The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Why Postmodernism and Woke Culture Are Killing Civilization (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to gatekeeper this episode will be in english since my very special guest

00:00:15.200 is the famous and some in some circles the infamous professor god sad hello god how are you

00:00:23.980 nice to to meet you i've been following your stuff for ages because you are one of the few people who

00:00:30.480 brought the anti-woke movement some humor most people on our side are very grave and very worried

00:00:38.220 about the the end of civilization your book is now in english to the original in hebrew to the

00:00:46.620 original english title was the parasitic mind it's called parasitim in hebrew and you can now get it

00:00:52.840 at selameir i'll post a link under this video with access to this book in a sale by by selameir

00:01:02.700 and and god this is the first time i've read a biographical sketch of yours um in that in

00:01:10.380 lebanon in the 70s in the midst of a civil war as a as a jewish family and i want to take you back first

00:01:19.920 something that i found very striking because i was thinking it's not as grave i was thinking of jewish

00:01:26.040 students in american campuses now being kept out of libraries by by pro hamas um idiots chanting from

00:01:35.740 the river to the sea without knowing which river and which sea and and and your your impression begins

00:01:42.660 here when you were six years old i believe and nazir died can you can you say a word about that so that

00:01:48.620 was i was not quite six i think i was uh just before turning six so it was in 1970 gamal abd-nasser

00:01:56.200 the egyptian pan-arabist the egyptian president had just died the reason why i'm i mentioned that he

00:02:03.280 was a pan-arabist is because he was very much loved and revered as a popular figure because he's trying

00:02:09.120 to unite all the arabs under sort of one platform and when he passed away in 1970 uh as often happens

00:02:18.380 in the middle east people take to the streets with fervor by the way for your viewers who don't know

00:02:23.440 this hamas means fervor zeal right so if you go on the street with hamas that means you're doing it

00:02:31.060 it doesn't necessarily refer to the terrorist group it's it means with zeal with fervor and so people

00:02:36.980 would were proceeding down our street we lived on a street called shari'ajish which means the

00:02:43.280 the street of the army actually if you translate it into english and uh there you know the usual kind

00:02:51.040 of lamentations and incantations and so on and amongst them is death to jews death to jews and so

00:02:58.200 i'm sitting there as a little boy looking over the balcony hearing death to jews and i turn to my

00:03:04.060 mother and i say well why are they chanting death to jews and you know she's like shut up put your

00:03:08.680 head down you know don't don't look out too much and so that was at least the first clear memory i had

00:03:14.620 of what it was to experience jew hatred in the middle east but then in the book i talk about several other

00:03:20.440 incidents it's a it struck a chord with me i remember when when i was about the same age we had

00:03:27.580 cartoons in on the afternoon in in on the single israeli channel and it only broadcasted until 5 30 i

00:03:36.160 believe it was and then we got jordanian tv and i remember the arab announcers and my parents explaining

00:03:42.640 to me that they want to kill us and wondering why why is that why would they want to kill us um it seems

00:03:51.820 like a a a common jewish experience and i think jews in in europe are are currently uh experiencing the

00:04:00.760 same thing uh but now it's under the influence of this pathogen the the mind virus uh which has

00:04:09.060 welcomed anti-semites um so you refer to this as a kind of illness in your book uh how is it similar

00:04:19.380 to to a parasite right so let me step back to explain how i came up with this parasitic framework

00:04:26.620 so in as an evolutionist i often will look to other animal behavior to make an evolutionary argument

00:04:34.580 right so if you're trying to make an argument that toy preferences are sex specific little boys prefer

00:04:40.900 certain toys and little girls prefer other toys and there is an evolutionary and biological reason for

00:04:45.860 that you might then study other animals to see if they exhibit the same patterns and it turns out

00:04:51.280 that rhesus monkeys vervet monkeys chimpanzees have the exact same sex specific preferences when it comes

00:04:58.080 to toy preferences so the idea of looking at other animals to make us to understand something about

00:05:04.520 human phenomena is an inherent feature of what an evolutionary scientist would do and so as i was trying to

00:05:12.040 come up with a framework of what could explain such departures from reason from from common sense from

00:05:19.260 reality i started reading the literature on parasitology now parasitology is the study in the

00:05:27.140 animal kingdom between uh hosts and parasites the dynamics between them the co-evolutionary arms race

00:05:33.620 but many parasites don't go to the brain so for example a tapeworm tries to parasitize your intestinal

00:05:40.320 tract but a neuro parasite is a particular type of parasite that needs to end up in the host's brain

00:05:48.700 altering its neuronal circuitry and subsequently its behavior to suit its reproductive interest so for

00:05:56.840 example a wood cricket when it is parasitized by a hair worm that the wood cricket detests water it does

00:06:04.460 it wants nothing to do with water but when it is parasitized by this hair worm because the hair worm

00:06:09.960 needs for the wood cricket to jump into water in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle

00:06:14.480 the wood cricket once it is parasitized jumps merrily into the water commits suicide because

00:06:21.280 it is and dies and drowns and it drowns okay so then i had my epiphany i said aha i'm going to now use the

00:06:29.460 neuro parasitological framework to argue that human beings could not only be parasitized by actual

00:06:36.960 physical brain worms but they could be parasitized by a second class of brain worms and i call these

00:06:43.560 parasitic ideas or idea pathogens and so in that sense i'm drawing an analogy between physical brain

00:06:51.960 worms and ideological brain worms so it's like a gene and a meme um exactly right exactly right so richard

00:07:00.440 dawkins in in his 1976 books the selfish gene argued that yes genes propagate but human beings are both a

00:07:09.280 biological and cultural animal therefore we also have mimetic propagation hence he came up with the

00:07:16.440 the concept of a meme now the difference between and of course i i cite uh richard's work in in the

00:07:23.220 the difference between a meme and a parasite at least an ideological parasite the way i'm speaking

00:07:31.220 a meme doesn't have an inherent valence to it it could be positive it could be neutral it could be

00:07:37.440 negative right if you start humming a song and i overhear it and later i walk and i'm humming it

