In short
Dr. Gad Saad argues in his forthcoming book Suicidal Empathy that the political left treats empathy as a moral absolute, leading to “hyperactivated” empathy that misidentifies who deserves compassion and can produce harmful policies.
Guest backgrounds
Saad is an evolutionary psychologist and a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom in Mississippi. He grew up as a Jew in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War era, later immigrating (the transcript mentions Montreal). He describes being a tiny Jewish minority and facing antisemitism and threats.
Key claims
Empathy is adaptive in moderation but becomes “dysregulated” like OCD (a germ-fear example). He says suicidal empathy reverses moral priorities (e.g., prioritizing offenders’ rights over victims). He argues this pattern drives domestic and foreign policies that “destroy the West,” and he frames it as more characteristic of the left than the right.
Notable examples
“Death to Jews” chants when he was five; a child saying he wanted to be a “Jew killer” at age eight; his brother pressured to retire from judo as a Jew. He cites the trolley problem and claims most people would save their own child. He references UK grooming-gang scandals, a Norwegian case involving a Somali rapist, and the idea of “moral preening”/“civilizational seppuku.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOGrowing Up as a Jewish Boy in Lebanon
1:58 to 7:23
Dr. Gad Saad shares his personal childhood experiences in Lebanon as a Jew.
“So tell me about your background growing up as a Jew in Lebanon.”
Identity Politics and Its Consequences
7:23 to 14:00
Discussion on how Dr. Saad's experiences shaped his views on identity politics.
“So when you went to school, did you speak French or Arabic?”
Understanding Lebanon's Political System
14:00 to 17:30
Explore the complexities of Lebanon's representation and its historical context.
“and some Lebanese people defend this system.”
The Impact of Religion on Identity in Lebanon
17:30 to 21:00
Learn about the significance of religious identity cards during the Lebanese Civil War.
“So I remember reading a book by the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom many years ago called Against Empathy.”
Suicidal Empathy: Defining the Concept
21:00 to 24:50
Discover Dr. Saad's perspective on the dangers of misplaced empathy.
“What started off as a very adaptive mechanism to avoid Coleman uses cold becomes a very debilitating problem.”
Empathy's Evolution and Misapplication
24:50 to 28:00
Examine the evolutionary basis of empathy and its maladaptive expressions.
“So what I show in the book is that most of the domestic and foreign policies that are orgiastically destroying the West stem from this misguided empathy.”
The Concept of Suicidal Empathy
28:00 to 31:26
Explore the idea of suicidal empathy and its implications in modern society.
“nothing more, there's a beautiful term, I don't remember the gentleman, he called it moral preening, right?”
Empathy Across the Political Spectrum
33:44 to 42:00
Delve into the relationship between empathy and political ideologies.
“And this has been reported in even mainstream sources, mainstream left-leaning sources like the New York Times and the BBC and so forth.”
The Role of Empathy in Policy Decisions
42:00 to 45:31
Discusses how empathy influences political decisions and policies like tariffs.
“externalities that come along with that.”
Understanding Political Tribes
45:31 to 49:24
Explores the concept of political tribes and their psychological underpinnings.
“So my next question came from a conversation I had with two brothers who are political scientists.”
Show all 14 chapters
The Nature of Human Beliefs
49:24 to 53:58
Examines the stability of human beliefs and the evolution of political ideologies.
“Then I'll argue for the opposite position.”
Traits Influencing Political Views
53:58 to 56:00
Analyzes how physical traits and personal success impact political beliefs.
“Okay, so I want to dig a little deeper into that because it could seem potentially contradictory.”
Overcoming Personal Shortcomings
56:00 to 1:01:02
Learn how personal attributes can compensate for perceived shortcomings in life.
“nor do I hold any rancor towards him because he's taller than me and has more money than me.”
Understanding Empathy's Limits
1:01:02 to 1:03:13
Discover the precarious balance of empathy and the dangers of excess.
“Obviously, you're doing your best by writing this book and trying to persuade people.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Coleman Hughes:Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Dr. Gad Saad. Gad is a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom in Mississippi, and he is also an evolutionary psychologist. Today, we talk about Gad's forthcoming book called Suicidal Empathy, in which he argues that the political left has taken empathy to a dangerous extreme. We also talk about Gad's childhood as a Jew in Lebanon and his family's experience of the Lebanese Civil War. So without further ado, Dr. Gad Saad.
0:43Coleman Hughes:If you're like me, you've probably seen a recent headline and wondered, can the president really do that? That's why I recommend checking out the chart-topping podcast, You Might Be Right, hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. It's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. And fun fact, the show's named after Howard Baker's principal, Always Remember the Other Fellow Might Be Right. Now that's a quote that Conversations with Coleman can get behind. On You Might Be Right, the governors tackle timely policy conversations with political luminaries like Al Gore and Judy Woodruff.
1:23Coleman Hughes:If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode on whether there's too much money in politics. Political spending enables expression and participation, but at what cost? As we approach the midterms, this is a timely and thoughtful discussion featuring Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig and former chair of the Federal Election Commission Brad Smith. Hear balanced perspectives without the shouting matches found on mainstream news. Follow You Might Be Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell them I sent you. Okay, Gad Saad, thanks so much for coming on my show.
2:00Coleman Hughes:I'm delighted to be with you. Thank you, Colin. So tell me about your background growing up as a Jew in Lebanon. Right. Okay, so I was born in 1964, as you said, in Lebanon. We were part of a very, very minuscule community of Jews. At one point, there could have been a few thousand Jews in Lebanon. But by the time we were still there in the mid-70s, we were probably down to a few hundred people. My parents had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon, perhaps not reading the writing on the proverbial wall. Much of my extended family had left well before the civil war broke out in 1975, many of them to Israel, some to France, some to Canada.
