Can the West Reverse Course

Too little empathy or no empathy makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy at the wrong opportunity to the wrong targets can result in a manifestation of suicidal empathy. I empathize more with the rapist than the victim. I empathize more with the illegal migrant than the American vet who lost his limbs defending our freedoms. I empathize more with the homeless drug dealers in the park than the children whose parents pay tax money so that the children can play in the park. So it's a complete erasure of the entire adaptive calculus of empathy. This is why both us in Canada, in the United States, you in Australia are going to be committing civilizational sepuku if we don't engage in some autocorrections really soon. Can that in the face of reality be reversed and can it be reversed in time before we eat ourselves out from within? The optimist in me says the following Friends, it's good to be able to announce my new Substack, which will be known as Our Civilizational Moment. The Substack will explore the pressing issues facing countries like ours, loosely called the West, the Democratic countries, and how they're playing out in the country that I love and hope you do too, ours, Australia. I'll offer thoughts on the events and trends alongside contributions from some very knowledgeable friends and people I respect. Click the link in the description, subscribe, and share the essays with your friends and family. Let's do everything we can to bring back the Australia that we love, but which we're losing. Well, Professor Gad Saad, thank you so very much indeed for joining us. It's wonderful to be with you. What an honor. Thank you . Now, the title of your latest book is Suicidal Empathy . Obviously, many of us would say, well, empathy is a great thing. It's like love and kindness and caring for other people. It couldn't possibly be bad. The more the better. But you convince us, I think, that that is not so . Tell us why it's not so indeed. Actually the the hit pieces are already coming out against me, even though the book has yet to be released and and the attacks are exactly in line with what you're saying , which is, you know, you've got this demonic character who is trying to rid the world of empathy and create a dark world. I'm absolutely doing no such thing. Empathy is a perfectly adaptive virtue. It is evolutionarily selected. It makes sense for a social species to exhibit empathy, for you and I to have a meaningful interaction, I have to put myself in your mind and vice versa. But just like Aristotle explained to us several millennia ago, everything in moderation, too little empathy or no empathy makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy at the wrong opportunity to the wrong targets can result in a manifestation of suicidal empathy. So life is about finding that sweet spot and that also applies to empathy. It sometimes seems to me, uh, if I may, that there's a difference between empathy and sympathy . Maybe I'm being simplistic here with my words, but when we empathize into the modern world, it seems as though we say, I absolutely unconditionally embrace you, and I agree with your perspectives on everything, and I'm on the journey with you, whereas sympathy will occasionally say I'm sorry for you, but I actually need to encourage you to think a little bit more carefully, indeed some wise person put it this way, just because I disagree with you doesn't actually mean I don't love you. In fact it might mean that I do love you. Is there a difference between the two? I mean, you're exactly right that it's certainly in the academic literature that that distinction is sparse, the difference between sympathy and empathy and compassion and kindness. Uh and we can certainly parse those out if you'd like, but in a general colloquial sense, when we say I empathize with you, we typically mean one of two types of sentiments: either cognitive empathy , I I understand your pain, uh, versus affective empathy or emotional empathy, I feel your pain. And again, there are slight distinctions with sympathy, but it they don't matter for the current purposes. What matters for the current purposes is to argue that a perfectly laudable virtue, right, to be able to put your sh the yourself in the shoes of another and empathize with them can completely misfire and result in domestic and foreign policies that are genuinely suicidal to your society. And let me explain here why I use the term suicidal empathy or even more so parasitized suicidal empathy. So if you take, for example, the wood cricket, the wood cricket is an insect that abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when it is parasitized by a hairworm that goes to its brain, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to haplessly jump into water, commit suicide, because the hairworm can only complete its reproductive cycle in water. And so therefore, the parasitic mai, which is my previous book, and suicidal empathy serve as the one-to-punch for how to hijack someone's capacity to reason. The parasitic mind deals with hijacking your cognitive system, your thinking system. Whereas suicidal empathy looks at what happens when I hijack and parasitize your emotional system. If I could zombify you by hijacking both of these systems, then you lose your ability to engage in critical thinking. Now, what are some ways by which this manifests itself? There are many, and I'm sure we'll discuss these throughout uh today's discussion. Take, for example, the idea that it is incredibly empathetic to have an open border immigration policy because everybody deserves a chance to live out their dreams and hopes and aspirations in Australia or in Canada or the United States. Well, that's a very lovely message. It's a very empathetic message. In an ideal unicorn world, you'd want everybody to be able to maximally flourish. But the reality is that all immigrants are not equally likely to assimilate, right? The idea that Elon Musk, who's an immigrant, is as likely to assimilate as Ahmad Muhammad , who just came back from a summer camp in Waziristan with Al-Qaeda , is silly, right? Immigrants might be equal under the law, but they're not equally likely to assimilate because they bring a set of cultural and religious values that may not be consistent with those of the host society. To argue that should be obvious to a three-day-old pigeon, but yet in the suicid ally empathetic West, that becomes a very controversial and bigoted point of view and that reflex of invoking empathy to felons, to the homeless to drug dealers to all immigrants is exactly a manifestation of the misfiring of an otherwise laudable virtue. Dad I must remember that expression uh obvious to a three day old pigeon. That's a that's to that's a beauty. Um can we go to your early years on this issue of different cultures you experienced it firsthand really growing up in Lebanon, I think. Can you give us a bit of a feeling for how quite early on in life you saw that , if you like, the that cultural antagonism between groupings of people and had to grapple with the fact that some of them were really intent upon your destruction . Indeed. So uh for your viewers and listeners who may not be familiar with my background, I was born in Lebanon. We were part of the very, very small dwindling community of Lebanese Jews, not Druze, Jews, J-E-W-S , who had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon, notwithstanding the fact that much of my extended family had already fled Lebanon prior to the start of the Lebanese Civil War in nineteen seventy-five. In nineteen seventy-five, the civil war broke