An Evening at the Reagan Library Discussing Suicidal Empathy (THE SAAD TRUTH_2037)
This is an onstage conversation at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library where the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad lays out the central idea of his book Suicidal Empathy. His claim, argued throughout, is that empathy is a real and good evolved trait, but like everything else it follows a curve with a peak, and past that peak empathy turns self-destructive. When compassion is hyperactive, aimed at the wrong targets, and unmoored from any cost-benefit reasoning, Saad says it stops protecting a society and starts dismantling it. He calls that failure mode suicidal empathy.
Published Jun 12, 202653:16 video27 min readAdded Jun 14, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
This is an onstage conversation at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library where the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad lays out the central idea of his book Suicidal Empathy. His claim, argued throughout, is that empathy is a real and good evolved trait, but like everything else it follows a curve with a peak, and past that peak empathy turns self-destructive. When compassion is hyperactive, aimed at the wrong targets, and unmoored from any cost-benefit reasoning, Saad says it stops protecting a society and starts dismantling it. He calls that failure mode suicidal empathy.
Around that core he builds a whole vocabulary. Bad ideas, in his telling, behave like parasites: they get into a mind, rewire its judgment, and drive it toward behavior that serves the idea at the host's expense. He calls them idea pathogens and traces them to postmodernism. He calls the people running them wood crickets, after an insect a parasite compels to drown itself. He ranks countries on a five-stage scale of decline, puts the United States at stage two and Canada at stage five, and argues the West is committing what he names civilizational seppuku. The talk is opinionated and political throughout, and the views below are presented as Saad's own. It is a remake of the full evening in order, with the arguments, the examples, the jokes, and the audience exchanges that closed it out.
What "suicidal empathy" actually means
The moderator opens easy: what does the phrase even mean? Saad's first move is to defend empathy, not attack it. Empathy, he says, is an evolutionarily selected trait, and it has to be, because humans are a social species. For two people to have a meaningful conversation, each has to model the other's mind. That capacity to put yourself inside another head is what psychologists call theory of mind, and it sits inside what Saad calls cognitive empathy.
Then comes the frame that organizes the entire talk. He reaches back to Aristotle: too little of a thing is bad, too much of a thing is bad, and most of life is the search for the sweet spot in between. Empathy is no exception. Too little empathy and you drift toward psychopathy. Too much empathy, specifically empathy that is hyperactive, fired in the wrong situations, and aimed at the wrong targets, and you get the cocktail he is naming. His example of misaimed targeting is deliberately provocative: caring more, he says, about Guatemalan illegal immigrants than about American veterans who lost limbs fighting for the country. That mismatch of target and intensity is suicidal empathy.
Figure 1. Saad's causal chain as described in the talk. A parasitic idea enters the mind, behaves like a neuroparasite that rewires the host's circuitry, and corrupts the "empathy calculus" so that compassion is aimed at the wrong targets. The host, the "wood cricket," then acts against its own interest. This is Saad's model, presented as his framework rather than settled science.
Why he wrote the book: the campus as a hatchery for bad ideas
Asked whether one story set him off, Saad says no, it was a long arc. After 32 years as a professor he had watched nearly every devastatingly bad idea that feeds suicidal empathy get hatched on university campuses, because, he jokes, it takes intellectuals to produce some of the dumbest ideas. He borrows from the economist Thomas Sowell: some disciplines are fully decoupled from the autocorrective mechanisms of reality. In those fields you can stand up and pontificate about nonsense and reality never slaps you out of your stupor.
That is why, Saad argues, the business school and the engineering school are less likely to be parasitized. You cannot build a bridge with "lesbian dance theory," and you cannot build an economic model out of "queer indigenous ancestral knowledge." The fields where claims meet a hard wall of reality are inoculated; the fields where they do not are where the rot grows. He frames the whole book as the record of watching that departure from reason play out.
On how he handled it in his own classroom, his answer is discipline: he never brought politics into a course on evolutionary psychology or decision-making, so his students never had to hear his views on Justin Trudeau (views he hints are not flattering). The craziness reached him elsewhere. He is leaving Concordia in Montreal to join the University of Mississippi as a distinguished professor, and he says the main reason was the climate after October 7th, 2023. As an outspoken defender of the Jewish people, and Jewish himself, he found his Montreal university, which he says has been colloquially called "Gaza University" for 25 years and which he says cancelled Benjamin Netanyahu back in 2002, simply infeasible. He adds a warm note about his new home, calling Mississippians "honorary Lebanese" for a culture of hospitality that reminds him of his own.
Anti-Semitism and the well of empathy that runs dry
The moderator, also Jewish, raises a thread from the book: anti-Semitism is the one place where suicidal empathy seems to run in reverse, against Jews rather than toward them. She cites a contemporaneous piece headlined around an "explosion of anti-Semitism."
Saad's explanation rests on the oppressor-versus-oppressed schema he says now governs progressive moral judgment. Jews, in that schema, are cast as oppressors, not the oppressed, so they fall outside the circle of protected empathy. He pushes the timing hard: within one day of October 7th, he says, Jews had exhausted their well of empathy, because preemptive protests against Israel were already underway at his university before Israel had fired a single shot in response.
Then he turns the lens around to argue Israelis suffer from the same disease. The architect of October 7th, Yahya Sinwar, had been imprisoned for life as a terrorist. While imprisoned he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and Israeli doctors, bound by what Saad calls their Hippocratic instinct to save even an avowed enemy, treated him. He was eventually released. The kindness, in Saad's telling, bought nothing: Sinwar repaid it by masterminding the attack. It is his cleanest single illustration that compassion extended without an evolutionary calculus can be lethal to the one extending it.
Wood crickets and neuroparasitology
The talk turns to protest culture through a vignette from the book: a pink-haired gay woman at a pro-Palestinian rally who, told that she herself would be killed in the place she is championing, says she does not care, she is here to protest. Why, the moderator asks, do people seem not to grasp what they are protesting for, only that they have a right to protest?
Here Saad introduces his master metaphor, neuroparasitology. Parasitology is the study of host-parasite interactions. A tapeworm parasitizes the intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is different: it has to reach the host's brain and rewire its circuitry to serve the parasite's interests. His signature case is the wood cricket. The insect abhors water and wants nothing to do with it. But once a hairworm infects its brain, the cricket is compelled to leap into water and drown, because the parasite needs water to complete its reproductive cycle. The cricket cheerfully commits suicide on the parasite's behalf. Saad's whole point: a human running a parasitic idea is a wood cricket, marching toward self-destruction for the benefit of something that has hijacked the controls. The protester championing a cause that would kill her is, in his frame, behaving exactly like the cricket.
Calibrating empathy: the gift-giving study and the trolley problem
If empathy can be too much, how do you find the right amount? Saad's answer is that empathy, like most evolved traits, has to be tethered to an evolutionary calculus. He cites his own research with a former doctoral student on how people allocate a gift-giving budget. Hand someone $1,000 and watch where it goes, and people, even with no conscious idea of why, are exquisitely calibrated: larger gifts to close kin, more to siblings and children, less to a second or third cousin. There is an evolutionary logic running underneath the spending. He argues empathy obeys the same kind of calculus.
To sharpen it he invokes the trolley problem from experimental philosophy. A trolley is barreling toward three of your biological children; you can pull a lever to divert it onto five random strangers. Naive arithmetic says five outweighs three, so let the children die. Evolutionary logic says the opposite, and so do most people's guts, because we would readily jump in front of a bus to save our own children. Empathy, in other words, is supposed to be weighted, not flat.
