Transcription
There's a lot of good sex in Islam, so a lot of stuff that I can't pursue in the earthly realm I can certainly be promised in the afterlife. A reasonably conservative estimate is 300 million killed in the 1400 years of Islam. It's a lot of souls.
LW, there is no documented society throughout human history where Islam has become the majority religion and thereafter individual freedoms have flourished. Gay, trans, as long as you don't tell me that men too can menstruate, right? Then I'm the most socially liberal guy in the world.
When it comes to immigration, when it comes to the death penalty of repeat child molesters, I'm the number one guy for executing them. Donald Trump does intimate most of the positions that the average person with a brain has.
Anybody who replaces Justin Trudeau would be a great advance for Canada. A lobotomized turtle would be coming in with a lot of excitement. Why is it that the West is so completely impotent to ever connect the dots together? If we have to murder and rap truth to get to that ultimate goal, so be it.
I'm Jonathan Sati. Dr. Gadad, thanks so much for joining me. It's really great to have you with me. How are you doing?
I'm doing well. I could be better. I've had a rough week last week and I've had to reschedule our meeting because I suffered from a nasty stomach bug, but I'm happy to be here with you.
Well, I hope you're feeling a bit better, and thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. Listen, we're talking now as a result of the rescheduling. It's a momentous moment, actually. I feel quite privileged because we know that Donald Trump's going to take the U.S. to the moon, that there are now only two genders in the United States, that the Gulf of Mexico is going to be the Gulf of America, that America is going to be the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth again, that he's a peacemaker and a unifier. I mean, this is Messianic stuff. What do you make of it?
Well, I mean, I guess it depends on what you use as your metric of comparison, right? If you're comparing to the current administration, then a, you know, a lobotomized turtle would be coming in with a lot of excitement. So again, it's like saying Justin Trudeau—anybody who replaces Justin Trudeau would be a great advance for Canada.
But that notwithstanding, I think that Donald Trump does intimate most of the positions that the average person with a brain has. We are a sexually reproducing species made up of two phenotypes called male and female. Your compatriot Charles Darwin explained that to us in "On the Origin of Species," and until about 15 minutes ago, that was incontestable. But apparently, it wasn't for the previous administration.
So I think there will definitely be some wonderful autocorrections to all of the woke nonsense. Now, will it reach the high that he's promising? Probably not, but I'm certainly hopeful, and it's good to aim high, I think. I mean, it's unusual to have leaders, sadly these days, who seem to do that.
And I must say, I think it's strange times when we find that an incoming U.S. president has to make an executive order to say that there are men and women. It seems like we've really caught the woke M virus. And to talk about your work, this is really a parasitic mind virus. One does wonder what the purpose of this parasite was. Most parasites infect their host for a distinct purpose of their own. What on Earth was the purpose of the mind virus that had us deciding there were all these different genders and men can be women and women can be men just if they say so and put a bit of lipstick on or whatever?
Well, that's a fantastic question. I actually addressed that in "The Parasitic Mind." Let me draw an analogy with, say, oncology. You know, you could study cancer—many different forms of cancer. Pancreatic cancer behaves differently from leukemia, behaves differently from liver cancer or skin melanoma. But one thing that they all have in common is the unchecked division of cells.
So if nothing else, we know that that is a fundamental commonality to all cancers. And so I try to address exactly your question in the same way that you've got all these different cancers that at least have one thing in common: unchecked cell division. I try to look for what is the commonality across all of these parasitic ideas.
And just for your viewers and listeners, a parasitic idea would be—so the granddaddy would be postmodernism. There are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths. Social constructivism would be another one. Radical feminism would be another one. Cultural relativism would be another one.
So then what I was trying to do to your question is, well, why? Why would these parasitic ideas be so alluring, so sticky, so enticing, so viral? And so my argument is the following—let me know what you think; people seem to resonate with it. All of these parasitic ideas start off from a noble place, and then in the service of that noble goal, if we have to murder and rape truth to get to that ultimate goal, so be it.
So let me give you a concrete example. Equity feminism is the idea that men and women should be treated equally under the law. There should be no institutional barriers for why the two sexes should not be treated equally. Based on that definition, you and I would probably put up our hands and say, "Hey, sign me up. I'm an equity feminist."
Then radical feminists come along and say, "In the service of squashing the toxic masculine patriarchy, we need to now promulgate the idea that there are no distinguishable evolved differences between men and women. All differences between the sexes must be due to social construction because that will allow us to achieve our noble goal of squashing the patriarchy."
So in the service of what started off as a nice idea, if I murder and rape truth, so be it. And so I argue that all of these parasitic ideas free us from the pesky shackles of reality. I don't want to be shackled by my genitalia. I don't want to be shackled by my biological limitations, right?
It makes it much more hopeful for me to espouse the idea that your child and mine could be the next Michael Jordan and the next Lionel Messi. That makes me feel better. So if in the service of some noble goal I have to squash the edifices of reason, so be it.
