.600empathy for people who live in faraway lands and saying, well, why not? They all deserve a chance
00:36:10.320to come to America or to Canada. It reminds me of the example that Charles Dickens gave us
00:36:17.020in Mrs. Jellybee in Bleak House. This was a woman who was so consumed with her philanthropic mission
00:36:23.820to Africa that her own children go hungry and her own household falls apart. Dickon
00:36:29.160called it, quote, telescopic philanthropy, moral energy that is directed at distant abstractions,
00:36:37.380distant peoples, while real obligations go unmet nearby. Now, that was in 1853.
00:36:44.120Is suicidal empathy essentially a 21st century civilizational scale version of Mrs. Jellybee?
00:36:53.400And if Dickens could see it so clearly 170 years ago, why have we forgotten that lesson?
00:36:59.080Yeah, I remember you asking that fantastic question and referencing Dickens, and I wasn't aware of that reference.
00:37:05.440Before I answer your specific question, I want to mention a point which I don't think I had mentioned in the San Diego conference.
00:37:12.800One of the reasons why literature is so powerful is because when properly done, literature is a window to our human nature, right?
00:37:24.840So there's literally a field called literary Darwinism, which basically is the study of novels, novellas, all forms of literature via a Darwinian lens.
00:37:39.500So rather than looking at literature through a Foucault lens or Marxist lens or feminist lens, you look at it through the proper lens, which is powerful narratives in literature withstand the test of time precisely because I can read an ancient Greek poem today and fully understand the meaning of what that ancient Greek poet was saying.
00:38:05.800Because the software that runs his mind is exactly the same as the one that runs yours and mine, notwithstanding the fact that he doesn't know what an iPad is or what a plane is, right?
00:38:19.500So it does not surprise me that Dickens would have picked up on that insight about the frailties of the human mind.
00:38:27.040But now coming to the exact question that you asked, it's not that the reflex of suicidal empathy is only current.
00:38:39.040What is unique about the current period is that it took a specific set of parasitic ideas that were spawned in the last 50 to 100 years to result in the suicidal empathy that we are currently seeing.
00:38:55.460You follow what I'm saying? So take, for example, 300 years ago. It's not as though people didn't
00:39:01.360succumb to parasitic ideas then, right? In the Northeast, this was a way that you could
00:39:06.420conceivably organize your neighborhood. I think that Linda might be a witch. So you know what?1.00
00:39:12.260Let's whisk her out of the house, throw her into a body of water. And if she swims, that proves1.00
00:39:18.920that she is a witch. And if she drowns, oops, I guess we were wrong. She's not a witch. And that0.94
00:39:24.440idea was internalized by a group of people at a particular time period. So the capacity to be
00:39:31.460parasitized by bad ideas is an inerrant feature of the architecture of the human mind. But the
00:39:38.140fact that a specific set of parasitic ideas has resulted in the current manifestation of
00:39:45.120suicidal empathy is specific to this time period. So we'd mentioned the Oslo syndrome before and
00:39:53.520And, you know, we haven't really talked about your remarkable origin story growing up originally, early childhood in the Middle East.
00:40:04.460And, you know, I wonder if the experience that you had seeing people who actually, you know, wanted to see you dead kind of helped immunize you to this kind of, you know, delusional, suicidal empathy, or at least made you better able to spot it.
00:40:28.940It's not the only reason why I'm so clear-eyed about the world, but it's certainly one of several factors that allow me to see the world as it is rather than through a utopian, you know, prism-colored thing.
00:40:42.800uh look lebanon was the ultimate manifestation of what happens to a society that is rooted in
00:40:52.320identity politics because everything in lebanon is viewed through the prism of the religious group
00:40:59.100that you belong to as a matter of fact in lebanon there's an internal id that you had to carry
00:41:04.360not unlike say a passport but it's for inside domestically so that if the cops stop you and
00:41:10.760say show us your papers that internal id which in arabic the word is hawiyah so if you show the
00:41:17.960hawiyah the most conspicuous feature of that card is your religion it's not your height it's not
00:41:25.800your eye color it's not your weight it's not your name it's which group do you belong to are you0.99
00:41:31.000maronite are you shia are you dirzi are you sunni are you god forbid jewish by the way0.66
00:41:38.200jewish in arabic is yahudi but that's not what was written on that card it was written0.69
00:41:44.460israeli israeli means israelite so it was even greater animus if you were stopped somewhere
00:41:51.660somehow you cease to become lebanese you are an israelite even though i had nothing to do with
00:41:56.940israel i was born in lebanon my parents were born in lebanon and so on so because of that
00:42:03.000because I saw what happens to a society where whether you could be president of Lebanon or
00:42:09.960prime minister of Lebanon or speaker of the house in Lebanon it is specifically tied to a specific
00:42:16.780religion that's called by the way a confessional parliamentary system so having seen that having
00:42:24.060had to wear really good running shoes so I could sprint really fast to outrun those who wanted to0.56
00:42:30.340behead me, then I come to the West and I look around and I say, wait a minute, there is a
00:42:36.540political party in the United States that aspires to have the Lebanese model, meaning identity
00:42:45.120politics. It's insane. So a lot of my recognition of the dangers that we see in the West regrettably
00:42:53.320come from the childhood that I had in Lebanon. Yes. Building on that, you've argued that Jews
00:42:59.000are often placed outside the empathy hierarchy.