out. It lasted fifteen years from nineteen seventy-five to nineteen ninety, more than 150,000 people died. Uh in a country of about 3 million, that's quite a chunk of the population. Now, in Lebanon, everything is viewed through the prism of your religious belongingness , right? So on your internal ID card, this is the equivalent of having a passport, but inside the country, if let's say the cops were to stop you and say, show us your your ID card. The most conspicuous feature of your ID card is your religion. Uh now if you were Jewish, uh there weren't going to be many militia roadblocks once the civil war started that you were going to clear. And there was further animus added to being Jewish in that it wasn't even written that you were Jewish. The the Arabic word for Jewish in in well in Arabic is Yahudi . Here it was written Israeli , which me which translates into Israelite. So of all of the militia groups that you might have the misfortune of being stopped by, very, very few were going to be sympathetic to you being an Israelites, notwithstanding the fact that you were a full-fledged Lebanese person, right? You spoke Arabic. That's our mother tongue, we ate Arabic food, we were fully Arabized, but we suffered from the terminal disease of being Jewish and so it became incumbent uh of of us to to leave Lebanon. We ended up leaving Lebanon. We faced some real horrors that first year of the Civil War. On one of their return trips to Lebanon, uh my parents were kidnapped by Fata h, by the group of Abu Nidal and some really you know bad things happened to them but uh luckily we were able to get them out and so no one from my family has returned to Lebanon since uh 1980, even though I've been invited, you know, by many, you know, high profile delegates and prime ministers and so on, and who said that we can guarantee you your safety, uh, that's maybe an overpromise. And so I've never accepted an invitation, but inshallah, as we say, maybe one day I'll take my children there. We'll see. So in essence, you're painting a picture that that makes it plain that there are some cultural heritages which plainly regard themselves as clearly superior whilst we in the West have tried to adopt the idea that all cultures are of and belief systems if you like, the belief systems that drive those cultures are of equal worth and value and that we should put aside our differences no matter the price. Indeed. And so in in the parasitic mind, in my 2020 book, I talk about uh idea pathogens or parasitic ideas. So in the same way that I earlier mentioned how a hairworm can parasitize the mind of a wood cricket. I argued in that book that human beings can be parasitized by actual physical brainworms, but they can also be parasitized by ideological brainworms. And some of these ideological brain brainworms to your question would be for example cultural relativism. Cultural relativism uh renders you impotent to making value judgments about the beliefs and actions of another culture. If another culture decides to engage in female genital mutilation of their five-year-old children, shut up, racist. Who are you to judge that they do that? If they engage in child brides, shut up, racist. If they engage, if they participate in honor killings, shut up racists. All cultures are equal, except as George Orwell said, about all animals are equal, except some are more equal than others. All cultures are equal, except Islam is superior. Uh now the the sad part of this is that certainly, Islam teaches that, but to then have the West internalize that message is exactly a manifestation of suicidal empathy. Right? So the Islamophilia, the love of Islam that the West has engaged in can only lead to one outcome. And you're already seeing it in Australia. I hate to be the guy who said, I told you so. I've been warning people for several decades, standing on top of the mountain, screaming into the dark abyss. People didn't want to listen. Well, they're now finally paying attention. Some of them will write to me. Many cases it'll be, you know, very senior politicians who say, oops, I guess we should have listened to you. But the reason why they didn't listen at first is because they were infected by this fatal malady of parasitic thinking coupled with suicidal empathy, rendering them absolutely impotent to blatantly obvious realities. I think you've referenced uh and I'd certainly be interested in your views on an a sort of concrete example I've always thought it was the home of common law, the the the the the home of the idea that we may be different but all souls are equal in the eyes of heaven, so to speak . This horrendous um uh uh grooming gang problem where young English girls often vulnerable , poor, um , perhaps disadvantaged and and and troubled even , in vast numbers were abused in the most serious ways Money, but overwhelmingly more than that , it has to be said, it's got to be called out, and and moderate Muslims everywhere have to acknowledge this and come to grips with it. They were people who had a vast ly different view of culture derived from their beliefs? Surely. We need to face this. Isn't that a classic example of suicidal empathy? That's that's the epitome of suicidal empathy, right? I mean we are we as as human beings are endowed with a set of innate responses right uh so my my scientific work you, know outs,ide of the books that I write about, you know, culture and so on, is in evolutionary psychology, in applying evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior. And so the survival instinct is a fundamental driver of all animals, including the human one. And part of survival is that we have evolved this mechanism to defend the most vulnerable members of our society. They're called our children. So imagine if you now have an inverted moral calculus when you have authorities, cops, politicians who are tasked with the responsibility of protecting our children, but when faced with the reality that the cul prits of the attacks on those children come from an untouchable protected class, then their moral calculus is sorry, kids, you're going to have to take one for the team because we don't want to create a lack of community cohesion. We don't want to uh allow the festering of Islamophobia to take root in Britain, which of course reminds me of a classic quote by the late Canadian comic Norm McDonald. I'm are you familiar with him? Do you know who that is? No, no, I don't. I'm sorry. He's an Australian. I'm ashamed to admit. I I don't. Okay, well, I I I have it ready here because I figure we probably are gonna come to it. He famously tweeted the following: What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims. Well, that is a perfect exemplar of suicidal empathy, right? What he's doing there, he's satirizing the idea that if 50 million Americans died, the first reflex would be, but what about the moderate Muslims who didn't do anything? That's going to create Islamophobia. Look, the the the human mind did not evolve to have this type of suicidal reflex. Let me give you another slight example, but that is still within the the rape context . So I'm moving away for a second from the grooming gangs in Britain, which are truly astounding. More than 250,000 British white girls raped at an industrial scale level. Let me give you an example of a single person from Norway, this anti-racist feminist man, indigenous, I mean Norwegian white guy, was raped by a Somali immigrant. So he was sodomized by a Somali immigrant. Because the Norwegians are so kind, compassionate, and empathetic, they don't believe in long prison sentences. After the Somali rapist had served, I don't