Transcript of When Being Kind Goes Too Far New

A growing number of American institutions that once prioritized truth and open debate are now increasingly driven by emotional consensus and the fear of offending people. Supporters argue it's simply a more compassionate and inclusive way of thinking.

Evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad says the shift has gone much further than most people even realize, and when empathy becomes detached from reality, it can actually become destructive.

He joins us today to explain why he believes many in the West are engaging in suicidal empathy and what he thinks it will take to reverse course.

I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howell. This is a special edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us now is Gad Saad, evolutionary behavioral scientist, podcast host, and the author of a new book, Suicidal Empathy. Gad, great to have you on.

Thank you so much for having me on, John.

So let's start a little bit with your background. You've been a professor at Concordia University in Montreal for a number of years. I was actually a professor for a time myself, not nearly as, uh, prestigious as your tenure. But now you've told the world that you're leaving the university, you're leaving Canada, you're coming here to the US. What led to that decision?

This past year, I've been a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss, a big title. And starting next year, I'll be a distinguished visiting professor there. What led to it? Well, it's, it's As in most things in life, it's multifaceted. Number one, it has become increasingly challenging to be an outspoken Jewish professor in Montreal, Canada. So that definitely was not a good thing. But even if that didn't exist, as I get older, I've grown incredibly less tolerant of the bad weather. Even though we moved to Canada in the 1970s, you know, my genetic makeup is not made to be living in -20-degree weather for, you know, 6 months a year. So that would certainly be another one. And the third reason is, frankly, the taxation system in Canada is so astounding. And if you add Quebec and Canada, it becomes really impossible. And so might as well Go to the United States so I can experience my inner spirit, which is indeed American in reality.

Did suicidal empathy in Canada actually play a part into your decision as well?

I mean, it did, although suicidal empathy is something that regrettably has taken a hold of the entire West. Canada is certainly at the forefront of being, you know, some of the biggest sufferers of that malady. So I'll give you a few concrete examples. You know, in Canada, we very much have doubled and tripled down on diversity, inclusion, and equity. And this certainly manifests itself in a myriad of ways within the university ecosystem. So at my own university that I'm, you know, going to be leaving this summer, one of the key objectives in the strategic mission was to indigenize and decolonize the entire curriculum. I mean, you have to stop back and imagine what that means. Every single discipline that is being taught, you should try to incorporate Indigenous and decolonization lens to it. While I teach things like consumer psychology, evolutionary psychology, and psychology of decision-making, I didn't know that there was a decolonized way to study that. So that would be one example. And it manifests itself across all of academic excellence. University of Waterloo recently was looking for top professors in AI, and one of the positions said that you had to be two-spirit, non-binary, gender-fluid, or transgender.

That's probably not a good way to organize science.

No, not at all. So let's unpack this a little bit more. You make the case that empathy can actually become destructive when it's misapplied. When did you first start feeling this was really becoming an issue with the West? When did this become a, a major focus for you?

Well, it actually started, if, if you can believe it, straight out of my PhD, where I, my goal in my scientific work was to try to incorporate evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the study of human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular. And I started noticing many of my social science colleagues and, uh, colleagues in the business school were very adamantly against the idea that human beings are biological beings, right? Biology mattered for the horse, for the mosquito, for the zebra, but surely Professor Saad, you don't think that biology matters for human beings? So that was my original exposure to the idea that very bright people could be parasitized by idea pathogens. So that led to, my writing The Parasitic Mind a few years ago. But then I realized that in order for somebody to completely hijack your capacity to engage in critical thinking, they have to do two things. They have to hijack your cognitive system, your thought processes, and they have to hijack your affective system, your emotional system. That's what then led me to write Suicidal Empathy.

Can you actually further discuss this? So the pushback against the concept of biology influencing our actions, for you was a major trigger, a major clue that there was something wrong here. What's the fear from those that are pushing back against that idea that you come to some hard realities about human nature or something? What was their issue?

Right. That's a great question. So in The Parasitic Mind, I basically argue that all of the parasitic ideas, all of which were spawned on university campuses because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, all of those parasitic ideas free us from the pesky shackles of reality, right? So postmodernism basically says up is down, left is right, men are women, freedom is slavery, war is peace. Everything is relativistic, and therefore we're not shackled by this thing called reality. So to then argue that no, no, no, people are born with specific phenotypes, they're called male and female, and you can't alter that becomes very mean. It becomes non-empathetic. Be kind. So what happened in the university is we switched from an epistemology of truth to an epistemology of care, which is one manifestation of suicidal empathy.

Yeah. Coming back to that, the central premise of your new book, the idea that the elites really advocate for policies whose consequences, you know, rarely do they actually have to experience themselves. Do you think that that's mostly the ideology of this class of people, or is it a result of them living insulated lives?

It's both. But before I, you know, expand on what you just asked me, let me just for the listeners and viewers explain what is suicidal empathy. Empathy is a perfectly laudable virtue for human beings to exhibit, right? We are a social species. So for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind. So the book is not an attack on empathy, period. It's an attack on dysregulated empathy. Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago that all good things in moderation. Too little of something is not good. Too much of something is not good. And that exact principle applies to empathy. If I have no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath. If I have hyperactive empathy that is invoked in the wrong situations, toward the wrong targets, we end up with suicidal empathy. But to come back to your point, yes, the Pope behind the very high Vatican walls could pontificate about the love and brotherhood between Islam and Christianity as thousands of Christians are massacred in Nigeria. So I can stroke my beautiful, luxuriant hair while looking at myself in the mirror of moral preening.

