Gad Saad

Those are the parasites that need to go into your brain, altering your circuitry to suit their interests.

Including ideas.

And that's how I came up with the parasitic ideas and the parasitic mind.

But in order to fully tell the story, I then had to say, but a lot of the mechanisms by which people seem to be completely hijacked in terms of their ability to think critically is really coming from an affective place.

And so how can I explain that?

What I argue in the book, and then we can drill down to endless examples if you want, I'm not saying that empathy is a bad thing.

Because even though the book is just dropping, there's already been maybe 10 articles that have been hit pieces against the book, which of course people, it means people haven't read it yet, where they say, you know, here comes the dark Jew who is trying to promulgate the idea that empathy is a bad thing.

He's a neocon right-wing guy.

an Elon guy, a Donald Trump guy.

I'm not saying that empathy is bad.

Empathy is actually a very important virtue to have in order for you and I to have a meaningful conversation.

I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa.

That's called cognitive empathy, right?

Theory of mind is something that typically autistic children fail on very early in life.

That's how you diagnose them as being autistic.

So there's nothing wrong with well-modulated empathy.

The problem with empathy, like most things in life, is if there's too little or too much of it.

Aristotle explained this to us thousands of years ago via his golden mean.

If a soldier is not courageous enough, if he's cowardly, it's not good.

If he's too courageous, he becomes a reckless martyr, that's not good.