Dr. Gad Saad: The Psychological Disease Destroying Western Civilization

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Have you heard the term suicidal empathy? We're hearing it more and more in the modern lexicon. And the term was coined by our next guest who joins us to discuss how it is damaging our society.

[00:00:13]The book is called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.

[00:00:18]Our guest diagnoses the problem and provides us all with a wake-up call necessary to fight back against this ideology that promotes nothing but society's collapse. And I had to also say the author here, Gad Saad, is now, pretty soon, going to be going to Mississippi. He is at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at Ole Miss, proving once again that academic excellence in the United States is all moving to the south. Gad, welcome into the Scott Horton Show. We are grateful for your time and congratulations on this number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

[00:00:58]>> Thank you so much, Scott. Pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:02]>> Well, I'm glad you're here. And when I saw that your book rocketed up to number one, I wasn't surprised because I think there is a marketplace for common sense. And I think a lot of people in our politics and a lot of our cultural commentators and certainly a lot of academics have completely abandoned that. You, on the other hand, have plunged headlong into it with this idea of suicidal empathy. Tell us, how do you define suicidal empathy and what is the the thesis and the conclusion of the book here?

[00:01:34]>> Sure. Uh so, empathy is a wonderful virtue to possess. We are a social species. So, part of being social is that you and I, in order to have a meaningful conversation, I have to put myself in your mind and vice versa. So, there's nothing wrong with well-calibrated empathy. The problem arises, as Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago in his Nicomachean Ethics, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about threading that needle and finding that sweet spot in the middle.

[00:02:08]And that exactly applies to empathy. If I've got no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath.

[00:02:14]If I have a hyperactivation of empathy that is invoked in the wrong situations toward the wrong target, I end up with civilization collapse via suicidal empathy.

[00:02:28]>> Our author today is Gad Saad. He is the author of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. It is number one on the New York Times best-seller in the non-fiction hardcover category. I want you to order it today. If you're going to read one book right now, this is the one you need to read. It explains so much of what's going on with American politics, particularly on the left. When I think about what you've written here and how you're dealing with this topic, I cannot help but think about sort of the DNA of the modern left. The left in the United States, really the left around the world. Is this the Is this suicidal empathy concept Is this sort of the adopted number one DNA or number one operating principle for in politics for the American left right now? Is it Is that what they have evolved into? Is it Does it sort of Is it the threat that goes through everything for them?

[00:03:22]>> It does. So, I mean, the Democrats are known as the party of empathy. Barack Obama was colloquially referred to as the empathizer-in-chief.

[00:03:33]And so, look, life is about knowing which metric to optimize. If you're playing football, you should optimize the metric of scoring more points than the opponent, right? If you decide that what you want to maximize is the the number of minutes that your team holds the ball, that might be nice, but that's not how you win games. And so, life is about identifying the correct metric to optimize. There's Again, there's nothing wrong with empathy, but it can't be disregulated empathy because it results in domestic and foreign policies that are truly leading us to civilizational collapse.

[00:04:13]>> We've seen some stories in the news lately where this title, uh suicidal empathy, I mean, it applies directly.

[00:04:20]There was the story in New York City the other day. The lady was uh attacked by someone in the subway.

[00:04:26]She declined to press charges against that person because the person was black. She said that, "I didn't want to put another black person in jail." A few weeks later, that person is out of jail and then pushes a retired math teacher down the stairs who dies.

[00:04:42]There are lots of examples of this. So, in your research, in your writing, and in your uh theory here, who is most susceptible to this? And why do you think they are so susceptible to it in our uh Western culture now?

[00:04:56]>> So, certainly women more than men. Not to imply that men can't be suicidally empathetic, but women, on average, even when it comes to well-regulated, well-calibrated empathy, usually score higher on empathy than men. So, it would not surprise anyone to find out that suicidal empathy is more likely to be an affliction of women and of castrated men as well, which is not a surprising thing given that much of the left has decided that half of humanity, known as men, are pathologically toxic, right? So, if you take a feature of manhood, known as masculinity, and you pathologize it by calling it toxic masculinity, then you're going to have women who suffer more from suicidal empathy, you're going to have castrated men who suffer more suicidal empathy. And as we mentioned earlier, you're going to have people who lean to the left who suffer from greater suicidal empathy.

[00:05:56]>> The book is called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. The author is Gad Saad. He is an academic. He is an evolutionary behavioral scientist. And he currently is affiliated with Ole Miss University at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom. Gad, uh talk to us about suicidal empathy in our American culture. You I think I think it's your theory that this is antithetical to the concept of the American dream. Maybe expound upon that a little bit.