His example of empathy gone past the peak is grim. A woman was gang-raped in Germany by men speaking Arabic and Farsi. When police asked her what language the attackers spoke, telling the truth risked, in the prevailing logic, marginalizing the Middle Eastern community, so she lied and said German. Saad's verdict, stated as the evolutionary psychologist in the room: our emotional system did not evolve to empathize with our rapists. (This is a strongly contested anecdote of the kind that circulates as illustration; Saad presents it as exemplary of a pattern he says recurs throughout the book.)
Figure 2. The "inverted U" Saad invokes to answer "how much empathy is right?" Benefit rises with empathy up to an adaptive peak, then falls. Too little lands in psychopathy; too much, past the peak, becomes what he calls maladaptive empathy and, at the extreme, suicidal empathy. The shape is the point: more is not always better.
Idea pathogens and cultural relativism
Is the phenomenon really worse now, or are we just noticing it more? Worse, Saad says, because of the cocktail of parasitic ideas turning people into wood crickets. He points back to his earlier book, The Parasitic Mind, where he introduced idea pathogens, ideas that hijack the capacity for critical thinking.
His worked example is cultural relativism: the idea that it is culturally imperialist to judge the beliefs and practices of another culture. Run that idea to its conclusion and you are disarmed. If a culture wants to perform female genital mutilation on five-year-old girls, "shut up, racist." Child brides, "shut up, racist." Honor killings, "shut up, racist." Once cultural relativism is internalized, Saad argues, you lose the standing to say you do not want people who hold those beliefs admitted to your country, which pushes you toward suicidally empathetic open-border policies. The idea, swallowed, produces the behavior. That is the mechanism in one move.
Satire as a weapon, and the linguistic shifts
The moderator quotes Saad's own euphemism-flipping from the book: under suicidal empathy, home invaders become "surprise house guests," rapists become "undocumented love-makers," even "altruistic sperm donors." Asked to explain the trick, Saad describes his method: take an insane position, push it to its extreme boundary, then fold his arms and wait for reality to catch up to the satire. He notes, with relish, why dictators kill the sharp-tongued and the venomous-penned before the strong: ideas are the real threat. He also takes a swing at academic colleagues who think it unbecoming of a professor to use humor or blunt language. He calls that snobbery foolish, because his goal is to change minds, and a mind-changer keeps every tool in the box, from comedy to the most professorial register. He is, he says, not a one-trick pony.
Misguided inequalities, E.O. Wilson, and socialism
Saad has a chapter of what he calls misguided inequalities, propositions people now treat as obviously true: "my truth is greater than the truth," "socialism is greater than capitalism." The moderator reads a Ronald Reagan line on socialism as "a system that works only in heaven, where it isn't needed, and in hell, where they've already got it," and asks how to right the wrong.
Saad answers with the biologist E.O. Wilson, the late Harvard entomologist who studied social ants. Ants have a reproductive queen and indistinguishable castes of workers and soldiers, a genuinely communistic social structure. Asked his view of socialism and communism, Wilson gave what Saad calls one of the greatest pithy answers he has heard: "Great idea, wrong species." Ants evolved for it; humans did not, because humans are hierarchical. Some are taller, shorter, better-looking, harder-working. Impose a communistic system on a hierarchical species and you always get the same result. It has been tried a hundred times and always fails, "but rest assured, Bernie Sanders and AOC are going to solve it for us."
Yes, he says, college students love socialism, because socialism is adorable in first grade ("sharing is caring") and then collides with the first paycheck. He turns it into a set piece on Quebec, his "socialist utopia." Top federal marginal rate 33 percent, top provincial rate 25.75 percent, so into the high 50s. Spend the 42 percent left and it gets hit with federal and provincial sales tax at 15 percent. Add carbon tax and the rest and he reckons he keeps maybe 30 cents on the dollar. Put another way: start working January 1st and you work for free for the government until the end of August, with the government generously letting you keep what you earn from September on. The punchline is his coming move south, "inshallah, I shall be a fellow American soon," and the aside that during the event's Pledge of Allegiance he debated whether a Canadian should raise his hand, then did it as an honorary American.
Disagreeing without becoming enemies
The Reagan Library's civility mission prompts a gentler stretch: how do we disagree better, how do we debate openly without dehumanizing the other side? Saad answers with a scene from the day before, at Crystal Cove near Newport Beach. He and his wife fell into conversation with an Iranian Muslim, then an Iranian Christian joined, and there sat a Lebanese Jew, an Iranian Christian, and an Iranian Muslim having an intense conversation in good spirit and walking away shaking hands. It is possible, he says. Part of why people respond to him, even on hard subjects, is that he is usually smiling; they call him the happy warrior.
He extends it to Joe Rogan, a friend, on what he says was his 12th appearance. Usually the talk roams everywhere, even to Sasquatch, but this time, after ten minutes on the book, Rogan kept raising anti-Israel talking points. The challenge was to hold his ground civilly with a friend, and he thinks they pulled it off. On whether social media has coarsened disagreement, he says the anonymity clearly fuels it: he gets vastly more hate online than in person, only one in-person threat ever against a flood of online death threats. Still, he refuses to write off the platform, because the audience he reached would have been impossible as a stay-in-your-lane professor. Good and bad in everything, social media included.
The cure: first-order myopia and the inoculation chapter
Is there a solution? The final chapter, he says, is entirely about inoculation. The core failure of the suicidally empathetic is what he calls the myopia of first-order effects: ignoring that the world runs on chains of consequences, a butterfly effect. Letting everyone who knocks at the border in feels good, an immediate empathy-based dopamine hit, a chance to admire yourself in the mirror of moral preening. But there are downstream effects. Admit millions from cultures whose foundational values are, in his words, antithetical to the host's, and you should not be surprised by a rise in Jew hatred and homophobia. He names Dearborn, Paterson, New Jersey, and Minnesota as places where he says demographic change has reshaped the local fabric. His larger claim is that American exceptionalism is not geography but a unique set of values, and that those values can be lost. The sad irony he closes on: that it takes a Lebanese Jewish Canadian to remind Americans of it.
Asked for practical habits, he returns to the inverted U. Empathy is not linear; more is not always better; past the peak it is maladaptive. He applies it to trans activism, which he frames as misguided empathy that, in his telling, elevates the transgender athlete (whom he describes in deliberately blunt terms) above all the biological women displaced from a podium spot. His prescription is to keep empathy tethered to biological reality rather than letting it run without limit. (These are contested positions stated as Saad's own.)
A digression worth keeping: biology and human behavior
Asked about his most popular classes, Saad gives the through-line of his teaching. Whether the course is consumer psychology or the psychology of decision-making, he applies evolutionary psychology to explain the biological underpinnings of behavior, and that is what blows students' minds, because most have never applied biology to humans at all. He finds it extraordinary. For every other species on earth you would never study it without invoking its biological heritage, yet for Homo sapiens alone we run whole disciplines, anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, without ever touching the biological imperatives that make us human. The classes that land hardest are the ones that put biology back in.
The audience takes over
The back half of the evening is the Q and A, and it carries some of the sharpest material.