But it just seems so idiotic that we've got to the point where we had to literally rot our brains to get there. The very starting point that men and women are just constructed differently by our narratives and our society is so counter to fact that it does seem a dangerous place for us to have gone.
And I think many are therefore grateful that perhaps there is, well, the leader of the free world resetting it a bit. Right? And by the way, just if I may add, my first exposure to these parasitic ideas was precisely in my scientific work, which sought to incorporate evolutionary thinking in the study of human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular.
So I came into the business school saying, "Hey, guys, you can't study consumer behavior or economic decision-making or entrepreneurship or behavioral economics without studying the fundamental biological mechanisms that drive our purpose and behavior." Well, to me, that seemed like a profoundly obvious and banal point to make to almost all of my colleagues, whether it be in the business schools or in social sciences.
That was completely crazy talk. Surely biology applied for every other species except one called human beings. And if it applied to human beings, Jonathan, it only lied up to the neck. So sure, go ahead and use biology to explain why we have opposable thumbs, but surely you're not some kind of quack Jewish Nazi who believes that the human mind is prone to the same evolutionary forces as your dog. That's crazy talk.
And so that was my first exposure to, boy, some really intelligent people could actually be bafflingly imbecilic. And that's how I then got onto the journey of the parasitic mind. So I think medically we have parasites with antiparasitics. I'm curious what the antidote should be. What's our thinking anti-parasitic, and how can we stop the development of more sophisticated parasites?
And I guess where I'm going with this is, you know, if we think about the mind virus as it's been called, is the way to deal with it that we set up a lab in Wuhan and develop better mind viruses and try to infect our enemies or ourselves? Or is it that we come up with these, you know, antivirals, antiparasitics, whatever we want to metaphorically call them? Is there a way out of this predisposition we have to be infected?
Beautiful. So I'll first answer the last part you said: predisposition to be infected, and then I'll answer the sort of the general mind vaccine. That's a really important sentence you said because often people ask me, "Is this a new reality that we face?" And I always answer, "Absolutely not." The capacity for the human mind to be parasitized is part of the indelible architecture of the human mind.
Right? There was a time where in Salem, Massachusetts, it was thought to be a good idea if your neighbor Linda, you thought she was a witch, throw her in some water. And if she swims and she doesn't drown, then that proves that she's a witch. But if she drowns, oops, I guess we were wrong, and oops, we made a mistake; she's not a witch.
And that was a perfectly reasonable thing to carry out. So the capacity for human minds to be parasitized is eternal. What is unique to the present time period is the specific parasites that are affecting us, right? Postmodernism didn't exist in Salem, Massachusetts.
And so, but which, by the way, is exactly the same if we push the metaphor, right? I mean, the COVID virus is a new virus, but the fact that we have co-evolved with endless pathogens has been part of our evolutionary history. Okay, so that's number one.
Number two, I have actually been arguing for many years, and I'm now kind of connecting with some pretty powerful people who would love for me to develop a mind vaccine institute, right? Where you literally bring people in of all types—it could be politicians, it could be journalists, it could be academics—and to try to inoculate them against the possibility of these parasites.
So definitely what you're suggesting is something that's on my to-do radar list. But let me give a specific example of what would a mind vaccine look like. If I may, it's a bit technical, so if you give me, is it okay if I give a five-minute answer?
You can give us even seven.
Thank you. So in chapter seven of "The Parasitic Mind," the chapter is titled "How to Seek Truth." I argue that there are different types of truths. So for example, there are axiomatic truths in mathematics, right? So for example, there are certain truths that we know. Here's an example of an axiomatic truth: the transitivity axiom. If I prefer car A to car B, and I prefer car B to car C, it must be that I prefer car A to car C.
So those are called axiomatic truths. But there are empirical truths. Men are taller than women, and that of course holds true even though your Aunt Linda is taller than your Uncle Jethro, right? And there's a way by which we can test that truth.
But what about more difficult statements? What if I were to tell you, Jonathan, it is not true that toy preferences are socially constructed, as every single social scientist has told us? There are evolutionary and biological reasons why little boys prefer certain toys and little girls prefer other toys. How would I go about demonstrating that truth?
Well, they've done that with apes, haven't they? They've shown like male apes will pick up cars and things, and female apes will pick up dolls and babies.
I'm going to come exactly to that in a second. So one type of mind vaccine is the building of what I call nomological networks of cumulative evidence. It's a mouthful, but what it basically means is can I come up with every conceivable line of evidence, distinct lines of evidence, that would triangulate and support my argument?
So let's do the toy preferences. I can get you data cross-species, to your point, with vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees showing you that they exhibit the same sex specificity as human infants already. That would be fatal to the social constructivist.
But I'm not going to stop there. I'm going to get you data from developmental psychology showing you that human children who are too young to yet have the capacity to be socialized already exhibit those preferences. So that already doesn't look good for the social constructivist.
I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology where little girls will suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is a masculinizing disorder. Those little girls will have sex reversal of their toy preferences.
