Gad Saad, evolutionary behavioral scientist, visiting professor at the University of Mississippi, and host of The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad podcast, is the author of The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (2020), and its sequel, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind (2026). Saad spoke to a September 28 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
A specific example of the connection between parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy that is endangering the West is its open border immigration policies.
It is necessary to make the distinction between the “rational virtue” of well-modulated empathy, on the one hand, and suicidal empathy, on the other. “Cognitive empathy, or theory of mind” occurs when the human species interacts in meaningful conversation with the thought that “I need to put myself in your mind, and vice versa.” However, healthy empathy requires a balance, much like Aristotle’s golden mean. Too much empathy towards the wrong target manifests in suicidal empathy. It is akin to the cell division that occurs in healthy bodies, yet without the stopping mechanism for the division that all cells undergo, the faulty cells become cancerous. Suicidal empathy “hyper fires in the wrong situations towards the wrong targets.”
As stated in the prequel to Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy, the emotional system needs to be subsumed in order for parasitic ideas to hijack the thought processes used to navigate the world. An effective process to accomplish this aim is via “cultural relativism”—an “idea pathogen” that argues “you are in no position to ever make moral, ethical, legal, societal, cultural judgments about how another society adopts its own values, its own behaviors.”
A specific example of the connection between parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy that is endangering the West is its open border immigration policies. The assertion that people are less likely to assimilate into the U.S if they come from cultures with values that run counter to Western values is rendered impotent when filtered through the lens of cultural relativism. Democrats, leftists, and progressives, who comprise “the party of empathy,” are prone to succumb to suicidal empathy, and the ideology feeding it stems from the intellectuals and academics on university campuses. These individuals “operate in an ecosystem that is perfectly decoupled from the autocorrective slap of reality.”
The decline in academia that accelerated some three decades ago has decoupled social sciences from evidence-based truth found in the scientific method. For example, when a top Canadian engineering and computer science school offered professorships endowed by the government, the open slots were available only to people who met the criterion of “two-spirit, gender non-binary” rather than to “meritocratically relevant people.” The system’s failure to see that “science is specifically liberating because it frees us from the shackles of our personal identities” fell prey to the failed policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Postmodernism uses language to advance its cause through a variant called “deconstructionism” that claims essentially that “language creates reality.”
“I think the main reason for our existential guilt is because we have 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 on stolen land, we are misogynistic.” Spreading those toxic self-destructive ideas is civilizational suicide “using the blade of suicidal empathy.”
Post-modernist philosophers unleashed the “granddaddy of all parasitic ideas” because of their rejection of universal truths. Their philosophy replaced the scientific method in academia “through feminization, with an epistemology of care.” Instead of creating new human knowledge, academia refrains from any research that would “end up hurting someone’s feelings.” Postmodernism uses language to advance its cause through a variant called “deconstructionism” that claims essentially that “language creates reality.” This is why progressives play linguistic games rather than acknowledge that there is an objective reality.
Other examples of suicidal empathy can be found among the Jewish population in the diaspora, a.k.a., “wood cricket Jews.” In the insect world, when the hairworm parasite invades the wood cricket’s brain, the wood cricket, which abhors water, will jump in the water to suit the hairworm’s survival at the cost of its own. In humans, the parallel would be the hijacking of the brain to alter behavior, thus producing an outcome that suits the parasite’s reproduction rather than the host’s survival. This example describes those Jews who will sacrifice their own survival in order to ascribe to an ideology where they can say “I am infinitely tolerant and kind.”
A far greater example that afflicts the West writ large is the insistence on a distinction between the religious ideology of Islam and Islamism. “There is no such thing as Islamism.” Placing qualifiers before the word “Islam” to mean anything other than Islam’s doctrines being “incongruent with Western values” misleads people into a “kind and empathetic reflex” that obfuscates and should no longer be used.
The vaccine against suicidal empathy has very specific prescriptions, the first of which is “don’t succumb to the empathy-based dopamine hit.”
Doctrinally adherent Muslims have repeatedly told the West that it will be conquered demographically “through the womb,” by immigration, and “by using your miserable freedoms against you.” The many Muslims who refrain from implementing “the doctrinal canonical imperatives of Islam” and prefer instead to coexist within Western values find that if they are “fully practicing Muslims,” the two are at odds. Even if the global percentage of violent Muslims is a relatively small 10 percent of the total Muslim population of two billion, that would equate to 200 million people. How many of the remaining 1.8 billion Muslims are complicit in the goal of the 200 million by not speaking up and objecting remains an open question.
The vaccine against suicidal empathy has very specific prescriptions, the first of which is “don’t succumb to the empathy-based dopamine hit.” Submission to it is a slippery slope that renders you susceptible to the “myopia of first order effects.” What inevitably follows is the domino of second and third order effects. “If your society becomes majority Islamic, then we will have a different reality than the one that your children grew up in.”