know, a short sentence, maybe two, three years, and now he was going to be deported back to uh Somalia. The rape victim felt incredible moral angst at the fact that his sodomizer was not going to be able to maximally flourish back in Mogadishu. Well, I'm here as your resident evolutionary psychologist, uh, to confirm to you that we haven't evolved the emotional system that makes us empathize with our rapists. The only way that we empathize with our rapists Just back on the grooming gangs, uh Mordf you you touched on some of the institutions that now really do have to be closely examined. Um you know, it was institutionally wide. It was extraordinary. It was it was local leaders, it was uh national leaders, it was institutional leaders in the police forcing and in the courts . Where in your view uh d does uh suicidal empathy really spring from in terms of institu tions in the West . Right. So this is why I I alluded earlier to to sort of the one-two punch of my two books, right? The parasitic mind hijacks your cognitive system. And it is that process that then lays the fertile ground for suicidal empathy to kick in. So to go back to the example of cultural relativism, cultural relativism, as I said, renders you impotent to make any judgments of other cultures. Once I'm able to convince you that it is racist of you to argue that five-year-old girls should not have their clitoris cut off, then that opens the door for you to be suicidally empathetic in letting people in who avow those beliefs, right? So you need one to get to the other. Now the next question that you could ask is, but where do these parasitic ideas come from that that eventually lead to suicidal empathy? And I hate to say this because I've been a professor for 32 years, every single one of those parasitic ideas were spawned on university campuses. Because to sort of paraphrase George Orwell, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. Now, why is that? How could it be that professors who are supposed to be intelligent and educated could come up with these ideas? Well, because they could pontificate complete nonsense fully decoupled from the autocorrective mechanisms of reality, right? So if I'm a professor of lesbian dance theory in some philosophy department, I could pontificate about the fact that sex differences are only a social construction. They're due to the evil patriarchy. There are no innate uh athletic differences between men and women because I can pontificate this stuff to gullible 19-year-olds without having the slap of reality put me back into reality, right? On the other hand, some department s, like the business school and the engineering school, while they too were prone to be parasitized by nonsense, they were less likely to be so. Why? Because those are applied disciplines. So in engineering, you can't build a bridge using indigenous physics that is distinct from the scientific method, because that bridge will collapse. If you're developing a mathematical model to explain consumer choice, you can't have a feminist postmodernist model to understand consumer choice because then it won't predict anything. So some disciplines, by virtue of them being tethered to reality, offered the inoculation against the nonsense. But the other disciplines that can truly exist in the lofty world of the unicorn ivory tower could pontificate all this nonsense and then that lays the ground for all of this suicidal empathy. Look, I we just came away, we meaning Canada, from 10 years under the walking manifestation, the human manifestation of all of the parasitic ideas and the suicidal empathy that I talk about in my books. He's called Justin Trudeau. Now it's Justin Trudeau, I don't I don't I've never met him, but I don't think he is innately a demonic creature. But he is the product of the educational process that he's been put through. And so once he breaks free from the lab, so to speak, once he leaves his academic training and he becomes a politician . He espouses all of the nonsense that he's been exposed to throughout all of his education. So I hate to say it, but much of the problem that the West faces originally stems from the university ecosystem. So given that the universities are, if you like, overwhelmingly what we'd call ideologically left , how what created the vacuum in which such unwise concepts started to ga gain traction . It it there there has to have been a vacuum, it seems to me. Our cultures you can three there are three great strands of work here really. There's a Judeo Christian culture. Uh there's the been then you've had secular humanism replacing it really in the rejection of the idea of transcendence almost, opening the way now to extraordinary religious conviction, vehemently opposed as it happens to secular humanism and to Judeo Christianity. This is extraordinary if you stop and think about it. In our lack of conviction, another way of putting it, we now find we have no effective answers to those who are loaded with conviction and believe that we are weak and degenerate and don't stand for anything, and are totally convinced of the rightness of their cause. I'm thinking particularly of radical and political Islam, of course. Indeed. That said , many of the parasitic ideas, all the parasitic ideas that were spawned on university campuses were not necessarily due to I mean it is true that many professors are not much in terms of their religiosity, but I don't think that that's what uh served as the catalyst for the spread of these parasitic ideas. I have a slightly different take, if I may . All of those parasitic ideas share one thing in common : a desire to achieve some noble goal. And in the pursuit of that noble goal, if we have to murder truth and reality, so be it. So let me give you an example. Equity femin ism is a great idea. It basically says there should be no institutional reasons why men and women shouldn't be treated equally under the law. And if that's the definition of feminism, then I dare say that both you and I would say, yeah, sign me up. I'm an equity feminist. But then radical feminists come along in third wave third wave feminism and say, if we are going to squash, the sexist status quo, the patriarchy, and so on. We need to promulgate the idea that men and women are indistinguishable from each other. All differences between men and women must be due to social construction because if we promulgate that message, it will better allow us to squash sexism and the patriarchy. So, in the service of what originally started as a noble goal, if we have to murder truth and reality so be it same thing for example with transgenderism right i went in front of the canadian senate in 2017 and i warned the canadian senate that exactly what happened is what ended up happening. I said, look, I believe that everybody has the right to live a life with dignity and free of bigotry. But in the service of that goal, that doesn't mean that you erase the most fundamental bar markers of reality, which is that there is a male and female phenotype in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic speci es, right? So the fact that those activists were able to get the most recent addition to the US Supreme Court to equivocate when she was asked, Can you define what is a woman? And she didn't have the self-assuredness to say, Yeah, of course I could define what is a woman. If you remember her answer was, Well, I don't know, I'm not a biologist. Well, until 15 minutes ago, the hundred and seventeen billion people that had lived on earth, that's an actual estimate. 