2:51But then the civil war broke out in April 1975. And as you correctly pointed out, we typically think of Lebanon as really a dynamic between Christians and Muslims, a whole wide range of Muslims. of course there was also the PLO there the Palestinian Liberation Organization which was also involved a lot of fighting but the bottom line is if you were Jewish there weren't too many places that you could hide in peace and so it became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon we ended up leaving at the end of that first year of the Civil War but I often remind people that even before the Civil War broke out where it really became an imminent threat of execution to be Jewish.
3:38It's not as though the romanticized view that people have of Lebanon, the Paris of the Middle East and the Switzerland of the Middle East. I mean, yes, there is some of that. Lebanon was, quote, a progressive, tolerant place, but those words are in the context of the Middle East. It's progressive and tolerant. That doesn't mean that a Jew could aspire to be prime minister or president of Lebanon. As a matter of fact, in Lebanon, it's a confessional parliament, meaning that seats are assigned in parliament as a function of how important that particular religious group is. And each of the positions, whether you are prime minister or president or speaker of the house, is reserved to a particular individual of a particular religion.
4:27As you might imagine, Jews did not get many seats in the Lebanese parliament. So growing up, I did face Coleman with some Jew hatred, a lot of Jew hatred. I'll give you a few examples. Many of these I explain in the parasitic mind. So for example, when I was five years old in 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser had just died. He was the very popular pan-Arabist Egyptian president who was trying to unite all Arabs as one people against the evil Jews and so on. And as you might imagine, he found a large population that was willing to support his message. Well, when he passed away and the people would go into the streets to lament his passing, all I kept hearing as a five-year-old, that was the first sort of memory I have of Jew hatred, was death to Jews, death to Jews.
5:20Everybody was proceeding down our street, screaming death to Jews. I turned to my mother and asked her, well, why are they saying death to Jews? She said, shut up, keep your head down, be quiet. So that was the first time. I'll just give you one or two other stories and I'll turn it back to you. When I was about eight years old, so maybe about two years before the Civil War started, the teacher asked the kids to stand up and tell us what we each wanted to be when we grew up. Oh, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a soldier. I want to be a fireman. I want to be a nurse. Well, a kid stood up knowing full well that I was a Jewish kid.
5:53And he said, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer to thunderous, raucous applause and laughter. Now, that kid wasn't expelled. It was totally part of the DNA and the fabric of Middle Eastern society to, you know, flippantly say that you want to kill Jews when you grow up. And then finally, one story from my brother. And then if you want to hear more, I can give you more stories. my brother was Lebanese champion in judo for many years in a row and that was becoming embarrassing to the Lebanese authorities because we don't want a Jew to be winning in a combative sport and so he was visited in about I think it was maybe 1973 so this is about two years before the civil war he was visited by some men who explained to him that it was time for him to retire lest there might be an accident unfortunate accident that happens to him while he didn't want to retire.
6:44So he ended up forcibly having to leave Lebanon. This is before the civil war and continuing his judo career in Paris, France. Now in 1976, life can be ironic at times. In 1976, the Olympics were happening in Montreal where we had immigrated to, and he ended up representing Lebanon in the Montreal Olympics. So the guy who suffered from the problem of being Jewish in 1973 free, we could overcome his fatal disease of being Jewish when he can represent us in the Montreal Olympics. So that's what it was like growing in Lebanon as a Jew.
7:23Coleman Hughes:So when you went to school, did you speak French or Arabic? Both. So I went, you may or may not know this, but at one point, well, Lebanon used to be a French protectorate. And so in Lebanon, at the time, a lot less now, the sort of, quote, educated class, of course, would learn Arabic as so Arabic is my mother tongue. But we also went through the French school system. French meaning from France. And I make that distinction because now I live in Montreal where we also, there is French, but it's Quebec French. It's a completely different system. And so I went to a school called Lycée des Jeunes Filles, which is like the Lyceum of young girls, even though it was a co-ed institution, both boys and girls.
8:12I couldn't tell you the exact breakdown but in my class there were a lot of Muslims, a lot of Christians and there was one other Jewish kid
8:24Coleman Hughes:So do you think there's any way in which your childhood in Lebanon affected your views on identity politics? Right, so I mean there are several ways one way and that was one of the reasons, I mean there are several reasons why I decided to introduce my personal history in the opening chapter of the parasitic mind. So identity politics, which is viewed as a laudable way to organize society in the West, certainly by one of the political parties, well, Lebanon is the ultimate manifestation of what happens to a society that is organized along identity, you know, with the ethos of identity politics.
9:07In this case, It's your religion, but it could be in the West, it could be whether I'm trans or not, whether my skin color is dark enough or not. But the idea of identity politics has certainly shaped my deep aversion towards that ethos. But originally I experienced Lebanon, so that would be one answer. But even more poignantly, understanding what happens to religious minorities in societies that eventually become dominated by Islam is one hell of a lesson to learn. And so one of the things that I've kept screaming from the top of the mountain, at first very few people were listening to me, now there's a bit more people listening to me, but in my view, not enough are listening, is that we need to decide whether it's a good idea to have more or less incursion of Islam in the West.
10:04Now, I hate to say this because I find it, frankly, it's offensive to have to always start with this preface. I know more Muslim people than most people will ever meet. All of them have been soccer player friends of mine, and we have fun together, and none of them have tried to kill me. And so the fact that I say that Islam is a profoundly antithetical ideology to our Western liberties and freedoms in no way is bigoted towards individual Muslims. So probably the most poignant and powerful lesson I've learned from having grown up in the Middle East as a Lebanese Jew is that you might want to carefully think about whether you wish to increase immigration from Islamic societies.
