The Weekend Interview with Gad Saad: Suicidal Empathy and Western Decline

“The threat to flee to Canada if a Republican is elected president has become a trope in American liberal politics, though few ever actually make the move. Gad Saad is about to do it in reverse.

 

Mr. Saad, 61, is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind," published in May, a cri de coeur against "maladaptively irrational altruism."

 

On immigration, crime, homelessness, taxation, schooling, environmentalism and transgenderism, he argues, Western elites have embraced policies that allow them to bask in a glow of self-satisfied virtue "while being fully decoupled from the negative consequences."

 

In a conversation by Zoom from his home in Montreal, Mr. Saad says he has been driven from Canada by the "orgiastic commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity, or 'DIE,' across all Canadian institutions, but especially Canadian universities," as well as by the unprecedented levels of antisemitism in the country. After Oct. 7, Jews, around 1% of Canada's population, have been on the receiving end of 70% of all religion-related hate crimes.

 

Canada's official reaction takes Mr. Saad's breath away: "Mark Carney, the prime minister, has proudly proclaimed that Islamic and Canadian values are the same," he says. The mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, "repeatedly mentions Islamophobia, because it would be too bigoted to reserve her empathy strictly to the Jews." Suicidal empathy, he says, "requires that whenever Jews are attacked, Western leaders should urge us to redouble our efforts to defeat Islamophobia. To do otherwise would be mean, racist, bigoted."

 

Mr. Saad has also had enough of Canada's "soul-crushing parasitic taxation," which has hit him afresh in the form of an exorbitant "departure tax." The fair market value of his taxable assets will be calculated on the day of his departure from Canada. He will then be deemed to have sold and reacquired these assets, with the difference between the market value and the original purchase price being taxed as capital gains. "No human being in a free society should have their hard-earned money stolen in this manner," he tweeted. He declines to say how much he expects to pay, but the top rate works out to more than 25% of the appreciation in value.

 

His move to the U.S., where he will be a professor at the University of Mississippi, will make him a two-time immigrant. Mr. Saad was born a Lebanese Jew. "It's not an oxymoron, though it sounds like one," he says. He was 11 when his family fled his native Beirut in 1975, at the outbreak of civil war. "It became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon." The Arabic-speaking Saad family, Mizrahi Jews, settled in Quebec.

 

"You didn't see a single veil back then," he says. Today in some Montreal neighborhoods, "50% of the women are veiled," largely the result of immigration from North Africa, especially Algeria. In seeking to bolster the French language, the province of Quebec encouraged immigration from French-speaking but Muslim Algeria. "Thank God the French language has been protected," Mr. Saad says. "Never mind the elementary-school teachers wearing the niqab or the influx of Muslims praying on sidewalks, parks and streets." (In a rare departure from Western policies of cultural accommodation, the Quebec government in April passed a law banning public prayers. "They didn't say it was in response to Islamic gatherings," says Mr. Saad. "But there are no Jains blocking the streets, no Seventh-day Adventists, no Orthodox Jews.")

 

"Suicidal Empathy," Mr. Saad's fifth book, is a sequel to his third, "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense" (2022). That book caught the eye of Elon Musk, who said its message gave him nightmares. Mr. Musk wrote a blurb for "Suicidal Empathy," and his endorsement made the outspoken Mr. Saad even more reviled on campus.

 

"The great majority view me as a dangerous ideologue, an evil Jewish professor trying to create a dark, sinister world with no empathy," he says -- never mind that he has nothing against empathy: "You need empathy to serve as the lubricant of our sociality," he observes. "I'm saying what Aristotle explained to us millennia ago in his 'Nicomachean Ethics': everything in moderation. Too little or no empathy makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy, invoked in the wrong situations, toward the wrong targets, is suicidal."

 

"The Parasitic Mind" argues that "idea pathogens" have taken root in the Western mind. "In order to fully hijack your ability to reason, I need to parasitize both your cognitive or thinking system, as well as your emotional affective system." Brainwashing isn't enough: "To turn you into a willful collaborator, I need to also attack your emotional system. Empathy is an adaptive virtue. Suicidal empathy is the misfiring of this adaptive process." Empathy, in this view, has both a cognitive component ("I understand your pain") and an affective one ("I feel your pain").

 

The academic literature, he says, differentiates between "sympathy, empathy, compassion, kindness. There are very small, granular differences between each. Empathy itself has 43 different definitions." In his book, he treats empathy in a largely colloquial sense, "as both a way of exhibiting sympathy towards someone, as well as a means of putting myself in your shoes."

 

For empathy not to misfire in the policy sphere, he contends, we need a "cultural theory of mind," where "one culture puts itself in the mind of another culture." The West, he says, lacks such a facility. "We presume that beneficence, compassion, empathy, sympathy or kindness will be processed by this other culture in ways similar or identical to ours." But other cultures aren't always in sync with us. Islam, in particular, "hears and sees these virtues and processes them as weakness, weakness, weakness, weakness and weakness."

 

Mr. Saad offers a list of parasitic ideas that distort the way we think by denying or playing down objective truth: postmodernism [1], cultural relativism [2], social constructivism [3] and "biophobia" (the fear of using biology to explain human behavior). "All of these idea-parasites were spawned on university campuses, in some esoteric humanities department," he says. "But they've broken out of the 'lab' and have caused people to abandon their capacity to think properly." Now "we're adjudicating what constitutes being a man or a woman, when up until recently tens of billions of people who'd existed on earth were fully able to navigate that conundrum."