00:43:08.140It's, I mean, you know, we don't need to rehash it,
00:43:10.760but it's the day where Jews were most killed
00:43:15.260since the Holocaust in unbelievably brutal ways.0.59
00:43:19.200Now, you would have thought that that would have bought1.00
00:43:22.500those pesky Jews, you know, some leeway of empathy.0.99
00:43:26.260Let's give them three months of carte blanche empathy before we start hating on the Jews.0.95
00:43:34.040No, on October 7th, on October 8th, as you well know, Jay, there were already preemptive protests about the Israeli retaliation that had yet to happen.
00:43:46.960So we were already screaming about the looming genocide that the IDF was going to do, but not a single retaliatory weapon had been fired yet.0.95
00:43:58.440So within 24 hours, the mean Jews had lost the right to empathy.0.97
00:44:05.380And then, of course, once we've got the leveling of Gazan buildings, well, then clearly the Jews are not deserving of any empathy.1.00
00:44:13.160This is what, by the way, I call the amnesia of causality. We no longer remember what led to the Israelis retaliating. October 7th really never happened. It's lost in the memory hole. And if we could remember it, it's probably justified that October 7th happened because of the main occupation and the genocide of the Palestinians, supposedly.0.97
00:44:39.260And so therefore, according to that logic, according to Mamdani and his gang, the Jews are not deserving of any empathy. It's unbelievable. It really is shocking. Even for someone like me who comes with the background that I've come from, I was astounded by the level of Jew hatred I personally face.
00:45:00.780So after October 7th, it became difficult for me to go to campus at my Montreal University, because I was this high profile, very outspoken Jewish professor. So if the anonymous Jewish students were afraid to go to campus, could you imagine the kind of target I had on me? It was unbelievable.
00:45:22.700Well, we talked about how that kind of identity politics ended in Lebanon. And you've said that a civil war is coming for the West. Do you mean more of a moral and cultural separation or an actual shooting war? And do you see it as inevitable because we've gone too far? Or can we still pull things back, even if more people start to reject unquestioned suicidal empathy?0.57
00:45:50.400uh you can go back to content that i've produced for several decades where i say if we don't
00:45:59.760right the ship there will be a repeat of the lebanese civil war that i escaped and then people
00:46:05.820would then say you are such you're so hyperbolic why do you exaggerate this way no way what are
00:46:11.780you talking about well it's because they didn't have the capacity that the power to extrapolate
00:46:19.400into a future from current trends, right? If you live in Montana or you live in Wyoming or you live
00:46:26.100in a beautiful neighborhood in Utah, what is this Canadian professor talking about Lebanese Civil
00:46:31.800War? I'm walking around in beautiful Jackson Hole and it's beautiful and there is no Islam. What is1.00
00:46:37.520he talking about this idiot? Well, because you can't extrapolate from current conditions, but then1.00
00:46:43.480you close your eyes and you open your eyes. Well, now you have Dearborn, Michigan. Well,
00:46:48.400well, but that's just Dearborn. Well, but now you have Patterson, New Jersey. Well, okay,
00:46:52.420but that's just Patterson, New Jersey. Well, now you have Minnesota. Well, okay, so now we have
00:46:58.300Dearborn, Patterson, and Minnesota, but that's it, nowhere else. Well, go check what's happening
00:47:04.340in Texas, in red-blooded American Texas now. So the Islamization of a society doesn't always0.97
00:47:13.120happen in 14 nanoseconds in some cases you come in and you kill everybody who's not muslim and it0.98
00:47:19.180takes four seconds to take over in some cases it's a 500 year process and so you have to have the0.98
00:47:26.600capacity to read the patterns and then extrapolate from those patterns so am i saying that civil war
00:47:34.840is looming on american streets by next wednesday no but give it another 100 years and get back to
00:47:42.900me, and then I'll be sitting in the back, and you can come and tell me that I was right all along.