10:47Coleman Hughes:So what would you say to the argument that some people make, which is that you've got the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, and Jews and other minorities are living in relative peace. And by relative, I mean relative to Europe, where Jews are being persecuted left or right. And for many people, this is proof that Islam is not, or over the grand sweep of history, is by default less anti-Semitic than Christendom was. So what do you make of that argument? Right. So I'll draw this analogy, and I'm not trying to be facetious towards you, but hopefully, you know, analogical reasoning is an important tool to understand the veracity and power of an argument.
11:36But Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, if we look at the number of days that they lived and we calculate the percentage of days of those days that they've lived where they've killed somebody, it'll come out to about 99.9 % of the days that they lived. They never killed anybody. Yet nobody would say, but come on, bruh. I mean, John Wayne Gacy, you're talking about only 27 kids he killed or whatever it was. That's 99.97 % of the time where he was totally lovely to kids. So Islam is a very bad place for religious minorities to be. That doesn't mean that for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 1400 years, they go about slaughtering everybody.
12:23The Ottoman Empire also had this little thing called the Armenian Genocide. So apparently, you know, they were very nice until they weren't very nice to 1.5 million people. So it is, I'm not in the least bit sympathetic to that argument. The other one that we usually hear is, but come on, Al-Andalusia, everybody lived in peace. Well, I can cite you all sorts of references, including a professor that specializes in this field at Northwestern, who tells us that Andalusia was anything but a cakewalk for Jews and Christians under Islamic domination. If you live as a dhimmie, that's the Arabic word for ahl al-kutb, which means in Arabic the people of the book, meaning the Christians and the Muslims that live under Islamic dominion, we tolerate you, but we also pat you on the back and say, don't be too Jewish, Jew.
13:22And we also have to pray really hard that our daughter is not super sexy because when my Islamic overlord comes to me and says, it's time to fork up that really pretty daughter, then I have to do it as a good little dhimmi. And so, yes, there were periods where it was worse to be Jewish under Christian dominion. That doesn't mean that I long for the day to be under Islamic rule.
13:48Coleman Hughes:I'm aware that in Lebanon, there is a system that they developed at the end of the Lebanese civil war, where 50 % of the seats in parliament are reserved for Christians and 50 % are reserved for Muslims. and some Lebanese people defend this system. From a Western perspective, we would see this as a breach of democratic norms, right? We wouldn't reserve a certain number of seats in Congress for Christians or any religion, right? But in Lebanon, they do, even though Christians are only something like 30 % of the population. So they're in a way overrepresented systematically in the government in a way that we find undemocratic.
14:30Coleman Hughes:But for the standards of the Middle East, some people would defend it and say, well, that's it works for them and it's necessary to keep the peace. And it came out of a particular history. So what do you make of that defense of the Lebanese system? So I didn't know about the 50-50 split. So this is I can't comment to the veracity of that, but I trust your numbers. No, there is no way for me to defend that because, I mean, of course, as you know, Coleman, there are many foundational deontological principles that made the West great, one of which is individual dignity over collective tribalism. And if you wish to abide by that freeing ethos of individual dignity, then there is no way to ever justify allocating parliamentary seats based on religion.
15:26Look, one of the best ways or one of the most direct ways that people got killed at the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War, I'm just making a link now with this identity politics in terms of religion. So in Lebanon, there's a thing called hawi. Hawie is the Arabic word for like your internal ID card. So it's kind of like a passport, but it's one that if the cops talk, they'll say, show us your papers. Well, it turns out that what's most important on that ID card is, and this again predates the Civil War. It's just that during the Civil War, it became really problematic. and you'll see in a second why, that ID card, yes, it might have your height and your eye color and your weight, but those are not nearly as important as what your religion is.
16:15And so one of the ways that you would get killed in the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War is they would be, because this was a very, very brutal house to house civil war. So different neighborhoods, the militia of that neighborhood would set up a roadblock for you to decide if they're going to let you pass or not. And so they would ask for your Hawiye, your ID card. And if your ID card had the wrong religion, that wasn't going to end up well. That was one of the reasons why it was very difficult for us to actually leave the house in Lebanon, even to go to a bread queue. Because if you, God forbid, were stopped by the wrong militia and there weren't too many militias, would be very friendly to somebody that has.
17:00By the way, in my Hawi, in my card, it wasn't written Jewish. It was written Israelites. In Arabic, the word for Jew is Yahudi, whereas Israeli means you're Israelite. So I lost my Lebanese marker. I was an Israelite, right? Not a Lebanese Jew. And so no, it'll take a lot of mental gymnastics for me to be able to ever support such a system.
17:30Coleman Hughes:So I remember reading a book by the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom many years ago called Against Empathy. And it affected me quite a bit because he made the very counterintuitive argument that although empathy is a great emotion to have in the appropriate context, when it misfires, it actually leads to great harm in the world.
17:59Coleman Hughes:so to me this seems similar to your idea of suicidal empathy which i know is the topic of your next book and has gotten a lot of play on twitter so tell me what you mean by suicidal empathy yes thank you for that great question uh and and i mean it's it's nice the way you framed it because i'm already receiving tons of hit pieces written against me about how you know i am the dark over, I'm the Jew behind Elon Musk, who's trying to create a dark world where we kill empathy. And sure, I mean, Elon Musk might be worth$400 billion, so you might think he's powerful. But really, there's always a Jew puppeteer that's kind of architect, that is the architect of the diabolical plan to kill empathy.
18:45Okay, so having said that, let's explain what I mean here. There are many psychiatric ailments that when expressed within adaptive ranges are evolutionarily appropriate, but the problem arises when they become dysregulated. So let's take, before I give you psychiatric examples of that, let's do another example. Cancer cells are cells, except that they've gone rogue, and that despite the fact that cancer cells are meant to replicate, cancer cells don't have a mechanism of stopping that replication. So what started off as a adaptive process that you would expect, cells divide, becomes maladaptive, and it can kill you when it is expressed, in this case, in a manner where there's no stopping mechanism.