I can get you data from completely different societies, sub-Saharan Africa, so it's not the West, where they exhibit the same preferences. I can get you data from 2,500 years ago on ancient funerary mounds in ancient Greece and ancient Rome where little children are depicted with the exact same sex-specific toy preferences.
So look what I've done. I've gotten you cross-cultural, cross-temporal, cross-methodology, cross-species, and it becomes impossible for you to refute it. Now here's the problem with this particular mind vaccine: it's effortful to take that vaccine because it's not easily, you know, imitable to each person to go out and build such a network.
But what allows me to not be—one of the reasons it's hard to cancel me is because when I go into very hostile territory with a lot of interlocutors who hate anything that I have to say, I've already built that nomological network for whatever debate we're having. I've already inoculated myself against all of your arguments.
So if you're going to come and debate me, to our earlier point about you speaking at Oxford Union, good luck. But what that allows me to do is I have epistemic humility, meaning that I really know what I know, and I know what I don't know.
So if you ask me a question where I haven't built the requisite nomological network, I will be a lot more tempered in my answer. "Hey, that's a great question, Jonathan. Unfortunately, it's above my pay grade. I don't know enough about it to tell you."
So I think that there are at times effortful ways by which we could inoculate ourselves against the lunacy. So I'm pleased to hear that you are working in developing a kind of mind virus vaccine, though I hope it doesn't make you like the Fauci of the mind.
I might be a good caller.
I might be a good caller if that's possible.
Okay, well, that's definitely good. I not having met you in person, I can't comment, so I don't have the empirical data. But let's say that—let's flip to another kind of issue I think I've heard you speak a lot about recently, which does touch on this, and that is Islam.
So I think that since October the 7th, many people have been a lot bolder in criticizing Islam. And that's because I think there was a realization that what happened in Israel was not just about land or about Palestinians and Israelis, but it was effectively about jihad.
And similarly, I think it's coincided well in slow motion with jihad around the world. So whether it's been driving a truck into a crowd in New Orleans or in Germany or any of the numerous Muslim terrorist attacks around the world, I think people are slowly waking up.
And I say slowly to this threat. So I wonder how you think, as a professor, an expert, an academic on the mind and on how ideas influence us, I'm very curious about Islam as a set of ideas rather than as a religion, and why you think, as somebody that grew up in an environment where it was prevalent, why you think it is so appealing to people.
Is it, as I suspect, in a way one of the most expert religions in terms of marketing? Is it that it has a very good way of itself to human beings?
Exactly right. So I've actually made that exact point in several forays and certainly in "The Parasitic Mind," where I compare, let's say, Islam to Judaism. Well, Judaism absolutely sucks as a marketing endeavor, right? Because if the goal is to quote penetrate the market, if the goal is to build customers, then we have about 15 million customers in Judaism, and that number doesn't seem to grow much.
And we have about 120, 125 times as many Muslims right now. Every single element of the architecture of the metrics of Islam is structured to promote that growth. And regrettably, if we care about market penetration, it's the opposite in Judaism.
So let's just take one, but we could discuss other ones if you want. Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. If you wish to convert to Judaism, it is really—you’re tested in your will to convert. So it's not you say that one public proclamation, the Shahada, and then, boom, you're Muslim, right?
It takes a lot more effort. By the way, you're not even allowed to—even though many people violate that—you’re not supposed to convert in Judaism for ulterior motives. So if you convert because you're trying to marry a Jewish spouse, that would be a no-no. It really has to be from a pure sort of spiritual awakening that you're doing this, right?
Okay, so then it doesn't take a fancy professor to then say, "Well, which one is likely to—you know, one of them I just say abracadabra and I become that thing. The other one I have to get a PhD before I become." Well, let me do the abracadabra one.
So now there are also rules about, I mean literally reproduction, right? Islam is built—you could have up to four wives. You could take non-Muslim women, but not the—so there are many, many elements of Islam that allow it to proliferate beyond just the sword, which is of course another way by which it has proliferated for 1400 years.
So there is definitely—so what you said is exactly right. But if I may jump in, because I see where you're going, but what I'm asking, I think aside from this, is why are the ideas of Islam? It may be easy to put into action and understand why it's happening, but the ideas of Islam, when I read the Quran, seemed maybe attractive to someone in the seventh century in Arabia.
But to me, the promise of flowing water, sex on tap, food, and fruits—I mean, I've got the shop at the end of my road where I can find probably most of those, if not all. Not sure about the sex on tap, but you never know.
I think in the modern world, it seems to me a strange assortment of fear and prize, and I wonder why you think mentally and psychologically that's attractive.
Right, so I was answering the first part, which is just why is it mimetically viral in the sense that I answered it, but you're talking about the specific contents of the codified elements of Islam.
Well, there again, as an evolutionary psychologist who understands that there are four key Darwinian modules that drive our behavior, two of which are survival and reproduction, there's a lot of good sex in Islam, right? You're promised a lot of—so a lot of stuff that I can't pursue in a dar with a lot of Darwinian alacrity in the earthly realm, I can certainly be promised.