1 17 billion people, they all seemed to know perfectly well how to navigate the very difficult conundrum of knowing what is male or female, but parasitic thinking coupled with suicidal empathy removes our ability to recognize the most fundamental fabric of reality. That's why I use this neuroparasitological framework because nothing else could explain the fact that we need the Olympic committee to now tell us what constitutes male or female. That's the power in the framework that dare I say I developed Get it does seem to me that people are very selective though, with whom they seek to empathi ze . So uh I was I have to say genuinely staggered at the lack of empathy uh for Charlie Kirk and indeed his wife and children, when he was shot for daring to put a set of views on university campuses . I have to say that I see in much of the left in my country a desire to empat hise more at the moment with the Iranians than with President Trump. So empathy doesn't seem to be, if I might put it this way, a universal human value in this new world that we've cre ated. Yeah. So let me let me explain the theoretical framework of how suicidal empathy misfires, and then I'll link it exactly to your point about empathy pointing to the wrong targets. All right. Take for example, uh if I were to meet you at a party and prior to us meeting one another, my coming up to you or vice versa to shake hands, I noticed that you're constantly sneezing in your hand. So it looks like you may have a cold. So I will discreetly, having noticed that, I will discreetly head off into the bathroom, wash my hands after I've shaken your hand, because I don't want to catch your cold. Therefore, I scanned the environment for environmental threats and I acted according ly. That's perfectly adaptive. That's exactly what you would expect uh evolution to endow us with, scanning the environment for environmental threats. Now let's compare that to OCD. OCD is obsessive-compulsive disorder, a psychiatric disorder, of which one type of OCD is germ contamination fear. Now, the OCD sufferer, what is he doing? He 's sitting in his bathroom, washing his hands in a repeated ritual for six, seven, eight hours until his skin is falling off and sc alding hot water. He can't get to work because he's stuck in an infinite loop. So the mechanism that was adaptive, right? My warning flag went off when I had to shake your hands because you were sneezing. I washed my hands, warning flag went down, and I went on with my day. The OCD sufferer has a hyperactiv ation of this otherwise adaptive mechanism. That's exactly what happens with empathy. Empathy , when it is applied in the right amount, in the right situ ation, to the right targets, to your question , that is adaptive empat hy. Suicidal empathy violates all of these. It hyperactivat es in the wrong instances to the wrong targets. So I empathize more with the rapists than the victim. I empathize more with the illegal migrant than the American vet who lost his limbs defending our freedoms and on and on. I empathize more with the homeless drug dealers in the park than the children whose parents pay tax money so that the children can play in the park. So it's a complete erasure of the entire adaptive calculus of empathy. And that's what results in the left caring more about the Iranians than they do about the the ones who are fighting the Iranians. You really paint a very fascinating picture of an almost sort of cultural death wish. You know, we we're talking here about a lot of people who are academically quite gifted, you know, the old saying that intelligence and wisdom are not necessarily acquainted . Surely history screams at us that people like the current regime in Iran endanger us all . They have ill intent at their the centre of their minds and the capacity to do immense damage . They are a theocracy, not a democra cy who believe that martyrdom is actually quite desirable. These are all matters of logic that, as you said earlier , ordinary people blessed with a good dose of common sense and intelligence who've not been subjected to a university environment can see straight through this stuff. And yet, people of high intelligence. So I think the point I'm making is intelligence really isn't wisdom, is it? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, I I cherish receiving fan letters from the trucker , from the corrections officer, from the soldier who tells me you don't know how much we we love and appreciate you in our barracks. I take that as a much greater badge of honor. I mean, this is not to imply that I don't appreciate if an academic colleague, you know, loves my work, but knowing that many of my academic colleagues are fully parasitized, uh I take much greater pride in exactly to your point, having the welder and the electrician saying, Hey, listen, uh, when I'm driving, I'm listening to your stuff. That means my message is resonating because it is not restricted to the ego stroking that we engage in amongst academics. I know that my message is reaching a much broader audience that is wedded to reality. But I want to go back and mention sometedhing when you said cultural suic ide. Uh one of the terms that I introduced in suicidal empathy is the following term, civilizational sepuku. And let me explain what that means. Sepuku is a Japanese ritualistic suicide that typically the samura i class would engage in . Remember, the Japanese are very much driven by the culture of honor and shame. Therefore, there is nothing worse if I am a samurai to lose face, to bring about shame through some action that is shameful. At that point, the only way that I can atone for this existentially shameful act, whatever that may be, is to commit self-disembow n, and that's the way that I am redeemed. I kill myself to expatiate uh my great shame. So I took this principle from Japanese society that applies at the individual level. It's a singular samurai that's committing sepuku. And I said the West suffers from the collective malady of civilizational sepuku. Now you might say, but what is it that the West is shameful of? Well, somehow our intelligence class, intelligentsia class, has convinced us that the West is irredeemably evil. It is transphobic, it sits on stolen land , it is Islamophobic, it hates women. So all cultures are beautiful except one called the West that is uniquely demonic and evil. So what better way, if I am a suicidally empathetic Westerner, what better way to then atone for my existential original sin than to commit civilizational sepuku, then hopefully the gods will now look down upon me with kindness. And so this is exactly what you see, right? You the suicidally empathetic person, if I can use my poetic prose, wakes up, looks at themselves in the mirror of moral preening, right? Strokes their luxurious hair and says, Look what a good person I am. I believe in open borders. Look what a good person I am. When I put gas into the car, I cry tears of empathy because this is the devil's juice that has raped Mother Earth. That I took the gas. I'm a good person. I don't judge other societies. I don't judge other religions. All religions are equally beautiful. I am a good person as I stroke my beautiful, luxuriant hair. So this has become now the most laudable value in the West. It is to demonstrate unrestrained, untargeted , dregulated empathy to ward all the wrong people in the wrong circumstances. This is why both us in Canada, in the United States, you in Australia are going to be committing civilizational seppuku if we don't engage in some autocorrections really soon. I think you just touched on it. Do you see a parallel with uh if you like the worship of the earth as Mother Gaia, you know, Greco-Roman term, Mother Earth. It's almost