19:42Okay. Now let's apply that principle to say obsessive compulsive disorder, which is a phenomenon that I've actually written academic papers on. OCD is the maladaptive expression of an otherwise adaptive process. So that's a lot of fancy academic lingo, but let's break it down very easily. For me, I meet Coleman. Regrettably, I don't remember. I don't think that we did meet at the University of Austin. But had I had the pleasure of meeting you and I would have noticed that before you shook my hand, you sneezed into your hand and then were about to shake it, then it would make perfect adaptive sense for me, quietly and discreetly, after I've shaken your hand, to go to the bathroom and wash my hands because I don't want to catch Coleman's cold.
20:32Therefore, having a germ contamination fear is perfectly adapted. However, if it becomes hyperactive to the point whereby I spend eight hours a day at the sink in front of scalding hot water where my skin is falling off because I am obsessively washing my hands, I can't get to work, and therefore I've now lost my job, That's germ contamination OCD symptomatology. What started off as a very adaptive mechanism to avoid Coleman uses cold becomes a very debilitating problem. So now you can see where I'm going to go with empathy. Empathy is a perfectly adaptive, noble virtue when properly expressed.
21:22For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, we both have to have theory of mind, which is to be able to put ourselves in the mind of the other in order for us to have this valuable conversation. Autistic children, by the way, the way that we're able to establish that they are autistic is we give them early in life a theory of mind test, which they fail. There is no blood test that you could give to establish that a child has autism, but typically they fail the theory of mind test, right? And so therefore, while it is perfectly reasonable for a social species like Homo sapiens to exhibit empathy, the hyperactivation of empathy and the erroneous targeting of who should be privy to our empathy becomes suicidal empathy.
22:15And so let me give you an example. The classic trolley problem that you see in moral philosophy, where you say, should you press the lever to kill one person here or five people here? Well, when you study that problem or many, many other types of problems, people have an evolutionary-based calculus that determines whether if you place a gun to my head, am I more likely to save my biological child or a random child? Well, it may not surprise you to know, Coleman, that most people, roughly 99.9 % of people on Earth, if given the forced choice of choosing, would be more empathetic and jump in front of a bus to save their own child rather than a random child.
23:02That doesn't make them callous. It doesn't make them evil. It simply makes the point that our cognitive, emotional, moral, perceptual, behavioral systems have evolved to solve evolutionarily relevant problems. But what suicidal empathy does, and we can get into the reasons why suicidal empathy arose after I explained the mechanism. Suicidal empathy says, no, the felon who's only been arrested 137th times before, therefore he deserves a second chance because white supremacy is more deserving of a 138th chance than, you know, the person who ended up being clobbered by him, as we saw in the recent case with the Ukrainian woman on the bus or subway or whatever it was, right?
23:53So we care more about the rights of the felon than we care about the victims. We care more about the rights of the Muslim noble rapists in Britain than we care about those whiny, entitled British white girls. So when it comes to the moral calculus of should we have greater ire towards the ones who gang-rape 12-year-old girls for six months, but that would necessitate that we say that they were all coming from a Muslim background. Well, no. Our empathy module, our suicidal empathy model module should much more target being kind towards the Asian men because we have to come up, by the way, with euphemisms to hide their identity.
24:40Japanese men are Asian. Lebanese men are Asian. But it turns out that when we're talking about Asians here, wink, wink, we're talking about largely 99.9 % of Pakistani Muslims. So we care more about the homeless people who are shooting up heroin in the public parks than about the rights of your children and mine to be able to be in that park because we pay taxpayer money so that we don't have to avoid the needles in the park. So what I show in the book is that most of the domestic and foreign policies that are orgiastically destroying the West stem from this misguided empathy.
25:25Coleman Hughes:so how did western cultures come to adopt this trait of suicidal empathy where does it come from yeah that's that's a great question i i get into all that in the book so let me give you a a few uh you know psychological factors but we can also get into historical factors and so on
25:47suicide exists throughout history for all sorts of reasons and some of those reasons by the way could be explained via an evolutionary lens which sounds paradoxical at first because suicide is the ultimate manifestation of lack of a survival instinct yet it turns out that even that Even the erasing of one's life could itself be an adaptive evolutionary-based mechanism. But let me give you a few examples of historical manifestations of suicide, and then we can get into the specific manifestation of the current suicidal empathy. So seppuku in Japanese culture, which is a highly high honor, honor and shame culture, not unlike the Middle East, there is nothing worse for a honorable Japanese warrior than to do something that brings about this honor.
26:44So for all sorts of reasons, we could decide whether placing that value, honor, as the most important virtue and to never want to lose it, we could debate whether that's a good idea or not. But for various reasons, that becomes the fundamentally most important thing to ascribe as, as the ultimate apex value. And if I engage in any behavior that makes me lose that honor, then the only way to remedy that, the only redemptive path is for me to engage in seppuku. I just, I literally, you know, put the knife in and then therefore I can expatiate the shame that I brought for being a dishonorable man, right?
27:26There are many cases, for example, Masada in the Dead Sea, where the Jews, knowing that they were likely going to face a very ugly reality, decided to commit collective suicide. There are cults where people commit suicide for some transcendental reason. And so the concept of suicide itself can be studied through historical, cultural, and evolutionary lens. But then the question to your point, why is the inequality of empathy in this manner? Imagine if I can convince a large swath of population that there is nothing more noble, nothing more, there's a beautiful term, I don't remember the gentleman, he called it moral preening, right?
28:13So imagine peacocking, right? Imagine, right? We know, for example, that the peacock's tail could not have evolved because it confers a survival advantage. It only evolved through sexual selection because it provides mating advantage. It is basically saying to the female peahens, despite this very burdensome tail, look at me, I'm still surviving. Don't you think that that's an honest signal of my quality and therefore you should choose me? So now imagine, and then if you want, we can drill down further why that is the case. But imagine if I can develop a contagion, in this case called suicidal empathy, that renders it that the greatest goal that I could aspire to be is to be so committed to my progressivism, so committed to my non-racism, that if I have to commit civilizational seppuku, a term that I introduce in the book, in order to demonstrate that, so be it.
