Welcome back to the program. Today I'm very pleased that we're joined by Dr. Godzad, a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi to discuss his upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, and one of his previous book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas

Are Killing Common Sense.

So thank you so much for coming on the program.

Lovely to be with you.

Thank you.

So when I saw the title of your upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, I thought of a remark

by Elon Musk that empathy could be a huge or a big weakness for the West.

And, well, in my opinion, his comments was widely, I guess, or misinterpreted, if not deliberately so, in terms of being criticized. And I also

noticed from Twitter or X that Elon Musk is obviously a fan of yours. So I thought it would be a good

place to start about the thesis of your upcoming book. That is, empathy can be both noble as well as a dangerous thing.

Right, perfect. Thank you for that question. So empathy, when properly modulated, is a perfectly adaptive virtue to possess.

We are a social species, Social species that need to interact with

each other must have both cognitive and emotional empathy. For you and I to have a meaningful

conversation, I have to put myself in your mind. This is called theory of mind, and that allows me to then infer certain things,

how I should speak to you, what can I assume about what you know or don't know. By the way,

autistic children, the way that you diagnose them as being autistic, there is no blood test,

right? There is no genetic marker. What you do is you give them a theory of mind test,

which they typically end up failing, and that's how you find out that they're autistic. So empathy

is perfectly fine when it targets the right people in the right situation and the right amount,

which, of course, although he didn't apply it to empathy, Aristotle had already explained this to us in his

Nicomachian ethics where he talked about the golden mean, right? Life is about identifying that sweet spot.

The problem with suicidal empathy, according to my thesis, is that it is a dysregulated, maladaptive form of an otherwise adaptive process.

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