Is The West Sowing The Seeds of It’s Own Demise? W/ Dr. Gad Saad

0:00Hello, hello from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in hot, humid New York City. I am Carlo Versano, and this is your weekly edition of The 1600. This country was stone cold dead. Today I'm speaking with somebody I've been really meaning to speak with for a while. I'm very excited about this. His name is Dr. Gad Saad. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist, a self-described optimistic realist, which is something that no one's ever accused me of being, but I like that anyway. And a great social media gadfly, social media provocateur, one of the great follows on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days.

0:35And Dr. Saad says that the West is dying, but dying of kindness. Not literally, of course, but according to his recent bestseller, Suicidal Empathy, he basically makes this point that the instinct of us in the West to extend sort of endless compassion to criminals, terrorists, and the ideologically hostile has become a kind of civilizational death wish among liberal societies like ours. Dr. Satt, thank you so much for your time, sir. Oh, so good to be with you. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Thank you. I'm really glad to have you. So I wrote about a version of this myself recently, which I want to get to in a minute, whereby I'm sort of like watching my own party, you know, the Democrats and my own city, New York City.

1:16Their empathy-driven policies collide with what I thought would be a relatively simple act of, you know, bureaucratic normalcy of getting my daughter into kindergarten. garden. It's not been that, and I'll explain all that why. But I wanted to bring you on because you are the man that coined this term, suicidal empathy. I guess my first question to you, sir, is this a diagnosis of what's ailing the West or just what your critics might say is a clever rebrand of an old argument dressed up as evolutionary psychology? No, it's a unique malaise of the current period. There have been previous people who've commented about how civilizations die by suicide, not by murder.

2:02And so the famous case would be the eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee, who exactly arrived at that conclusion. What is unique to my work is that I'm offering the mechanism by which today this civilization has decided to commit suicide. Now, it's not just because I'd like to couch it in evolutionary psychology, because if you look at all of the domestic and foreign policies that are leading the West into the abyss of infinite darkness, it all stems from dysregulated empathy. And if I can take maybe two or three minutes to explain the framework. Many of my detractors have wrongly argued that I am the dark, evil Jew who's trying to create a world bereft of empathy.

2:49I'm doing no such thing. As an evolutionary behavioral scientist, I fully recognize the importance of empathy for 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 or cognitive empathy. So there's nothing wrong with well-modulated empathy. but as Aristotle explained to us 2000 plus years ago via his Nicomachean ethics everything the golden mean the golden mean right yeah too little of something is not good too much of something is not good now if we apply that principle to empathy little or no empathy makes you a psychopath too much empathy the hyper activation of the empathy module in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets results in suicidal empathy so i mean i think i i totally agree with you that you know we we all would all agree i think that you need empathy to survive and to flourish as a species what would you say to somebody who might be listening to this and they're saying like okay he's just he's coining a term for just empathy that i of something i disagree with uh no because if it if that mechanism results in suboptimal consequences, then it is pathological.

4:05Look, cancer and regular cell divisions, the only thing that differentiates the two, they both divide, right? Regular cells divide, cancerous cells divide, but they are hyperactive. They don't have a stopping mechanism that stops the cell division. So it's not as though the example that I'm using here hasn't been documented in other natural phenomena. The idea that you take an adaptive process and it becomes maladaptive when it misfires is found throughout the psychiatric literature. Let me give you a concrete example. If you and I, if I had the pleasure of meeting you at one of those swanky parties in Manhattan with Malcolm Baudwell, where he explains to us that we're degenerates for actually believing that there are differences between men and women, because he is just smarter than the rest of us.

4:54So if I were to meet you at that party, And I noticed before you came up to shake my hand that you were incessantly sneezing in your hand. Well, then I've scanned the environment. I looked for potential threats. I've identified a threat. I'll go to the bathroom. And when you're not looking because I don't want to offend you, I'll wash my hands once and then I'll move on with my day. That was an adaptive process. OCD, germ contamination fear, is the maladaptive misfiring of this otherwise adaptive process because I'm stuck in an infinite loop in the bathroom. for eight hours a day washing my hands.