29:12So in the same way that Narcissus in Greek mythology was so enamored with his beauty that he ultimately ended up drowning because he fell into the well when he was looking at his beautiful morphological feature on his face. As a suicidally empathetic person, I would like to look at the moral mirror. And what I want to see as a reflection is I will not discriminate against my rapist. I will not wish ill towards my rapist. As we know, by the way, from a 2013 case where a Norwegian man was sodomized by a noble Somali, and after the noble Somali had a very short sentence, three, four years, because the Scandinavians are more virtuous than we are.
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30:05They don't believe in severe punishments. When he was going to be returned to Somalia, the one who had been sodomized by him, by the way, he writes that he is a feminist and anti-racist as his fundamental marker of his identity, was wracked with guilt that he was going to be, he, the sodomizer, was going to go back to Mogadishu. Imagine the horror, Coleman, that that sodomizer will not be able to self-actualize the way Abraham Maslow taught us to self-actualize. So suicidal empathy is a form of moral lobotomy where you no longer are abiding by all of the evolutionary-based computational systems in your mind because you've transcended that.
30:54You are on a higher moral plane. I don't know if I've been too philosophical here, but I hope I've answered your question. We didn't know how it happened, who did it. We didn't know any of that. It doesn't add up. It's pretty surreal that she is the subject of a murder mystery saga. Samantha Wall, a beloved community leader from Detroit, was murdered, stabbed to death, and found laying outside her home. To this day, no one has been convicted of the crime. We investigate at the Free Press with a new series called Spiral, Murder in Detroit, available wherever you get your podcasts.
31:27Coleman Hughes:All of the details of this are extremely bizarre.
31:57Coleman Hughes:Israeli history. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present, with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives. And when he brings in guests, like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retzig-Gor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare, and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. On this show, we've spent a lot of time having honest, unfiltered discussions around Israel, Zionism, and anti-Semitism.
32:40Coleman Hughes:And if our conversations have made you more curious about any of these topics, I have a recommendation for you. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast hosted by two of the leading Jewish voices of today, Noam Weissman and Mihal Bitton. On their show, Mihal and Noam are finding fresh perspectives on tough subjects. They've explored the war on Iran from the viewpoint of Persian Jews, poked fun at anti-Semitism with comedians, and asked prominent rabbis about the future of religion. If you value nuance over hot takes and want to get past all the noise, this show is for you. Search Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube and subscribe.
33:44Coleman Hughes:if not earlier, scandals in the United Kingdom, the Rotherham scandal being, for instance, the most famous, where you literally have grooming gangs of mostly what they call in the UK Asian, but we would call Pakistani men that have raped young girls in numbers that are difficult to believe when you actually read them. And this has been reported in even mainstream sources, mainstream left-leaning sources like the New York Times and the BBC and so forth. And there's obviously a frothy element of the far right that loves to linger on these details and probably exaggerate them. But the truth is, even without exaggerating them, the details of those scandals are just crazy.
34:32Coleman Hughes:and they would be enough to make someone a single issue right-wing voter and an immigration restrictionist in the context of the UK. And so that's an example of left-wing suicidal empathy in my view. Meanwhile, on the right, I want to ask you this because, you know, is the concept of suicidal empathy just sort of a stand-in for the left-right debate in general, or is there an example of problems with empathy on the right? So for example, in America, we've had this debate on USAID for quite a while. Now, whatever you think of USAID right now, of us sending taxpayer money to Africa, it's not disputed that we saved tens and tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives by sending aid to Africa in the 2000s during the AIDS crisis.
35:35Coleman Hughes:And this wasn't a woke policy. This was George Bush, and it was one of the crowning achievements of his presidency. And regardless, I'm open to the idea that that has outlived its usefulness. I'm not an expert on foreign aid, and really most of the people talking about the subject aren't. But there is a certain casualness with which people on the right are just happy to terminate our foreign aid all around the world without a deep sense that, well, we should really check if this one isn't still saving thousands and thousands of lives before we just turn off the tap. So my question is, is there a problem with too much empathy or too little empathy on the right?
36:22Coleman Hughes:How do you view the relationship between empathy and the political right? Beautiful question. Before I answer it, I will address the exact same question as relating to the parasitic mind, because a lot of people asked me as I was lecturing about the parasitic mind, and this is why I actually made sure to include a section early in that book, addressing your question about left versus right, but as relating to parasitized ideas, idea pathogens. Look, I inhabit the world of academia. Academia is astoundingly leftist. Therefore, all of the degenerate and basilic parasitized ideas that I discuss in the parasitic mind effectively stem from the left.
37:12That's incontestable. That doesn't mean, so to your point, I'll specifically answer the suicidal empathy part, but I want to give a broader question first, a broader answer first. But to your point, that doesn't mean that people on the right cannot be parasitized by bad ideas. And I'll give now an example demonstrating that using my own field of evolutionary psychology. When it comes to the rejection of the theory of evolution, just evolution as the mechanism that explains, for example, speciation, people on the right are more likely to disagree with that because it attacks their fundamental religious beliefs.
37:50But when it comes to the instantiation of the theory of evolution to the study of the human mind, which is called evolutionary psychology, it's people on the left that detest that idea. Because how How dare you, Professor Saad, say that there are biological imperatives, that we're not all born tabula rasa with equal potentiality. So using the general idea of evolution versus evolutionary psychology, I've shown you that it could be either the right that act like morons or it could be the left that act like morons. So having said that, suicidal empathy by the very nature of the hyperactivation of the noble virtue is more a problem of the left.