00:07:43.020 you have mimetically transferred what you were singing to me that has no parasitic quality to it i'm not

00:07:48.760 jumping into the water to commit suicide right well it depends what song i'll infect you i agree if it

00:07:56.140 is the beatles then it is parasitic we have to agree on that but but anyway so so so that's why i did not

00:08:03.360 use the memetic framework i needed something more punchy more zombified and hence i went the

00:08:10.720 neuroparasitic route and i think the metaphor appeared earliest and it's it's striking because computers were

00:08:17.960 very rare and very clumsy back then but i think it was clifford geertz in the the interpretation of

00:08:23.800 cultures who said that human beings are like are like computers in the sense that they have hardware

00:08:29.920 but the hardware cannot work without software and the software is culture and so if you if you think of

00:08:37.740 it in this term when the software goes wrong when the software is infected things seriously go wrong

00:08:45.240 um and we saw them you we saw i think you know a a culture derailed because if if i i hope i'm not

00:08:55.860 carrying the metaphor too far but if the the goal is reproduction what happened to western culture with

00:09:01.860 the with the parasitic minds is that it's it's it's sort of lost its ability to preserve itself hasn't it

00:09:10.500 i mean by the way this might be the first time that i've been interviewed where someone makes a

00:09:16.780 reference to geertz so chapeau to you as we say thank you well done clearly you are an academic uh

00:09:23.260 uh i mean that is literally true what you said in that some of the parasitic ideas never mind that they

00:09:31.960 you know they they drive you off the abyss of infinite lunacy in a metaphorical sense but they

00:09:39.160 literally shut off your actual reproduction so for example in my next book where i'm talking about

00:09:45.020 suicidal empathy so the birther movement right i am so empathetic i am so kind i am so compassionate

00:09:52.780 that i'm unwilling to rape mother earth by doing the unthinkable which is to reproduce and have my

00:09:59.860 own children because of my infinitely suicidal empathy i will shut off the most fundamental impulse

00:10:07.200 that i have in my life there are two the game of life is made up of two steps survive and reproduce

00:10:13.880 right because if i survive all you want but i never reproduce the genes end with me and so you are exactly

00:10:20.580 right that many of these parasitic ideas are a true darwinian dead end and they seem to erode the very

00:10:28.820 idea of culture and not not just a specific culture i'm thinking here it's i'm free associating to

00:10:35.140 to uh our prime minister's speech at the uh at the joint session of the of the two houses of congress

00:10:44.160 where he said what is happening in israel now with hamas is not a clash between civilizations it's a clash

00:10:51.060 between civilization and barbarism and it seems that the woke virus like an autoimmune disease is

00:10:59.580 basically letting in barbarism into our own home as if by some some uh death instinct or or or a a an

00:11:10.400 impulse of self-hate where does this before we we try to analyze the virus where does the the the

00:11:18.440 motivation come from in europe where when has the west lots its will to reproduce itself not just its

00:11:25.440 fantastic question so what i do in the parasitic mind is i discuss each of the parasitic ideas and

00:11:32.560 just for the for the you know uh con for context for your viewers and listeners post-modernism would

00:11:39.900 be the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it purports that there are no objective truths

00:11:44.440 other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truth right so that framework then allows

00:11:50.580 me to argue that up is down left is right uh women can have penises men can menstruate right so that

00:11:57.300 gives me the quote epistemological degrees of freedom to then say anything i want now but that's not the

00:12:04.140 only parasitic idea cultural relativism who are you to judge the the the beliefs and and actions of

00:12:10.020 other cultures don't be a cultural imperialist uh social constructivism everything is a social

00:12:15.720 construction biology doesn't apply for human phenomena so each of these parasitic ideas were

00:12:22.020 spawned on university campuses as i always like to remind people it takes it uniquely takes professors

00:12:28.800 to come up with some of the dumbest ideas right and so therefore so to answer your question depending

00:12:36.080 on which parasitic idea we're talking about we can give it a different time stamp some of the idea

00:12:42.400 pathogen started about a hundred years ago so for example you earlier you mentioned an anthropologist

00:12:47.440 a cultural anthropologist uh franz boas a jewish cultural anthropologist is the sort of the genesis

00:12:55.320 of cultural relativism and then he trained many of his students to argue that there's no such thing as a

00:13:00.960 human universal there is no such thing as a shared biological heritage and so on so that particular idea

00:13:06.920 pathogen is almost 100 years old post-modernism is really 45 50 60 years ago with all of the french

00:13:15.020 post-modernist bullshitters if you don't mind me saying that so jacques lacan jacques derrida

00:13:20.380 michelle foucault and all michelle foucault yeah the father of them all and the most challenging yeah

00:13:25.860 exactly and so so it depends on which idea pathogen we're talking about but we could certainly say

00:13:32.560 that the festering that we now have saw sort of explode has its roots about 50 to 100 years ago

00:13:42.280 it took now one more point and i'll cede back the floor to you when i first started standing on top of

00:13:48.900 the mountain and screaming hey we have a problem here many people would respond to me yeah you're

00:13:54.360 right that these are silly ideas but they are reserved to some esoteric department in the humanities

00:14:00.320 and then i would literally use the metaphor of an actual pathogen and i say but you know the virus

00:14:07.300 eventually breaks out of the lab this is way before covid so you are wuhan you you american

00:14:14.040 departments of literature you are wuhan so so they didn't have the capacity to you know play the

00:14:24.840 slippery slope argument right to forecast to extrapolate from where we are to where we would

00:14:30.860 end up be i said to them look all of those people who are now being parasitized by this nonsense are

00:14:37.240 going to become our leaders and yeah and it's called justin trudeau yeah let me insert a historical

00:14:48.780 angle because because winston churchill said that that in in perhaps in the in two world war

00:14:54.880 europe has spent its soul does that apply does that connect does that lead in some way to the 60s

00:15:03.440 because when i went to do my phd but the original plan which as you know when you when you do a phd

00:15:08.700 you have a grand plan and then you sink into one little segment of it but my idea was to show that

