How Empathy Is Destroying Western Civilization (with Gad Saad)

In this episode of Reasonably Happy, I sit down with Dr. Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, longtime professor, and author of the New York Times bestseller Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. Gad lays out why empathy, when it hyper-fires at the wrong targets, becomes a form of civilizational self-disembowelment. We cover open-border immigration, cultural relativism, the UK grooming gang scandal, DEI and the anti-meritocracy push, his move to Ole Miss, and what a real prescription for the West actually looks like.Timestamps00:00:00 Trailer00:01:28 Intro00:01:40 From marketing professor to cultural critic00:03:20 Born Jewish in Lebanon during the civil war00:05:03 Defining suicidal empathy00:08:29 Civilizations die by suicide, not murder00:13:47 How open-border immigration became the flagship case00:14:29 Cultural relativism and the parasitic mind00:22:12 UK grooming gangs and the fear of Islamophobia00:28:13 One-way tolerance and the parasite analogy00:34:10 Anti-meritocracy, DEI and attribution bias00:40:16 The career cost of speaking honestly in academia00:43:34 Why he chose Ole Miss over the Ivy League00:49:09 Hope through the Southern freedom centers00:52:10 The prescription: an inverted U-curve for empathy00:57:36 OutroFollow GadInstagram: @doctorgadsaadX: @GadSaadFollow MeInstagram: @paul_ollingerX: @Paul_Ollinger Get full access to Reasonably Happy at words.paulollinger.com/subscribe