5:31No, that's a great way of putting it. Okay, so let's talk about some sort of like political examples here in the U.S. of suicidal empathy. The ones that come to my mind, we'll talk about my point about the kindergarten and immigration in a minute. But off the top of my head, right, I went to CVS yesterday, which has become like a humiliation ritual because you have to like buzz somebody to get your toothpaste, right? Everything is now locked up in all of the cases here in New York City. I don't know if it's like this in other parts of the country, but in New York, you cannot just go into the drugstore and buy toothpaste anymore.

6:07You have to ring a little bell, which gets some guy, you know, some college kid in the back to scutter around and unlock it for you. And the reason is because, you know, there was this big surge in shoplifting during COVID here and also because of policies that the Democrats here in New York have instituted of not prosecuting shoplifting crimes. Right. So instead of prosecuting shoplifting crimes, now they just put everything behind the plastic and regular non-shoplifting people like me have to now. It's a big production for us to go in and get toothpaste. Is there something else like that? That strikes me as suicidal empathy, right?

6:43It is. So that would be a on the on the continuum of how nefarious suicidal empathy can be. The shoplifting example would be on the lesser end. Right, it's annoying. Yeah, but let's speak about this one. In ethical systems, there's a distinction between what's called deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. Deontological statement would be, it is never okay to steal. That's it. It's deontological. It's an absolute. It's kind of like a Kantian imperative. On the other hand, if you say it is okay to steal if blah, blah, blah, if the consequences, then you are falling into a consequentialist ethos, right?

7:23So for many things in life, we're all consequentialists. So for example, if you want to have a happy marriage, I often remind people if your spouse asks you the following question, do I look fat in those jeans? Then you better put on your consequentialist hat and perhaps lie because you actually care about the feelings of your spouse. So it makes perfect sense to be a consequentialist for many things, But there are certain foundational principles that by definition have to be deontological. Freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, presumption of innocence, right? Thou shall not steal. Once you use a consequentialist ethos because you are suicidally empathetic to a deontological principle, you end up at the abyss of infinite lunacy.

8:12The other one I'm thinking about is, which I guess is sort of tangentially related, is just how we speak about homelessness in this country now. You know, people aren't homeless anymore. They're unhoused. And I guess, you know, again, this falls in the continuum of sort of like stupid stuff, not like big stuff. But I think it's still important. And that always grinded my gears when I heard people say that or people would say like, oh, you don't say homeless anymore. You say unhoused. You know, we don't want to stigmatize these people. But you do want to stigmatize homelessness, right? I mean, why do we want to de-stigmatize?

8:49I'm not saying that we want to stigmatize people who are homeless or who are addicts, but the idea of de-stigmatizing something like being without a home seems crazy to me. So this is part of a section in the book where I talk about linguistic empathy. Yes, exactly. Right? So I'll give you much worse examples than the homeless versus unhoused. How about minor attracted individuals for pedophiles? Because God forbid if we were to marginalize the otherwise noble pedophilic community. And that's why using my satire I came up with, we don't really want to marginalize the rapist community. That's why it's better to call them either undocumented lovemakers or altruistic sperm donors.

9:37Because again, rapists have feelings and we need to be kind. We need to create a more inclusive society. Now, I hate for people to think that, you know, it's just me being my spicy satirical self because my satire comes from the really ugly Kafkaesque reality that I see every day around me. I've been a professor for 32 plus years. This is basically standard father within the academic milieu. So there you go. Well, you know, I was going to ask you because, I mean, it wasn't – you know, there's always been this sort of like PC thing that happens when you're in college. I remember as a college student myself.

10:13But obviously the wokeism stuff has taken on a totally new level of hysteria in the world of academia. I mean I haven't been on a college campus in 20 years, so what do I know? Good for you. Yeah, to your point. Right. Duck, I'm trying to ask you what I want to ask you is like, what's the evidence against your thesis? Like, is there a policy driven by empathy that you would call successful? Well, so it depends what is the metric that we are trying to optimize. So there's and forgive me if I get professorial, I will then tie it all back together. There's a field called operations research. It's an applied mathematics field where you try to either minimize something or maximize something.