00:15:15.600 the rebellious youth of the 60s are the origin of all our troubles and and that started when i was

00:15:23.360 very young because i in my youth i was in love with this girl for too many years and then came the

00:15:28.860 ideas of the 60s and free love and i thought i'm not going to share her with anyone not that she ever

00:15:34.160 noticed me or anything but already i didn't want to share her and so i guess that the grudge started

00:15:39.540 there but then you look at the 60s and it all looks so inspiring and woodstock and give peace a chance

00:15:44.680 and all that but you look these students felt deep disappointment with the west they adopted a

00:15:52.160 french theory which they did not completely understand in order to express their disappointment

00:15:57.980 with their own culture and they became the teacher so is the context here a a historical crisis

00:16:05.320 that that that did not originate with academics that originated with the general experience of people

00:16:12.600 after two world wars i mean no in the sense that some of these parasitic ideas proceed uh well or at least

00:16:22.540 the the earliest ones are around the first world war so i wouldn't say it's it's it's an either or argument

00:16:29.840 there might be some validity to what you're saying but by the way as you were saying what you were saying

00:16:34.660 you said oh i was i didn't want to share her with anybody else that that reflex speaks to a fundamental

00:16:41.300 uh insight from evolutionary theory right i mean the reason why men have evolved sexual territoriality

00:16:50.080 is because men are very vested fathers within all of the animal kingdom right we we are actually truly

00:16:57.680 super dads compared to all other mammalian species while we don't invest as much as women in the human

00:17:04.080 context we do invest heavily we do much more than just have sex and reproduce therefore it makes

00:17:09.760 perfect evolutionary sense that if you're going to be a heavily invested father that you make sure that

00:17:15.340 it's not the sexy greek gardener who fathers your kids and then you spend the next 18 years raising

00:17:21.320 someone else's genes right so therefore the cognitive system the emotional system the behavioral system

00:17:28.380 that causes us to feel sexual territoriality is perfectly easily explainable from an evolutionary

00:17:35.180 perspective so i'm here to tell you that it was perfectly natural for you let me tell our viewers

00:17:40.540 that this argument is made in detail in the book and you also explain the difference between

00:17:45.620 uh the kind of things that make females of the human species uh jealous and the kind of things that make

00:17:53.640 males uh jealous so you obviously if you read between the lines of the question already you went head

00:18:02.280 on with the with the post-modern gender feminism and first of all let me commend you for the courage

00:18:08.960 because that is dangerous is it not in in academia in canada oh my goodness i mean you know on any given

00:18:15.640 day there is a a very long list of people coming after me but you know people have asked me well what

00:18:23.440 what is the unique set of skills that you had that you know it had to be you well there of course there

00:18:30.540 are many elements to an answer to that question one of which is for better or worse i'm generally a

00:18:38.040 honey badger in other words i feel personally offended by bullshit right like i can't walk

00:18:45.420 away from seeing someone espouse some lunatic thing on say social media and i just say off

00:18:53.020 forget it because if i do that and and maybe it's not good for my blood pressure but it i would then

00:18:59.680 feel at the end of the night when i put my head on the pillow to sleep i would feel that i was fraudulent

00:19:04.760 because i knew that there was an attack and a murder on truth that happened and i looked away and i

00:19:11.080 pretended that i didn't hear the screams of truth when it was asking me to come and protect it so

00:19:16.360 i think one of the reasons why i literally go like this and i don't care about anybody coming after me

00:19:22.560 is because i am my worst enemy meaning that i've got to live up to my own standards and i'd rather

00:19:30.860 make sure to sleep well at night i don't care about the feminists coming after me they can all come

00:19:35.800 sometimes fun though to get into these skirmishes of ideas incredibly so but you remember earlier you

00:19:43.180 said uh you know you you you bring levity and humor into it now i do this for two reasons i mean it's it's

00:19:50.660 a natural reflex for me it's not a strategic thing but i do it really it comes from two places one

00:19:56.940 humor serves as a pressure relief for me right because it otherwise i would explode right if i don't make

00:20:05.480 fun of some of this stupidity then i would not be able to go on another day but secondly and here's

00:20:11.980 a bit more of the uh the the pragmatic element dictators as you know as a historian uh they are

00:20:21.420 not afraid of the guys with the big muscles because those we can get rid of them very quickly

00:20:26.380 they're afraid of the guys with the sharp tongues because they are the ones who can really attack

00:20:33.680 my standing right the the pen the pen is mightier than the sword is exactly referring to that so we

00:20:40.200 need to get rid of the humorous the satirist because they're the ones who will cause the most

00:20:46.120 havoc to us and so i use satire sarcasm for many reasons one of which is that it's the perfect as i

00:20:54.900 explained in the perfect mind it's like the surgeon's scalpel cutting through layers of warm butter

00:21:00.780 bullshit right because and by the way that's that's why i don't also get canceled because when i take

00:21:06.820 one of my satirical positions you don't know i mean yes the people who know me know that i am being

00:21:12.580 satirical but you can't cancel me because i will literally say i genuinely meant that i really do

00:21:19.220 believe that men can menstruate because i studied that at oberland college so i'm untouchable i've i found

00:21:26.140 the singularity point gadi that's that's wonderful also you know uh it's not just that that the tongue

00:21:33.600 is dangerous humor is dangerous as hannah arendt observed that laughter undermines authority like

00:21:41.960 like nothing else and they're so pompous you know there's a the israeli feminists have a very large

00:21:48.220 group on facebook uh which i guess i'm not allowed on but i can peek at and which is called i too am a

00:21:55.420 feminist and i don't have a sense of humor they they are proud of it and one wonder is what kind

00:22:01.420 of creed makes people proud of not having a sense of of humor so god what has gone wrong with with the

00:22:10.920 with modern post-modern feminism well so equity feminism is a great idea it says hey there should

00:22:20.260 be no institutional mechanisms by which men and women are not treated equally under the law equally

00:22:27.360 for hiring and so on for promotion and by that definition of feminism then probably you and i

00:22:33.860 would put up our hands and say hey we're we're equity feminists sign us up the problem then comes

