Gad Saad on Suicidal Empathy and the West’s Survival

0:01 Good afternoon and welcome to the Middle East Forums weekly podcast. My name is Lauri Regan and on behalf of MEF, I thank you all for joining today and for your continued support of the critically important work that we do. This afternoon, I'm very excited to be joined by the brilliant Gods, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, author, and a leading public intellectual who often writes and speaks about ideal pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. He hosts the Sad Truth podcast and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Mississippi, having spent much of his career as a professor at Concordia University in Montreal. God is the author of numerous books, including The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, and his new book, which he'll be discussing this afternoon, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind Copy is Here, particularly in the context of current events surrounding Israel, anti-semitism, Islamism, and the Decline of the West. I'm going to spend the first part of the podcast discussing these important issues with God and then we'll open the discussion to audience questions. So, if you have a question,

1:02 please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screens. And please do limit your questions to questions only. Um, I'll do my best to get as many of your submissions as possible in the brief time that we have together. Today's podcast is being recorded and will be available for future viewing. So, please do share this link with those in your networks who you think would be interested in learning more on this important and timely topic. Um, Gad's insights are important and should be heard far and wide. And in that context, I highly recommend that you follow his work, which um you can do on X. Thank you, Gad. And, uh, appreciate you joining us this afternoon.

1:36 It's so good to be with you, Lori. Uh, just a quick question before we even begin. Are you by any chance related to a professor of psychology at Cornell named Dennis Rean? I am not. I usually get, am I related to Ronald Reagan, but no, I am not. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Um, so Gad, I wanted to start by asking you to share with our audience the premise of your book and what you mean by suicidal empathy. I know that the book begins with the following quote. Um, suicidal empathy is a tragic manifestation at the civilizational level of the well-known proverb, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So, what exactly, God, is suicidal empathy? And could one make the argument that many of the people suffering from it have actually become evil given their lack of a moral compass? Right. So to your second part, absolutely emphatically yes. But let me explain what uh empathy is versus suicidal empathy. And I'll begin with an analogy. Cancer cells divide and healthy cells divide. The only difference between the two is that the former have

2:41 unchecked cell division. They don't have a stopping mechanism for the division to stop. Now why is that related to the distinction between empathy and suicidal empathy? Well modulated empathy is a perfectly rational virtue for humans to possess. We are a social species. Therefore we interact with each other for you and I Lori 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 there's nothing wrong with well-calibrated empathy. Suicidal empathy though does something akin to what cancer cells do. It hyperfires in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets. Once that rational empathetic module is gamed, it becomes suicidally uh you know faulty. Now and let me draw another very quick reference. Aristotle several thousand years ago explained

3:43 through his golden mean the idea that too little of something is not good. Too much of something is not good. And much of life is about finding that sweet spot, that golden mean. That exact principle applies to empathy versus suicidal empathy. No empathy renders me a psychopath. Too much empathy towards the wrong targets makes me suicidally Thank you. It's such an interesting premise and and we're going to get into it in a lot of different contexts. But um you know many of us in this space for a very long time have been speaking and writing about the decline of the west where arguably many Western European countries may be past the point of no return and the US may be on its way to joining them. You're the first person to recognize the role that hypermpathy can act as a deadly contagion is is the term that you used in your book and that if not properly contained it it can destroy the west. How is suicidal empathy destroying the west and is it too late to stop it? Perhaps also god when you answer the question can you tie in the James Bham observation that you quote in

4:45 your book liberalism is the ideology of western suicide right uh if thank you for mentioning his work it actually I think his book came out in 1964 which happens to be the date of my uh birth. So there you go. Uh look there are many many ways by which suicidal empathy manifests itself. Uh and of course in the book I go through an endless number of cases whether it be in criminal justice whether it be with climate alarmism right let's stop producing children because otherwise we are raping mother earth. Well for a sexually reproducing species where there are two functions that you have to achieve. First survive and then reproduce. If you if suicidal empathy erases your survival instinct and if suicidal empathy tells you don't reproduce because you need to be empathetic to mother earth, that's probably not a good civilizational outcome. But let's discuss a few specific ones. By far the one that is most existentially dangerous to the west is the open border immigration policies of the west. And now let me here link