00:47:48.140Okay. In your book, you shared a wonderful observation by Bono, who said, in the United
00:47:54.120States, you look at the guy that lives in the mansion on the hill, and you think, you know,
00:47:59.280one day, if I work really hard, I could live in that mansion. In Ireland, he says, people look up
00:48:05.480at the guy in the mansion on the hill and say, one day, I'm going to get that bastard. It's a1.00
00:48:11.440different mindset uh do you think that's still true if it seems that young people in the united
00:48:18.040states are much more prone to envy than older generations um yeah yeah that's you're exactly
00:48:27.160right and i will let's apply it to arguably the guy who lives in the highest of the biggest of
00:48:35.620those metaphorical mansions his name is elon musk the the front the blurber in the front cover of
00:48:42.320my book right i i say that do you know what a rorschach engblatt test is do you have you heard
00:48:48.500of that term yeah of course yes okay so the rorschach engblatt test which you know has been
00:48:53.280you know invalidated at this point but it's okay let's talk about it it's it's called a
00:48:59.820projective technique, meaning that I'm going to show you a fuzzy amorphous looking stimulus and
00:49:06.020then ask you to tell me what you're seeing. And based on your answer, I'm going to be able to
00:49:12.980understand certain repressed things that you might be, you know, holding back. So, and that's why it's
00:49:18.840a projective technique. You're projecting some latent motive or latent feelings and so on. It
00:49:24.680comes from psychoanalysis. And I've always argued that how you react to God's sad, I am a Rorschach
00:49:32.300in blood test. Because if you love me, I can usually predict the type of guy you are. If you
00:49:38.480hate me, I can predict the type of guy you are. So usually very confident men who are not in any
00:49:46.040way threatened by my strong person personhood say, I love this guy. Guys who cross their legs like
00:49:53.400Justin Trudeau also called most of my academic colleagues, they go, he's so mean, he's so uncouth,
00:50:00.880right? So it can't be, right? I'm the same guy, but you projected different things to that same
00:50:07.100guy. Well, now let's apply it to Elon Musk. People can look at Elon Musk and say, what is the secret
00:50:14.200sauce that causes him to be such a visionary? And can I somehow emulate that secret sauce?
00:50:22.340And he's a personal friend of mine. I'm not in any way envious of his great success. If anything, I rejoice at his great success because he's doing incredible things that we should all be thankful for.
00:50:36.440But if I am bathing in the beautiful infinity pool of covetousness, of envy, then I look at Elon Musk, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and just like the Irish in the Bono thing, I say, get that guy.
00:50:57.420He doesn't, he shouldn't have that much money.
00:51:00.340It's unbecoming for him to have that much money.
00:52:19.160Lionel Messi, who I'm a huge fan of, maybe I'm his biggest fan, although he has billions
00:52:24.460of fans uh had failed many many times with the argentinian team and then the latest coach came
00:52:33.000in in 2019 i think his name is scaloni and he basically said i am going to build a team that
00:52:40.740is completely revolving around lionel messi so that every single other part of the machinery
00:52:48.020of that team is willing to die for Lionel Messi right and he picked his players by the way these
00:52:56.060are all international world-class players that could certainly have an ego saying I'm not gonna
00:53:02.740die or play for Messi but if you listen to them speak literally every single one to the last of
00:53:09.220them will say I am willing to kill and be killed to make sure that this guy wins well guess what0.97
00:53:15.680they they found that team none of them had the ego to say no no no but i want to be the star0.97
00:53:21.160recognizing that it's perfectly okay for him to be the man and they won the world cup and look
00:53:26.300what they're doing in this current world cup so oftentimes people who are very self-confident
00:53:31.780can recognize the value and the power of someone else without it diminishing them in the least bit
00:53:38.660and so one of the reasons by the way why i think elon and i can sit down with each other
00:53:45.020and have, you know, these wonderful conversations is because we really come towards each other
00:53:51.220with zero ego. I mean, I've interacted with people that are obviously astoundingly less
00:53:57.940accomplished than Elon, but I can't stomach talking to them for five minutes because I can
00:54:03.060very quickly sniff out that they're these sort of narcissistic me, me, me thumping their chest.