00:22:38.780 with radical feminists who then argue in the service of pursuing that laudable goal

00:22:45.620 let us now promulgate the idea that there are no innate differences between men and women it's all

00:22:52.360 due to social construction because then that makes the ultimate goal of eradicating toxic masculinity and

00:22:59.380 the patriarchy more poppable if we promulgate that argument then it becomes easier for us to fight the

00:23:05.320 patriarchy there are no biological differences and so that's why in the book in the parasitic mind i argue

00:23:11.540 that each of these parasitic ideas begins from a noble place it it starts off with a noble reflex to

00:23:19.620 solve some valuable objective but in the service of that objective if i have to murder and rape truth

00:23:27.260 so be it whereas i argue no i can walk and chew gum at the same time i could pursue noble goals

00:23:34.360 without ever ceding a millimeter of the truth in that service but they end up you know it was most striking

00:23:42.100 to a lot of israeli feminists who i think had a rude awakening in the aftermath of october 7 when feminists

00:23:50.320 sided with hamas rapists against the israeli raped women and suddenly i believe you turned into wait we need

00:24:00.560 more evidence because because being a palestinian trumps being a woman yeah well exactly that that's

00:24:09.180 why all of those feminists they're the wood cricket that jumps into the water right that's like that it

00:24:14.900 can't be a more apt metaphor uh i'm going to use an example from israel to exactly demonstrate this

00:24:23.620 point and as once i say the name of the person you might even shake your head and do you know where

00:24:27.720 i'm going with the story gadi or no no i'm waiting tal nitzan do you know who that is

00:24:33.460 i think i do tal nitzan no i'm not sure yeah is a jewish jewish woman probably she's part of the

00:24:43.020 facebook feminist group that you are not allowed to go into i'm sure she is uh she was pursuing some

00:24:49.640 doctoral work i think she was at well i think she was at hebrew university if i'm not mistaken

00:24:53.500 you can you can check the reference in in the parasitic mind and she wanted to do some research

00:24:59.440 are you looking up tal nitzan i am yes i am you caught me yeah go on yeah so tal nitzan who's who's

00:25:08.760 who's a lot more progressive and enlightened than you know degenerates like me uh so she wanted to

00:25:16.720 demonstrate that the idf engages in massive rampant rape of palestinian women right because she's

00:25:24.660 progressive because she knows how to engage in self-loathing because the only road to repentance

00:25:30.740 is to suicidally hate yourself as much as possible okay great so then she goes out and she conducts the

00:25:37.980 research and she can't identify a single instance of documented rape by the idf soldiers on palestinian

00:25:46.460 now you have a phd i have a phd we are taught that you you go where the evidence leads you if your

00:25:55.000 hypothesis is falsified well then so be it but in the world of the parasitized monsters your ideology

00:26:03.080 could never be falsified right it doesn't adhere to popper's falsification principle so when we found

00:26:10.300 out that the idf didn't rape anyone did she alter her position that they are monsters no

00:26:16.320 she just pivoted a bit yeah they are so horrifying in their othering of palestinian women that the

00:26:24.720 palestinian women are no longer valid women that are worthy of being raped so they are so evil the idf

00:26:33.860 that they wouldn't rape the women so if she had uncovered rape it would prove that the idf

00:26:39.660 is disastrous and if she uncovers no rapes it in no way affects the fact that the idf are i are

00:26:47.700 terrible monsters this is not a feminist at oberlin college who learned that hamas is freedom fighter

00:26:55.260 this is tal nidzan jewish tal nidzan at hebrew university so the parasites know no bounds yes but

00:27:02.360 but a professor or a phd candidate at hebrew university needs recommendation from oberlin college

00:27:07.780 or for somewhere else in america so they write to produce when i was a young professor and i was

00:27:12.980 very passionate about the my anti-post-modernism and i came to an older professor and i said this

00:27:19.280 is horrible a whole department whole departments here are infested with this and they're all so

00:27:24.320 ideological and he said they're not ideological at all they just have to publish and they know that

00:27:28.620 this is the mood we are completely slavishly slavishly if i'm pronouncing it correctly

00:27:35.360 a subservient to to the american academy so that even if you are a professor of hebrew literature

00:27:42.480 believe it or not you need to publish in english in america in order to be promoted and what happened

00:27:48.280 in america is unbelievable i was there at the i think the very last moment where you could still

00:27:54.800 speak some of the truth i had to leave class and take independent studies because i was because

00:28:00.700 professors were one professor walked out in the middle of i i was saying something and he just

00:28:06.360 walked out of the room in the middle of of my speaking do you remember what you were saying

00:28:11.480 yeah yeah it was there was i i'll say for my department at rutgers university the history

00:28:16.960 department that he got reprimanded because you you know i'm a teacher you're a teacher you don't

00:28:21.820 you don't label a student as a persona non grata you just don't even if something they said is

00:28:28.140 outrageous you do not just turn your back and go i was you know i was stunned and it's a it's a it's

00:28:34.160 a foreign country but i i learned my lesson and then i did independent studies and and that went

00:28:39.460 very well but i experienced the same thing as you because when i started doing with it they thought

00:28:45.080 this is the margin of some godforsaken departments of of literature and and and israeli history and and

00:28:53.060 and it became so incredibly influential so now i want to get to something i i've argued with you

00:29:00.500 many times in my head gun so now i'm going to let you enter into my internal dialogue with you

00:29:07.080 and see and see if you know your lines so sit tight i might it's not just you because my

00:29:13.740 my argument i guess with with the critics of the of of of wokeness in in their many generations they

00:29:23.380 label this as cultural marxism and the logic is obvious because marxism taught you that there's

00:29:30.420 there are oppressors and the oppressed and the the terms were economic and this was then shifted to

00:29:37.100 identity another same model applies to women to blacks to uh invented categories from the american

00:29:44.640 census such as uh hispanic americans and and others and what i think is missing in all this

00:29:52.180 is that the american left has also radical individualistic roots and when i because i because

00:30:01.880 i studied classic american ideas in my phd i i i then read judith butler read is not a good word i