as though much modern environmentalism. And there is a Bible here for progressives. You know, you must be empathetic, you must decry your own culture. The West the is evil. Uh and we are destroying the earth and we are the chief destroyers because we had the industrial revolution and we discovered the use of coal and of fossil fuels. Never mind that it lifted count as billions out of Hobbs andy you know brutish short lives. Um we have offended Mother Earth. It's actually very cruel uh you know uh sort of um doctrine, really, because the only redemption is through self-destruction . We've offended Mother Earth. We must pay the price. Exactly. And and let me I mean, let me give you concrete consequences of this, you know, completely nihilistic viewpoint . Evolution is a two-step process. You first have to survive, and then you have to mate if you're a sexually reproducing species, right? So I could survive all you want , but if I don't find someone with whom to mate, I can't propagate my genes. And it's a Darwinian dead end. So this two-step process of first survive and then reproduce the suicidally empathetic, remove both of these, right? First of all, I I commit suicide both literally, either individually or civilizationally, and hey, this reduces the density of the population in the world so that mother nature can heal. But there are literal movements that seek to convince people to not reproduce because to reproduce with add carbon footprint, blah blah blah, and therefore this will be a frontal attack on Mother Earth. So imagine that you have ideological movements that take all of the med uh mechanisms that evolution has endowed us with, including our survival instinct and our reproductive instin inct , and now says, No , eliminate those instincts, rise above, transcend those evolutionary instincts so that you could reach a higher plane of civilizational sepuko. It is absolutely astounding. Does it tell us that deep down we're all actually uh uh you know partly in some deep way religious, we're actually looking for a cause. We we we we recognize we're not as good as we ought to be. Uh we don't know how to what good really is. No one's defining it for us anymore. So somehow or other uh in uh in this mix we're trying to redeem ourselves. Is that part of what you're saying? I mean th there there is a feature of wokeism and all this parasitic stuff that to your point is akin to a quasi-religion, right? Because in religion, there are revealed truths that are sacrosanct, that are impervious to evidence, right? Uh, I can't have a discussion with a young earth creationist to convince him or her that the earth is not six thousand years old. No, no matter the evidence I share, I'm never going to be able to epistemologically flip them. By the same token, I can't convince a woke person that all immigrants might not be equally likely to flourish in the Western tradition. No amount of evidence will ever convince them that. No amount of evidence will convince them that Islam contains certain tenets that are a lot less peaceful than Jainism, right? The Jain when they walk on the on on a sidewalk, well, if they are truly pious in their Jainism, they walk with a broom that they sweep the floor because lest they might inadvertently step on an ant so someone who is a Jain and takes their religion seriously by definition is extreme in their pacifism. Someone who is very committed to their Islamic doctrines, well, good luck to you if you're not Muslim. And so you are right that this wokeism stuff, along with it, suicidal empathy and so on, is akin to a quasi- religion. But here's some potentially interesting information to your viewers. Conservatives, so this was in my previous book where I talked about various drivers of happiness. One of the most ubiquitous findings in the happiness literature is that conservatives score much higher on happiness than progressives. And and this research, this finding has been replicated in in many, many different ways. Now, I offer, and I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are, I offer a speculative, but I think a a a plausible explanation for that finding. The conservative wakes up in the morning and they're existenti ally satisfied. It it may not be a perfect society that they live in, but they are imbued with gratitude . We have freedom of conscience. We have freedom of speech. We live in a good society with individual rights and individual dignity. Yes, there are things we could improve, but existentially, I'm happy. Let me go on and tackle my day. The progressive wakes up with existential dread. I live in a dreadful society. I've killed the indigenous people. I'm transphobic. I'm Islamophobic, I am misogynistic, self-flagellation, self-flagellation. So I have existential angst. And around the corner, if I could now restart our society, burn ever ything down, around the corner lies unicornia. And I will find it once I can engage in the social engineering that I learned in my lesbian dance theory course at Columbia University . So I think that explains why conservatives are a lot happier. They're wedded to human nature. They they usually will have larger families because surprise it turns out that human beings as a sexually reproducing species should be reproducing. It's probably not a good idea that most western countries have now a fertility rate that is well below replacement rate . That probably doesn't result in a good outcome. There will be population collapse. It's probably not a good idea to argue that since we're not having a lot of sex and reproducing, why don't we import tons of people who don't share any of our deontological foundational values? I'm sure that will turn out well. But all of these insane policies ultimately stems from this parasitic suicidal empathy . You said you'd be interested in my view. I think uh and plainly I am conservative, I'm also Christian. I think part of it is a is a framework Because we believe essentially a conservative's core belief is that human nature doesn't change. And that there's something noble in every human being, there's a propensity to draw out the truly bad angels in every human being as well. And you need a framework. You need on the one hand to be able to say, yeah, every human being matters, and yes, every human being or you know is worthy of some degree of respect, but you need the discrimination to say that they're also flawed. And if you play to their worst angels, just as if you play to your own worst angels, you'll end up being a pretty ugly human being and a destructive one. I think the other thing that a conservative believes is that the modern obsession with self is very dangerous. You know, if I celebrate my rights as an Australian, my freedom of conscience, my freedom of speech, my freedom of assembly, freedom to earn and trade property, including my intellectual know-how to earn a living. Some feudal overlord can't come along and take it over . That's all very well, but if I turn that into a selfish doctrine, it's all about me , that won't work. Because if everybody else then reciprocates and says, Well, no , my right to sp free speech and so forth means it transcends yours, it won't work. So I think it's a much better framework. It's worth noting that Jonathan Haidt, who freely uh says that he, you know, was well into life before he found a conservative could be a decent human being, was struck by this sort of righteousness that people adopt. I'm right, you're wrong. And when he really started to look at it, he actually found conservatives have a broader moral palette than most progressives. And again, it goes back to my point. I probably