5:49 because you so kindly mentioned one of my other books parasitic mind with suicidal empathy. Those books are actually in a very meaningful way related to one another. It's a it's a suicidal empathy is in a sense a sequel to parasitic mind. In the parasitic mind I was looking at what happens when parasitic ideas hijack your cognitive system your thought processes. But we are both a thinking and a feeling animal. So in order for me to completely hijack your ability to navigate the world, I also have to hijack your affective system, your emotional system. And that's where suicidal empathy comes in. And let me show you specifically how one leads to the other as related to open border policies. Cultural relativism is an idea pathogen that I discuss in parasitic mind. So cultural relativism regrettably was originally espoused by a Jewish anthropologist by the name of France Boaz about 100 years ago basically argues that you are in no position to

6:53 ever make moral, ethical, legal, societal, cultural judgments about how an other society adopts its own values, its own behaviors. So if another culture wishes to cut off the clitorises of 5-year-old girls, shut up racist. If they wish to have honor killings, shut up racist. If they wish to have child brides, shut up racist. Well, if I internalize that parasitic idea called cultural relativism, it then renders me impotent to be able to make judgments in my immigration policy because it's wrong for me to then argue that people in Waziran and Afghanistan are less likely to assimilate than native Swedes or Danish people into the United States. That feels wrong. That feels go. So there is a direct line between adopting these parasitic ideas and then becoming susceptible to succumbing to suicidal empathy. To your question as to whether it's feasible for us to get out of this or not, but well your point about the the the 1964 book

7:57 is liberalism by virtue of it. I mean, to put it in in my framework, by by virtue of the Democrats, the leftists, the hyper liberal folks, the progressives being the party of empathy, then by definition, that's going to render them more likely to be susceptible to to suicidal empathy. Thank you, God. Um, I I I also serve as the vice president treasurer of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and I've been writing and speaking about the problems on our college campuses for decades. So I'd love to hear your take on the role that academia plays in the spread of this disease. And it's clear that many of our young minds have been indoctrinated to hate America, Israel, and the West more more broadly. But where does suicidal empathy come into the brainwashing? And is there a way to deprogram these kids, right?

8:46 Um you know, I'm sure your experiences at Concordia played a role in your understanding of the problems at Western University. So we'd love to hear maybe some personal examples that you have as well and perhaps explain what you mean when you discuss the feminization of Right. So look, every single parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind which eventually leads to suicidal empathy. Every single one stems from university campuses because it as I to sort of channel my inner well who mentioned this many decades ago. It uniquely takes intellectuals to come up with some of the most devastatingly imbecillic ideas.

9:27 Now why is that? Is it because intellectuals are dumb? No. It's because many intellectuals operate in an ecosystem that is perfectly decoupled from the autocorrective slap of reality. Right? So, I can sit up as a humanities professor in my tweet jacket and say that up is down, left is right, men are women, and then I'm hailed as a great thinker of lesbian dance theory and I get promoted to becoming a tenure professor. I don't get punished for espousing nonsense. I go upward the more insane my ideas are. Right? And so, to your first question, every single bad idea that leads to suicidal empathy comes from academia. Now, in terms of personal anecdotes, well, in a sense, I started writing the parasitic mind the day that I became a professor. Although not not literally writing it, but writing it in my head because my scientific work outside of my public commentary is in applying evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and

10:31 consumer behavior and economic behavior in particular. So, I've historically been housed in a business school. Well, to me it it can't make sense that you could study employer behavior, employee behavior, investor behavior, consumer behavior without ever invoking the biological heritage of those creatures. You would never study any other species without invoking its biological heritage. But there's only one species that exists outside of the realm of biology and they're called human beings.