00:30:08.940 then struggle through the ointment of judith butler's uh horrible arrogant prose because she says simple

00:30:16.620 things it's just if you blow them up behind this this impenetrable jargon then you seem very deep

00:30:22.580 it's not deep but it's also not not really marxist this is you read this and you say i've seen this

00:30:31.380 in a john wayne movie that's the self-made man is now the self-made transgendered individual and the

00:30:38.540 whole logic is only i will decide who i am and then if you are trained in american thought then you read

00:30:45.180 you read emerson and you say emerson said that the self is always a work in progress this is what these

00:30:52.480 people are repeating and then you say wait a minute and you go back to france and foucault is also not

00:30:57.900 not a marxist foucault is a nietzschean and what foucault is striving for is not class solidarity

00:31:03.280 in any form and when you take this back to identity politics is you know one of my the first brilliant

00:31:10.260 insights you know her christina hoff summers she's absolutely brilliant in her book who stole feminism

00:31:16.440 that was the 90s and she said you know when i came to a conference of the gender the national

00:31:23.340 association of gender studies professors in the 80s we had an agenda we were supporting the era the

00:31:28.720 equal rights amendment and other things when i came back in the 90s the groups kept fragmenting

00:31:34.920 and then i'm improvising but it's very close to what she said the group of overweight jewish women

00:31:41.100 who was whose sexual identity was in transit split into the allergic and the non-allergic and the

00:31:48.340 allergic demanded that no one come to the conference with dry cleaning clothes because it makes them

00:31:54.060 sneeze so so you're saying it's a misnomer to use the term cultural marxist which is a collectivist term

00:32:00.900 on these fragmentations into unitary identities that i summarize this properly close i'm i'm less

00:32:07.520 belligerent and i would say that cultural marxism is half the story the other story is when it meets

00:32:14.980 american individualism because why are these groups fragmenting they are fragmenting because

00:32:20.580 no one will define me from the outside this is why the melting pot is wrong this is why

00:32:26.600 feminism is white and we now need black feminism this is why black feminism is going to split into

00:32:32.060 straight and gay so uh you the floor is yours yeah uh that very nice uh leader uh by the way just

00:32:43.160 to set the record uh straight i don't use the term i i would challenge you to find a writing where i

00:32:50.020 use the term cultural marxism i i don't use it so in a sense i'm supporting your position uh although

00:32:58.340 although i do believe that marxism is a parasitic idea right so so i'm not saying that wokeism is just

00:33:08.300 a manifestation of cultural marxism so in that sense i agree with you but it is certainly the case

00:33:14.100 that marxism is completely parasitic as a matter of fact in my forthcoming book in suicidal empathy i

00:33:21.040 have a chapter i mean it's still in flux so it might change the the organization but i have a whole

00:33:26.020 chapter on parasitic uh taxation uh which comes with the social welfare state but it really is rooted

00:33:34.180 in empathy right i mean because we are so empathetic us the benevolent magnanimous government

00:33:40.300 it only makes sense that we take from the super productive and rich and redistribute that because

00:33:45.880 we should all be equal so there is a parasitic i mean literally a parasitic element because i am sucking

00:33:51.600 off all of your labor and talent to redistribute it as i see fit and and by the way remember earlier i was

00:33:59.660 saying that your reflex about uh feeling uh you know sexually territorial was perfectly evolutionary

00:34:05.940 i want to link what what we said earlier to the socio-political economic system and human nature

00:34:12.240 eo wilson are you familiar with eo wilson no eo wilson was a he just recently passed away and i

00:34:20.320 so regret that we never got a chance to know each other he he was you know arguably one of the most

00:34:25.560 famous evolutionary scientists in the 20th century by by training he's a entomologist a an insect

00:34:32.540 scientist specifically specializing in social ants uh and he wrote a very influential book that was

00:34:39.480 kind of a precursor to evolutionary psychology called sociobiology where you apply biology to study social

00:34:45.680 behavior across animals including humans and he was part of the early culture wars because his colleagues

00:34:52.760 at harvard who were themselves completely evolutionists did not accept the fact that you

00:35:00.140 could apply evolutionary theory to explain human behavior because that would be contrary to their

00:35:05.640 marxist philosophy right so they were already parasitized but the reason why i'm saying this whole

00:35:10.940 long-winded story is because when eo wilson was asked professor wilson i mean i'm paraphrasing the

00:35:18.760 the exchange professor wilson what are your views on socialism slash communism he paused and said great

00:35:26.940 idea wrong species which is one of the most beautiful quotes i've ever heard with very very few words

00:35:33.680 because social ants are communistic there is a reproductive queen there is a class of warrior ants

00:35:41.280 and a class of worker ants that are completely and utterly indistinguishable from each other they're just

00:35:47.180 one small cog of the bigger wheel so some species have a phylogenetic history whereby they genuinely have

00:35:56.920 evolved communism as the optimal pathway humans are not communistic some of us are taller shorter

00:36:03.640 smarter harder working more ambitious less ambitious better looking less better looking so to impose

00:36:09.860 a socio-political economic model that is perfectly incongruent with human nature it doesn't take

00:36:17.160 fancy professor god's out to tell you that it will always fail as history has shown repeatedly in

00:36:23.140 every culture where it's been tried how does nationalism fit in that discussion because there is a a a

00:36:31.900 communal social side to to human beings which i think radical individualism fails to be able to

00:36:40.380 explain so if you follow the path of i don't know hobbes and freud you you you cannot explain why

00:36:46.900 people would sacrifice their lives for something larger than themselves why do they ants do it

00:36:53.620 yes yes great question so two ways to answer that in terms of the reflex for in-group out-group

00:37:01.620 thinking of which nationalism will be one example we are the nation and there's the outside enemy

00:37:06.900 that coalitional psychology is an indelible part of the architecture of the human mind right seeing the

00:37:12.960 world as blue team and red team is a fundamental feature of our psychology and as a matter of fact

00:37:19.640 there are so many studies that demonstrate that very very early we start attributing people as being