A questioner worries about civilizational decline. Saad answers in good-news-bad-news form. The good news: there is an actionable cure for what he calls civilizational seppuku, his name for the West's self-destruction, borrowed from the samurai ritual disembowelment that restores honor after disgrace. The West, he says, has been taught it is born of original sin, evil, living on stolen land, transphobic, Islamophobic, bigoted, patriarchal, so the only "honorable" exit is to destroy itself. The autocorrections are easy and accessible: close the borders, do not admit people who do not share your foundational values, and recognize that not everyone has a god-given right to be in America. The bad news: he sees zero evidence the West will implement even a millimeter of correction; he sees doubling and tripling down instead. He introduces his staging scale. The US is only at stage two, protected by inoculations like the First and Second Amendments. Canada, some Scandinavian countries, and Britain are at stage five, a level above the previously known maximum of stage four.
A questioner argues the country only looks 50/50 divided because what he calls an "industrial derangement complex" has taken over its sensibilities, and that the real split is more like 80/20. Saad agrees and goes further: the silent majority abhors the nonsense; the split is even more lopsided than 80/20. The problem is what he wants added as an eighth deadly sin, pathological cowardice. People are so cowed into herd conformity that adults email him to ask, sincerely, whether it is true that men can now menstruate, needing a professor's imprimatur to be told no. The reason the parasitic ideas flourish is that they go unchallenged. He reads out the template of his most common email: lavish private compliments, ending with "please don't include my name." He writes back asking whether that final sentence is not exactly why we are in this predicament. Plenty of people cheer him on privately and then refuse to stand up beside him, always with a justification, which leaves him carrying the cost: leaving Montreal over death threats, living with armed security, keeping his wife and children out of public view. If everyone stood up in unison, he says, the problem would be solved by next Tuesday.
A questioner in an empathy-based profession describes wanting to withdraw from society entirely, not from cowardice but from exhaustion. Saad answers from his own experience inside academia. The epistemology that should drive a university is the epistemology of truth, the scientific method approximating reality. It has been displaced, he says, by an epistemology of care, which he attributes to the feminization of the university, noting that meetings run in what he describes as a maternal register made him feel returned to kindergarten. The damage shows up as forbidden knowledge: research that might hurt a marginalized group's feelings goes undone. Study sex differences and find women outperform men, publish with pride; find men outperform women, as he says you should expect in a sexually dimorphic species, and you bury it or be accused of promulgating the patriarchy. A system that should reward meritocracy and truth has been captured by care. His own coping strategy is unapologetic: he is a honey badger, marches to his own drummer, and does not care who dislikes it.
A self-described superfan named Michelle asks whether suicidal empathy existed before postmodernism, which Saad has called the granddaddy of idea pathogens. Not in the precise modern form, he says, but the human mind's capacity to be parasitized is ancient. Viruses have always existed; Ebola and shingles are both viruses but different ones. He offers the old New England logic of testing a suspected witch by drowning: if she floats she is a witch, if she drowns, oops, she was innocent, a perfectly self-sealing parasitic idea the culture eventually outgrew. What is unique now is the specific roster of parasitic ideas. He singles out postmodernism because it negates objective truth itself, which is what licenses up being down, freedom being slavery, men being women, my truth outranking the truth. He calls it the most nihilistic form of intellectual terrorism. Michelle's follow-up, whether suicidal empathy can run toward one's own kin, he declines at the kin level but answers at the individual level with a stomach-turning anecdote from the book about a progressive American woman who, he says, traveled to demonstrate a belief that black men never commit violence, was raped there, and later wrote that she was grateful because she had served as a vehicle for the rapist's rage at white supremacy. Saad offers it as suicidal empathy in its purest individual form. (It is an extreme and contested anecdote, presented as illustrative.)
A Jewish questioner asks why Jews, having survived 3,000 years of attempts to eliminate them, do not collectively recognize the danger, citing the share of New York Jews who voted for a candidate he names. Saad reserves the wood cricket label especially for Jews who, in his view, side against their own survival, and names the physician Gabor Mate as the archetype. He is scathing about Mate's identity claim, arguing that being removed from his family at six months old does not make one a conscious Holocaust survivor in any meaningful sense, and that the rhetorical move exists to license harsh anti-Israel statements. (This is a sharply polemical personal characterization, offered as Saad's opinion of Mate's public stance.)
An Israeli immigrant who fled Canada during the pandemic thanks him at length and praises the freedom he found in the United States. Saad receives it warmly.
The final audience question, from a film fan, asks why Hollywood keeps prioritizing message over art with no financial penalty for the box-office failures. This launches Saad's clearest piece of business analysis, a four-stage history of the company-customer relationship that he says is in his book.
Figure 3. Saad's four eras of the company-customer relationship, drawn as a growing stack of obligations. Each era adds a duty: just make the product, then honor varied preferences, then avoid harming third parties, and finally take sides in social justice. His argument is that the fourth duty can override the third, second, and first, including the duty to make money, so a film studio ends up optimizing message instead of art.
In Saad's telling, a century ago the relationship was production-centric: a carmaker's only job was to make cars, captured by Henry Ford's line that you can have any color you like as long as it is black. Next came marketing-centric: meet demand while honoring heterogeneous preferences, some want red, some blue. The third social contract, from roughly the 1960s, added a duty not to harm third parties, the seed of the green marketing movement. The fourth stage, the one the questioner is feeling, adds active allyship in social justice, and Saad argues that fourth duty can now take precedence over the fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder profit. His example is the Jaguar rebrand ad, all stylized identity imagery and not a single car, to which Elon Musk, whom he names as a friend and the front-cover blurb of his book, replied, "Hey Jaguar, do you still produce cars?" Borrowing from operations research, the branch of applied mathematics about optimizing an objective, Saad's diagnosis is that studios are no longer optimizing the value of art; they are optimizing social justice.
Era
What the company owes
Saad's marker
Production-centric (early 1900s)
Just produce the product. Preferences are irrelevant.
Henry Ford: "any color, as long as it's black" make it
Marketing-centric
Meet demand while honoring varied customer preferences.
Red, blue, or black cars serve taste
Social contract (from the 1960s)
Do the above without harming any third party.
Green marketing, don't harm the environment no harm
Social-justice-centric (today)
Be an active ally, even ahead of profit and the core product.
The Jaguar ad with no car message over product
The one takeaway and the tribute to Reagan
Asked for the single thing he wants readers to keep, Saad's answer is plain: please, please, please do not be suicidally empathetic. You may not see the end of the civilization in your lifetime or your children's, but he invokes the British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume A Study of History concluded that civilizations do not die by murder, they die by suicide. Saad's claim is that the specific instrument of our suicide is dysregulated empathy. Be kind, he says, he considers himself a very kind and empathetic person, but within the bounds of evolutionary theory. Do not be kind to those unworthy of your kindness.
The evening closes on the host. They had toured the Library together and stopped at the Reagans' grave site near the 22nd anniversary of President Reagan's passing, and the host had seen Saad's tribute post. Asked what Reagan means to him, Saad goes back to boyhood Beirut, before he spoke English, watching the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone with Clint Eastwood as the larger-than-life figure who rides in and renders justice against the bad people. The boy who could not yet speak English wanted to be that guy. Reagan, he says, was that guy in real life. Then the audience headed to the book signing.
Key takeaways
Empathy is a real, evolved, good trait, and Saad is explicit that this is not an attack on it. The argument is about dosage: empathy follows an inverted U, and past the peak it becomes maladaptive and ultimately self-destructive.
"Suicidal empathy" is empathy that is hyperactive, fired in the wrong situations, and aimed at the wrong targets, including those who would do you harm.
Saad's mechanism is parasitic: idea pathogens (cultural relativism, and above all postmodernism) act like neuroparasites that rewire judgment, turning a person into a "wood cricket" that acts against its own survival.