38:34And I can give you a few psychological reasons that explain why that is more likely to happen. There is something in psychology called the self-serving bias. the self-serving bias explains how we ascribe causality to events in our lives most people tend to describe successes internally i did well on the exam because i'm really smart and they ascribe failures externally i did poorly on the exam because professor saad is an asshole is unfair. Okay. And it is a mechanism that actually serves as an ego protective strategy, right? Most of us want to navigate through the difficulties of the world, thinking that when we do things well, it's because of our great talents or when we do something badly, it's due to the outside world.
39:25Now, why is that related to what we're talking about? People on the left ascribe all negative outcomes in life to external factors, right? You are poor, it's only because of whatever. If you're black and poor, it's because of white supremacy. If you're homeless, it's because of greedy Jewish capitalist overlords. If you're addicted to opiates, well, that's the Sackler family, which, by the way, is a Jewish family. So here again, the Jews are poisoning our streets. Human beings don't have personal agency, especially if they have ascended in the hierarchy of who is worthy of our empathy. Therefore, it could never be that the guy who just killed the Ukrainian white woman is a degenerate that should be slowly executed.
40:24It's probably because he is a victim of the white supremacy. so why would you go out of your way to double penalize him he's already had to live as a black man in this disgusting society called the united states now you're going to punish him for what whites have done to him so yes i'm sure that if you and i sat down together we could come up with ways by which people on the right might have a poorly calibrated mechanism tied to empathy but I hate to say it, maybe that's not the answer you wanted to hear, Coleman. Much of the manifestations of suicidal empathy that I can think of, by definition, will come from the truly noble and kind and compassionate liberals.
41:11Coleman Hughes:So I'll give you what I think could be an example. The timber industry in the northwest of the United States, like Oregon and Washington, used to be massive. And then partly because jobs started getting shipped overseas because of globalization, a lot of these guys that used to, that, you know, they were loggers, their fathers were loggers, their grandfathers were loggers. All of a sudden, this industry contracted massively and literally whole towns that were based on timber like ceased to be financially, economically viable. And you would hope that those men would just get the next best job in a different industry.
41:56Coleman Hughes:But the social reality and the psychological reality is a lot of them stopped in the timber industry on Monday and started drinking on Tuesday and all of the externalities that come along with that. And a lot of people on the right, because these are, you know, we're talking mostly working class white communities. A lot of people on the American and right have a lot of empathy for that. And in the name of that empathy, they will support a policy like Trump's tariffs, right? We're going to tariff timber from the rest of the world to bring back manufacturing jobs into the country. And who cares that it's going to raise prices everywhere?
42:34Coleman Hughes:And who cares that every single economist that's ever studied the issue is unanimous in opposing tariffs? We're going to support them anyway, basically out of genuine empathy for this one population of people that we believe have been screwed over by a policy that is perhaps net good for the country, but has losers, right? Would that potentially be an example? Yeah, no, it's a good example. I mean, I would probably put that under more the general rubric of ascribing wrong causality for a particular phenomenon. You know what I mean? It's stretching it to try to fit it within the rubric of suicidal empathy.
43:15But you're exactly right. Why is this guy suicidal himself? Why is he depressed? Why is he sitting at home drinking because he's lost his job? There are many ways by which we could ascribe the key causality for that tragic reality. And perhaps sometimes people on the right will over-ascribe factors that are out of my control to personal agency. So in that sense, I would concede the point to you, right? I mean, but that effectively, Coleman, becomes the grand story of, are you able to always ascribe the right reasons for why you are in a particular place in your life? By the way, there's a humorous story that speaks to this.
44:01I remember I first heard of it in a advanced social psychology course I took in my first semester as a doctoral student. It was by a professor, my professor, his name was Dennis Regan. And he was talking about the fundamental attribution error, which is exactly the idea that we often attribute things to dispositional factors rather than situational factors. And he was talking about, I think it was a study whereby if you're trying to increase your chances of having a, I hope I don't butcher this example. Someone will probably explain it in the commentary section in your... So like you want to go on a second date with someone and you're going to have a kiss with them.
44:43So you want there to be the physiological arousal state of sort of the butterflies. Try to have that kiss on a suspension bridge or something, right? Or something to that effect. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that even though there might be movement in this case that is not officially ascribed to the fact that you've had a good date, the fact that physiologically, there is an arousal state that's coming from something else could then result in that person saying, you know, I really felt an arousal state. Maybe I need to go out with this person again. So I think that the general lesson of that story is those of us who are best able on as many occasions as possible throughout our lives to ascribe the right causality to the event are the ones who are going to win in the game of life.
45:31Coleman Hughes:So my next question came from a conversation I had with two brothers who are political scientists. I think their names are Verlin and Hyland Lewis. I could be getting that wrong, but they're the Lewis brothers. They wrote a book, I had them on my podcast, where they argue that the political tribes of left and right are just that. They're tribes. There's nothing more to the left and the right at a conceptual level then it's just two tribes of people like two sports teams that have as their badge of inclusion in the tribe just a rotating basket of beliefs that don't have anything inherent to do with each other and the reason this is if true this is a profound statement is because there are many other serious people that believe the left and the right represent something deep.
46:30Coleman Hughes:There are people who believe the left and the right represent a certain genetic profile. In other words, people with certain types of genes tend toward left-wing beliefs, and other types of genes tend toward right-wing beliefs. That is certain types of personality profiles. Like if you have more of an authoritarian personality, you go to the right. If you have more of a high and like trait open mindedness, you tend to go towards the left. So that the right and the left actually represent different psychological tendencies within the human species and are actually different in some way behaviorally, cognitively.
