Gad Saad on Empathy as Signalling

Transcript

MEF speech-to-text, word-timed; edited only to withhold private names and to correct misheard public names, in square brackets. Timecodes are source time; each opens the source at that second.

1. 35:19the illegal refugee knocks on the door, and I can do two things at that point.
2. 35:24I could let in six million of them, and I will immediately be drowning in the
3. 35:31dopamine because I am stroking my luxuriant hair in the mirror of moral preening and
4. 35:36going, "Look what a good person I am. I just let in four hundred thousand Ahmeds into
5. 35:41my society. I'm better than those people who would have judged them." So I got that
6. 35:46dopamine hit. But in doing so, I'm stuck in what's, what I call the myopia of
7. 35:51first-order effects, meaning there is a second-order effect and a third-order effect.
8. 35:56If your society becomes majority Islamic, then we will have a different reality than
9. 36:03the one that your children grew up in. So Don't succumb to the empathy-based dopamine
10. 36:09hit. Recognize that life is not a first-order world, but has a domino effect.

Views expressed are the speaker's own.