Holy crap. Guess who these guys are looking towards for advice. Gad Saad.
Musk: I mean, there’s a guy who posts on X who’s great: Gad Saad.*
Rogan: Yeah. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome. … And he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right. Understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes. Like it’s weaponized. Empathy is the issue. Yeah, weaponized empathy.
He’s awesome
…I’m going to have to puke. Gad Saad is a marketing professor with no qualifications in science, but is thriving by jumping on the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. Or, as Eiynah describes him,
He is a white nationalist, someone who calls for expelling Muslims, a vicious transphobe, someone who refers to anti-Zionist Jews as insects. A truly vile man who they described as ‘a Canadian professor’.
His latest schtick is to claim that people are caring too much for their fellow human beings, especially if they belong to ethnic groups he doesn’t like, and calling it suicidal empathy
. He’s written a whole book on the topic, a book I’ve mentioned before, and not one I’d ever care to read. Let’s take a look at the Amazon reviews, where it has 4½ stars (the reviews show all the signs of being carefully pruned of criticism), and all you have to do is look at who is praising him to know it’s trash.
“Western civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival. Gad Saad articulates this well. All of Gad’s books, including this one, are great.” — Elon Musk
“Over the course of nearly half a century tracking culture war issues I have some perspective on our time and society, and I am deeply worried that the West faces a challenge like no other. But I was unable to link the disparate threats—the DEI, BLM, and trans movements, the fetishization of victimhood status, the ennobling of terrorists and criminals, and the failure to solve the drug and homelessness problems—to the underlying cause until I read Gad Saad’s magisterial work on Suicidal Empathy. There it is! We’re killing ourselves with kindness and it must stop before the patient dies, starting with this book, which includes the contagion’s diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.” — Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine, author of The Moral Arc and Conspiracy
“What happens when society becomes so empathetic that it tolerates intolerance? Gad Saad is the evolutionary psychologist who can tell us whether the enlightenment can endure in an age of suicidal empathy.” — Lord Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and Birds, Sex and Beauty
Western civilization is doomed
, unless we purge it of DEI, BLM, and trans movements
and stop being kind. But Musk, Shermer, and Ridley are the people you should listen to only if you plan on doing the opposite of what they advise.
Instead, respect every branch of human civilization equally, regard them with fairness and generosity, and give them nothing but kindness. Except for Nazis.
Sucking up to Rogan or Musk will only make you popular with Nazis, and those people are bad.
Thanks for this. If it contributes even slightly to the destruction of Musk’s reputation, it was work well done.
There are plenty of unpleasant people who hope to be the next Ayn Rand by saying what billionaires like to hear. We should encourage them to smoke lots of cigarettes.
While I have extensively critizised the mess that is muslim theology, the idea of collective punishment because of a handful of terrorists is repugnant. Or should be repugnant.
.
Empathy is the most precious fruit of the Enlightenment era.
Even the pre-Reagan/Thatcher conservatives valued empathy (to some extent).
Those who see it as the problem want us to return to a very dark age.
… the fetishization of victimhood status…
Please apply that insight to the present spokespersons for the billionaire, cis-white-male, christian, and “conservative” populations, Mike. Wotchasay?
Musk apparently deserves empathy for his cars being vandalized. Hind Rajab? Not so much. JFC, I hate these people.
These people don’t seem to ever define suicidal empathy, at least very well. From my reading between the lines the empathy they don’t like is empathy towards people who don’t look like them, or worship like them, or don’t control, by reasons of birth alone, the same amount of capital resources as them. In short, they have no empathy at all. You can’t be empathic to someone in the exact same situation as you. That’s incoherent. Their expression of empathy is lip service only.
It is quite the stupid claim.
Empathy is the cognitive or emotional ability to mirror and understand another person’s internal state, but it does not entail kindness or helpfulness or even duty, being a capacity for perception but not a moral imperative.
It can be useful.
cf. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7534327/
↓
Investigative empathy: a strength scale of empathy based on European police perspectives
A growing body of research suggests that empathy plays a major role in establishing and maintaining rapport during police interviews. The benefits of rapport include not only increased cooperation from interviewees, but also gaining more accurate investigation-relevant information. However, there still is no universally agreed-upon definition and very little research on operationalizing empathy, especially within investigative interviewing. The present study analyzed police interviewers’ self-reports regarding their (a) training and methods employed during interviews, (b) application of empathy in interviews, and (c) definitions/understanding of empathy. It was found that officers in all seven participating countries varied within each country in their use of accusatory or information-gathering interview styles. The majority of participants in each country claimed to employ empathy in their interviews with suspects, yet they varied regarding the definitions they provided. In no country was empathy defined as having aspects that may not be conducive to investigative interviewing.
In regard to empathy versus scapegoating, Paxton’s claims are catching up to him.
.
He claimed 58 000 foreigners voted in Texas elections After a six-year crusade, one (1) has been indicted.
Saad ane Paxton are different variants of the Green Slime (the 1960s horror film). Disgusting, hard to get rid of.
They want to punch down so badly. But the moment someone is mean to them personally? Their fragile ego can’t handle it, they whine, lawyer up, and try to silence any further discussion.
Rules for thee, not for me.
.. and the pig got up and slowly walked away.
.. and the pig got up and slowly walked away.
.. and the pig got up and slowly walked away.
whoops!
IQ 9nversely correlated with wealth…
…the fetishization of victimhood status, the ennobling of terrorists and criminals, and the failure to solve the drug and homelessness problems…
Sounds like he’s talking about Republicans. I’m all in favor of getting rid of them.
Suicidal empathy? My empathy for these fascists is more homicidal than suicidal.
Empathy is fairly obviously an automated tendency to foster trust and cooperation, a reasonable evolved trait. Like other pattern recognition systems it is prone to error, and exploited by sociopaths.
Gaad Saad, Elon Musk et al are sociopaths (or perhaps psychopath is the better word).