And they give you details about how those prospective mates are going to look like in the afterlife. And so, by the way, right? When you tell a female suicide bomber in Islam that you can do it, it doesn't say you have access to 70 cabana boys with really pouty asses.
Because it turns out that all religions seem to be really good as evolutionary psychologists and understanding that there are sex-specific mating preferences that are different across the two sexes. So the promissory note that I give to the male jihadi suicide bomber is different than the one that I give for females.
So I think we can easily analyze it from a Darwinian perspective. I think the next question, which you didn't necessarily ask, is why is it that the West is so completely impotent—notwithstanding that you're saying that some are starting to criticize—completely impotent to ever put the dots together?
And so I've got a chapter in "The Parasitic Mind." It's called "Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome," because of course the ostrich, while it doesn't literally do that, has become a metaphor of ignoring reality. So I literally list all of the reasons that super woke Westerners have come up with for why a particular terror attack happened.
So for example, we needed Bill Nye the Science Guy to explain to us that the Bataclan terror attack in Paris, where they screamed "Allahu Akbar" and then gave us the specific Quranic incantations, that was actually due to climate change. It was due to solar panels, right? Have you seen that or not?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we've also been told that the—I think it was the Belgian terror jihadis' lack of art exposure. I mean, who amongst us didn't grow up not seeing enough Chagall and Klimt and then decided to go to ISIS and join Raqqa? It's a direct line from not enough Chagall to killing the gays off rooftops.
Well, listen, I mean, it's what I think—I was talking with Inna Wol not that long ago. It's what she calls "Westling." So the idea is that Islam and its practitioners are very clear about why they do things a lot of the time.
And just in the same way that we talk about Islamophobia, we don't hear them talking about kufr phobia. It's just totally acceptable. So I think that the idea of Westling, as she puts it, is we're always trying to impose our reasoned explanation for these very unreasonable actions, even if they're completely clear about why they did it, as they were on October the 7th.
You know, this is for the nation of jihad. One of those clips I watched from their dash cam said, "Not this is for more electricity in Gaza." I wonder, though, in that case, so what I—you know, I wrestle with this idea a lot.
Why do you think it is specifically that Jews are so bad at criticizing Islam when Islam is pretty good at criticizing Jews? And I can say that as a Jewish, non-Muslim, gay, Western, whatever other list of things they might dislike about me person.
Do you own a black dog?
The trifecta: gay, Jew, and owner of a black dog, you're done. And I drink alcohol too.
So other than, you know, I mean, what I'm trying to get at is it's very, very explicit. If you read Islam's fundamental text, its foundational text, it's not about different strains or different practices. The actual foundational touchstone is so clear on what it thinks of, let's say, me.
Why is it that it's seen as impolite or racist or politically incorrect for so many Jews? Why do you think Jews are supremely bad at daring to criticize something which is very, very explicit about them?
So there are several possible, you know, factors at play, one of which could be linked to the dhimmi psychology, right? So in Islamic society, a dhimmi is—it's not even a second-class citizen; it's less than a second-class citizen. It's people of the book, meaning of Abrahamic faith, Christians or Jews, that could be tolerated in Islamic society until, of course, we reserve the right to stop tolerating at any time we no longer wish to tolerate.
And because we are going to tolerate you, we're going to have to impose very humiliating restrictions on you. Now, not in every Islamic society has it been imposed with complete, you know, judiciousness, but certainly in the Quranic principles you have that.
Now imagine if I am a dhimmi in such a society. I develop the reflex to never criticize the one who could look at my beautiful daughter, who's coming of age, and decide that, you know, I've got designs on her, right?
And so for that, that would be for Jews in an Islamic-like environment. So that might explain my situation. Why people like me would not—not me, obviously; I criticize Islam—but others, now other Westernized Jews, because they have been at the forefront of fighting for civil rights, because their own civil rights have always been, you know, eradicated and so on.
You know, they're walking in Selma, Alabama, and they're, you know, they're the pioneers of fighting for civil rights in the United States and so on. It becomes inculcated in the mind of a Jew that it is uniquely gauche to criticize another's religion.
It's just, it's not something that, you know, when I speak with a progressive lisp and I go to Oberlin College and I'm a good Jewish, then it's just not something that we do. So even if you might end up decapitating me, I will know that I will go to my death being a progressive Jew speaking with a progressive lisp.
But by the way, it's a very similar mechanism for why French Canadians, in their desperate attempts to protect the French Canadian language in Quebec, have thought that it was a beautiful idea to let in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Muslims who will then decapitate you.
But before they do that, Jonathan, they say, "Bonjour, ça va?" So as long as the decapitation happens in French, there really is no problem. So that might explain why the Jews have a hard time with it.
I guess it's about priorities in that sense. But I've always thought as well that, you know, there is a great deal of truth to that. And I think there's an added element of guilt, which is as a people who've been constantly persecuted for our religion or beliefs unjustifiably, we are maybe afraid of criticizing other people's beliefs, even when they are so dangerous to our own existence.