00:54:08.380Whereas Elon and I sit with each other, two guys, let's talk ideas. Let's enjoy each other's
00:54:14.700neuronal activation patterns with zero pretense that's why we get along well i think that also
00:54:21.080comes back to the question of semantics i would say that's not because you guys have zero ego it's
00:54:26.500because you have strong egos you have a strong sense of yourself and you're not looking for
00:54:31.900validation or conversely to see somebody else torn down in order to provide that sense of self
00:54:40.040So in the just couple of minutes that we have left, I've got a last two questions for you.
00:54:46.740In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand observed that, quote, 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 values.
00:55:02.440So, of course, our student conference, Gulp's Gulch, is named after the place where in the novel the productive people have withdrawn that sanction, have refused to continue to be sacrificial victims.
00:55:15.720For those in the grips of suicidal empathy, what is the cure?
00:55:20.320How do we encourage them to withdraw the sanction of the victim?
00:55:23.980Other than, of course, read this book.
00:55:26.860Well, as you were speaking, I put up a copy of the book, a 1957 edition of Atlas Shrugged.
00:55:35.040Look, I experienced that exact reality that Ayn Rand discussed in her novel in Canada, right? Because Canada is built on a gigantic parasitic taxation system that basically argues that it is existentially unfair for some people through the hard labor of their work, of their minds,
00:56:05.040to make a lot more money than others so the benevolent empathetic overlords called our
00:56:12.960provincial and federal government is going to come in is going to tax us at a rate that almost
00:56:20.400renders us as complete slaves let me mention some of these realities the highest federal tax bracket
00:56:27.880in Canada is 33%. The highest provincial tax rate in Quebec is 25.75%. Both are applied. So at the
00:56:37.080higher ends, we're getting well into the high 50s. Now the money that's left to you, the government
00:56:42.980doesn't say, okay, well, that's yours now. We've already stolen Gadsad, most of your book royalties,
00:56:48.540which were, by the way, garnered outside of Canada, 99% of them. We get the royalties for
00:56:54.540that book. We were your co-author in that book, right? Not only we were your co-author, we were
00:57:00.86058% your co-author. Okay, fine. But then when I go out with the 42% that's left and I buy something,
00:57:08.380then I get double consumption tax. I get a federal tax and I get a provincial tax at the rate of 15%.
00:57:16.360percent once i then pay my property tax my carbon tax my school tax i'm left with about
00:57:23.64030 35 cents to the dollar meaning let's put it another way from january 1st to about august 31st
00:57:31.880i work fully for free for the government starting in september the government allows me to keep the
00:57:41.320toils of my mind called my books. Well, isn't that what Ayn Rand talked about? Because
00:57:48.560what did I do? I simply one day said, I'm no longer willing to be raped this way. I'm no
00:57:56.360longer willing to be the primary victim of the ultimate parasitic Ponzi scheme, whereby a few
00:58:04.760of us fund the largesse for everyone else in our society. 40% of Canadians don't pay income tax,
00:58:13.200but I get taxed a lot for free healthcare, right? So what did I do? I disappeared just like in the
00:58:20.460Ayn Rand thing. I said one day, well, there is a country called the United States. While hardly
00:58:26.920perfect, while it too has too high of a tax rate, it's certainly a lot better than Canada. I'm going
00:58:33.600to Mississippi, where they currently have an income tax rate of 4%, and they're trying to
00:58:40.980bring it down to 0%. So what would I tell those people? Well, it's very hard to tell them anything
00:58:47.240because in such a parasitic welfare state, 95% of the people benefit from that parasitic taxation.
00:58:56.000So every time I go on social media to complain about the manners by which I've been financially0.81
00:59:02.660raped. People say, boo-hoo-hoo, rich Jew. Why don't you write another book so we can steal0.98
00:59:08.920all your proceeds? So they don't empathize with me. Rather, they think I'm a bad guy for complaining
00:59:15.420that you stole all my money. So unfortunately, the Ayn Rand reflex of those guys to remove
00:59:22.360themselves from society is really the only solution. That's why the SADs are heading down0.96
00:59:27.860to mississippi i'm very very excited about that um and hey god you just have two more months to
00:59:35.280work until you get to start enjoying some of the book so good luck with that uh and again everyone
00:59:43.360um i want to give my wholehearted uh endorsement to this book not just because i loved it not just
00:59:50.920because elon musk loved it but because my father dr brosman has finished reading it and he loves
00:59:57.100too. So you can't get a higher endorsement than that. So thank you, God. Thanks so much for
01:00:03.720joining us. Thank you, Jack. Pleasure talking to you. Cheers.