Empathy should be tethered to an evolutionary calculus, the same way gift-giving and the trolley-problem intuition weight kin and consequences rather than flat headcounts.
The myopia of first-order effects is the core error: feeling good now while ignoring downstream consequences.
Saad ranks national decline on a five-stage scale, placing the US at stage two (protected by constitutional inoculations) and Canada, Britain, and parts of Scandinavia at stage five.
He blames the campus and "epistemology of care" displacing the "epistemology of truth," producing forbidden knowledge that science refuses to pursue.
His proposed cure, in the book's final chapter, is inoculation: secure borders, refuse hostile foundational values, and above all break the "pathological cowardice" of the silent majority by speaking up. Many of these claims are contested and are presented here as Saad's own positions.
Chapters
Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read. This video has no creator-set chapters, so these markers are estimated from position in the talk.
0:00 What suicidal empathy means (Aristotle's sweet spot)
3:30 Why he wrote the book: campuses and decoupling from reality
7:30 Leaving Concordia for Ole Miss after October 7th
10:00 Anti-Semitism and the well of empathy that ran dry
13:30 Wood crickets and neuroparasitology
16:30 Calibrating empathy: gift-giving study and the trolley problem
21:00 Idea pathogens and cultural relativism
24:00 Satire as a weapon, and the linguistic shifts
27:00 E.O. Wilson, "great idea, wrong species," and socialism
31:00 Disagreeing without becoming enemies (Crystal Cove, Joe Rogan)
35:00 The cure: first-order myopia and inoculation
38:30 Audience Q&A begins: civilizational seppuku and the five stages
42:00 The 80/20 split and pathological cowardice
45:00 The epistemology of care and forbidden knowledge
47:30 Postmodernism, the witch test, and suicidal empathy at the individual level
49:30 Gabor Mate and the wood cricket Jews
51:00 The four eras of the company-customer relationship (Jaguar, Musk)
52:30 The one takeaway (Toynbee) and the tribute to Reagan
Notable quotes
Too little empathy, you could be a psychopath. Too much empathy, if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, and if it faces the inappropriate targets, then you have that cocktail of suicidal empathy.
Gad Saad, 1:10
You can't build a bridge using lesbian dance theory. You can't develop an economic model using a queer indigenous ancestral knowledge.
Gad Saad, 4:20
The hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump in water, merrily committing suicide, in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle.
Gad Saad, 14:30
Our emotional system did not evolve to empathize with our rapists.
Gad Saad, 20:10
I take an insane position and I push it to its extreme boundary, and then I cross my hands and wait for reality to catch up to my satire.
Gad Saad, 24:40
Great idea, wrong species.
Gad Saad, quoting E.O. Wilson, 28:30
Civilizations do not die by murder, they die by suicide.
Gad Saad, quoting Arnold Toynbee, 52:40
Elon Musk, friend and front-cover blurb, and the Jaguar rebrand he mocked.
Yahya Sinwar, the figure in Saad's Israeli "suicidal empathy" example.
The one idea to walk away with
Saad's whole evening collapses to a single shape: the inverted U. Empathy is not a virtue you can have too much of, the way courage and honesty have a too-much. Past the peak, kindness aimed without judgment at those who would harm you stops being moral and starts being fatal. Whether you accept his politics or not, that is the testable core of the talk, and it is the thing he begs the room to remember on the way to the book signing: be kind, but tether the kindness to reality, and do not be kind to those who are not worthy of it.
Full transcript
We'll start really easy. I scrambled all those words up. What do you mean by suicidal empathy?
So, as you correctly said, empathy is an evolutionarily selected trait. So this is not an attack on empathy. We are a social species. For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called theory of mind, which is part of cognitive empathy. But like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot. The same applies to empathy. Too little empathy, you could be a psychopath. Too much empathy, if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, and if it faces the inappropriate targets, caring more about Guatemalan illegal immigrants than caring about American vets who might have lost their limbs fighting for the freedoms of the United States, then you have that cocktail of suicidal empathy.
And was there a specific moment, a specific story that made you say, I need to write this book?
Not a single story. So I've been a professor now for 32 years, and I hate to say this, but pretty much every single devastatingly bad idea that ultimately led to suicidal empathy was spawned regrettably on university campuses, because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. Especially because, as Thomas Sowell also explained, when you have disciplines that are fully decoupled from the autocorrective mechanisms of reality, you can stand up, pontificate about nonsense, and reality doesn't sort of slap you back out of your stupor. And this is, by the way, why some fields, the business school, the engineering school, are less likely to be parasitized by suicidal empathy, because you can't build a bridge using lesbian dance theory. You can't develop an economic model using a queer indigenous ancestral knowledge. And because of that, there are some disciplines that are inherently more likely to have this kind of nonsense. So for me it's been a long journey ending up in this book, just seeing the departure from reason.
Well, so right, being a professor, seeing this on college campuses, and we're going to talk about suicidal empathy a little bit more as we get into this, but when you're confronted with it, with students protesting or things that you're seeing on campus, how are you dealing with that?
Luckily in my classes I didn't have too much of that stuff. Maybe in part because I was very disciplined to not bring any political discussions. If I'm teaching a course on evolutionary psychology or psychology of decision-making, I don't have to tell the students what my thoughts are on Justin Trudeau. And so I wouldn't get... and if you want to guess, they're not very [laughter] they're not very complimentary. So I didn't experience it in my classrooms, but where I did experience the craziness is, I took a two-year leave. I'm now leaving actually Concordia and joining Ole Miss permanently as a distinguished professor, and one of the reasons I left, maybe the main reason, is because after October 7th it became incredibly difficult for me. I'm a very outspoken defender of the Jewish people. I'm Jewish myself. [applause] Thank you. My university, the one in Montreal, has been colloquially referred to as Gaza University for 25 years. Benjamin Netanyahu was cancelled in 2002. And so it simply became infeasible for me to be there. And it turns out that the Mississippians, I call them the honorary Lebanese, their culture of hospitality is like the Lebanese. So I think we're going to fit in very nicely there.
So I actually want to ask a question about that. I'm actually also Jewish, and I found there were some sections in your book that you talked about the growing rise of anti-Semitism. And you even talked about how it's the one area where suicidal empathy almost doesn't seem to be going toward the Jews. It almost seems to be going against it. And as I was reading your book, I saw an article, so I'm going to read it. It was an Axios article and the article was called Explosion of Anti-Semitism. And basically it was saying the same thing. The level of anti-Semitism is growing. There seems to be no empathy toward the Jewish race right now. And I was just curious why you thought that.
So I think... I mean, there are several reasons, but one of which is the idea that the Jews are viewed as the oppressors and not the oppressed. So literally within one day of October 7th the Jews had exhausted their possible well of empathy, because already at my university there were preemptive protests against Israel. Israel hadn't yet fired a single weapon and already the Jews were no longer deserving of empathy. But to the point about Jews and empathy, even the Israelis, by the way, suffer from suicidal empathy, because the architect of October 7th, Yahya Sinwar, had been imprisoned for life as a terrorist. Eventually he was released, but while he was in prison, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. And the Israelis thought that their Hippocratic oath, their desire to save even their worst avowed enemy, superseded their feelings of repulsion towards him. They saved him, and that didn't buy them any empathy. He repaid them by being the architect of October 7th.
