加德·薩阿德談「自殺式同情」與西方的衰落

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華爾街日報
如果共和黨人當選美國總統，就揚言搬去加拿大，這幾乎已經成為美國自由派政治中的一種老套說法，儘管真正付諸行動的人寥寥無幾。 而加德·薩阿德卻即將反其道而行之。
現年六十一歲的薩阿德是一位進化心理學家，也是加拿大蒙特利爾康考迪亞大學市場行銷學教授。 他是《自殺式同情：善良至死》一書的作者。 這本書於今年五月出版，是一篇針對他所謂「適應性失調的非理性利他主義」的激烈控訴。 他認為，在移民、犯罪、無家可歸、稅收、教育、環保以及跨性別等問題上，西方精英奉行的政策，使他們能夠沉浸於一種自我滿足的道德優越感之中，同時完全擺脫這些政策所帶來的負面後果。
薩阿德在蒙特利爾家中接受視頻採訪時表示，使他決定離開加拿大的，是加拿大所有機構，尤其是大學，對“多元、包容與公平”——他諷刺地稱之為“DIE”——近乎狂熱的投入，以及加拿大前所未有的反猶主義。 自二〇二三年十月七日以來，僅占加拿大人口約百分之一的猶太人，卻成為全國百分之七十宗教仇恨犯罪的受害者。
加拿大官方的反應，更令薩阿德感到震驚。 “總理馬克·卡尼曾驕傲地宣稱，伊斯蘭價值觀與加拿大價值觀完全一致。” 他說，多倫多市長周美玲則“一再提及伊斯蘭恐懼症，因為如果她只把同情心留給猶太人，就會顯得過於有偏見。 “薩阿德認為，這正是”自殺式同情“的體現。 “它要求的是，每當猶太人遭到攻擊，西方領導人就應該呼籲我們加倍努力打擊伊斯蘭恐懼症。 否則，就會被視為刻薄、種族主義或者充滿偏見。 ”
薩阿德也已經受夠了加拿大“令人窒息的寄生式稅收”，而最近最讓他難以接受的，就是高額的“離境稅”。 加拿大政府將按照他離境當天應稅資產的公平市場價值進行計算，並視同他已經出售、隨後重新購回這些資產，再就資產現值與原始購入價格之間的差額徵收資本利得稅。 他在社交媒體上寫道：「在一個自由社會，沒有任何人應該以這種方式被奪走自己辛苦賺來的財富。 “他拒絕透露自己預計需要繳納多少稅款，但按最高稅率計算，資產增值部分超過四分之一都要繳稅。
此次移居美國后，薩阿德將出任密西西比大學教授，這也意味著他將第二次成為移民。 薩阿德出生於黎巴嫩，是一名黎巴嫩猶太人。 “這聽起來像是自相矛盾，但事實並非如此。” 他說。 一九七五年黎巴嫩內戰爆發時，他只有十一歲，全家逃離家鄉貝魯特。 “當時，在黎巴嫩已經不可能繼續作為一名猶太人生活。” 講阿拉伯文的薩阿德一家屬於米茲拉希猶太人，後來定居加拿大魁北克省。
“那時候，你幾乎看不到一個戴面紗的人。” 他說。 而今天，在蒙特利爾一些社區，“有一半女性都戴著面紗”，這主要是來自北非，尤其是阿爾及利亞的大量移民所帶來的變化。 當年，為了加強法語地位，魁北克省鼓勵來自法語國家、但以穆斯林為主的阿爾及利亞移民進入加拿大。 “感謝上帝，法語的確保住了。” 薩阿德諷刺地說，「至於小學老師戴著面罩上課，或者越來越多穆斯林在街道、公園和人行道上集體祈禱，那就另當別論了。 “（與西方普遍採取文化包容政策不同，魁北克政府今年四月通過一項法律，禁止公共祈禱。” 他們並沒有說這是針對穆斯林聚會，「薩阿德說，」但堵塞街道祈禱的並不是耆那教徒，也不是基督複臨安息日會信徒，更不是正統派猶太人。 ”）
《自殺式同情》是薩阿德的第五本著作，也是他第三本著作《寄生心靈：傳染性思想如何扼殺常識》的續篇。 《寄生心靈》曾引起馬斯克的注意，馬斯克表示，這本書的觀點令他做噩夢。 後來，馬斯克還為《自殺式同情》撰寫推薦語，而這份背書，也讓一向敢言的薩阿德在校園裡更加遭人厭惡。
“絕大多數人都把我視為一個危險的意識形態分子，”薩阿德說，“一個邪惡的猶太教授，企圖建立一個沒有同情心的黑暗世界。 “然而，他強調，自己並不是反對同情心本身。” 同情心是社會的潤滑劑。 他說，他真正反對的是“自殺式同情”。 他引用亞里士多德在《尼各馬可倫理學》中的觀點：一切美德都存在於兩個極端之間。 缺乏同情心的人是精神病患者; 但如果同情心過度，而且給予了錯誤的人、錯誤的物件，就會演變成一種危險的病態。