11:04 And so that was the my first exposure to to uh oh Houston, we seem to have a problem because how could all of these colleagues of mine that are supposed to have many titles before their names and after their names be such walking imbeiles? Like there's nothing particularly incendiary about arguing that hormones affect our economic behavior. How else could it be otherwise? But to them who were inculcated and trained within the social sciences, that's completely heretical to say something like that. So that would be the first sort of grand personal experience of how I discovered that there was a problem. But then in being a professor for 33 years, I started seeing stuff that is espoused on university campuses that simply is insane. So for example, many universities in Canada, including the one that I was at formerly, now engage in a systematic and indigenization of the entire curses of the curricula across the entire university. Meaning for those of you who don't know those those idiotic terms

12:06 like decolonization and indigenization that means you can't truly study neuroscience or Shakespeare or consumer psychology or engineering without you incorporating the guiding light of our indigenous forefathers. No, science is specifically liberating because it frees us from the shackles of our personal identities. I don't do Lebanese Jewish evolutionary psychology. I just do evolutionary psychology. That's what makes the scientific method so great. So it's rife with this nonsense in academia. For example, we don't give to the most worthy and meritocratically relevant people. We give them based on diversity, inclusion, equity. I'll give you one specific personal example since you asked for that. University of Waterlue is akin to MIT or Caltech. It's one of our top one of our meaning in Canada. I'm now in the US. Uh one of the

13:10 top Canadian engineering and computer science schools. Well, a couple of years ago, they put out a call for Canada research chaired professorships, meaning these are chaired professorships that are endowed by the Canadian government. So, it's a very prestigious professorship. They were looking to attract the top talent in artificial intelligence and computer science. Both open positions required that only people who are gender non-binary and whatever all the other terms of gender whatever uh only those people could apply. This is coming from the endowed chair of the Canadian government at one of the leading institutions. So if I am a twospirit non-binary person, I could get that professorship. If I am the smartest artificial intelligence researcher who happens to be Christian white male and I'm attracted to women, we're not interested in you.

14:12 Amazing. It's really amazing. Um, I'm going to turn to our people, Jews. Um, one problem of concern for me is the fact that many Jews both in Israel and the diaspora suffer from suicidal empathy. And um, in fact, I I actually wrote a column a few years ago entitled God is Testing American Jews. They're failing. from the producers of this Israeli movie Naza and you know most of the opinion writers at Harets to Brad Lander and the 30% of New York City's Jewish population who voted for Amdani in you know in Congress we've got Bernie Sanders Adam Schiff Jamie Rascin in Hollywood we've got Hannah Einbinder and you know all the other anti-Israel folks there and and then we've got our Jewish NOS's from J Street and Ben the Arc if not now and I could go on and on. I mean, there's a lot of j dangerous Jews who hide behind there as a Jew high road on all things Israel. Um, so as an evolutionary behavioral scientist, Scott, are you able to explain what's wrong with so many Jewish people and why after close to 4,000 years of persecution, we have yet to build up

15:14 immunity to the suicidal empathy disease, which is presumably what makes us disregard our own survival instinct? Yeah, fantastic question. Thank you for that. Uh, are you familiar? I you said earlier that you you follow me on social media and I actually also mentioned the term in the book. Are you familiar with my term of wood cricket juice? Do you know what that is? I I have heard you discuss it. Yeah. Okay. But maybe it's worth mentioning it to to your audience because it actually does apply an an evolutionary/biological framework to explain this. The the reason why I use the neuroparacy framework and I know it's a mouthful so let me explain it. Parasettology is simply the study of parasite host interaction. So, a tapeworm is a parasite, but it parasitizes my intestinal tract. A neuroparasite is a parasite that gets to your nervous system, to your, in this case, your brain, altering your behavior in order to suit its reproductive interest, meaning it has literally hijacked you.