47:02Coleman Hughes:And then there are people like Thomas Sowell that argue that there are two basic philosophies in politics, the tragic vision and the utopian vision. The tragic vision sees human nature as inherently flawed, inherently imperfect, and you have to accommodate that with your political system. and the utopian vision sees human nature as perfectible in principle. Like we can all become better in principle and live like one big happy family. And so where in that debate do you sit? Do you think that the left and the right represent real conceptual phenomena or do you think that they're just tribes? It's a bit of both.
47:45And again, I expected nothing less of you. I love your deep questions, so I appreciate them. So let me start with the part that seems to agree with the Lewis brothers. There's a great book, and I always feel as though I should be getting some of their book royalties because I keep promoting their book. There are two French psychologists by the name of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. They wrote a book called The Enigma of Reason. And in the book, and they're evolutionary psychologists, and in the book, they argue that there isn't a sort of domain general quest for humans to seek truth, meaning our reasoning capability didn't evolve to seek some objective truth, but rather to win arguments.
48:39So to your point about tribalism. So it doesn't matter if Donald Trump, you know, finds a way to cure cancer himself in the lab, because then the left will say, as you probably heard the quip at this point, this means that there'll be a lot of oncologists who would lose their job. and therefore he's really a bad guy because he's hurting the economy by solving cancer. All right? So therefore, there is an element of truth to what the Lewis brothers are saying that a lot of the disagreements really are not about right or left substantive issues. I just want to say what is exactly opposite to the other camp because it is terribly satisfying for me to demonstrate that I'm right.
49:22And I'll just make one more point about this. Then I'll argue for the opposite position. that there are inherent differences between the two tribes. I was once on a show about a year and a half ago hosted by a British psychiatrist, and he was the only one in the thousands of shows that I've done to ask me the following question. He asked me, Professor Saad, in all the years that you've been a professor and behavioral scientist, what is the single phenomenon that has most surprised you about the human condition? Which is a tough question to answer off the top of your head. And I paused for a second or two and I said, probably the inability for people to change their minds once it is anchored solidly in cement, right?
50:04I could offer you all the evidence in the world and nothing is going to alter your position. So I think there is definitely something to be said about Lewis's position, but it isn't true that it's all bullshit and there aren't any stable traits that differentiate between these two visions. And in that sense, I'm much more in line with the great Thomas Sowell. One of my great regrets in life, he's still alive, is that we came very close to holding a chat together, but then it didn't end up happening. I still hold out a very minuscule hope that maybe one day we'll be able to have a chat because he's the OG of fighting all of this woke nonsense when we were in diapers, if not even born.
50:44So let me explain what are some of these fundamental differences. And I'm going to use now, rather than personality traits explaining the two tribes, because there is a lot of evidence in support of that. I'm going to actually do something that might surprise you in your audience. There are morphological differences between members of the two tribes. And so it turns out that the physical formidability of a man, as measured by a whole bunch of metrics, including, for example, his just physical strength, determines his positions on a whole bunch of issues that are either left or right. So let me give you an example.
51:26Or maybe, forgive me, I hope I don't put you on the spot, but maybe I'll ask you to predict. Who do you think is more for egalitarianism, whether it be economic egalitarianism, social egalitarianism? Do you think it's men who are very strong or men who look like Mamdani?
51:43Coleman Hughes:Well, I think I've seen the abstract of this study on Twitter, so I know it's the latter. Yeah, well, probably that abstract comes from stuff that I've been writing about. Yeah, it was probably your Twitter. Yeah, probably my Twitter, exactly. Well, because the idea is that if I am physically strong, I'm likely to appreciate the fact that life is competitive. And therefore, I recognize existentially that when we step into the ring, and if Coleman Hughes is smarter than me, he will beat the hell out of me rhetorically. if he's physically stronger than me, he'll beat the hell out of me, literally physically.
52:22And I understand that to be true because life is a competition. On the other hand, if I think that we should all end up equally at the same place because it's unfair to have any instantiation of inequality, then I'm much more likely to support egalitarianism because that's more fair, because that's more empathetic. But now let me tie all this together to evolutionary theory. E.O. Wilson, the very famous evolutionary biologist, he's not the only one, by the way, to have made that point. He was an expert on social ants. Social ants are communistic. There is one reproductive queen and then just an entire cast of indistinguishable warrior and worker ants.
53:07Social ants are communistic. Human beings are not communistic. So when he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your thoughts on communism and socialism? He said, great idea, wrong species. Why did he say that? One of the greatest comebacks I've ever heard. Because in that little sentence, he explained that the phylogenetic history of a species matters when you are creating sociopolitical and economic systems. Those that are congruent with our human nature are more likely to succeed, and those that are not will fail. That's why communism has been tried 14 trillion different ways, but it has always failed.
53:48But of course, Mamdani is going to solve that because he's going to institute the true socialism in New York City. So yes, there is something to be said about the Lewis position, but hail to Thomas Sowell.
54:01Coleman Hughes:Okay, so I want to dig a little deeper into that because it could seem potentially contradictory. So on the one hand, what you're saying is there are these studies showing that the winners in life, you know, the men that are stronger, more successful, smarter, because of that, they're more likely to favor market capitalism because that's a game where they can win because they're winners. Whereas essentially the losers, the people that are weaker and less smart, less likely to win are the ones in favor of redistribution because they're not going to win the game if they play the game, right? But at the same time, you're saying that America has a culture of suicidal empathy, where essentially what's rewarded is signals of empathy, right?
54:54Coleman Hughes:Or redistribution. So if you think of a guy like Gavin Newsom or whatever, he's clearly like, by any metric, he's a winner. He's an alpha male. He's tall. He's handsome. He's successful. He's the governor of a state. And yet, in the culture, at least of blue America, he can't really be pro-market capitalism or pro-meritocracy so much because he exists in a value structure where he actually gets rewarded for saying the opposite. So how do you reconcile all those two ideas? Yeah, I'm not sure I see the contradiction, but I'll try to answer it as best as I can. And if I haven't hit it, please challenge me again.
