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.”
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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.”
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