00:37:25.980 as part of our in-group or out-group so there is an evolutionary argument to be made for why we have that

00:37:31.560 reflex to to create a delineation between us and them regarding your question of why i would you know jump into a

00:37:38.980 river to save my co-religionist or friend or so that here there are two two different mechanisms

00:37:45.440 so in in my earlier books uh my evolutionary psychology books i argue that there are four

00:37:52.720 fundamental darwinian modules that drive much of our purpose of behavior there is stuff related to

00:37:59.960 survival so for example we've evolved gustatory preferences to prefer fatty foods because that

00:38:05.920 was an adaptation to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty so that's survival second one is

00:38:11.880 related to reproduction remember earlier i said there are the life is a two two-step game survive and

00:38:18.020 then reproduce so in all cultures men are outlandishly more likely uh to be ferrari owners even though

00:38:26.860 there are many billionaire women's who could afford ferraris because the ferrari becomes a modern

00:38:32.580 instantiation of peacocking of of sexual signaling that is desired by women that's why men buy that

00:38:39.320 because they know that they are responding to a preference that that women have so number one

00:38:43.900 survival number two uh reproduction the next two are going to answer your question kin selection is the

00:38:51.560 mechanism that explains why i would jump into a river to save three of my children darwin had argued that

00:39:00.260 selection operates at the level of the organism but if that were true then there would never be the

00:39:08.480 evolutionary pressures for me to sacrifice my life to save three of my children but if i recognize that

00:39:15.000 i simply am a vehicle of my genes then from an evolutionary calculus of the gene then that makes perfect

00:39:23.740 evolutionary sense because each of my children on average share 50 percent of their genes with me

00:39:28.320 therefore even if i were to cease to exist if i save the packet which is which would amount to more

00:39:34.900 three children then i then there would be evolutionary pressures for kin altruism to arise so that's another

00:39:42.000 explanation but then that doesn't explain why i would jump into the river to save gadi gadi is not my

00:39:48.980 child gadi is not uh you know my father there so there is no kin relationship between gadi and me i mean

00:39:55.660 unless we said the jewish people right but i mean literally in a strict genetic relatedness

00:40:00.900 context well the reason why i do that is because of the fourth module which is reciprocal altruism or

00:40:09.640 reciprocity so in a social species you have to evolve the mechanisms of tit for tat right now some have

00:40:18.820 argued that that originated as a solution to caloric uncertainty right we're all going around in the

00:40:25.760 african savannah we all are likely to die of starvation why don't we strike a deal so that when we bring

00:40:32.120 down the three thousand pound game i will share it with your family on the condition that when we are in

00:40:38.340 lean times you will reciprocate and share it with me even though we're not biologically linked that's why i

00:40:44.440 argue many rituals of friendship from a strict economic perspective we don't have to pursue

00:40:50.840 them right if i invite you for your birthday and pay fifty dollars and then you reciprocate and pay me

00:40:56.640 fifty dollars when it's my birthday why don't we from a classical economics university of chicago model

00:41:02.060 stop the charade and we both don't invite each other and we'll be at the same final end point

00:41:07.400 no the reason why we do it is because that ritual oils our affiliation it oils our bonds of reciprocity

00:41:16.460 and so that would explain why we would jump into the river to save our co-nationalists and so on

00:41:25.080 very interesting um let me let me ask you a follow-up question on that about empathy empathy is a strange

00:41:35.260 thing and it's and it's not even limited to human beings we feel empathy for a puppy in distress and

00:41:42.780 this is how i learned i i used to think that i like that i like uh nature documentaries that's because i

00:41:50.320 saw national geographic and not national geographic wild because when i saw national geographic wild

00:41:55.580 i remember seeing a a few lions tear apart a a baby elephant and it take it took an awful lot of

00:42:05.180 time i kept i kept switching to zapping to other channels till it was over and i was wondering why

00:42:11.820 am i so distressed by it's not even a person i don't know it's an elephant in africa that is being

00:42:20.200 torn apart by by lions why do i feel it's empathy i feel distress not just empathy you know it i literally

00:42:29.420 earlier this morning i was working on a section where i was working on exactly what you just asked

00:42:37.160 i mean i could literally put i could literally pull it out and actually i was working on a section

00:42:42.340 you're going to find this interesting so so uh peter singer the the philosopher uh wrote a book in the

00:42:50.920 early 80s about uh increasing the circle of whom you include in that circle so that you know you feel

00:42:59.480 affiliation for them and so on his point being as an animal activist we should incorporate to your

00:43:04.780 question animals within that circle right does he mention the scottish enlightenment i'm not sure if

00:43:11.640 he does you mean in that particular book yeah i'll put an asterisk and add a after but please go on

00:43:17.440 yeah so uh by the way he's people many years ago he came on my show and we had a really interesting

00:43:23.720 uh conversation uh about all sorts of things related to philosophy but specifically i but i mean i set

00:43:30.660 myself up i asked him given the fact that i am an incredible animal lover am i hypocritical that i eat

00:43:39.600 meat now i actually don't think it's hypocritical but i wanted to ask him and he sort of paused and if i

00:43:45.580 remember correctly his answer was yes that's it so so but anyways uh the reason why i'm telling you

00:43:52.480 that that i was writing about it today is that as i was thinking about exactly the types of scenarios

00:43:58.740 of you know why do we why can't i also not see the zebra being eaten alive and so on uh i i had this

00:44:05.460 hypothesis i said you know what i bet you that my empathy changes as a function of how far

00:44:15.560 removed an animal is from me in the evolutionary tree of life meaning that i will feel more empathy

00:44:23.680 towards a an ape than i will towards a turtle because the turtle the common ancestor with the turtle

00:44:31.720 diverged from from us way earlier in the tree of life and so i thought you know what i should

00:44:39.640 probably conduct a study to to test this so then i go on to check and just like two years ago the exact

00:44:49.020 same study published in a nature journal which of course on the one hand you get pissed but that's

00:44:54.680 how science works people come up earlier than you with the great idea that you thought you had

00:44:59.140 uh but it was it still felt good that you know independently because you feel vindicated