So let's talk more about protest culture. There's a chapter in your book where a woman's being interviewed, right? And she's attending a pro-Palestinian rally. You describe her as a pink-haired gay woman. And when it's explained to her that if she actually went to Palestine as she is, she'd be killed, she goes on to say she doesn't care. She's pro-Palestine. She's here to protest. Why do you think people aren't even realizing what they're protesting for? It's more, almost now they feel like they have a right to protest whether they even understand what they're protesting for.
So this is why I use the framework of neuroparasitology, and let me explain what that is. Parasitology is simply the study of host-parasite interactions. So a tapeworm could be a parasite, but it parasitizes your intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is a parasite that needs to end up in the host's brain, altering its circuitry to suit its interests. So you often... those of you who follow me on social media, or maybe who've read the book, I talk about wood crickets. When somebody is exhibiting that type of suicidal tendencies, I call them a wood cricket. Now, why do I use that term? A wood cricket, the actual insect, abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a hairworm that goes to its brain, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to jump in water, merrily committing suicide, in order for it to complete its reproductive cycle in water. So the pink-haired lesbian woman is behaving exactly akin to... [laughter] a new nickname for her.
So how do you actually determine what is the right level of empathy?
Right. So empathy, like most things, has to be tethered to an evolutionary calculus. So for example, I've done studies with one of my former doctoral students where we looked at how do people allocate their gift-giving budgets. If I give you $1,000, how will you allocate that budget? And it turns out that people, even unbeknownst to them, they may not know the evolutionary reasons, are very, very well calibrated to give their gifts in a way that makes evolutionary sense. Right? So I give to close kin larger gifts than I would give to a second or third cousin. I give more to my siblings and my children than I would to a second cousin. Meaning that there is an evolutionary calculus that is behind my allocation of investments. The same applies to empathy. So let me give you an example. Many of you have heard of the trolley problem. The trolley problem is a problem that you typically see in experimental philosophy. If a trolley is barreling down towards three of your biological children and you could pull a lever and it could be diverted and kill five random strangers, what will you do? Well, the evolutionary logic is not that, since three is smaller than five, kill your children, because most of us would be much more willing to jump in front of a bus to save our biological children for obvious evolutionary reasons. And so empathy is also bound by an evolutionary calculus. But here is when it's too much empathy. Let me give you one example, but there are a million of these in the book. A woman was gang raped in Germany by a bunch of men who were speaking in Arabic and Farsi. When the cops tried to identify who the perpetrators were and asked her a whole bunch of questions, one of them was, what language were they speaking? Now, if she says the truth, which is they were speaking Arabic and Farsi, that might marginalize the noble Middle Eastern community. So she lied and said that they were speaking German. Well, I'm here to tell you, as the evolutionary psychologist here, that our emotional system did not evolve to empathize with our rapists.
Has this phenomenon become more pronounced in recent years, or are we just paying more attention to it?
It has become more pronounced because of the cocktail of parasitic ideas that have turned us into wood crickets. And let me give you a specific example. In one of my earlier books, The Parasitic Mind, I talk about what I call idea pathogens that literally hijack our capacity to engage in critical thinking. So one such pathogen is called cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is the idea that it's wrong for you, it's culturally imperialistic of you, to judge the beliefs and practices of another culture. If they wish to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, shut up, racist. If they wish to have child brides, shut up, racist. If they wish to engage in honor killings, shut up, racist. Well, if I internalize cultural relativism, it then renders me impotent in terms of saying I don't want people who hold those beliefs to be let into my country. Therefore I'm much more likely to become suicidally empathetic in my open border policies. So internalizing the parasitic idea leads to suicidal empathy.
So I love all these terms you have. And so I'm going to give a couple more in your book. I think I know where we're going with this. There's a chapter and you're using terminology, and I had to read the chapter a couple times because I kept having to keep going back to what you wrote. So he says, "Using suicidal empathy, they're no longer home invaders, they're surprise house guests. They're no longer rapists, they're undocumented love-makers." Or altruistic sperm donors. Yes, yes. How was that? Can you, and this is really just a continuation of your last answer, but can you sort of talk about these shifts?
Yeah. So one of the reasons why I think, if I may say, my satire is very successful is because I take an insane position and I push it to its extreme boundary, and then I kind of cross my hands and wait for reality to catch up to my satire. [laughter] And that's, by the way, one of the reasons why dictators, typically, when they try to eliminate people, the first ones they eliminate are not the ones with the big muscles. They eliminate the ones with the sharp tongues, the ones with the venomous pen, because it's those guys that can attack my dictatorial positions. The big guys, I can get rid of them quickly. So, satire. And by the way, to my great chagrin, many of my academic colleagues, who are high-falutin, who speak with a progressive lisp, who cross their legs like Justin Trudeau, they think that it is unbecoming of a professor to use some of the communication modalities that I use. But that's why they're imbeciles, because I'm in the business of trying to change people's minds. So within my weaponry, my toolbox, I can use many different tools. Sometimes I can use humor, sometimes I can be as professorial as you can get. So I'm not a one-trick pony. All possible modalities are up for grabs in order to change your mind.
So in addition to calling types of people different names that are both eye-opening and funny and scary, you also have a chapter where you list a whole slew of what you call misguided inequalities. So an example that I wrote down was, you call, you know, "my truth is always greater than your truth." Another misguided inequality you list is "socialism is greater than capitalism." Now I found this quote from President Reagan, so I'm going to read it: "We've been creeping closer to socialism, a system that someone once said works only in heaven, where it isn't needed, and in hell, where they've already got it." What's your recommendations for righting this wrong? Well, specifically socialism. Socialism.
So I'm going to tell you a quote that I often use when discussing socialism. It comes from E.O. Wilson. I don't know if any of you know who that is. He's a Harvard biologist who recently passed away. He was an entomologist. He studied social ants. Now, social ants have a unique social structure in that there is a reproductive queen, and then there's a whole caste of indistinguishable worker ants and a whole caste of indistinguishable warrior ants, soldier ants. So when E.O. Wilson was asked, "Professor Wilson, what are your thoughts on socialism slash communism?" he gave one of the arguably greatest pithy answers that I've ever heard. He said, "Great idea, wrong species." Right? Meaning that social ants have evolved a social structure that is communistic. But human beings are not communistic, because we are a hierarchical species. Some of us are taller, shorter, better-looking, worse-looking, harder-working, less hardworking. So to impose a socio-political-economic system, as per socialism slash communism, on a species that is hierarchical, you'll end up with always the same outcome. It's been tried a hundred times. It always fails. But rest assured, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, is gonna solve it for us. We're saved.
Just out of curiosity, because you are a college professor, do you see a lot of college students supporting the idea of socialism?
Yes. Yes. Because socialism is an idea that is very cute when I'm in grade one. Sharing is caring, right? [laughter] But then there is this thing called growing up and reality, and you receive that first paycheck. If you're in Canada, by the way, if any of you dare complain about your taxes in California, come live in Quebec for a while. Let me just tell you what socialist utopia Quebec looks like. The highest marginal tax at the federal level is 33%. At the provincial level, it's 25.75%. So we're getting into the high 50s. Now, the 42% that remains in my pocket, if I go out and spend it, I'm taxed both provincial sales tax and federal sales tax at 15%. So now I've already lost 58%. Now the money that's left, I've lost 15%. Add carbon tax, mother earth tax, hugging-the-trees tax, and the rest of them, I end up with probably about 30 cents to the dollar. Now, let's put it another way. If I start working on January 1st, I work for free for the government until end of August, and starting in September they allow me to keep my money. That's very kind of them. Yes. That's why I'm moving to this. That's why, inshallah, [applause] I shall be a fellow American soon. By the way, I was very conflicted, because when you did the pledge, yes, I thought about that as I did it, do I put my hand up? But I'm Canadian. I said, you know what, I'm going to do it as an honorary American. [laughter]
So we've been talking about suicidal empathy. We've been talking about protests. Here at the Reagan Library, the Reagan Foundation Institute, we do a lot of work on civility. Really the goal of, how do we disagree better? How can you disagree without being disagreeable? How can we encourage open debate without dehumanizing, my gosh, dehumanizing, thank you, those who disagree.