16:12 Now, a wood cricket is an is insect that abhores water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is paracetized by a brainworm called the hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to happily and merrily jump into water, commit suicide, hence suicidal empathy in order to adhere to the reproductive interests of the hairworm at the cost of its survival. So now you see why that neuroparistical framework is not only a powerful metaphor, but it is a literal functional explanation for why I'm willing to give up my own survival imperative in order to adhere to a grander ideological commitment. In this case, I am infinitely tolerant and kind.

17:01 So what all of those Jews that you mentioned and many others, none perhaps greater than the completely degenerate lobotomized Gabbor Mate, who is a trauma expert, who is, you know, a not only is he Jewish, but he is a Holocaust survivor. Now, let me just break this down a bit for you. At at the age of 6 months old, he was passed off to a family to be protected. 6 months old infants cannot build memories. Therefore, they're not cognizant of anything that they experienced when they were 6 months old. But yet, he uses the impremature of being a I am Jewish. I gabbor mate and I am a Holocaust survivor. And I'm telling you that there is nothing worse than Israel. Not only are they the new Nazis, they actually outrank the Nazis that I myself am aware of. Well, if he is a Holocaust survivor, then I too am a Holocaust survivor because as I remind people, I was once in my dad's testicles in the 1940s.

18:03 Therefore, I too was technically existentially a Holocaust survivor. Now, it sounds I'm being spicy and provocative, but it's because it what happens to the minds of a parasetized Jew, right? But it takes Jews like myself who had to wear running shoes, good running shoes, and really run fast to outrank outrun the ones who were going to behead us to then come to the west and say maybe you need to be a bit less tolerant from your beautiful campus at Oberlin College where you learned about near east studies and leave it for those who sampled from the buffets of society to tell you what the real deal is. So yes, there are explanations that I offer for these people. And I should mention to your audience, there is no one I despise more than the wood cricut Jew because at least the ones who want to kill the Jews are committed to their cause. But when I say, "Oh, please take me." And, "Oh, by the way, my children are upstairs, so please go rape them. Look how tolerant I am." I really despise you.

19:07 Great examples. Thank you, God. Um I I want to tie Islamism into the conversation also because I think it serves as one if not the most dangerous enemy of Western civilization. Um we've established that suicidal empathy leads to people doing things and taking positions that are anathema to their own survival as you just pointed out and um I would suggest that in inviting unvetted and untold numbers of Muslim immigrants into Western civilizations um as to which they have no interest in assimilating is expediting the decline of the West. Um you pointed out I'm going to quote you from your book. The West suicidal empathy is an aphrodisiac to those stemming from to those stemming from cultures with a supremacist and doineering ethos. My first memory of Western suicidal empathy was when um George W. Bush stated almost immediately after 911 that Islam is peace. And you've pointed out that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently proclaimed that Islamic and Canadian values are the same. Today, anyone who presents an honest critique of Islam's connections to terrorism is labeled an Islamophobe and forced to apologize or cancelled.

20:08 So, chapter 3 of your book, I I think you do a phenomenal job of discussing all of this, and I'm sure the audience would love to hear your thoughts on this, including your discussion of of what I call stealth jihad, in which Islamists recognize that they don't need weapons to conquer the West. Yes. [clears throat] Another great question. Uh, one, forgive me, you're the host. One small correction if I may. You use the word only once. I've never heard of that word. I don't know what it is. You use the word Islamism. I don't know where where are the cannons of Islamism that are distinct from Islam. And I'm being facicious because I the point that I'm making is there is no such thing as Islamism. There is no such thing as radical Islamism. There is no such thing as self-radicalized militant jihadi Islamism. Because if I put a bunch of qualifiers before the word Islam and then I add the magical suffix ism, then somehow I'm saying something that is different from Islam. There is no such thing. The quicker people stop using that very kind and empathetic reflex, the better that we will be. Now,