expressed it a bit poorly, but the thing that apps I am the product of one of Australia's better universities, probably not one of its better products, but I am. Uh and um you know, it just strikes me time and time again that there there are intelligent people who are wise, and perhaps you can't be truly wise without a certain amount of intelligence. But being intelligent often makes you an extremely stupid human being. And I know we've touched that ground, but what I'd be interested in your views now are what you're actually seeing is this terrible fracturing in Western society. Uh and you've touched on this, between if you like the elites who are university trained and those who perhaps are not, or if they were, did practical things like un you know, perhaps agriculture or engineering or science, and those who are, if you like, driving us now culturally. There's two aspects that I'd really appreciate your views on. One is the incredible political fact fracturing. So I've always seen the whole Trump and MAGA movement, if you like, as a symptom of the problem, not the problem, but the left describes it as the problem . And we here in us in Australia we are seeing a minority party rise to the fore. It's never been seen as a government, a party of government. But people now the even mainstream people are saying, well, you know, we're just sick to death of what happens in the beltway, in the amongst the elites, amongst those who tell us how to live our lives. And they are really kicking out. So firstly the fracturing, then I'd like to come to the issue of masculinity in our culture and how we perceive it. But the fracturing, is this part of the if you like , people of common sense and some grounding reacting against where their cultures are being taken Well, the fracturing is uh a a real problem in that uh let me give you a a a personal anecdote, which I actually mention it in in my forthcoming book. So I I did my uh MS and PhD at uh Cornell University in the US and uh I had met there this is in the you know I was there in the early 90s, I met a gentleman who was pursuing his MBA. We became, you know, uh strong friends. And uh we never we didn't see each other much through the years, but we always had a great affinity for each other and great affection. Uh two years ago, speaking about Trump and Republicans and so on, I was giving a lecture in Savannah, Georgia to the to their local Republican club, you know, about all these things, parasitic mind and suicidal empathy and the policies that that engenders and so on. And he lived, this friend of mine lives in uh Georgia, not too far from Savannah. So I reached out to him and I said, Hey, I'm uh I'm going to be in the area. It's been a while since we haven't seen each other. You know, I miss you. Uh let's get together. So I receive a very, very long email where he says, unfortunately, given the fact that you seem to be of the opinion that Trump, you know, is not an existential threat, I could no longer maintain a friendship with you. Now, you have to remember, I'm Canadian. So it's not as though I voted in the American elections. So the the only information that he had on me is that I wasn't spending all my day using my platform screaming about how Trump was worse than Himmler. So the fact that I didn't engage in the behavior that he thought was worthy for such an existential threat as Trump demonstrated that I'm not a person that has a proper uh moral compass and therefore we could not move forward in our friendship. You know, we are a storyt elling animal. We we we learn by hearing stories. So I can give you all of the you know professorial examples of the echo chambers and the fractured reality of our political systems, but that story is as powerful as anything else that I might say. Somebody decided to break a 30-plus-year friendship because a Canadian did not exhibit the proper amount of due disdain for an American president. That's probably not a healthy way to live life in order for you to be maximally flourishing. So it's regrettable, and I hate to say it to your point , the progressives are much more likely to engage in this than the conservatives, even though many people feel that it's the opposite. The archetype is that the conservatives are dogmatic. Certainly, my personal experience suggests otherwise. You know, anecdotally I've seen the same thing. And I'm going to be quite frank about this. It has been my extra you know, I've had a long time in public life. I've met an extraordinary number of people and still do. That generally speaking, a thought through conservative will try and form a nuanced view of someone else. So in the case of Trump, they might say, don't like his narcissism, but I can accept that uh he's done other things that are good and they can try and form up something that's balanced. In other words, they will look for the good and the bad because they don't think human nature changes. They don't think anybody's got a monopoly on uh total What I find there's the extraordinary rapidity within which many of today's so-called progressive slide is one of simplistic, we cannot possibly accept that there is anything good about this person . And I've had that direct experience with people, with Americans actually, who who want to list and catalogue everything that Trump has done is wrong . And on one notable occasion, I sort of um made one point that they obviously hadn't thought about, and both of them, as a husband and wife team, said, Oh, well, yes, I suppose that is a fair point. Probably more out of politeness than conviction. There's this incredible reluctance to l to nuance . Yeah, and I would say I mean speaking about the nuance as relating to Trump, in the parasitic mind, I argue that the the the really the visceral disgust that so many people, certainly in academia, uh exhibit towards Trump is because he represents an existential aesthetic injury, right? So they've spent their entire life developing certain affectations, speaking with a progressive lisp , so that they could be invited to the cool kids parties in Manhattan. And now here comes this cantankerous, you know, brawling character that doesn't speak with the cadence and the elocution that they have been trained to speak at. And now the reason the the there's a reason I'm I'm I'm explaining it this way, because there's something in consumer psychology where if you're trying to develop say a persuas ive message, an advertising campaign, you can invoke either what's called the central root of persuasion or the peripheral root of persuasion. Central root of persuasion invokes your cognitive system. So, for example, if I'm trying to sell you a mutual fund, I will say, here are the seven reasons why you should invest in my mutual fund. I'm invoking your cognitive processes. But if I were selling you a perfume , what would I do? I would show you a beautiful girl with her hair flower flowing on a horse and then it would say mystère, right? I would just give you some French sounding name for the perfume. Because it's a hedonic product. I am I am in I am invoking your peripheral cues, right? Here's what happens with Trump? People use their peripheral system rather than their central system in judging him. Right? So I hate him, he disgusts me. These are all affective-based positions based on peripheral irrelevant cues. But you they might actually agree with his substantive policies. I've actually challenged some of my colleagues. Why I say , Are you for this policy? And they'd say, Yes. I say, Do you know that Trump supports that? I already start seeing them that their head is about to explode. Yeah, yeah, but I hate him. He