Yes. Yesterday we were in an area of Newport Beach called Crystal Cove. We were sitting down. I think you know maybe where I'm going to go with the story. My wife and I were sitting there. A gentleman sits down, and you know, we're friendly, so we start talking to him. He's Iranian Muslim. Okay. Another friend of his comes along, one of the very rare Iranian Christians. And here are the Lebanese Jews. We sat down around the table. Lebanese Jew, Iranian Christian, Iranian Muslim, had a very intense conversation in completely good spirit. We walked away shaking hands. It's possible. I think you know your morphology. One of the reasons I think people resonate with me, even when I'm dealing with very difficult subjects, I'm often smiley. They call me the happy warrior. So there is a way to interact with people even on very difficult subjects so that you walk away still feeling as though they're not your enemy. I recently had a chat with Joe Rogan, who's a good friend of mine. This was, I think, my 12th appearance on his show. Usually we go all over the place. It's very organic conversation. We could end up talking about Sasquatch. But in this case, the first 10 minutes were spent on the book, and then the rest of the conversation he kept raising sort of anti-Israel talking points, which was very difficult, because you have to do it with civility while being agreeable. He's a friend of mine, and I think we were able to pull it off. So there is a way to be able to disagree in an agreeable way.
Do you think any of this harsher disagreement has sort of stemmed from how fast social media is growing and the fact that you can somewhat be anonymous on social media?
I mean, certainly that. If I just look at the hate that I get, I get drastically more hate online than I do in person. I've only had once a person threaten me directly in real life, whereas I receive a gazillion death threats online, precisely because of anonymity. So, but I don't want to throw away the potential of social media, because yes, there is a bad side to social media, but the platform that I've been able to build, the number of people that I've been able to reach, I could have never done so if I had been a stay-in-your-lane professor. So there are good and bad to everything, including social media.
Is there a solution to suicidal empathy?
I mean, there is, and in the last chapter, the whole chapter is about inoculation against suicidal empathy. Maybe I can give you a few specifics and then I can maybe blow it up to 30,000 feet above. Many of the people who succumb to suicidal empathy are stuck in what I call the myopia of first-order effects. Meaning that they don't recognize that the world is comprised of, like a butterfly effect, right, there are sequences. So it's nice when people knock at the borders of a country to let them in, all of them, because that gives me an immediate dopamine hit. It's an empathy-based dopamine hit. I could stroke my luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral preening and say I'm such a good person, right? But there are downstream consequences of that, and hence the myopia of first-order effect. For example, if you let in millions of people that come from cultures that couldn't be any more antithetical in their foundational values to our foundational values, it shouldn't surprise you that you're going to have a rise of Jew hatred, of homophobia. You're going to have Dearborn. You're going to have Paterson, New Jersey. You're going to have Minnesota. And as the demographic realities change, the inherent fabrics of American exceptionalism will disappear. Right? The United States is not the United States because you have beautiful Pacific Ocean. It's because there is a set of values that are part of the American ethos that is truly unique in the history of world societies. Don't lose that. And it's a sad state that it takes a Lebanese Jewish Canadian [laughter] to have to remind you of that. Yeah. [applause]
So what practical habits can ordinary citizens adopt to remain compassionate while also thinking clearly?
Always remember that, like anything in life, as I mentioned earlier, it's not a linear relationship. It's not more empathy is always better than less empathy. Empathy follows an inverted U curve. So once you start getting into the diminishing returns of that curve, you're exhibiting maladaptive empathy. And so it's difficult, because it's on a case-by-case basis. For example, the trans activism stems from a misguided form of empathy whereby the transgender person, aka a woman with a penis, is afforded greater empathy on the podium than all of the biological women that otherwise have just been cheated out of a spot on that. And the reason for that is because your empathy calculus has become hijacked. That unique person called the transgender person is worth more empathy than all of the other biological women. So just be mindful of that. It's not a drastic, never-ending empathy. It has to be tethered to a biological reality.
So I have additional questions, but I want to ask them at the end. So we're going to turn to the audience, but just out of curiosity, what are your most popular classes that you currently teach?
Well, in all of my courses, whether it be consumer psychology or psychology of decision-making or whatever it is, I always apply evolutionary psychology to explain the biological underpinnings of why we do the things that we do. And that's really where the students' minds are blown away, because most students, especially... I'm housed at, I mean at Ole Miss it'll be a different department, but historically I've been housed at the business school. I apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior. And most students in the business school or in the social sciences in general have never applied biology to study human behavior, which is quite extraordinary. Right? Every single other species on earth, you would never dare study that species without invoking its biological heritage. There's only one species called Homo sapiens that you could study anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology without ever exploring the biological imperatives that make us human. And so usually the most successful classes are the ones where the students are really learning about evolutionary psychology.
We're going to turn to all of you in the audience. We do have staff members with microphones. Please do wait for a microphone to be brought to you so that the people watching at home can hear your question. There's someone coming. Hold on one second.
[audience question about civilizational decline and suicide]
Right, no, great question. So this genre of question I usually answer with, there is a good news and bad news. Okay. The good news is that there is an actionable solution that the West can implement to autocorrect what I call civilizational seppuku. Seppuku, for those of you who don't know, is in the Japanese culture, certainly the samurai class, where it's an honor culture. Nothing is worse than losing face, you know, living a shameful life. The only way that you could then redeem yourself is if you self, you know, disembowel. And so I argue that the West is committing civilizational seppuku. We were born of dermatological original sin. We are evil. We live on stolen land. We're transphobic, Islamophobic, bigoted, patriarchal. So the only way that we can resolve this problem is to commit civilizational seppuku. So the good news is that there are very easily accessible autocorrective procedures. Close the borders. Don't let in people who don't share your foundational values. Not everybody has the god-given right to be in America. Right? If you sit and chant death to Jews, death to the infidels all day long, then you don't belong here. Okay? But here's the bad news. I see zero evidence that the West is willing to implement even one millimeter of autocorrection. As a matter of fact, what I'm seeing is a doubling down and tripling down in the suicidal empathy. Now, the United States, since we're here in the US, and certainly in this austere environment, is only at stage two suicidal empathy. You'll be happy to know that I've already assigned Canada as stage five suicide level, which is higher than the heretofore known stage four, which is the highest level. So Canada is at stage five. Some of the Scandinavian countries are at stage five. Britain is at stage five. Now, you're at stage two only because there are certain inoculations that you have, First Amendment, Second Amendment, and a few other things that make it a bit more difficult for you to swim in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy. But if you don't listen to guys like me, you will end up in the very laudable stage five suicidal empathy.
[next audience question]
If it's okay with you, I'd like to consider you, think of you, as a quintessential American. Oh, you're very kind. Thank you. I have a question. And by the way, thank you for your body of work. It's really critical. My question has to do with, I think it's understandable to think of this as a divided country, but I'm not sure that's accurate. If you consider a metric, the 80/20 metric on various issues, and I think what has happened, like the camel's nose under the tent, what I consider the industrial derangement complex has come into the tent and has taken over the sensibilities of this country and has created this sense that it is a divided country. It's easy to think that if you saw hearings today, you see the House of Representatives 50/50, Senate 50/50, but I do wonder whether it's really 80/20, right? And I think unless you address this industrial derangement complex, how do you actually make a turnaround that's significant?