薩阿德認為，西方大學幾十年來傳播了幾種「思想病原體」，包括後現代主義、文化相對主義、社會建構主義，以及他稱為「生物恐懼症」的思想，也就是拒絕運用生物學解釋人類行為。 他認為，這些觀念最初誕生於大學人文學科，後來逐漸擴散到整個社會，使人們越來越脫離現實。 “例如，我們今天居然需要認真討論什麼是男人、什麼是女人。”
在薩阿德看來，後現代主義是所有這些思想病原體的源頭。 它否認客觀真理的存在，認為真理只是權力關係和社會建構的產物。 文化相對主義則進一步宣稱，不存在任何普遍適用的人類價值，每一種文化都只能依據自身標準來評價。 因此，如果有人批評女性割禮、榮譽處決或者童婚，就可能被指責是在搞文化帝國主義。
他說，這種思維方式最終影響了西方的移民政策。 由於害怕被貼上種族主義或缺乏同情心的標籤，西方社會越來越不願意討論一個顯而易見的問題：來自不同文化背景的人，在融入現代自由社會方面，是否存在不同程度的困難。 於是，人們假裝來自巴基斯坦瓦濟里斯坦的五十萬人，與來自丹麥的五十萬人沒有任何區別。
薩阿德認為，這正是文化相對主義最危險的後果之一。 加拿大前總理賈斯廷·杜魯多長期宣揚，多元文化永遠只會帶來積極效果。 但薩阿德認為，這顯然不符合現實。 “例如，對於同性戀，我們不應該接受所謂價值多元。” 他說，“同性戀者應該能夠和平生活，而不是讓別人繼續討論他們是否應該擁有平等權利。 同樣，如果你大量引進仇恨猶太人的人口，那麼你最終也會把這種仇恨一起引進自己的國家。 ”
薩阿德認為，真正陷入這種「文明切腹」的，主要是西方國家，而中國、日本和以色列則沒有出現同樣的問題。 “一個真正相信自己文明的人，不會輕易患上自殺式同情。” 他說，「但如果你不斷告訴自己，你們的歷史只有殖民主義、奴隸制度、伊斯蘭恐懼症和種族滅絕，那麼毀掉自己的文明，看起來反而會成為一種道德義務。 ”
當然，他承認，普通工人、卡車司機和監獄看守並沒有患上這種思想疾病。 真正推動這些理念的，是大學教授、媒體記者以及企業高管等知識精英。 “不是海豹突擊隊員患上了自殺式同情，而是杜魯多，以及那些沒有脊樑、沒有勇氣的精英。”
薩阿德一向以言辭尖銳著稱。 他曾把賀錦麗形容為「一個做過腦葉切除手術、只會傻笑的人」，也曾公開嘲諷魁北克法語口音，因此不斷引發爭議。
他十分欣賞川普，認為川普可能是整個西方世界最不具有“自殺式同情”的政治人物之一。 不過，他並不認為川普能夠徹底扭轉局勢。 “川普終究只能執政有限幾年。” 他說，“他更像是一道擋在海嘯前面的臨時防波堤。 如果西方文化本身沒有改變，如果我們仍然繼續把自殺式同情視為最高道德，那麼川普充其量只是按下了暫停鍵。 ”
在他看來，美國目前仍然遠遠好於加拿大。 加拿大已經進入文明切腹的第五階段，甚至比癌症第四期還嚴重。” 他說，瑞典、挪威、英國和德國，也正沿著類似道路前進。
最後，薩阿德用一個形象的比喻總結自己的觀點：“假設切腹用的短刀長七英寸，我們現在已經刺進去兩英寸。 人口結構決定未來。 去法國看看，去英國看看，再來加拿大看看。 我們已經開始親手剖開自己的腹部。 ”
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gad-saad-on-suic ... ?st=xj8LB1

Gad Saad on Suicidal Empathy and Western Decline
Civilization is destroying itself, says the Canadian scholar who is fleeing Montreal for the U.S.
By Tunku Varadarajan
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, cultural relativism, social constructivism 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.