10:56So, for example, there's something called the traveling salesman problem. You have a salesman starts at city A and he has to visit these 10 cities. In what order should he visit them in order to minimize his travel costs? Right. So so when you're developing an optimization model for these types of situations, the question becomes, what is the metric that you're trying to minimize or maximize? Now, let's apply it to this kind of conversation we're having here. If universities are meant to be a place where you seek truth and defend truth, then that becomes the metric that you're trying to optimize, not trying to create people who are social activists.

11:42In other words, social activism cannot be the metric that you optimize instead of seeking the truth, right? Once you cross your wires in terms of which metric to optimize, you end up with the problems that we're seeing. So now I'm going to tie it to your question. The place where you see that your policy is wrong is if we agree on what we're trying to optimize, and then the implementation of that policy results in a downstream negative consequence of that optimization model. So example, if I'm trying to optimize the landscape of empathy, then every single individual who wishes to come to the United States should be allowed in because that is the metric.

12:28Because to not let everybody in is less empathetic from their perspective than to let them in. But if you realize that you live in the real world, not in unicornia, therefore you recognize that you can't have social welfare systems where you have open border policies. So that orgiastic empathy of having open borders results in a nefarious outcome if I'm trying to optimize certain metrics other than empathy. So that's how you navigate that. Well, so the perfect segue to the reason why I wanted to bring you on to begin with, because I had a real again, I've talked to you before. You know, I'm open about this.

13:10Like I'm a Democrat. I'm sort of like a center left, you know, sort of an old school Democrat. Not like how they are now, evidently. But I had this sort of like real epiphany this summer, because if you'll allow me to sort of get into this, because, you know, so my daughter's five years old, she's going into kindergarten right here in New York City. You're zoned for a certain school. If you want to go to a school that's not in your zone, you have to apply to be on a wait list. Right. So we're on all these wait lists. None of them are moving. The school that she was zoned for what used to be, you know, a mediocre school, but one that you would send your kid to and be OK with it.

13:50Right. Several years ago, when during this huge influx of migrants during covid, you know, during the Biden presidency, See, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the city moved thousands of migrants into a pair of these really big apartment complexes, right? They bought the buildings and they are housing these migrants, mostly from Latin America, in these buildings. OK, fine. I got nothing against those people, obviously. But those – the children of those migrants are now going to this school, right, because the school is in that zone. So, again, I don't have any problem with my daughter going to school with people who don't look like her, right?

14:28I wouldn't raise her in New York City if I did. But these students, generally speaking, don't speak English at home, right? So, well, in kindergarten, I think it's probably kind of important that the students all speak the same language in class. Also, when you have a school that is mostly servicing, you know, migrants and children of migrants, it's transitory by nature, right? It's transient by nature. Kids are moving. They're moving housing. Some of them, their families are getting deported. They just they just up and vanish one day. This is the thing that was sort of a black pill for me because I voted for this.

15:02Right. I voted for Joe Biden. I enthusiastically said I want Joe Biden to come in because he's not like Trump. He's you know, he's a nice guy. He's going to be he's going to be a president who has empathy. Right. I remember even thinking that in my head voting for him. I voted for whoever that our last stupid mayor was who was completely incapable of managing this influx of migrants, mostly because he was corrupt and also just like ill-fitted for the job. The federal government didn't do anything to serve all of these migrants that are now in my neighborhood, which again, fine. I don't have any problem with them.

15:36But I resent having to feel bad when I talk to other liberals in Brooklyn, other sort of like latte-sipping libs like myself, that, you know what? No, I don't actually think it's acceptable for my daughter to go to a school where most of the students don't speak English. Is that suicidal empathy? Well, so I want to give you a big kudos because the fact that you were willing to, on camera, admit that you used to believe X and now in light of incoming evidence you believe not X is already something that is quite unique among human beings. Most people are never willing, irrespective of how much evidence they see, to change their anchored position.

16:20So that's number one. The suicidal empathy that you exhibited was that you voted for Joe Biden because he is, quote, a nice guy, because he was going to not be mean and not, you know, have, you know, go against open borders. Because he doesn't remember when there was a guy who killed, a Venezuelan guy who killed and attempted to rape a jogger. He first had said that, you know, this migrant, this illegal migrant or whatever had done so. And then he went back in front of the television and apologized profusely for having used such an injurious word like illegal migrant. for an illegal migrant, because that marginalizes the illegal migrant community.