And I think that brings me to this other idea of yours: suicidal empathy.
Yes, sir. Because it's not just Jews who have this. It's this very modern Western liberal attitude that we must be empathetic and tolerant, even of unempathetic and intolerant people, even when they're literally killing us because of who we are.
So I wonder, in terms of this idea of suicidal empathy, what you think the best way to wake people up is. I've had many conversations where, you know, among like-minded people, we always said, "Well, the next massive terror attack that's going to wake everyone up, you know, when they blow up the tube."
And then they blow up the tube, and it didn't. Or when they, you say, when they blow up a concert of little girls dancing to Ariana Grande, that'll wake them up, and it doesn't. I wonder if you think there is anything that can wake us up.
And the thing I wanted to specifically ask you about is, you know, when you have trouble waking up in the morning, there are two options. There's the, you know, really loud multiple alarm clocks choice, or there are those kind of expensive sun lamps that slowly come on and fool you into thinking it's daytime even when it's still dark outside.
What would be the clearly the loud alarm clock version? You know, bombing us, killing us isn't working. But what might be the sun lamp version? And do you think there's any hope for it?
Well, I like the language, the analogy. So let's do the sun lamp version. It's to try to convince people that there is nothing laudable about orgiastic empathy. It's not a value that makes you virtuous.
So let me step back and not to get too philosophical, but I guess I am a professor, so it's part of the territory. In my last book, in "The Happiness Book," one of the chapters I talk about the ubiquity of the inverted U. The inverted U is something that Aristotle taught us in the Nicomachean Ethics.
So too little of something is not good; too much of something is not good. And life happens somewhere at the sweet spot. So now let's apply that principle to empathy. No one is suggesting that empathy is not a laudable value. As a matter of fact, from an evolutionary perspective, that positive emotion is an indelible part that oils our human sociality.
So for example, for you and I to have a meaningful exchange, I have to have theory of mind. I have to put myself in your mind, get a sense of what I think you know, and that oils our capacity to engage in a meaningful way.
So you expect a highly intelligent social species to develop the emotion of empathy, but all good things in good measure. So as long as it is to the right person, at the right amount, at the right place, it's perfectly laudable.
Once it isn't, it becomes dysfunctional. Let me—and I'll cede the floor back to you in a second—let me draw an analogy with a psychiatric condition: OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is a dysfunction. It's a psychiatric disorder, but its root is based in an adaptive mechanism.
The idea that I should scan the environment for environmental threats makes perfect evolutionary sense. If you are sneezing and then you go to shake my hand, I will very politely go to the bathroom to wash my hands because I don't want to catch your stomach bug or your, you know, flu or whatever it is, right?
Too late, too late. Exactly, as I found out last week. But if I—so once the flag goes up, the warning flag, I tend to it; it goes back down, I go on with my day. What the OCD sufferer has is an infinite hyperactive slide.
So that person will spend eight hours in front of scalding hot water until their skin is falling off. They can't go to work, and they'll be fired from work because they are making sure, "Let me just wash one more time to make sure that my hands are not contaminated."
So it's a hyperactive mechanism that is otherwise adaptive. Well, I argue for the exact same principle when it comes to empathy. Empathy is great, but it shouldn't be meted out to Guatemalan gang members more so than American vets.
Once you do that, you're targeting the wrong target. And so that would be the slow, what you call the slow sunlight, which is to kind of embolden people to recognize that orgiastic, unencumbered by any reason empathy is nothing laudable, and it's bad, and it has to stop.
It's always so hard to sell people moderation, though, isn't it? Because it's like the least sexy thing in the world. I think in reality, people kind of like an idea, and they go for it more.
And in this era of algorithmic instant gratification, we're often forced down those kind of rabbit holes of following our urges to their very limits. And one other aspect of it that I think I've heard you talk about is kind of tribalism, let's say.
So for example, I—the idea of the research that you did on how we distribute our gift-giving budget. So the idea that we prioritize those close to us. Again, I wondered how this fits in with Islam or religions because even I get told a lot when I criticize Islamic thinking or doctrine that not all Muslims are suicide bombers and such like.
And of course, that's true, and I know many Muslims who find all of that as reprehensible and destructive and terrible as I do. But then I have experienced something over the last 15 months. I wonder if you have too, which is some people who I viewed as very moderate Muslims in their behavior, very modern people, when it came to this sort of crunch moment, there was a tribalism in that their gift-giving of mental loyalty suddenly went a bit towards this deeply evil jihad tendency.
And I found myself thinking, "Wow, I thought we were friends," and you think there's a justification for the rape, murder, and kidnap of my people, of any people. So do you think that there is a way for us to defeat these instincts, like tribalism or our own biology, in how we're coming up with ideas and loyalties?
Fantastic question. And you're exactly right that I've addressed this in my scientific work. I've actually addressed it also using Israeli data—not really only relevant to the extent that we talked about, you know, some of these Middle Eastern issues.