disgusts me. So it's always this visceral peripher al response when they should be applying their cognitive system. And so again, that speaks to that duality: cognitive versus emotional . The trick to life, the the challenge in life is to make sure to trigger the right system for the right occasion. When I'm judging who should read who should lead the free world, I should be Said to me on one of these conversations that the old distinction between left and right is now really not very useful. It's more, and I think this is following on the comments you just made, those who believe in reason, calm debate, let's examine reality, and those who go straight to feelings and emotion. Indeed, ANHSI Ali warned that we're in danger of turning our democracy into an emocracy. My listeners will have heard me reference both of those in the past, but I just want to run them by them because as someone who's actually had many years in Parliament, I was part of a reforming government. We grappled with reality every day. And what I've noticed since in government is that it now is another source of therapy, playing to people's feelings. We don't want to challenge you with the great issues that are actually now threatening our children. We don't want to have to tell you that we are borrowing unconscionably against them and that we're going to crimp their lifestyles. We don't want to have to tell you that actually if Iran gets a nuclear bomb, none of us will be safe and that perhaps what President Trump is doing, chaotic as his approach might have been, will actually produce a safer world. We don't we don't seem to be able to rise above collective emotional responses to situations anymore. So is it right that the better dividing line now is more along that sort of calm reason, cognitive debate, and emotion than feeling and hopefulness as approach to realism? I mean, uh certainly that's true, but I would say that it's not a statement that applies across all contexts, that reason is always better than emotion. Let me give you a counterexample. Let's suppose I'm about to take a shortcut through an alley because that will cut my walk to get home by 20 minutes. And as I cut through this dark alley, I notice four young men who are loitering and they seem a bit suspicious. Now, at that moment, I might have an autonomic affective response called a fear response. My heart rate will go up. My blood pressure might go up. I my skin uh might start uh perspiring. That autonomic affective response is exactly what I would expect evolution to endow me with. So there, so again, that goes to my earlier point. It's not that reason is always better than emotions. It's that you need to deploy the right system for the right occasion. If I'm trying to do well in a calcul us exam, having my fear response triggered is not going to increase my chances of doing well in the calculus exam. I need to trigger my cognitive system. So, but to your point, when we're dealing with policy decisions, when we have to sit down and debate the pros and cons of a policy, then of course we should be relying a lot more on our cognitive system rather than our affective system. So that's certainly true. I I'd say the two need to be kept in balance. You know, um it when it comes to say government expenditure, there are always emotional reasons why you want to do more for people in need. But then you need to balance that against being irresponsible uh financially, uh emotionally, you need to be considering out of love and affection and commitment to the next generation their interests as well. So you need to balance your desire to do more for people now with the needs of people later. So it's a question of balance. But coming back to masculinity, we touched on that. Um we are it,s seem to me, and and and you say that we've become an empathy culture, and I'm seeing exactly what you're driving at. Part of that empathy culture seems to have been the decrying of many masculine traits. And I think that's the other backlash. We're talking about political division. But I and uh I I run into countless young men who feel that the culture has gone to a simplistic place where Now they're kicking back against that very badly. So we're we seem to be at war with one another culturally. We seem to be at war with one another across the generations. We seem to be at war with one another um you know in terms of um the battles over racism real and perceived uh and now we're at battle uh between um men and women . What are your perspectives on on our if you like it seems, distortion around undesirable and desirable masculinity or masculine traits. Right. So remember how earlier I mentioned that many of these sort of mother earth mov ements seek to remove our most fundamental drivers such as reproduction, right? Those are an innate feature of our desire to reproduce. Well, to your point now , these movements that seek to pathologize masculinity are literally anti-Darwinian. Why? And and by when I say anti-Darwinian, it speaks to I mean you framed it in the context of religion where you know there's an inherent human nature that is unchangeable. Well, let me add to what you said. In evolutionary psychology, we know that if you ask people from an astounding number of varied cultures. I mean really in ep cultures that vary in every conceivable way. What are the key attributes that you look for in your ideal mate, you ask that of women and men and of men and women, you find some unbelievable commonalities, irrespective of whether you are the Yanamomo tribe in the Amazon , or you are a Aboriginal tribe in uh Central Australia, or you are in Detroit, Michigan, if it's 800 years ago or 800 years from now. Why? Because as a sexually reproducing species , there are certain traits that each of the sexes desires in the other that are universally true. What are some of these? If you ask men what are some of the attributes that they look for in women, by the way, both sexes want to have someone who is kind and intelligent. So that's nice. So this proves to you that it's not that empathy is bad to the extent that empathy is correlated to kindness, we want somebody to be empathetic, but strategically so, right? It's deployed properly. Okay. What do women want in men? Are there any cultures where women look for men with pear-shaped bodies, nasal voices that suck their thumb, cry all day while they exhibit zero social dominance? If you know of that culture, please email it to me because I'll make you famous. Guess what? That culture doesn't exist. Every single culture will exactly uh exhibit the exact exemplar of their model man. He is tall, he is socially bold, he has resources that he can defend. If he doesn't have resources, he exhibits the cues that can obtain those resources. This is what explains, for example, why some women will be attracted to the starving musician. Well, that musician hasn't made money yet, but he he has a talent that will hopefully send him on the trajectory of social ascendancy. No culture has ever been found where women said, I'm sexually aroused by really whiny wimps, right? So therefore, we we have all of the scientific data spanning all known cultures, suggesting that that which the current Western Zeitgeist has told us, which is it is pathological to be bold and masculine, that's exactly what all women throughout all of societies have always said they should want, but now we pathologize that. So now men are completely confused . Sh am I is it okay for me to be bold and try to go up to a woman to to date her? Or am I going to be accused of uh seduction rape because I said that she looks good in that dress? Or it's going to be a