17:07So it was suicidal empathy what you felt then. It's not suicidal empathy what you feel now. But here's my, and this is not to put you on the spot. No, by all means. It often frustrates me to no end that the people who would scoff and mock my positions while I stood alone for decades on top of the mountain, warning people, will then send me the private email saying, I'm now on your side because the monster that I've been warning them about has finally come home to bite you in the ass. Until it bit you, the monster didn't exist. And Dr. Gadsad was a bigot, Islamophobe, xenophobic guy, transphobic.

17:53But once he bit you, once your daughter took a shower with a six foot eight girl with a nine inch penis named Linda, then you realize that my position was right. Now, had you stuck to deontological principles, then you wouldn't have needed reality to specifically slap you for you to come around to seeing things correctly. It's so I mean, it's I know you have kids. It's like there's something about you become a parent. And I mean, you know, the old adage is like you become more conservative, which is certainly true, by the way. But also you just become it's you almost feel like you're betraying your child in, you know, by by by putting them in these positions that are sort of outside of your control.

18:38But again, maybe they're not outside my control. Right. I mean, I I voted for this. Right. I voted for the situation in which I now find myself. But anyway, I look, what was me? I'll be I'll be fine. She'll be fine. But I will say that this was a black pill moment, as they say. And also it just you know, you bring it all together. Right. It's like it's that it's it's not her not having a kindergarten three weeks till school starts. It's going to CVS and not being able to get the toothpaste. It's, you know, dodging like a paranoid schizophrenic in the in the subway and being afraid that I might, you know, accidentally call them homeless instead of unhoused.

19:13housed, right? Like it's insanity. So are we seeing before our eyes the switch of Mr. Versano from being a hopeless progressive to actually being wedded to reality? Look, I mean, I'm not saying I'm a Republican. I did say to somebody recently, I was like, I said, I got to move out of New York City before I become a Republican. But in terms of being a A realist, yes, I mean, I think you're absolutely right, and I think you've been absolutely right about all of this. I want to ask you for a minute about your earlier book, which was called The Parasitic Mind from a few years back. So you frame postmodernism and this idea of identity politics as idea pathogens, using your words, right?

19:59And you're basically using this infectious disease metaphor. My question is, like, what makes an idea parasitic as opposed to just being wrong, right? Is there is there a, you know, a evolutionary psychology claim underneath that metaphor? Is it just like, oh, an idea I don't like is parasitic? No, very good. I could say that Toulouse is the capital of France rather than Paris. That is that is a wrong belief. It's not parasitic for something to be parasitic. it has to be detrimental to the one who is infected by the parasitic idea, right? So, for example, when a rape victim, this is a real story and I could give you many others, both covered in the parasitic mind.

20:50I think I know where you're going with this, but yeah, go ahead. So, a rape victim is stopped by the cops and they ask her, give us some identity markers of the rapist. Then her suicidal empathetic calculus says, I don't want to marginalize the community from which these men originate, which is the Middle Eastern community, because she heard them speaking in Arabic and in Farsi. And therefore, she says that they were speaking in German. So she lied to the cops. So to protect the ones who violently gang raped her, that's parasitic. That's not just a wrong idea. I could be wrong as to whether Bolivia is north or south of Peru.

21:34That's not parasitic. But it is parasitic if I'm willing to jump into the abyss of infinite lunacy in order to allow that idea to flourish. Now, let me explain how I use the neuroparasithological framework because it speaks exactly to your point. In the animal kingdom, there is a huge field of study called parasitology. That is the interaction between parasites and their hosts. So a tapeworm is a parasite, but it parasitizes your intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is one that needs to end up in your brain, altering your circuitry to your detriment to serve typically the reproductive interests of the parasite.

22:19So the classic example I give, but there's a million others, is the wood cricket. The wood cricket is an insect that detests water. It wants nothing to do with water. When it is parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to happily jump into water, commit suicide, because for it to complete its reproductive cycle, it has to happen in water. So that is the distinction between what you call just a regular vanilla bad idea and a parasitic idea. Your analogy about the rape victim brings to mind something similar that actually did happen here in New York City this year in which a woman was accosted on the subway by some guy.

