Gad Saad on Suicidal Empathy and Western Decline
"Suicidal Empathy..." That's how you know when you are in a cult.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gad-saad-on-suicidal-empathy-and-western-decline-cdae269f?st=xj8LB1
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.