[00:06:28]>> So, let's take for example the parasitic idea, which I talk about in one of my previous books in The Parasitic Mind, known as cultural relativism. So, cultural relative relativism purports that who are you to judge the cultural practices and cultural beliefs of another society. If they wish to engage in female genital mutilation of 5-year-old girls, shut up, racist. If they wish to engage in honor killings, shut up, racist. Well, if I internalize the dreadfully parasitic idea of cultural relativism, that renders me suicidally empathetic when it comes to uh immigration policy because then I am for open border policy because who am I to decide that some people from some cultures are less likely to assimilate within the American experience.

[00:07:15]Therefore, people who come from Waziristan and Afghanistan are just as likely to integrate as are people from Denmark and Sweden.

[00:07:24]That's what suicidal empathy looks like.

[00:07:26]And again, demography is destiny. The US thinks that it's protected by these big oceans, but give it enough time, you'll close your eyes, and you'll open up your eyes, and you'll end up like the society that I fled from in Lebanon.

[00:07:42]>> Gad, I'm interested what's going to happen in Oxford, Mississippi when you get down there. I'm interested in your going to one of these southern universities integrating this sort of teaching on campus. Tell us about this Declaration of Independence Center at Ole Miss. What are you going to be teaching? Is this text going to be part of what you're telling the students there? And how do you expect it to be received on a college campus?

[00:08:06]>> Uh well, certainly better than the university that I was at. You may or may not know, Scott, although I I've loved my time at my university in Montreal, this university has been referred to as Gaza University for well over 25 years.

[00:08:22]As a matter of fact, Benjamin Netanyahu was canceled from speaking at Concordia in 2002. So, to be able to go down south where men are still men, women are still women, uh you know, there isn't as I mean, not that there isn't woke ideology, but certainly less than what I've been accustomed to for 32 for 32 years as a professor is really welcoming. Some of the things that I'll be teaching are are things that are related to my books, The Parasitic Mind, Suicidal Empathy. I wrote a book between those two books on happiness. How does freedom relate to happiness? So, I'm incredibly excited and and so thankful that I've been given this new opportunity in Mississippi.

[00:09:07]>> It seems to me that the things you write about and the things you'll be teaching about are foundational to the fight to save Western civilization. And I talk a lot about this on my show. I talk a lot about it in my speeches out there. I try to talk about it on CNN every chance I get. That Western civilization is important and that it is worth defending.

[00:09:27]In a lot of American academic culture, Western civilization, the American experiment is denigrated, it's attacked.

[00:09:33]They're training people and teaching kids to hate it and to try to destroy it. Do you see yourself as a warrior for the West and do you see these books that you've written and these courses that you plan to do at Omiss? Is this part of how we're going to retrain kids to understand Western civilization is a good thing? We have to fight for it and we have to preserve it against people who very much want to tear it down.

[00:09:57]>> Indeed, from your lips to God's ears they say. Look, some of the strongest and most vociferous defenders of the Western tradition in general and the American experience in particular are immigrants such as myself. And And let me explain why. Because we we weren't born into what Americans think is the default reality throughout the world, right? We don't take it for granted because we've sampled from the buffet of societies and we know what's out there. Therefore, when we come to free societies, we say, "Hey guys, don't take it for granted what you have. You could close your eyes and open your eyes and you'll lose it."

[00:10:37]So, this is why it's folks like me, folks like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other immigrants that usually stand on top of the mountain and say, "Hey Americans, wake up and fight for your freedoms."

[00:10:49]>> The book is called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. The author is that voice you're hearing on the Scott Horton Show, Dr. Gad Saad. He is an evolutionary behavioral scientist. And this book is flying off the shelf and I'm going to end it here. Number one on the New York Times bestseller list, which by the way, I'm sure I am sure they choked when they had to put you at number one on the New York Times bestseller list because, you know, it's not purely on sales. It's a little bit curated over at the Times and the fact that they had to admit admit that your ideas here are number one in the world. I'm sure it killed them and I'm glad that you achieved that spot. You can go on Amazon, go to any bookstore, but you need to get this book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. And if you're if you're if you're going to Ole Miss, if you're one of the students out there in our audience headed to Ole Miss, I recommend checking out the Declaration of Independence Center there. And uh Dr. Saad is going to be on campus with you in Oxford soon enough. Gad, I'm really grateful for you. I follow you. I've been a huge fan of yours. I've been looking forward to this interview, and I can't thank you enough and congratulate you enough on having this great book, Dying to Be Kind, Suicidal Empathy.

[00:12:00]Please search for it, go pick it up today. Gad, thanks for your time today.

[00:12:04]>> Thank you so much for the kind words.

[00:12:06]Cheers.