00:45:04.760 because you feel vindicated that that brilliant insight that you had but by the way i also had

00:45:10.320 that insight not insight but that realization when i was working on my latest book the previous book

00:45:17.480 on happiness and you know i would of course you you can't not talk about the ancient greeks when

00:45:25.080 you're talking about you know how to live the good life and so on and so i would get some

00:45:30.240 brilliant insight and i would be sort of looking at myself in the mirror my goodness are you a

00:45:35.980 brilliant guy and then i go to check and i go god damn it epictetus already said this two thousand

00:45:42.000 years ago i'm an idiot that's slightly late slightly so you know uh academia has a a nice way to keep

00:45:50.860 you grounded in that yes of course you come up at times with your own insights but there's a lot of

00:45:56.520 very bright people that have traversed the intellectual landscape before you so you really

00:46:01.180 have to be careful to before you think that you came up with an original thought but i so but to answer

00:46:06.420 your your question of why we feel that there are several arguments for that uh it could just be

00:46:14.160 so there are let me answer in a couple of ways there is a distinction evolutionary theory between

00:46:21.180 something called an adaptation an adaptation is something that confers survival or mating advantage

00:46:28.760 to you an exaptation is a byproduct of an evolutionary process meaning our skeletal system is the color that

00:46:39.480 it is not because it is advantageous for it to be that color but it was just a path dependent

00:46:47.200 engineering reality because of other things that happen that's the color that the sky so it's a

00:46:54.140 byproduct it piggybacked right so one argument would be that you're directing the empathy toward

00:47:02.620 the hapless baby elephant is just the byproduct of the empathy system that evolved society together

00:47:12.020 right so we are a social species and one of the ways that we evolve emotions that keep us well

00:47:22.320 regulated within human sociality is to have empathy and theory of mind so that's why empathy evolves

00:47:30.240 that's the adaptive argument but then it is exapted to the baby elephant in the way that you felt it

00:47:36.700 so i'll just add one one more bit of doubt to the theory that both you and someone in the science journal

00:47:45.140 developed about animals having more empathy to animals the more similar there there are to us

00:47:53.180 because abused children i would argue based on other it interested me very much for a long time

00:47:59.680 because it changed a psychoanalytic psychoanalytic theory the study of children who've had horrible

00:48:05.640 childhoods and many of them uh love animals because they are not like human beings because they are

00:48:13.020 distant from them so they can find empathy and and a sense of a communality with something outside the

00:48:21.400 species because they were traumatized within the species so very interesting so i i i i and i and

00:48:28.860 and some of what we now know i i wish i knew more more uh uh medicine more more of the science of uh of

00:48:39.520 medicine because now we know that the the restructuring of the brain abused children have

00:48:45.800 the the the part of the brain where empathy resides is smaller and less developed and so well we should have

00:48:54.660 another conversation got one day because because you you the meeting of the study of ideas and the

00:49:01.000 and evolutionary theory basically your career is i think one of the most uh fruitful and most

00:49:09.800 hopeful developments in science because because i think that i i don't academia is i don't i i'm not

00:49:19.060 sure it could be reformed anymore so because of the tenure track system and all the rest of it and

00:49:25.120 because because it produces also speaking of evolution bad character because what happens in academia is that

00:49:33.680 the the reward for conformism is just so huge that when an einstein comes along he has to do it outside the

00:49:41.480 university and when a freud comes along he has to do it outside the university or he will be crushed and

00:49:47.100 then freud became a dictator in his own little in his own little cult which which you just flattened by

00:49:53.420 the way with the with the egotistic gene right because because freud's old psychology it says that

00:49:59.900 we are pleasure seeking and we are not if you if you seek survival then then then pleasure is i mean

00:50:07.920 this is what makes me more hopeful egotism is just a false description of human

00:50:16.900 motivation what's your view on that are we altruistic or are we egotistic or is it just the

00:50:24.540 genes and not us yeah very amazing question first if i can uh give you a a a hint of optimism because

00:50:33.720 you you said you know i'm i think that academia is dead i think that there are institutions many of

00:50:40.280 which are contacting me that are trying to solve that problem so i wouldn't to use the old term i

00:50:49.480 wouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water i think that there are problems in academia but there

00:50:54.860 is now a growing movement it's still small but there's a growing movement of either existing

00:51:03.120 institutions that are trying to auto correct or new institutions and believe me i'm at the forefront of

00:51:08.480 that because you know they're all reaching out to me for for obvious reasons so please don't give

00:51:13.300 up hope on academia we we still need you uh regarding the the issue of you know are we inherently egotistic

00:51:19.780 or altruistic so here i'm speaking to a fellow jew and an israeli you'll be happy to uh hear me quote

00:51:28.980 maimonides so in my first my first book uh this is almost 20 years ago now in the evolutionary basis of

00:51:37.000 consumption i talk about uh you know altruism philanthropy right really grand uh pious generosity

00:51:47.120 and i talk about maimonides discussing the eight levels of tzedakah right and and now he maimonides did

00:51:58.120 not call himself an evolutionary psychologist but he was an evolutionary psychologist because he was a

00:52:04.540 he was well and not never mind just because he was a physician but because he is a product of

00:52:10.400 evolution he's a darwinian being so he has access to those evolutionary insights and so what he basically

00:52:16.660 said you'll see in a second how i'm going to link it back to your question what he basically said is

00:52:22.120 that one of the highest levels of tzedakah you know piety and so on is when the recipient of the

00:52:30.420 altruistic act and the benefit and the altruists don't know of each other's identity and that is very

00:52:40.580 pure because then i mean i'm he didn't use these words but i'm using it in my language because then

00:52:47.800 you can't get the social signaling rewards associated right even when you say at hebrew university

00:52:54.620 you don't write it's the anonymous cancer center right it's the rubenstein cancer center it's the

00:53:02.540 it's the gadi cancer center right so even though you are a philanthropist boy are you still getting a lot

00:53:10.220 of social rewards for that you know pure philanthropy so you know it's a it's a philosophical discussion