So to your point, actually it's a lot. The good news is it's even more than 80/20, in that the silent majority abhors all this nonsense. The problem is, you know, I've always said that we need to update the seven deadly sins to add an eighth one, which is pathological cowardice. Right? So most people are so cowardly, are so cowed into the herd mentality, that you have professors who will say things like, "Yes, yes, of course, men too can menstruate. Yes, yes, evolutionary biologists say that." So imagine that I receive emails from just regular adults: "Dear Professor Saad, I'm just wondering, is it true that men now can menstruate?" So the fact that in the 21st century a functioning human being needs to write to me to receive the professorial imprimatur that, no, men cannot menstruate, suggests that something has gone wrong parasitically, right? But again, to come back to your point, it's not 80/20. Most people hate this. The only reason why all the parasitic monster ideas are flourishing is precisely because they go unchallenged. So let me give you, and I've mentioned this on many occasions, but it's worth repeating, probably the template of the most common email that I receive is the following one. You ready? "Dear Professor Saad, many, many compliments." And it ends with the following last sentence: "If you choose to read this email, finish the sentence for me." "Please don't include my name." Please do not include my name. I usually write back and say, "Dear so-and-so, thank you very much for your lovely words. Don't you think your last sentence is exactly the reason why we are in the current predicament that we're in?" So the reality is most people privately come to me and say, "Go on, thank you." But then I say, "But why don't you stand up with me?" "Shh, no, no, I don't want." And there's always a justification for why you shouldn't put your neck out. But then that puts a big burden on me. I have to leave Montreal because of the death threats. I have to always have armed security because of the death threats. My children and wife could never be shown in public because I don't want the threats to go to them. Now, is that fair? Because what most people do is they say, "Gad can handle it, he's got broad shoulders." But if we all stand up and in unison say enough of this stuff, the problem will be solved by next Tuesday. Thank you. Thank you.
Hi. Good evening. So along those lines, I was wondering if you could just speak to maybe the dangers, or maybe the thoughts, of somebody who works in an empathetic field, but the calculus is totally skewed, and it's causing a reverberation of like isolation and not wanting to be a part of society and wanting to move away. Not from the cause of like not being bold or courageous, but from the fact that you just don't want to be a part of it anymore.
Right. So I can maybe answer that using my own personal experience. So in the university ecosystem, the epistemology that should drive our behavior, epistemology means philosophy of knowledge, what should be driving our behavior is what's called the epistemology of truth. We use the scientific method to try to approximate the truth out there to better understand the world. Well, the epistemology of truth has now been taken over within the university ecosystem by what's called an epistemology of care. And that, I'm sorry to say for all of the lovely ladies that are in this room, stems from the feminization of the university. Right? So when I now sit in departmental meetings at my Canadian university, not Ole Miss, Ole Miss is full of brawny, masculine, sexy men [laughter], but at my home university in Canada, whenever a departmental meeting was run by a woman, I felt as though I had regressed back to kindergarten class. "How's everybody doing? How's everything going?" Why are you speaking to me in this tone, as if I'm a three-year-old child? But it's because they are a lot more caring than us toxic masculine men. We only care about pursuing the truth, but truth takes a backseat to empathy. Now, how does that manifest itself in the practice of science? Well, I talk in the book about forbidden knowledge. Forbidden knowledge is the idea that if you're going to do a research program that ultimately the results might end up hurting the feelings of a marginalized group, then truth takes the back seat against not doing the research. So for example, if you want to make sure to never flourish in academia, do research on racial differences. Okay? I mean, sex differences are also toxic. So if you do studies on sex differences and the results show that women are better on a task than men, then publish those findings with pride, because you're breaking the antiquated sexist stereotypes. But if, god forbid, you find that men actually do something, anything, better than women, as you should expect in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic species, then you better bury those in the drawer, because if you publish those results, then you are promulgating the patriarchy. So that's the problem, which is the university ecosystem, which should only be about meritocracy, individual excellence, truth, has been completely hijacked by an epistemology of care. So I don't know in your case what you'd have to do. In my case, I say I don't give a damn. I'm a honey badger. I walk to my own drummer, and, sorry to say, f you if you don't like it. End quote. [applause]
Hi. Hi there. [inaudible] It depends on whether you're saying it to a man or a woman. Correct. My name is Michelle, one of your biggest fans. I have all of your books, listen to all of your podcasts. My question I've always wanted to ask you is, is suicidal empathy something, because you said that it's caused by idea pathogens, by internalizing them, and the granddaddy of these idea pathogens, as you said, is postmodernism. Yes. So my question is, before postmodernism, before the objectivity of truth or lack thereof, did we have suicidal empathy?
Not suicidal empathy in the precise way that I'm defining it, but I'll answer your question in a more general way. The capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is not a current feature. The difference is in the specific parasitic ideas that are prevalent today. Right? Viruses have always existed, but Ebola is different than shingles, even though they're both viruses. So there used to be a time in the Northeast where neighborhoods were organized as follows: I think that my neighbor Linda might be a witch. Let's throw her into water, and [laughter] if she swims, then we know she's a witch, and if she drowns, oops, I guess she wasn't a witch. Right? And that was a very reasonable way to organize the neighborhood. But then we grew out of that parasitic idea. So what is unique about the current time period are the specific parasitic ideas that lead to suicidal empathy. So postmodernism, for example, by the way the reason why you correctly said it's the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, because it literally negates truth itself. Right? There are no objective truths, according to postmodernism. And that's what allows then up is down, freedom is slavery, men are women, my truth is more important than the truth. So that's why I call it the most nihilistic form of intellectual terrorism. So suicidal empathy is a current manifestation, but the capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is part of the architecture of the human mind.
I also had one more question now that I have the microphone. So you talk about suicidal empathy as like a macro phenomenon, like an inter-civilizational, like an inter-societal phenomenon. Is it possible to have suicidal empathy towards your loved ones, towards your biological kin?
I mean, you can, but I won't answer it for kin. I'll answer it just at the individual level rather than at the civilizational level. There is truly a hallucinatory number of examples in the book that really are hard to believe. But I'll use one that's fantastic. A woman, a white woman, much more enlightened than all of us in this room, because she's extremely progressive, she knows that the stereotype that black men ever commit violence is simply untrue. In the natural state, there is absolutely no evidence that any black man has ever committed any violence. So she goes to Haiti to demonstrate that reality. And then in Haiti, she is faced with something called, or what is it called, reality, where [laughter] a Haitian man who doesn't subscribe to the very progressive things that she learned at Oberlin College is raping her violently on top of a rooftop. As he's raping her, she's saying, "But don't you realize that I'm a huge BLM ally myself? I am a Malcolm X scholar myself." And she was very surprised that that didn't stop him in his tracks from raping her. At the end of the rape, she then wrote, a few days or weeks later, she wrote an essay, which is referenced in my book, where she says that now, in its totality, since the rape is in the rearview mirror, she's actually very thankful for the experience, because the black man raped her, he was using her as the vehicle to express his rage at white supremacy. So a Haitian man in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, raped a white woman because he was responding to the white supremacy found in the United States. That's suicidal empathy at the individual level.