23:04And the cops asked her for a description. She didn't give one. And then that same guy a couple of weeks later pushed some random person in the train. Guy died, had a brain hemorrhage and died. And then the New York Post, I think, called that woman and asked her, you know, do you regret that? And she was like, look, I just didn't want to put another another black man in jail. And it's like, OK, I mean, talk about suicidal empathy. Right. And I guess I'm a little empathy. Can I give you a one that even beats that one, please? OK, so super liberal, very progressive, much more enlightened than me.

23:41White progressive woman wants to put an end to the terrible stereotype that black men are ever violent. In their natural state, black men are noble and lovely because there's absolutely no evidence that we could see in reality that any black man has ever committed any violence other than when it is a reaction to white supremacy. So she decides to go to Haiti. I don't know specifically why Haiti, but she decides to go to Haiti to demonstrate that in Haiti, where all these black men live outside of the white supremacy of the United States, she could then show that they're all going to sing Kumbaya and play John Lennon's Imagine.

24:23Well, just like you were slapped in a slightly less serious version by reality, she was slapped by reality when one of these noble, peaceful black Haitian men was gang raping her violently on top of her roof. And then she tried to tell him, do you not realize that I am a BLM ally myself? I myself love Malcolm X. And that didn't stop his rape, despite the fact that she was a BLM ally. At the end of the rape, when she returned to the United States, she wrote an essay, which is referenced in my book, where she says that at the end of the day, she was very thankful for the experience of being violently raped.

25:10because it demonstrated how much this Haitian man in Port-au-Prince-Héry had internalized hate against white supremacy, that he used her body as the vehicle of his rage. And she was thankful for that. That's what suicidal empathy, Carlo. That I actually, from your book, I noted that example. I have her name here somewhere. I forget. Yeah, Alex. Amanda Kajera. Yeah. Amanda Kajera. Quite. OK. I'm going to let that one let that one lay there for a minute, Doc. I want to turn to an easier topic. Israel, Israel and Gaza. One of my least favorite things to discuss, but obviously an important issue, one in the news, one in which you've been vocal about.

25:58You are, as you noted, a Lebanese Jew. We're coming up on three years since since October 7th here. You've been very outspoken in your defense of of Israel since then. And before you've argued that, you know, again, we sort of pathologize empathy for Palestinians, which then gets weaponized against the Jewish state by bad actors on the left. I think I probably am going to disagree with you on this. I think I don't see the liberal reaction to Gaza as suicidal empathy. To me, it just looks like empathy. Right. I think most people, most normal people were horrified by what happened on October 7th.

26:35I mean, I covered that day. It was horrific. And then they're also horrified by Israel's disproportionate response to it. Tell me why you disagree with that, if you disagree with that. Right. By the way, suicidal empathy doesn't only apply to some of the misdirection of empathy towards the Palestinians and not the Jews. Even the Israelis exhibited suicidal empathy that led to October 7th. And let me give you an example. Yahya Sinwar was one of the heads of Hamas who had dedicated his life to eradicating every last Jew, including the ones that are hiding behind the tree. That comes from a famous hadith from the peaceful religion of Islam.

27:20We will go on until the end of times, until the trees say, oh, there's a Jew hiding behind me, kill him. Okay, but the killing will happen peacefully, so it is a peaceful religion. So in any case, Yahya Sinwar was in prison for life for some terroristic acts that he had committed. But then because the Israelis are very keen to do the exchange of prisoners, they'll exchange one of their prisoners for thousands of theirs. They decided to release Yahya Sinwar. Now, in the meantime, when Yahya Sinwar was in prison, he was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor. Now, because the Israeli surgeons were adhering to the deontological principles inherent to the Hippocratic oath, they said, we don't care that he has committed his life to the extermination of Jews.

28:11We are held to a higher standard. We have to intervene. They saved his life. And when he was released, that didn't buy them any empathy chips. He said, hey, here's a great idea. I'll pay them by being one of the architects of October 7th. So suicidal empathy also applies to the Israelis in this case. Now, but to your more specific question, look, when I defend Israel, part of my defense of Israel stems from being Jewish, from having tons of family in Israel. But actually, my defense is at a much higher level, meaning that I'm defending the Western tradition of which Israel is a much greater exemplar than all of its neighbors.