21:12 that doesn't mean that every Muslim wishes to implement the doctrinal imperatives of Islam. That's clear. I know more nice Muslims than most people in your audience will ever meet. But those two statements are perfectly consistent with each other. There are nice people that are Muslim or Jews and mean people that are Muslim or Jews. But Islam is a very specific set of codified ideas as enshrined in the Quran, the hadith, the the sayings and the deeds of Muhammad and the S, the biography of Muhammad. that content is very clear about whether Islam is congruent in its foundational tenants with Western values or or not. And let me get to the punch line. You couldn't have come up with a set of doctrines that are any more inongruent with Western values. Like in other words, if I told you, here's your homework assignment. come up with a set of beliefs that are maximally in

22:16 congruent with Western values, it would be called Islam. So, it's a terrible tragedy because the Muslims are incredibly smart in their ability to understand what the weakness of the West is. That's why they have told us repeatedly to your point about what you're calling stealth jihad is that we're going to conquer the West through three means. We're gonna conquer the West through the womb of our women, right? We breed 7.2. You're too lazy to even have enough sex to reproduce beyond the replacement rate. It's just a matter of time, inshallah, when we will outgreed you. Number two, we will conquer the West through Hijra. Hijra is the Arabic word. Arabic is my mother tongue. So, it's kind of tough for people say, "But he doesn't understand.

23:07 He doesn't know. His name is Joe Smith and so on, right? Hijra is the term for migration. Well, how great is it that when the West faces 9/11 and all the other terrorist attacks attacks and George Bush then says, "I will not tolerate any attacks on Islam. And I'm going to show you that I won't tolerate it by letting in 5 million people into my country, many of whom celebrated 9/11." That's probably not a good idea. And the third way we're going to conquer the West is by using your miserable freedoms against you. So, but this is not I did some deep dive sad investigative journalism to arrive at that. They have been standing on top of the mountain and screaming their plan for all of us to hear for decades. And we go la, I don't want to hear it. Your grandchildren are going to pay a deep price for that.

24:02 Thank you, God. Um, there's a number of questions and we're going to uh get to as many as we can. Um, somebody asked, "Is secular humanism particularly vulnerable to unmmerited guilt?" Unmmerited guilt of of which type? Existentially guilt guilt like I think in the context of suicidal empathy he's asking. I mean, I don't I don't think there is necessarily a uniquely direct link from secular humanism to feeling guilty or not, right? I mean Catholicism is is rooted in guilt, right? We are born sinners and therefore we you know we have to go to confession. So so the the road of experiencing existential guilt doesn't have to come with whether I am religious or not. Both groups of people can succumb to existential guilt. I think the main reason for our existential guilt is because we have uh promulgated the idea that not only is the west not a great civilization, it's actually the most evil of all civilizations because we are transphobic, we are Islamophobic, we sit

25:04 on stolen land, we are misogynistic. So how else can I solve that problem but then to commit civilizational sepuku as I introduced the term sepuku is a term that captures how the Japanese used to engage in self-d disembowelment when the samurai class would engage in a behavior that was shameful while civilizational sepuku I argue you're using the blade of suicidal empathy to engage in the existential self-d disemboundment of your society but no it is not unique to secular humanists So, um, I'm going to turn back to audience questions in a second, but I realized I I I also wanted you to talk about postmodernism because the sufferers, excuse me, [clears throat] of suicidal empathy seem to make up their own truths and facts and reality. And you there was an Albert Einstein quote in your book that um you included that uh quote, "Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not yet completely sure about the universe." I love that quote.

26:02 Yes. Uh does does Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, forgive me for interrupting. Uh, postmodernism of all of the parasitic ideas that I cataloged in the parasitic mind, I argue is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas. Meaning that it is the the apex parasitic idea. Why? Because it rejects the notion that there could be universal truths. It even rejects the notion that there is an epistemology of truth. Like for example, the scientific method is the epistemological tool that we use to adjudicate between competing scientific hypotheses. Well, we've replaced that now in in academia through feminization with an epistemology of care. In other words, the the central premise of a university is not to create new human knowledge and distribute that new human knowledge and intellectually enrich our students and so on. It is to be maximally caring. So for example, if I'm

27:07 going to do a research program that does advance scientific and you know human knowledge, but in doing so I end up hurting someone's feelings, then I should refrain from engaging in that research and therefore it becomes a type of forbidden knowledge as I discussed in suicide empathy. So postmodernism is the worst of all parasitic ideas because everything is up for grabs. up is down, men are women, slavery is freedom, war is peace. Who are you to tell me what truth is? So, following with that, somebody asked, "How can we use the progressives own vocabulary to defeat them?" Um, if we don't use their language, they don't listen to us. Do you have any thoughts on that?