I've done research with Israeli weddings showing that not only the finding that you mentioned, that the closer I am genetically to the recipient of the gift, the larger the gift, right? So that's one finding. But I also demonstrated with a few Israeli colleagues that the mother's side of the bride and groom give larger gifts than the paternal side, the groom's side, because there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty, but there is such a thing as paternity uncertainty.
So even in the context of a patriarchal society in the Middle East, biology matters. So why am I saying all this? Because it's very, very difficult to eradicate some of these fundamental biological imperatives.
So coalitional psychology is a fundamental feature of our human psychology. We view the world as blue team, red team. That's what makes Abrahamic religions so easy to internalize because there are the Jews and the goyim. There are the believers and the kufar.
They are those who are going to be sitting with Jesus in heaven, and the rest of us are going to burn in hell. So all of these religions draw these demarcations. But what I can—so to answer your question, we will never eradicate our capacity for coalitional thinking.
But maybe we can eradicate the fact that if you're on the blue team and I'm on the red team, I decapitate you. Maybe I won't invite you every day over for dinner. Even that would be reprehensible, although in the Quran it says don't take Jews and Christians as your friends.
But maybe my coalitional imperative doesn't have to instantiate itself in the most bloodthirsty ways. By the way, the idea of genetic relatedness and so on, there is a great quote from Leon Uris—I’m going to totally butcher it—but it's in this book right here, "The Consuming Instinct," where he says, you know, the nation versus this, the my tribe versus other tribes, my clan versus that.
So you keep bringing it down. So he's literally using, in his own poetic way, the language of evolutionary psychology, which is we met out our investments as a function of these evolutionary imperatives.
So I don't think we'll get rid of it, but maybe we can sort of deactivate some of the ugly manifestations of that imperative. So no way.
One of the unique beauties of being human, as opposed to any other species, is perhaps that we allow ourselves to have a level of control or intellect over some of these biological or psychological urges.
And I mean, when it comes back to the Islam question, I had a sort of remote conversation between two quite well-known Muslim friends. So one was Loi al-Sharif, who you might be familiar with. I don't know if you are. He's very big online. He's a Saudi origin based in the UAE influencer who loves Israel and Judaism.
Yes, I do know who that is.
So on the one hand, I have him, and on the other hand, my colleague in the Auer debate, Mosab Hassan Yousef, who was the Green Prince, the son of Hamas. So the two of them, in my opinion, I've had, you know, quite long conversations with both of them about Islam, and they have very different attitudes towards it.
Both of them obviously like Islam, but they have very different attitudes towards what they do with it. So Mosab, on the one hand, says, you know, this is rotten, and even people who aren't extreme in their practice of Islam are therefore not Muslims because they're not really adhering to any of Islamic doctrine.
Whereas Loi says, no, no, there must be a sort of enlightened Islam eventually, and he urges the rest of us to hang on tight and hope it comes before we get beheaded. And to take Mosab's approach, he said to me, is to put a target on billions of people's backs.
My question, I guess that I'm searching for here, what is the right approach? Is it to try then to convince existing Muslims that their belief system is problematic, or is it to try to wait for this moderation of Islam and hope that we aren't slaughtered while we're waiting for it?
Forgive me for putting you on the spot. Can you guess what answer will be before I give it?
Yeah, I can if you want me to try it.
Oh, it's up to you. Do you want—I think you would want us, from observing your talking on this in the past, I think you would suggest that we need to kind of wake people up and convince them to leave behind the faulty ideas of not just Islam but any ideology, that you should try and convince people.
But is that practical?
Yeah, so there are—I mean, I can see the benefits of both approaches. It's not as though—what is the name of the general and not Mosab, the other one? What's Loi?
It's not as though he's the first one in 1400 years of Islamic history to come up with the idea, "Oh, reform, that's an idea." How come most of them get killed, right? That's the problem.
Exactly. So not only have all of them been killed, any serious ones, and it has never gained any traction. But if you go by the official doctrines of Islam, it is the final, inherent, eternal word of God to not be changed by one syllable. One letter cannot be changed.
Doesn't that serve as the final mic drop? So we could play all sorts of games, and I often satirically will go online—you've probably seen it—where I say, "Oh, but if only you understood Arabic philology, Quranic Arabic philology, you'd know that kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, take an espresso break, resume orgiastic killing really means kill with kindness."
But if only you do that, but you need to be at Al-Azhar University studying under Sheikh Qutb to be able to understand that kind of nuance. But all of you Westerners don't get it. That's why you miss.
Because we're reading in translation, we couldn't possibly get it right. Exactly, but I speak Arabic, so I know better, and I know that it really means kill with kindness.
So we can play all those games. It won't get us far. How many more people have to die before, as your friend said, "Well, hang on tight, and we'll resolve it"? We've had 1400 million years—1400 years, depending on the estimates.
We have up to—I mean, the estimates vary, but a reasonably conservative estimate is 300 million killed in the 1400 years of Islam. That's a lot of souls lost, right? So how many more? Another 300 million?
So, but I understand that it's impractical, and that what are you going to do? You're going to press a button, and it's going to cease to exist. So what, you know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a different approach. She says you can't ask people to leave a religion and be inviolable.