We're going to go right here. Professor Saad, I'm listening to you and finally start to understand a little more about this phenomenon, being Jewish myself. I also hear you talk about evolution and how evolution plays a role in the development of this suicidal empathy. Being Jewish myself, I mean, we Jews, we have lived through 3,000 years of people wanting to eliminate us, etc., etc. Shouldn't we recognize something and change? Why did one-third of the New York Jews vote for Mamdani?
Yeah. So, the wood cricket appellation I typically reserve it for Jews. When I call them wood cricket Jews, to your point, the granddaddy of wood cricket Jews is Gabor Mate, for those of you who don't know who that is. Gabor Mate. And the reason I'm answering with his exemplar is because he captures exactly what you're asking. So Gabor Mate is an addiction "specialist," and I put it in quotes, because every single ailment that you have is ultimately rooted in some pain that you had in your childhood. Well, by that measure, I went through the Lebanese civil war. I should be a psychopath killing everybody, right? And yet I haven't killed anyone. So Gabor Mate says that he himself, as a Holocaust survivor... now here's the problem. Gabor Mate was a Holocaust survivor in that when he was six months old, he was taken from his Jewish family and placed in another family. Six-month-old infants are not conscious of their experiences. So in no conceivable meaningful way are you a Holocaust survivor. If he's a Holocaust survivor, then I am a Holocaust survivor by virtue of having been a spermatozoa in my dad's testicles in the 1940s. So really my victimology score is very, very high, because not only am I a Lebanese civil war refugee, child war refugee, I'm also a Holocaust survivor, even though I wasn't born during the Holocaust. Now, the reason why he uses that rhetorical trick is because then that gives him the imprimatur to say, "Here I am, Jewish myself, a Holocaust survivor, and I can tell you that the Nazis are not nearly as diabolical as the Israelis." That is the... because if Gabor Mate was at that Nova dance festival, and if they were coming to do unbelievable things to him, he would have been praying for those really evil Nazis called the IDF to come and save him. So for me he is the worst of creatures. I respect the radical Islamist guys a lot more than I do the Gabor Mate. So there's a special place in hell for those Jews. [applause]
So I know there are a ton of hands up. We have time for one, maybe two, because I have two additional questions I want to get to before we wrap up. So I'll let the two of you figure out who we're going to next. Is it on? It's on, I hear you.
Shalom, Professor Saad. Thank you so much for your visit. We, myself and my wife, have a bit of a story. Also came from Israel, moved to Canada, stayed there for about 14 years, and then came the whole corona debacle. We actually visited Montreal and we've communicated, but the whole story of Canada at that time, we had to move to the US, we practically escaped Canada to come here and to thrive here. So, viva freedom of the United States of America. [applause] I think what you're about to do, moving to the new university for your new position, obviously we've read all your books, podcasts and all that. So thank you. Shukran. Toda. I think what you're doing is keeping the memory of those recent days, atrocities, and I myself consider the corona with Justin Trudeau in Canada, you remember what I'm talking about, as something of a memory to be tattooed in the days of history. And we thank you ever so much for doing what you're doing and speaking the way you speak. We look up to you, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.
And this right now will be the final question. One last question. Is this on? It's on. Okay. Just first of all, whoever booked you, give them a big pat on the back. This is excellent. You're welcome. Good job. Okay. We talk about the country, but I think the film industry, and I'm a film fan, and they sort of lost me, is at Defcon 5. There seems to be... films are not for art anymore. They're for empathy. They have to have a lesbian in it, they have to have certain races in it. They don't make it for art anymore. But there doesn't seem to be any financial penalty. They keep spiraling downward. Films are making less and they just double down and there's no stopping it. You'd think there would be a financial penalty that would correct this behavior, right?
So in Suicidal Empathy I talk about the evolving nature of companies with their customers. And so let me give you a quick synopsis. So the first 100 years ago, the relationship between companies and customers was what's called production-centric. So if you were a car manufacturer, the only thing you were tasked with doing is producing cars. Hence the famous saying by Henry Ford, the customer can have the car in any color that he wishes, as long as it's black. Right? Meaning that I don't care about customer preferences. I only have to meet consumer demands. So that's production-centric. The next stage was marketing-centric. I have to produce products that meet the demand, but while also adhering to the heterogeneity of consumer preferences. Some like red cars, some like blue cars, some like black cars. The third social contract, say, starting in the 60s, was, I need to meet consumer demands, while maintaining consumer heterogeneity, while not harming any third party. So that's where the green marketing movement comes in, right? You shouldn't harm the environment while producing cars. The fourth step, to your question, is now as a company not only do I have to do those three things, I also have to be an active ally in fighting against social justice, and that could take precedence over the fiduciary responsibility of maximizing profits for shareholders, to your point. So there's a great example that I discussed in the book where, I don't know if you remember the debacle of the advertising campaign with Jaguar. I hate how the British say Jaguar. No, "Jag-you-ar." So Jaguar, do you remember the one where you just see a bunch of trans stuff sashaying everywhere? You don't see a single car. To which Elon Musk writes, "Hey Jaguar, do you still produce cars?" Right? And for those of you who don't know, I'm not trying to name-drop, but Elon and I are good friends. And so I'm like, I love you Elon, because he quotes the front of your book. What's that? This is him on the front. And he's... exactly. He's the front blurb in the book. So to your point, I think what's happened to a lot of these companies, art takes a backseat to social justice, profit takes a backseat to social justice. And there's a field in applied mathematics called operations research. That's when you're trying to find a mathematical equation to maximize something, to optimize something. Well, those film companies are not optimizing the value of art. They're optimizing social justice.
So just a final few questions before we wrap up and head to the book signing. I know there's a lot of different takeaways in this book, but if you wanted readers to take one thing away, what would that be?
Please, please, please do not be suicidally empathetic. You may not see the end of our civilization within your lifetime or that of your children. But there is a great quote, and I actually mentioned it very early in the book, by an esteemed British historian named Arnold Toynbee. He published a 12-volume set, a study of how all civilizations eventually die. And his concluding maxim is, civilizations do not die by murder, they die by suicide. And in my case, I'm saying that the specific way that we are committing suicide is through dysregulated empathy. So be kind. I'm a very kind and empathetic person, but within the bounds of evolutionary theory. So be careful. Don't be kind to those who are not worthy of your kindness. Yes. [applause]
So my final question. Obviously we're here at the Reagan Library. I toured you and your lovely wife around earlier. We stopped at President and Mrs. Reagan's grave site, the memorial site. Just a few days ago was the 22nd anniversary of President Reagan's passing. And in preparation for today's event, I was on your X page, and you actually posted a small tribute to the president on the day he passed. What does Ronald Reagan mean to you?
He embodies all of the great things that, when I was a young boy, I think my wife alluded to it earlier, when I was a young boy in Beirut, Lebanon, I didn't speak English yet. I would see those spaghetti westerns. I don't know if any of you know him, Sergio Leone. Clint Eastwood would play many of the roles, right? The larger-than-life character who comes and renders justice in the town against all the bad people. And I would look at him, in the mind of the little boy that I was, who didn't speak English, and I would say, I want to be that guy. Well, I think Ronald Reagan was that guy in real life, and so in that sense he exudes what I saw in Clint Eastwood, but in the president. Love that. Thank you. [applause]
So I know that with your purchase of your ticket, you got a copy. So we will now head to the bookstore. Come on up and he'll sign the books for you. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend that you do. It's a fantastic book. Thank you so much for joining us here at the Reagan Library. [applause]
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