27:48 I mean, I don't necessarily have a top of mind strategy of how to use language. I mean, the the best language I have is this thing called truth. This is why I I could be as professorial, if not a lot more professorial than most other professors, maybe all of them, but I can also be very spicy and direct and frontal because I'm so exasperated by all of the untruths and the lies that there is no better way than to speak plainly and truthfully. And this is why, by the way, I use things like satire, why I use sarcasm, why I use humor. It may or may not surprise you, Lori, to know that of all the people that, you know, approach me in the streets, probably the number one thing I often get is I was watching one of your videos and I couldn't stop laughing for 10 minutes now. Is it because I I didn't really want to become a professor and I wanted to be a stand-up comic and that's why I use humor? No. It's because I will use all communication modalities that I

28:53 consider to be relevant to get my message across. So in that sense, I'm answering the question which is use all possible tools to to defend and protect the truth from all the nonsense. And in a sort of similar vein, somebody asked, can the word Islamophobia be linked to suicidal empathy because it propagandizes the fear of Islam as Exactly. And that that's why those the the Muslim uh you know activists were brilliant in understanding the weaknesses the Achilles heel of the west right by by the way that reflex of you know using language to you know uh advance your cause comes from postmodernism. It actually comes from a variant of postmodernism called deconstructionism.

29:42 Jacqu Deerida would be the sort of the the pioneer of that that quote field. It basically says that language creates reality, right? There is no objective reality out there that is outside that which we name. And that's why it becomes very important for the progressives to play all those linguistic games because then I can shift your understanding of the world based on what I label the Um, do do you know if there are any examples of suicidal empathy in the laws of the Torah?

30:16 I don't. That's what a great question. I I mean uh I I'm thinking of sort of the opposite of suicidal empathy. Take your insulent children to the gates of the city and stone them to death. That seems to be maybe on the other side of suicidal empathy. Your child is insolent, they die. Um, I mean, I can think of things that relate to suicidal empathy, not so much in the Torah, but in the New Testament, right? Because, and I guess you might, right, turn the other cheek, love your enemy, and so on. And I I referenced that very briefly in suicidal empathy. Do you have any readily available examples that you might want to share with me?

30:58 It was a question from one of our listeners. I see. I Yeah. No, I'm sorry. I I personally do not have that familiarity and I [laughter] wasn't you don't either. Yeah. I can't think of a readily example in the Torah of suicidal empathy. Maybe that's a good thing. Yeah. [laughter] Um so there's there's somebody that is coming back to Islam Islamism Islam um and asking you know whether questioning whether there are nice Muslims because aren't they sort of the Trojan horse of global jihad? you know, claiming to be moderates and reformers and um not actually being so and and that real moderate Muslims are are probably more like Ayan Herciel who has converted.

31:39 Thoughts on those on that? Right. Look, uh I don't necessarily pay attention to needing to light the Shabbat candle at 4:21 because Kabad has said that it's 421. based on that metric, then I'm not a very practicing Jew. Uh I don't necessarily not eat shrimp soup because there is a kosher law against shrimps. Then by that measure, I'm not practicing Judaism. But you'd be hardressed to find someone who lives their Jewish heritage and has many death threats for being Jewish. Right? So why am I saying this example? because you could be wedded to your Jewish heritage or your Islamic heritage or your Christian heritage without necessarily adhering to all of the cannons of that faith. Correct? So, I don't practice a gentle form of Judaism where we do eat shrimps. I just ignore the parts that I don't wish to pay attention to. And that in no way