00:53:19.000 whether there is absolute pure altruism that is fully detached from any ulterior motives my feeling

00:53:27.600 would be along with maimonides that that level of piety is very rare even when i am jumping into the

00:53:35.320 river to save my children ultimately i'm doing it for very clear evolutionary reasons so now let in in

00:53:43.880 closing let me take the ultimate risk with you god please for uh and ask about evolution i've always had

00:53:53.320 doubts about the mathematical validity in terms of uh chance and and com combinations i don't i know the

00:54:04.200 the term in hebrew combinatorica the science of of uh combinatorics combinatorics if the short time

00:54:13.320 that human beings have evolved in was enough to to account for all the coincidences of gene mutations

00:54:22.600 uh filtered through all the changes in environment to produce this unbelievably sophisticated structure

00:54:31.560 and and i and i and and i kept these doubts to myself because you know in in civilized circles

00:54:37.480 you you you don't say these things but then something came to my aid when he when apparently

00:54:45.480 it's been discovered i know too little about it two things basically one is that the the the brain

00:54:52.760 is a self-structuring organism so it's the the way that we are made is also there is intention

00:55:00.760 not not not necessarily ours we may not not have access to this intention in structuring our own our

00:55:08.200 own uh neural uh structure and and then that trauma gets written into the genes somehow i don't know enough

00:55:19.320 about that you probably know more than me and maybe what i said is is is complete rubbish um

00:55:26.200 if so please correct me yeah so let me first mention the the trauma part so that that comes so before

00:55:33.800 darwin the standing accepted evolutionary theory was called lamarckism and so after lamarck which was

00:55:44.440 called the theory of acquired traits meaning that the reason why giraffes have long necks is because they

00:55:52.520 have to you know reach further and further up so that within stretch right so that they stretch and then

00:56:00.040 of course the very easy pithy argument against that is if if it is the case that within the lifespan of

00:56:08.680 the organism changes in its life are passed down then jewish children should be born already circumcised

00:56:17.400 right so meaning that that's not how genetic transfer happens but recently there is some revival of

00:56:28.680 lamarckin theory to your point about trauma this is called the dutch famine studies that the most famous

00:56:36.200 one where you have children in world war ii or sorry grandparents who had gone through severe famine

00:56:46.360 in world war ii somehow the trauma that they experienced not not psychological trauma i mean literal

00:56:53.960 famine physiological trauma has been passed down epigenetically to their ancestors so that's called

00:57:02.600 epigenetic transfer so there is some new hints that the it's not only through direct genetic transference

00:57:12.040 that some of these mechanisms happen so that that's just answering that to your earlier question about

00:57:18.120 uh mathematically it is impossible we could get into the all the technical details the answer is

00:57:25.560 absolutely that's not a very compelling argument with all due respect because the time scale that it

00:57:33.480 takes for these things to happen fully can capture that uh now any alternative that people present usually

00:57:42.680 when from this side of the mouth they say combinatorially it is impossible then from this side of the mouth

00:57:49.320 the next one and i'm not saying that's what you're saying is that's why therefore it must be an intelligent

00:57:54.920 designer who who is somewhere in the sky oh i see him he's right there by the by the by the cloud so it is

00:58:02.440 very very difficult to take seriously the argument that a theory that has now been validated across 30

00:58:11.880 trillion ways since darwin i mean literally there is less evidence for gravity than there is evidence

00:58:19.240 for the theory of evolution that theory is on shaky grounds but there is a guy that looks like moses

00:58:27.560 that is an exquisite designer of the 300 000 species of beetles that that's a more compelling argument

00:58:38.200 i'm going to have to disrespectful i mean respectfully disagree with it but but but doubts about one

00:58:44.840 argument does not mean that you that you adopt another one i personally am not religious but but but but my

00:58:51.640 but there is the the strand of evolution that is completely materialistic uh steven pinker style

00:59:00.920 i i think is is seriously missing something um i had this argument with my dentist who said that we have

00:59:09.320 these tubes in our teeth and when they're hot or cold we experience that as pain and i said what do you

00:59:16.200 mean it is pain he said no you just experience it as pain and and then asked well who is experiencing

00:59:22.280 it and you know where that one goes yeah all the way back to you have a lot more you have a much more

00:59:28.600 interesting dentist than i do i need to go to your dentist my my dentist has retired because he is so

00:59:34.440 he's so smart that he invented something in dentistry which enabled him to stop working and just receiving

00:59:40.040 passive income from here to eternity you should meet him if you are interested in dentistry

00:59:47.160 and so so to conclude uh let me for for the enjoyment of our our listeners because you mentioned

00:59:53.240 lemurian uh um evolution i i don't teach biology but i do teach in in history of ideas spencerian

01:00:01.880 um evolution uh which which unlike darwin is you know teleological because it leads to more and more

01:00:09.800 sophisticated beings and and william james you probably know this used to mock herbert spencer

01:00:15.960 to his students and he described their the herbert spencer's whole theory in one sentence and i'll

01:00:23.320 read it now evolution is a change from a know-how-ish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehow-ish and in

01:00:30.440 general talkaboutable not all-alikeness by continuous stick-together rations and something else

01:00:35.960 specifications and and once you study that that description it's actually true because the whole

01:00:42.520 the whole view of spencer right is is is things become more specific and need to cooperate so you

01:00:50.680 from one ameba to the whole of the economy there's only one principle and it was once compelling and it's

01:00:56.920 striking in my profession that no one now remembers herbert spencer except antiquarians god this this

01:01:05.320 conversation was everything i expected it to be and more as you as you now know i've been speaking

01:01:11.800 to you for a while you just didn't hear it and and so it's a pleasure to to have a more reciprocal

01:01:18.280 dialogue with you than i'm generally used to so uh in conclusion this is god's new book in in hebrew

01:01:25.880 this is an important cultural war and it's very good for your genetic survival so let your egotistic

01:01:33.400 genes get a copy of this book in hebrew thanks very much it was a pleasure thank you god cheers

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - January 22, 2025

Why Postmodernism and Woke Culture Are Killing Civilization (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_788)

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