Because I don't bear any of the costs of appearing kind, tolerant, empathetic, and compassionate. It's grotesque, it's hypocritical, and it needs to stop because we will lose the West.

So the balance here is key. Can you speak to that a little bit more? How did we get so out of balance? Do you look at, you know, most of our society and see good levels of balance and just key players that are calling the shots really pushing this empathy on others, or is this actually more like a pandemic that's taking over in the West?

It's a pandemic. I don't think— I don't think that suicidal empathy was designed at a Davos meeting, you know, at the World Economic Forum, right? That would be too conspiratorial. I think what happened is a bunch of terrible ideas were spawned on university campuses. And to your earlier question, the professors who pontificate those ideas don't have the slap of reality to autocorrect their nonsense. So they could stand on the podium, pontificate nonsense, and not worry about those consequences. And then their students subsequently become our politicians, our filmmakers, our journalists. But let me explain, let me give a concrete example of how a parasitic idea can lay the groundwork for suicidal empathy. Take the parasitic idea of cultural relativism, which basically purports that you don't have the right to judge the beliefs and practices of another culture. If another culture wants to practice genital female, female genital mutilation on 5-year-old girls, shut up, racist. So then because I'm rendered impotent to criticize other cultures, when then I am the architect of the immigration policy, I no longer am willing to say, no, no, no, we shouldn't have millions of people that espouse those practices coming into our nation.

So cultural relativism leads to the suicidal, empathetic position of open border policies.

Yeah, absolutely. And we're seeing that play out dramatically in so many countries like the UK with their immigration policies. So what's the answer? Does it just have to be, you know, hard facts hitting people in the face? Does it have to be more people telling the truth about the reality on the ground? What is the solution?

Right. So in the last chapter of Suicidal Empathy, I offer a vaccine against suicidal empathy. But to your more general point, look, we all have to speak out against this nonsense. You don't know how many emails I receive. I mean, literally in the thousands and thousands where people say, dear Professor Saad, then they list a bunch of beautiful, kind words and compliments. And then the last line is, if If you decide to read this email on your show, please don't mention my name. And then I typically write back to them and say, thank you for your kind words. Don't you think the last sentence in your email is precisely why we're here? So most people realize that men can't bear children and that men can't menstruate, but they are so overcome with cowardice. They are so willing to diffuse the responsibility on a few of us that are willing to speak. That's how the monster of lunacy can come after all of us. If everybody stood up and said, we've had enough of this nonsense, the problem would be solved by next Tuesday.

Have you seen any progress? Obviously, you speak to a lot of people. You've got a large audience. Have you seen some progress on this front, or do you feel like we're still losing ground when it comes to this sort of battle?

So I'll give both an optimistic and a pessimistic answer, not to be coy or equivocate, but that's the truth. I am optimistic in that there is a prescription by which we can solve the problem, right? Donald Trump came in as the new president and signed an executive order, and suddenly the trans insanity in athletic competitions went away in the NCAA. So there is a mechanism by which we can solve it. My pessimism stems from the fact, and to your question, that I don't see many folks in the West willing to implement the autocorrections. Now, in the United States, it's a bit better. But for example, in Canada, I see the doubling down and tripling down of the lunacy. So I'm optimistic in that there is a solution. I'm pessimistic in that I don't see that there is the testicular fortitude to implement those solutions.

Mm-hmm. Now, this is kind of a wrinkle on this, but the idea of performative empathy on social media, we I see a lot of people putting on the guise of empathy and portraying themselves as supporting ideas that they actually don't off the camera. Is there actually some hope in a weird way in looking at it from that perspective of the sort of performative nature of messaging out there?

Right. Look, if you noticed around 5, 6, 7 years ago, everybody started putting their pronouns in their bios, right? And certainly all of the progressive folks, because until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had lived on Earth, that's a real estimate, they were able to fully adjudicate the very difficult conundrum of identifying who's male or female. But 15 minutes ago, we lost that ability and we needed to put those bios. Well, to your point about all it being performance and theatrics, Many of those people have quietly now removed those bios. Had it been something that was true, that we actually, you know, you can't tell that I'm a male based on my voice and my morphology. I actually need to tell you, Jon, oh, by the way, I'm he/him. Had this been a real thing, I wouldn't have to run away while nobody's looking and slowly scrub that from my bio. So, but even if it is performative, Because most people are cowardly, they take the signals from the herd and then they nod along. That's what happened with the imbecile Malcolm Gladwell, who recently came out and said, oh yeah, I guess I wasn't telling the truth when I said that there are no differences between men and women, but I lied for a valuable reason.

No, you're a cowardly imbecile who wanted to be invited to the cool kids' party in Manhattan. And so you went along to get along.

Well, one of the takeaways from just hearing you discuss this now is it just sounds like courage is maybe everything when it comes to addressing this.

It's everything.

Well, we're really excited about your book here. So far, how's the response been? Do you feel like the message is being received well by the audience?

Well, given the question you asked me, I hope you'll forgive me if it doesn't sound as though I'm being a braggart. It was certified number one in the world on Audible. It's been number one in Canada. It's top 10 globally. So reception has been very good, thank God.

Well, congratulations on that success, and thank you so much for talking with us today. Really enjoyed it.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

That was Dr. Gad Saad, author of the new book Suicidal Empathy, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.