compliment rape because by the way, you i i literally had to take mandatory sexual harassment training courses at my univers ity because well into my 50s, I apparently didn't know how to communicate to women, but I needed my very benevolent employer to gently grab me by the hand and teach me how to speak to women for me to become a good person. Because until then, I was just a Neanderthal walking around with a club hitting all of the women on campus. But that's what happens when you pathologize half of humanity called men. And by the way, I get hundreds of emails from women from around the world telling me. I mean, I'm going to paraphrase the email, dear Proorfess Sad, no man will ever approach me. Help me, right? Well, how do you expect him to approach you? He's afraid that if he approaches you, just to strike up a conversation with you to try to engage in a seductive dance with you, you might accuse them of hashtag me too. Therefore, what do men do? They turn inward. They no longer know what up is is, what down is, what left is, what right is, they turn to pornography and so on. It's not a good outcome. What we need is to have a return to standard role. Now that doesn't mean that women can't be firemen and that men can't love romance novels. There's always an overlap in any statistical distribution. Some little boys like to play with dolls, some little girls like to play with with guns. But all told , there are many traits that make men and women indistinguishable from each other, and that's fine. But there are many traits that are perfectly dimorphic, and that's exactly how it's meant to be for a sexually reproducing species Again, uh you've just encapsulated, I think, the difference between elites and what mainstream people feel. The problem with it is in many ways, I think that uh ordinary people feel so belittled and at the same time they're not getting any clear guidance and encouragement in what they essentially feel are right and appropriate instincts and how best to deploy them in a civilized way. Let me ask you then, and you've been very generous with your time, two uh broad questions. Um the first one is the practical one. We don't quite know as we talk what's going to happen in the Middle East, how things are going to resolve themselves. But you have lived in a country that once was majority Christian, then became majority Muslim, and I think you would say it wasn't a happy experience. Looking more broadly now at I ran , I can't help thinking we've been naive about this for far too long. We've let it rise up underneath us. It's made the world a very dangerous place. I believe the world will be safer when that place is defanged at the very least. My greatest sadness is for those who would like to live in a more humane society, but the world will be safer for the rest of us. Surely that is not so very difficult for even the left, who do like their lifestyles, Gate. I've noticed that. They like their mobile phones and they like to travel and they like to eat well. They enjoy all the fruits that have been given to them by democratic and free enterprise societies. Surely even they can see that we're all going to be safer if Iran is well and truly de fanged well I of course I certainly agree with you. It's it's an incontrovertible truth that the world will be safer when you get rid of a regime that has an eschatology that is, you know, end of world, you know, doomsday. That can't be a good thing. Uh, it certainly is going to allow for the flourishing of the Iranian people who are very much unlike some other societies in the region very much have a a an a a turning towards the west i i've met many of these Iranian graduate students who who who who very much seem to want to expand their minds. Many of them even reject their sort of Islamic uh the imposition of Islam on their otherwise Persian societies. They say, no, no, no, I'm Persian, I'm not Muslim . Uh so I think both for the external world outside of Iran and for the Iranian people, it'll be a happy day when the current uh you know theocratic regime uh is no more. Now that said, what seems obvious to you and I uh is not obvious, for example, to the people who are themselves part of the queer community, but then hold queers for Palestine, right? How is it possible that if your most defining feature of personhood is your queer identity, should you be more in support of Tel Aviv , which is one of the most queer friendly cities in the world. I mean, short of Montreal, short of San Francisco and New York, Tel Aviv is probably next on the list of the most queer friendly sort of socially liberal cities. So if you're queer, should you be so should you be putting your chips towards Tel Aviv or towards Gaza, where they, as I often remind people, they've come up with a hundred percent effective conversion therapy program. It's a gravity-based conversion therapy program. We throw you off the top of the buildings, and then when your head splatters on the pavement, you've been cured from your queerness , and yet many of the people on university campuses, when given the choice, will proudly put up their queers for Palestine. So, so what seems to you and I to be incontrovertibly true and a fundamental fabric of reality, unfortunately, is not something as incontrovertibly true for the suicidally empathetic. So yes, you and I agree, but good luck trying to convince some of the graduate students at Columbia University of that reality . Well that uh leads me to my final question . We've really essentially been talking about what's been known uh and was a deliberate strategy, the long march of the left through the institutions . Can that in the face of reality be reversed and can it be reversed in time before we eat ourselves out from within uh as cultures across the West ? So I I always that's a it's a great question to end our conversation. Although I've so enjoyed our conversation, I can go on with you, I'm sure, for another five hours. Uh I always like to end on an optimistic note, but I also have to be truthful. So let me equivocate a bit if I may . The optimist, the optimist in me says the following: there is a trajectory, there is a template for solving this problem. So unlike let 's suppose God forbid your physician tells you you've got stage four pancreatic cancer and there is literally no intervention. You've got three weeks left. Get your a fairs in order. Well, that's not where we are. There is a set of autocorrective mechanisms that would allow us to very quickly reverse course and solve the problem. That's the optim istic part. In the abstract, there is a solution. Here comes the pessimistic part. I see no evidence that the West is remotely interested, nor does it have the testicular fortitude to implement any of those autocorrections. If anything, and certainly speaking from a Canadian perspective, Canada is doubling down and tripling down on all of the suicidal empathy. So the good news, there is a solution. The bad news, la la la, I don't want to implement the solution. So we'll see which side wins . Well, I absolutely salute the efforts you are making to give voice to genuine wisdom, the wisdom of the years, frankly. Uh and I wish you all very best with it and you and I I suppose even our critics we would ask to acknowledge we are seeking to be humane and we are seeking a better future for our children than the one that is currently being offered them. So thank you very much for your time. I really do appreciate it. Thank you, sir. If I may say I am currently in discussion to be coming hopefully to Australia next February so I hope that I will have the immense pleasure of meeting you in person