University of Mississippi

The biological hijacking of the human heart Modern psychology often treats empathy as an unalloyed good, yet evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad argues that this virtue has been weaponized against the very societies that cherish it. In his latest work, Suicidal Empathy, Saad explores how the human affective system—the emotional circuitry that allows us to feel for others—is being parasitized by ideologies that demand we prioritize the well-being of those who mean us harm over our own survival. This phenomenon mirrors a biological nightmare found in nature: the wood cricket and the hairworm. Normally, the cricket avoids water to stay alive. However, when infected by a neuroparasite, the cricket's brain is hijacked, forcing it to jump into a body of water and drown. The cricket commits suicide so that the parasite can emerge and complete its reproductive cycle. Saad posits that Western civilization is currently acting as the wood cricket, jumping into the "water" of open borders, cultural relativism, and the tolerance of intolerance, all because its survival instincts have been erased by a misplaced sense of kindness. Aristotle and the danger of the hyperactive virtue To understand why empathy can be destructive, one must return to the Aristotelian concept of the Golden Mean. Virtue, Aristotle argued, is the sweet spot between two extremes of vice. Courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness. Empathy follows the same rule. On one end of the spectrum lies the psychopath, who possesses too little empathy; on the other lies the victim of suicidal empathy, whose emotional response is so hyperactive that it becomes a pathological liability. Saad provides jarring examples of this hyperactivity, such as the Norwegian man who felt existential guilt over the deportation of the migrant who raped him, or the German woman who lied to police about the ethnicity of her attackers to prevent "marginalization" of their community. In these cases, the natural instinct for self-preservation and justice is overridden by a desire to remain "kind" to the perpetrator. This is not a failure of character, but a cognitive and emotional glitch where the victim identifies with the predator at the expense of their own tribe and safety. Cultural relativism as a parasitic foundation Suicidal empathy does not emerge in a vacuum; it requires fertile ground prepared by specific "idea pathogens." The most pervasive of these is cultural relativism—the belief that no culture or set of values is superior to any other. When a society internalizes the idea that it is "racist" or "xenophobic" to judge the practices of another culture, it loses its ability to defend itself against antithetical values. Gad Saad argues that this leads directly to the paralysis seen in Western immigration debates. If all cultures are equal, then there is no reason to demand assimilation. If we cannot judge honor killings, female genital mutilation, or radical religious edicts, we cannot effectively screen who enters our gates. This lack of "cultural theory of mind"—the inability to recognize that other cultures may view our kindness as a weakness to be exploited—creates a one-way street where the host society is slowly dismantled by its own hospitality. The marketing success of expansionist religion In a candid exchange with Joe Rogan, Saad applies his background in marketing and consumer behavior to the history of Islam. He describes Islam as a "brilliant marketing religion" because its internal circuitry is designed for rapid expansion and customer retention. Unlike Judaism, which is anti-proselytizing and places high barriers to entry, Islam offers a low-cost entry point (the Shahada) combined with high-cost exit penalties (apostasy laws). Saad argues that much of what Westerners call "radicalism" is actually the literal application of canonical texts. He critiques the use of terms like "Islamism" or "Radical Islam" as linguistic camouflage used by both the Left and the Right to avoid addressing the core tenets of the faith. By categorizing the world into *Dar al-Islam* (the House of Islam) and *Dar al-Harb* (the House of War), the religion establishes a permanent geopolitical friction that Westerners, blinded by their own empathetic universalism, struggle to comprehend. The refusal to acknowledge this expansionist nature, Saad suggests, is a hallmark of the "wood cricket" phase of Western decline. Geopolitical agency and the amnesia of causality While Joe Rogan pushes back by pointing to the CIA and Western meddling—such as the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran or the killing of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya—as the true catalysts for Middle Eastern instability, Saad warns against "the amnesia of causality." He argues that while the United States has certainly made catastrophic errors, attributing 100% of the blame to Western intervention removes the personal and religious agency of the actors in the region. Saad uses the example of ISIS to illustrate this point. Even if the United States created the vacuum that allowed ISIS to flourish, the specific brutality of ISIS—the beheadings, the sex slavery, the implementation of Sharia—is derived from 1,400 years of religious canon, not from a reaction to the George W. Bush administration. To always blame one's own society for the world's ills is, in Saad's view, a form of "progressive sophistication" that actually reveals a deep-seated suicidal empathy. It assumes the "other" has no will of their own and is merely a puppet reacting to Western strings. The Jewish general and the mirror of envy Addressing the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, Saad introduces the concept of "market dominant minorities," a term coined by Amy Chua. Throughout history, small groups that "box above their weight class"—such as the Jews, Armenians, or Asians—often become targets of intense envy and animus. Because the Jews have been successful in so many disparate societies despite their minuscule numbers, they serve as a universal scapegoat for the collective failures of others. Saad references Thomas Sowell, who famously noted that the only way to stop people from hating Jews would be for them to fail. This success breeds a specific type of conspiracy theory, such as the Egyptian authorities claiming that shark attacks in the Red Sea were orchestrated by Mossad. In the Western context, this manifests as a obsession with the "Zionist lobby," where the influence of pro-Israel groups is viewed with a unique level of vitriol not applied to other foreign lobbyists, such as those from Qatar or China. Reclaiming the survival instinct As Gad Saad prepares to move his family from the increasingly volatile campus of Concordia University in Montreal to the University of Mississippi, his message remains one of urgent caution. He sees the West at a crossroads: it can continue to allow its compassion to be used as a weapon of its own destruction, or it can reclaim a sense of "rational mean" in its empathy. The path forward requires a rejection of blank-slate thinking and a return to the reality of human nature and cultural differences. It involves recognizing that not all ideas are equal and that a society that tolerates everything will eventually be ruled by the most intolerant. For Saad, the move to Oxford, Mississippi, is more than a professional shift; it is a search for a society that still possesses the "testicular fortitude" to defend its own values before the hairworm takes full control.