32:43 negates the fact that I belong to a nearly 6,000-year heritage of a peoples. And in that sense, I'm very much wedded to my Jewish heritage. So I think the exact same thing could apply to someone who comes from an Islamic background. They grew up in a culture. They were born in Bahrain or they were born in Morocco. They don't know what's in the Quran. They don't care what what are the in you know the imperatives that say that the entire world has to be Islamized under the flag of Allah. They just want to live their lives and they happen to be born into a Muslim. So in that sense they're good people, lovely people who don't wish anybody harm. And so it's in that sense that I say we have to grant some sort of uh place for those people to be able to exist, right?

33:29 They're just good people who would invite me over for a humos sandwich and they would not be decapitating me. But to your the person who asked that question, there is the issue of why so many are not actively fighting against the stuff in their religion that is problematic. Right? So you may have 2 billion Muslims of which only 10% are insanely violent. That makes 200 million people. We're left with 1.8 billion people. How many of those are being complicit in the goal of the 200 million? Regrettably, the number is quite high. So I think we need to offer some sort of goodness to many people who just wish to live their lives. That's why I always try to remind people that of course there are nice Muslim neighbors who don't wish you ill.

34:26 But again, I focus on Islam. If I am a fully practicing Muslim, could I truly coexist within Western values? And the answer is an emphatic no. So the the last question um somebody asked, "What do you suggest we do to fight the suicidal empathy?" So I think this is a good opening maybe for you to touch on your your final chapter to the book on inoculation. Yes. So exactly to to to what you just said in the last chapter in chapter 8 I offer a an I mean a vaccine against suicidal empathy and I offer you know very very specific prescriptions. So let me give you one or two of these but then I'll give a a broader sort of 30,000 foot uh answer. So for example, many people are intoxicated by the prospect of the immediate effect of the dopamine, the empathy based dopamine hit. So the illegal refugee knocks on the door and I can do two things at that point. I could let in 6 million of them and I will immediately be drowning in the dopamine

35:32 because I am stroking my luxurian hair in the mirror of moral preining and going look what a good person I am. I just let in 400,000 Ahmeds into my society. I'm better than those people who would have judged them. So I got that dopamine hit but in doing so I'm stuck in what's what I call the myopia of first order effects. Meaning there is a second order effect and a third order effect. If your society becomes majority Islamic, then we will have a different reality than the one that your children grew up in. So don't succumb to the empathy based dopamine hit. Recognize that life is not a first order world but has a domino effect. So that would be and I I list many others. For example, I talk about the false equality bias. Men and women are equal under the law.

36:23 They're not equal in their proclivities. Religions might be equally protected by the first amendment, although I think they shouldn't be. That doesn't mean that they are equally likely to assimilate within the western tradition. So don't confuse equality under the law as being indistinguishable. Right? Men and women are distinguishable from each other, but they should be treated equally under the law. But again, the suicidally empathetic make that categorization error. But the bigger picture is even something as wonderful and virtuous as empathy could become cancerous. The the cell division that causes your deep scab to get healed, right? Cell division is good. It's only good as long as there is a stopping point to that goodness.

37:15 Melanoma since we're talking about skin results in the bad version of cell skin cell division. So we didn't say cell division is good ad infinitum. We said cell division up to a point. Empathy is great up to a point and and it has to be strategically medded out in a way that is consistent with evolutionary rational calculus. It makes perfect evolutionary sense for every single person who will ever listen to this chat to be more willing to jump in front of a bus to save their biological children than random children in Rwanda. That doesn't make you callous or sinister or evil. It makes you a creature that is endowed with an evolutionary calculus. So empathy, good suicidal empathy will bring the end of us.

38:16 Brad, I wish we could keep you for longer, but um unfortunately we we do have to end this, but u we'll bring you back some time with your next book. Um I wish you all the best with this book and your new position at at at Miss at Old Miss. And uh again, thank you to everybody joining and thank you God wishing everybody a wonderful afternoon. Thank you so much, Lori.