 

Mr. Saad calls postmodernism "the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas." That would make the great-granddaddy cultural relativism, the brainchild of German Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1943). Boas and his acolytes argued, in Mr. Saad's summary, that "there are no human universals. Every culture has to be judged in its own idiosyncratic reality." For the West to "impose absolute deontological statements on a culture" -- to hold a normatively ethical view of civilization -- "is racist. Who are you to judge female genital mutilation? Honor killings? Child brides?"

 

To see how this leads to suicidal empathy, consider immigration. "We refuse to argue that some people stemming from certain cultures may be less likely to assimilate into the ethos of the Western tradition," Mr. Saad says. "That feels non-empathetic. So we end up acting as if 500,000 new immigrants from Waziristan are the same as 500,000 from Denmark."

 

Relativism leads to a toxic form of diversity. "People like Justin Trudeau" -- Mr. Carney's predecessor as prime minister -- "believe that greater diversity results in only positive outcomes. And that's just laughably, demonstrably false." As an example, Mr. Saad says, "there shouldn't be diversity in the West when it comes to what we do with gays. Gays should be allowed to flourish and live peacefully like anyone else." And we don't want a society "where there is a debate and diversity as to whether Jews are cockroaches. But if you import millions of people who think that, then you will get that diversity of thought."

 

Nothing sets Mr. Saad off more than postmodernism, "a dreadful idea" that came into vogue in the 1960s thanks to a trio of Frenchman, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. "Postmodernism purports that there are no objective truths, other than this one objective truth -- that there are no objective truths." That lays the ground for all the other parasitic ideas: "Men are women. Gaza is peaceful. Zionists are terrorists. Up is down."

 

Only the West is suicidal in its empathy. Israel is mostly an exception, "because they don't need anyone's help to die. You don't commit suicide when someone's trying to kill you already." The Japanese aren't committing what Mr. Saad calls "civilizational seppuku," even though the word for ritual suicide is theirs. Neither are the Chinese. "If I'm very self-assured about my cultural identity and heritage, I'm much less likely to succumb to suicidal empathy," he says. "If you truly believe the West is built on stolen land, slavery, Islamophobia and genocide, then it makes perfect sense for me to kill my society because it's so corrupt."

 

Aren't there robust forces in the West pushing back against Western self-destructiveness? Mr. Saad responds by conceding that "the welder, the trucker, and the corrections officer are not suffering from suicidal empathy." But they aren't the ones dictating policy: "Those are the intelligentsia: academics, journalists, boards of corporations. It's not the Navy SEAL who's suicidally empathetic. It's Justin Trudeau and the invertebrate castrati, lacking in spine and testicles, who make up our elites."

 

In case you haven't noticed, Mr. Saad can be vivid and blunt. In his book he describes Kamala Harris as a "lobotomized cackler." On Joe Rogan's podcast he called the Quebecois accent "an affront to human dignity." Quebeckers accused him, among other things, of "glottophobia" -- prejudice against dialects or accents.

 

In a recent tweet, he offered "congrats to two proud Islamic countries, France and Morocco," for reaching the soccer World Cup quarterfinals.

 

It's no surprise that he admires President Trump, perhaps the least suicidally empathetic politician in the Western world. Can Mr. Trump and his administration turn the tables on the suicidal empathizers?

 

Mr. Saad fears not. "He's only here for a limited time, right? So, he's a doorstop, an ephemeral doorstop to the tsunami of suicidal empathy. If there isn't a longer-lasting change that actually shifts the culture away from regarding suicidal empathy as the highest virtue, then Donald Trump will only have served as a pause button." While it was "much better, in my view, that Trump won instead of the lobotomized one, there's too much more that needs to be done."

 

Still, the U.S., he says, is in much better shape than Canada, which is in a "Stage 5 state of civilizational seppuku -- one higher than Stage 4, which is the worst stage of cancer." Other countries that are as "doomed" as Canada include Sweden, Norway, the U.K. and Germany. Part of the problem is that the end of the Cold War has meant that Western societies no longer have to affirm their own values: "We no longer believe that we are exemplars, better than other societies."

 

How far along is the process of civilizational seppuku? "Let's say the ceremonial blade is 7 inches long. We already have it in 2 inches deep. Demography is destiny. Go to France, go to Britain, come to Canada. We are starting to disembowel ourselves."

 

---

 

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.” [4]

 

1. Postmodernism is a late 20th-century intellectual, artistic, and philosophical movement. It rejects the idea of objective truth and universal progress. Instead of viewing history as a continuous march toward a better society, postmodernists are skeptical of grand narratives, focusing instead on subjective experience, irony, and the idea that reality is socially constructed.

 

2. Cultural relativism is the principle of understanding a person’s beliefs, values, and practices from the perspective of their own culture, rather than judging them against the standards of another. It serves as a tool to counter ethnocentrism by promoting empathy and respect for diversity.

 

3. Social constructivism is a theory proposing that human knowledge, meaning, and reality are not discovered objectively, but rather actively created and shaped through social interactions, culture, and language. It asserts that learning and understanding occur collaboratively within a societal and environmental context.

 

4. The Weekend Interview with Gad Saad: Suicidal Empathy and Western Decline. Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 July 2026: A11.