She used to be more bent towards atheism. Now she sees sort of Christianity as a sort of big sieve where people can go from being Muslim to maybe being Christian because they have to believe in something beyond simply non-belief.
So there are different approaches. What I can tell you is there is no documented society throughout human history where Islam has become the majority religion and thereafter individual freedoms have flourished. That hasn't existed, and it will never exist.
Oh, that's because I think that Islamic doctrine doesn't prioritize individual freedoms. In fact, that's one of the fundamentals of it.
So, but that's very interesting because effectively that is the difference between Loi and Mosab. Loi continues to consider himself a Muslim, but quite a Jewish one, he says, which is very confusing because Islam, of course, is meant to replace Jews.
But then Mosab actually became a Christian. This is what he did after his 10 years of helping the Shabak to foil suicide bombings. And now I feel, you know, we had a long conversation a bit like this one, but in person.
And he told me he's kind of not moved on from Christianity, but he's not as practicing, and he's incorporated other kind of spiritualities into his thinking. So I do think that's very interesting.
I suppose where I want to go from that is to ask you, when I talk about a lot of this stuff, I get accused of being far-right. And I'm not the only one. There's also people like Tommy Robinson in the UK, and Elon Musk is recently a sort of champion of his online.
The idea that this makes you far-right is interesting to me as well. What do you think is far-right these days? And do you think people who are slurred as being far-right should just embrace and say, "Well, if it's far-right to stand up for children and women and gays, then so be it," or should we fight back against that?
You know, labels have never really—I mean, if I were to be hurt by labels, I would have been out of this game a long time ago because on any given day, I'm accused of every conceivable thing.
I mean, I get hate mail where someone misinterprets my satire and thinks that I'm a jihadi. I get emails where people say that, you know, I'm literally the guy orchestrating the bombing of Gazan children. I'm the head of the mad—you can't be—that's me, apparently.
Oh, that's you?
Okay, but are you going to the mad retreat? I didn't get the invite, but I'm often told it's me. I'll speak to the folks.
But anyway, so, you know, I get all kinds of stuff. I just sort of go like this. Yes, of course, once in a while, it annoys you, but you really have to have thick skin.
So no, I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about the labels. By the way, people have often—not accused me, but sort of been frustrating with me because they say, "Well, you seem to be coy about what your political orientation is. Why don't you say what you are?"
And my answer, not to in the least bit be coy, is that I really am a man of ideas. So there are many ideas which if I gave you what my position on, you'd say, "Oh, he's extreme right." And there are other ideas—okay, gay, trans, as long as you don't tell me that men too can menstruate, right?
Then I'm the most socially liberal guy in the world. I couldn't give a damn what you do, who you marry, what happens. I don't care. So I'm the most progressive guy in the history of the world when it comes to immigration.
When it comes to the death penalty of repeat child molesters, I'm the number one guy for executing them. Now that makes me ultra-right-wing. So depending on the issue, I can oscillate from being very right-wing to being very left-wing.
So I'm really a guy of ideas. I don't care about labels. I wouldn't waste too much time worrying about these things.
As expected, I agree. But I've got, I think, two last things I'd like to ask you if we've still got time. One is about the idea of our biology influencing our behavior, which of course is quite fundamental to your work.
And I heard an interesting question in one of the Trigonometry podcasts, actually, from Constantin Kissen, where he was asking about this, about, for example, how testosterone might change our behaviors, but more than individually, as a society.
So we often read that testosterone levels are much lower historically, and that there's more estrogen in our food or water or whatever it might be. And then he was questioning whether that might have made us, as a society, somewhat, let's say, softer in our behavior.
I wonder how you think that might chime in with the idea of suicidal empathy. Do you think that maybe part of the empathetic of our being could have been influenced by something as simple as our decreasing testosterone levels?
Phenomenal question. So I think it's a two-pronged attack. One could well be those testosterone levels dropping, so that it really is feminizing society.
But I think a more direct pathway to that is the feminization of values, right? So men and women are very, very similar, if not identical, on many traits, and they're different on others.
And the framework that explains on which ones we're similar versus which ones we're dissimilar is exactly evolutionary psychology. And so when it comes to, for example, certain objectives at a university, men leaders in academic institutions behave in very different ways.
So for example, I go to meetings, departmental meetings. If it's headed by a female head, where I'm unsure if I'm about to take nap time because I'm in grade five kindergarten, how's everybody doing? How is everything? How are you doing? What's your feeling like? Tell, right?
It's a very different approach. Yes, I'm being stereotypical, but stereotypes exist because they're real, right? So there is an elevation of certain feminine qualities that historically were not as prevalent in certain domains.
Right? So when Justin Trudeau says that Canada is going to follow a feminist foreign policy, what the hell does that mean? Here is my foreign policy: you mess with us and kill 100 of us, we multiply it by 100 of what we kill of yours.
