I know you'd rather be on Tok, so I'm sorry for interrupting your doom scrolling on UFO'S, Taylor Swift controversies, and recipes that can be made in 39 minutes in the microwave. But quite frankly there's a lot of stuff going on in this world. More than even this commentator can screen, identify and illuminate for you. Not to mention the fact that my health is in serious decline. So I should make this quick while I still can.
Don't trouble yourself over my impeding death. I might be worried about my vitality, but you should be just as worried about the fact that our civilization is on it's way out too. And I'm not just talking about how Donald 'daddy' Trump is making the art of the deal with Vladimir Putin. Wait isn't Putin still a Soviet citizen? Who knows? But I guess MAGA is now more communist supporting than I ever was as a member of the CPUSA.
So what's today's topic? How about SUICIDAL EMPATHY? If you heard about suicidal empathy it's probably because it's been invoked by Elon Musk. Elon thinks we are committing civilizational suicide by allowing in a bunch migrants from 3rd world countries. “Weaponized empathy is the issue.” You see the democrats are only allowing folks in from other countries to be here so they can be used as tools for election tampering.
What Elon hates is that dems are giving immigrants free housing and EBT cards rather than helping out US citizens suffering from forest fires and earthquakes. Really {Elon worries} they are just bribing non-citizens in hopes they vote for democrats. No matter that non-citizens can't vote in federal elections. Dems can just grant them amnesty later. And let's not forget that in England, Canada, and France these Muslim {it's always Muslim} folk live lives with strange values. They don't support women's right to choose abortions, they aren't big on free speech by corporations {corporations are people too}, and they are anti science. Musk, Gad Saad and the whole right wing are worried about these developments because all that empathy.
But we can't just worry about dirty foreigners. Let's not forget we have infiltrators among us. Evil purple haired, nose ringed, polygamous left wing feminists. They cause a lot of problems getting black people jobs and Susie from HR wears a bunch of pant suits and can't take a joke. So there's a lot to worry about on the culture front that Musk and Saad have discovered. But unlike you (or Musk) I've actually read Gad Saad's Parasitic Mind. So, what's it like? And why did Musk borrow his worry about suicidal empathy from it? Here's a quick overview of the book:
"Reading The Parasitic Mind is like eating a family-sized bag of Doritos in one sitting. It’s addictive, full of bold flavors, and leaves you feeling like you’ve consumed something substantial—until you realize it was mostly air and artificial seasoning. Gad Saad delivers a fun, punchy take down of left-wing extremism, but beneath the spicy rhetoric, the book is more about rallying the tribe than seriously engaging with the ideas it claims to dismantle."
Look, obviously that last paragraph was written by AI. But you get the point. Gad Saad is an unserious blow hard. That's not to say that I didn't like the book. It's only the 3rd book I've read all the way through in the past year. So that says something about it. It's well written. It kept my attention using provocative, interesting ideas. And reading is good for you. It's good for your brain. And we don't do enough things anymore to keep our brains engaged. I can't tell you how hard it is to write after a year off of blogging.
But what are the serious ideas in the book that we can gleam from it? Folks on the left don't even call Saad an evolutionary psychologist. They refer to him as marketing guy. But the left hates evolutionary psychology anyways, so even if they got it right about him having a Ph.D they'd hardly take him serious.
Saad seems to be borrowing some ideas about memes from Dawkins (another dude the left hates.) While I'm not 100 percent sold on the memes idea myself, I think Saad oversimplifies his feeling vs. thinking analogy. Thinking in general can't be separated in to parts so easily. You don't have a tiny Spock in your mind that uses logic getting into arguments from your girlie feelings side. That's just not how the brain works. Do I need to name drop a little? Read some Damasio if you think I just made up that "feelings" are just as important to logic.
You see what Damasio theorized is something he called his 'somatic marker hypothesis.' I am getting into the woods here, so I apologize. Frankly, this analysis is the most difficult analysis I've ever attempted. But one way to think about this is that feelings guide decision making. They aren't separate processes like Saad suggests.
You see for Saad ideological parasites like suicidal empathy are like ghosts in the machine acting against our better interests. The left's view of tolerance becomes the tolerance of intolerance. Allowing non western thoughts like the subjugation of women and advanced patriarchy to live besides western values of individual human dignity. That's why French women have to be careful how they dress in certain areas.
What Saad is really doing is dressing up his talk about certain ideologies that he doesn't like in pseudo scientific sounding meme language like beware of 'parasetic empathy.'
But there's something more complicated going on than a simple hijack of our empathy. To borrow from Minsky our consciousness isn't a singular unified self like we assume. It's composed in such a manner that it's like we have bunch of individual little combative agents in our mind arguing among themselves. The arguing agents can make us feel like we are at cross purposes with ourselves. If we take that analogy further we can see how people can have multiple and competing theories and motivations about an action. Culture and ideologies pathogens aren't simply memes that attach themselves like parasites, infecting our rational thought. It's more likely a negotiation between different parts of ourselves that have their own reasoning and purposes.
