Gad Saad: When Empathy Becomes Dangerous
5/26/20261 hr 30 min
Gad Saad returns to discuss his new book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, a provocative argument that empathy is not a moral trump card. Empathy can illuminate suffering, but it can also distort judgment when it is treated as an unquestionable virtue, applied selectively, or insulated from consequences.
Saad's central claim is that many Western institutions have learned to treat compassion as a substitute for judgment. In practice, he argues, this can mean extending sympathy toward the wrong targets (for example, criminals over victims), excusing destructive behavior, rewarding ideological conformity over truth, or denying uncomfortable facts in the name of kindness. The result is a moral framework that feels humane in the moment but can produce outcomes that are unfair, irrational, or even dangerous.
The conversation covers cultural relativism, islamism, suicide cults, kamikaze pilots, immigration and foreign aid, forbidden knowledge, and why some ideas spread and take hold while others fade away.
Gad Saad is a professor and an evolutionary behavioral scientist. He has authored numerous scientific papers and pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. In addition to his scientific work, he often writes and speaks about idea pathogens that are destroying logic, science, reason, and common sense. He is the host of The Saad Truth podcast. His new book is Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.
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Gad Saad· Guest0:39
[ding] Let me define what suicidal empathy is, 'cause then it speaks to that calculus of who is more deserving of the empathy, the woman with the nine-inch penis or the woman with a vagina, right? So suicidal empathy really has three parts to it. There is the hyper-firing of empathy. It's hyperactive. There is the invoking, activation of empathy in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets. It's really all these three things that makes the perfect cocktail of suicidal empathy. The West has decided that not only it doesn't want to be, quote, Islamophobic, and I say quote Islamophobic 'cause there's no such thing as Islamophobia.
Michael Shermer· Host1:22
Mm-hmm.
Gad Saad· Guest1:22
It's perfectly rational to be deeply concerned about some of the central tenets of Islam if you're a Westerner. But the West has decided they wanna be orgiastically