It was a particular pleasure this week to welcome Gad Saad and his wife to Mississippi.
Gad is one of the most important conservative thinkers writing today. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is published next month, and I am the proud owner of a signed copy.
Gad Saad's new book is an instant bestseller!
Host of the Saad Truth podcast, Gad is now connected to the University of Mississippi's Declaration of Independence Center — one of the emerging citadels of intellectual excellence in American higher education today.
Gad is not just another academic. His work really matters to the future of the West.
For several decades, postmodern ideas hatched in the seminar rooms of 1960s France have been percolating through American academia — and from there into the corporate world, the public sector, the press, the courts, and the schools.
Postmodernism teaches that there is no objective truth and no shared moral order, only competing perspectives shaped by power. From that follows cultural relativism: no culture, no tradition, no inheritance can be judged superior to any other. By the time the rest of us noticed, these insane ideas had quietly become the unofficial creed of the Western managerial class.
This is how so much of America went "woke." These ideas encouraged a generation of young Americans to embrace identity politics — to stop seeing themselves as free individuals in charge of their own destinies, and instead to define themselves by where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood based on race and sex.
The result is profoundly demoralizing — in two senses of the word. It has stripped us of confidence in our country and our culture. And it has made it literally harder for people in positions of authority to exercise moral judgement at all.
Allan Bloom warned us of this forty years ago in The Closing of the American Mind. Until now, however, the conservative movement did little to stop it.
Signed by the author…
Gad has dissected the way postmodernism turns empathy with the marginalized into the supreme moral test. He calls it suicidal empathy — an irrational form of altruism that hijacks our moral judgement.
The result is a society that protects criminals over their victims, privileges illegal migrants over citizens, condemns self-defense as toxic, and lets feelings outrank facts. Aimed at the wrong target, in the wrong dose, empathy does not save a civilization. It dismantles one.
What Gad is doing aligns with what we are doing here at MCPP, where we run programs that teach young Mississippians about American exceptionalism and the moral case for the free market. Our illustrated children's book, What Makes America Special, aims to teach 7- to 10-year-olds the truths that will protect them from the woke mind virus in later life.
As Mississippi's economy flourishes, it is increasingly clear that our state has led the way on free-market reform. Perhaps now we need to lead the way on an even more important mission: the recovery of the American mind — and the defeat of divisive, "woke" ideology.
Thank you, as always, for standing with us.