55:44I'm friends with Elon Musk. I know him well. He's maybe 6 '3", 6 '4". He's got$400 billion. I'm not 6 '4", and I don't have the money that he has. yet I'm not in the least bit intimidated by him nor do I hold any rancor towards him because he's taller than me and has more money than me. I understand that there are vagaries in life that we can't control, my height but there are other parts where we can control. So for example, if mate choice were a and let me, sorry, I'm going to use like academic language but then I'll explain it. If mate choice were a non-compensatory process then I would have been doomed to a life of celibacy.
56:29Now, what does that mean? If every woman on earth said, there is no chance in hell that I will ever mate with a guy who's under six feet, I'm not six foot tall, therefore I'm dead. But that would be if mate choice were non-compensatory, meaning I cannot compensate for literally a shortcoming by having other qualities that women find very desirable. But notwithstanding that Elon Musk exists and is tall and makes a lot of money, there is still an ecosystem that I can fit in. There is still a niche that I could fit in. I'm rather easy on the eyes. I have some charm. I'm funny. I'm educated. I've accomplished something of my life that is very attractive to a lot of women.
57:17So I was able to compensate for many of my shortcomings by doing well on others. That to me sounds like a very freeing message, right? It says that even if you are too short or not enough this or not enough that, if you get off the couch, and I mean, by the way, that's why Jordan Peterson's message has resonated so well, but he was hardly the first to tell people to get off the couch, right? But that message says that I can ascribe causality to my life because of my internal dispositions. That's very freeing. That's very empowering, right? But the left says, look, something happened in the St.
58:04Lawrence River in 1733, where the Iroquois and Algonquin were stolen, whatever, because they were promised this in Treaty 7. So 400 years later, we need to still find ways to apologize to you and give you special treatment. Because what happened in the St. Lawrence River in 1732. Let me draw that model compared to a real story of victimology. You ready, Coleman? We escaped imminent execution in Lebanon. This is not in 1732. This is in my lifetime. I saw things in my childhood that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. My parents were kidnapped by Fatah and tortured. My grandparents escaped from Syria because they were Syrian Jews escaping the noble religion of peace.
59:04My wife's family is Armenian. They escaped the Armenian genocide. My brother-in-law's family are Egyptian, Alexandrian Jews who in the 50s had to leave Egypt under imminent threat of death because they were Jews. This is in my lifetime, not what happened to the Iroquois in 1732 or slavery and whatever. I'm not denigrating or minimizing those things. But I come from a stock that says, stop whining. That victimology narrative as part of my story. When it is appropriate for me to say it as I am saying it on the current show, I will say it because it's part of my regrettable history. But what defines me is that I've overcome it to be able to sit now and have a wonderful conversation with Coleman Hughes.
59:57I don't wallow forevermore boo-hoo-hoo in what happened to me in my childhood. And by the way, that's one of the reasons why it's very hard to cancel me because people say, How is it possible that someone who is so outspoken like you is able to survive in academia? Well, because even on the metrics of victimology that are so important to the degenerate left, I come out as the Olympic medalist, right? Therefore, it becomes very hard for you to accuse me of white supremacy and so on. Once I pull out my victimology card, I'm not Jussie Smollett. I'm Gat Saad. I have a real victimology story. So the bottom line is that when it comes to finding a socioeconomic political system that imparts the maximal amount of happiness to the greatest number of people, there is a tribe that is more likely to offer ideas to achieve that objective, and it's not the left.
1:00:57Coleman Hughes:Okay, so final question. What can we actually do about suicidal empathy? Obviously, you're doing your best by writing this book and trying to persuade people. But what can the rest of us who care about this issue actually do about it? I love that question because both in the parasitic mind and in suicidal empathy, the final chapter is a prescriptive action, you know, call to action precisely to address your question, which is there's no point in going to your physician and he or she telling you that you have a disease. And then when you say, well, so what's the cure, doctor? I don't know what the cure is.
1:01:35I just know that you're going to die. So there are several. I actually have a whole bunch of these. I don't want to bore you with all the different ones. But the most important sort of 30 ,000 foot prescription I can offer is to recognize that empathy, empathy is a noble virtue. But in exactly the way that Aristotle explained to us thousands of years ago in his Nicomachean ethics, all things at the right time, at the right place, to the right target, in the right situation. That's the game of life, right? Knowing when to invoke what and what amount. There is nothing noble about ascribing empathy towards a child rapist.
1:02:23He's not deserving of a second chance. It doesn't make you superior to me morally by being kind to that person, right? Sometimes empathy requires harshness in the same way that, you know, the old argument to, you know, you to seek peace, you have to be ready for war and so on, right? So you people have to be mindful that it's not a linear function, more empathy, always better than less empathy. It's an inverted you, too little empathy is not good. It makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy makes you suicidally empathetic. And the trick in life is to find that sweet spot. So if nothing else, but to be mindful of that general lesson, hopefully we can inoculate people against suicidal empathy.
1:03:13Coleman Hughes:Okay, Gad, thanks so much for coming on my show. And your book is going to be Suicidal Empathy. People can follow you on Twitter, I assume. And if you have a website, now would be a good time to plug it. My website is gadsad.com and I would be remiss in not saying that I recently started a new affiliation at Ole Miss, the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. You need a Canadian to teach Americans about American freedoms. So people should go check out that center because they're doing amazing things. They're exactly the opposite of the woke university. So thank you so much, Coleman.
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From the publisher
Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom in Mississippi and an evolutionary psychologist. We discuss his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, in which he argues that the political left has taken empathy to a dangerous extreme. We also talk about his childhood as a Jew in Lebanon and his family’s experience during the Lebanese Civil War. Has empathy gone too far? And is it really a phenomenon unique to the political left?
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