What I just said is called the policy since time immemorial. Let me explain history very simply. There is a river. There are two tribes on both rivers. The men on each of the two tribes would really like to get the attractive resources that the other tribe has.
The only thing that stops them, the only calculus that stops them, is that they know that there are men in the other tribe that would not take too well to that. So they think about it before they do it.
Now imagine if we create a new society where the men on one side of the river say, "That is so toxic masculine, that is so non-empathetic, that is so violent, barbaric, and Neanderthal-like."
M, which was trained by radical feminists, says that, "No, give up your children. As a matter of fact, I'll show you where my children are hiding so you can gang-rape them because I want you to feel welcome in my society."
Right? So I think it's a lot more the radical change in the values, as in part instituted by the parasitic ideas and the suicidal empathy that has feminized us much more so than that there is greater estrogen in some of the byproducts you described so clearly.
And our kind of biological tendencies are—what's unique about humans is that we have the ability to transcend those, to transcend our biology, to kind of put our culture and our intellect above our biological.
But of course, we're always going to be susceptible to those. So I think in closing, I guess I want to ask you the big one, which is how should we tackle it?
You mentioned that you'd seen this Oxford Union debate, if we can call it that, that I did. And a few people have said to me, you know, what your mistake was, it was to go there and try and make a reasoned case because all they wanted in that room was an emotional case.
And I've often sort of fleshed that out myself by saying that I think a lot of people prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth.
And so if that's the case, these are very human and natural tendencies. It's going back to something I asked you earlier. I think should we be looking for a way to make our messages more emotional and more beautiful and more in line with the biological urges?
Or should we be trying to make better humans and helping them overcome their biological determinism and their lack of conscious free will? Should we be, again, should we be waking them up, or should we be creating dreams out of what we want them to think and do ourselves?
Well, first, I love the fact that you explained the canard of biological determinism. One of the reasons why people abhor the application of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior is precisely because they succumb to the fallacy—the false fallacy is redundant—that we are just mere passive executors of our genes, of our biological imperatives.
Exactly to your point. I also have evolved other mechanisms that could temper those Darwinian pulls at any given moment. I've got Darwinian pulls pulling me in different directions, and that's what gives me that prefrontal cortex that allows me higher-order thinking.
So you're exactly right. And I get so frustrated when my fellow academics so often misconstrue biological explanations as being deterministic. So you're absolutely right.
To your sort of either-or, I think in a sense, if you forgive me for saying, it's a false dichotomy because we are both thinking and feeling animals. So to argue that let's cater to our emotions, hence it's natural—we're both.
The challenge, Jonathan, as I explained in chapter two of "The Parasitic Mind," is to know when to invoke which system. So for example, if I'm walking down a dark alley because I'm taking a shortcut to get home and I see four young men who look suspicious loitering, I get a fear-based response, an emotional response.
That's perfectly adaptive in that context. It makes perfect sense that it is my emotional system that went on hyperdrive. If I'm trying to do well on a calculus exam and I trigger my emotional system rather than my cognitive system, I'm probably not going to do well on my calculus exam.
So it's not that for maximal persuasion intent, I have to activate your reasoning or your emotions. It depends on the situation. This is why in my own public engagement, I have many weapons within my arsenal.
I can be as professorial as you can get, or I could hide under the desk pretending that I am scared because Donald Trump just got inaugurated while wearing a pink wig.
Now, many people who don't understand me or understand me will write to me because they're idiots and they'll say things, "But doesn't that take away from your, you know, professorial?" I said, "No, I'm a multifaceted human being. I have a sense of humor. I'm colorful. I'm also very academic and professorial, and I will use different approaches to get my message across."
By the way, I will say this to you, to your general question about emotions versus reason. I get more fans coming up to me in the street commenting about my humorous skits than I do about all of my fancy academic stuff.
Not because they don't like my—but because that sticks, right? Because people resonate with that. That's why politicians use emotional cues.
So it really depends. If I'm speaking at Stanford, I'm trying to convince a bunch of progressive lisp academics, then I will use all the professorial things needed. If I'm trying to reach as many people as possible, I will use your—so all bets are off when it comes to gaining access to your mind.
I guess on the big issues, though, the difficulty is trying to agree amongst ourselves which thing needs to be subdued by the other. So, you know, when it comes, for example, to Islamophobia, I would say notophobia is very rational.
It's a survival instinct, and other people will say, "No, no, it's your human baseness that's afraid, and you should be subduing that with your reason and, you know, make it beautiful in your mind, and you'll understand the beauty."
But I suppose, as you say, you need to choose who you give which message to as long as you're consistent in your line of thinking.
And I suppose on that level, I'd love to keep talking to you for hours, but I appreciate the time you've given me. I say in the words of a wise man, "Stand bravely, live proudly, dream boldly."
That's President Donald Trump just about an hour ago. And let's hope that the golden age has just begun, as he said.
I certainly know that your thinking and your contributions on all these issues and others is enormously influential to me and many people around the world. So thank you for it, and thanks for talking with me.
Thank you, sir. Great talking with you.
Cheers.