Why is the greatest civilization in history so insanely intent on committing collective seppuku? Why has the West regressed from a super-civilized society into the great herd of Gadarene swine stampeding wildly and drowning itself in the sea as in Mark’s Gospel?
A popular slogan of the totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his well-known dystopian novel, “1984,” is “Ignorance Is Strength.”
This perfectly sums up the ignorance of woke—a collective blindness and historical amnesia that admits of nothing outside its own self-reinforcing paradigm.
Wokeness divides people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed.’ It tells us who the villains are, who the victims are, and what kind of person we become, based on which side of this analysis we choose to line up on.
Best not to question the narrative or introduce countervailing evidence into the discussion. The reward of being woke isn’t only being ‘right.’ It’s being included. And the penalty for not accepting the woke narrative is excommunication.
Wokesters are primarily driven by fear of exclusion and ostracism. This deliberately cultivated psychological mechanism is far more sinister than it might at first appear.
When the woke encounter someone whose virtue credentials are not obvious, these must be established before all else, so it can be determined that being around them is “safe,” meaning they hold woke views, values, norms, and beliefs on a spectrum of issues.
If they are not from the same “community” or “culture” but give the correct virtue signal, then they are an “ally” and can be included in the woke world.
If they are not an “ally,” then they are an enemy not only of the wokester, but of the wokester’s Club Virtue membership, and hence a threat to the wokester’s place in the “community of the righteous.”
The most common wokester tactic to reassert lost control when confronted by an intellectually better–resourced opponent is argumentum ad hominem, or to use words that even a low watt bulb might understand: playing the man not the ball.
Disagreeing with a wokester means you are directly assaulting their self-image as a ‘good’ person. Thus, they feel entirely justified in personally attacking you in return, by labelling you a ‘bad’ person.
Once they have reclaimed the moral high ground in this manner, in their minds they do not have to engage with your actual argument.
Not buying into the woke narrative makes you racist, sexist, fascist, far right, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, or just plain stupid.
Since labels are not arguments but a sign that you don’t have one, rational discourse with wokesters is impossible. It simply can’t occur, because they are too busy evading any reality that disturbs their internalised self-narrative.
US political columnist Joe Sobran uses the metaphor of a hive of bees, united by a kind of “group mind,” to describe the largely informal body of Leftist groupthink to which these people belong. There’s no central direction as such, but the bees can sense an enemy, and know when to attack.
Sobran says: “To become a bee in this hive is to surrender, voluntarily and eagerly, your own personality: to submerge the self in a collectivity; to prefer the buzzing cliché of the group to individual thought and expression; to take satisfaction in belonging and conforming to a powerful mass while punishing others for failure to conform ... The similarity to an insect colony - where the individual exists only functionally, being both indistinguishable from and interchangeable with its fellows - is not superficial, it is of the essence. To be an insect is to be relieved of the burden of having a soul of your own.”
We encounter these emetics daily in our personal lives, our kindergartens, our schools, our universities, our health system, our workplaces, our churches, our government departments, our advertising industry, our entertainment industry, our HR departments and personnel agencies, our mainstream media, and pretty much anywhere else that they can ram their ideology into the public square.
Once wokesters colonise a place, they make sure that only the like-minded are hired. “Since everyone is ideologically biased,” they reason, “we are entirely justified in excluding competing world views and value systems.”
Every public square in the West has become a giant echo chamber for ideologies deliberately crafted and inserted to white ant ourJudeo-Christian post-Enlightenment culture in order to replace it with a model of the Hive’s own choosing.
When Hitler took over Germany, the majority of Germans were not Nazis. The majority of Germans were irrelevant.
When the Communists took over Russia, the majority of Russians were not Communists. The majority of Russians were irrelevant.
Nobody resisted these people until it was too late. It’s time for the silent majority to stand up and be counted. The only power the woke minority has is its control over the megaphones of our culture. Every individual act of resistance is a small step in wresting back that control.
‘Woke’ is in fact a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology.
The idea that whites are permanently tainted by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally self-flagellating for it, is the ‘woke’ version of original sin.
Consideration as to whether an opinion is “problematic” is equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous.
Cancel culture’s collective beatdown social mauling of the person with “heretical” thoughts and views parallels the excommunication of the heretic.
What we might call “public virtue signalling” channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of faith in Jesus.
Much of the ‘woke’ cancel culture regarding identity politics displays an almost performative joy in dog-piling onto the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is entirely predictable.
When some ‘wokester’ attests to his white privilege with his hand up in the air, palm outward—which I have observed more than once—the resemblance to testifying in church is clear.
The ‘woke’ secular humanist who views Christians as superstitious kooks reveals himself as, of all things, a parishioner.
I love your reference to the Gadarene herd. Could there be a kind of civilizational demonic possession? The possessed swine were overwhelmed so that the strong instinct to live and instead are driven to mass suicide. This is of course the first mention of deviled ham in the Bible (tongue firmly in cheek). In all seriousness there seem to be forces and impulses that result in suicidal behavior. Have we lost our civilizational will to live? I can't remember the source, but someone said that our Constitution and its freedoms are not a suicide pact. In what world can the freedom to kill ourselves be freedom?
The Ideological Defense Institute’s review of Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy is an exercise in advocacy journalism rather than scholarly critique. It frames empathy as a civilizational "pathology" to justify the exclusion of Muslims and migrants, using a pseudo-scientific veneer to dress up "clash of civilizations" tropes.
Centrally, the review misrepresents global refugee hosting. Contrary to the IDI’s claims, Muslim-majority nations like Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon host the world’s highest per-capita refugee populations, far exceeding Western levels. Furthermore, the review misapplies evolutionary psychology, committing the "naturalistic fallacy" by using biological descriptions to dictate discriminatory political "oughts." By relying on animalizing metaphors and anecdotal evidence, the text ignores base-rate data in favor of emotionally charged generalizations.
Crucially, this framing wages war against the Gospel’s message of love, justice, and reconciliation. While the review invokes the "Gadarene swine" to pathologize compassion, it ignores Christ’s radical command to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39) and His blessing of the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). By casting the vulnerable stranger as a "viper," the text repudiates Jesus’ explicit identification with the marginalized (Matthew 25:35). It replaces the transformative justice of the Cross with a fearful, survivalist exclusion that treats the "other" as a contagion rather than the Imago Dei.
Ultimately, the review pathologizes compassion to serve a pre-existing political agenda of religious antagonism. We must recognize these arguments as ideological, not scientific. A genuine commitment to Western values requires the very empathy this review seeks to dismantle.
A popular slogan of the totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his well-known dystopian novel, “1984,” is “Ignorance Is Strength.”
This perfectly sums up the ignorance of woke—a collective blindness and historical amnesia that admits of nothing outside its own self-reinforcing paradigm.
Wokeness divides people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed.’ It tells us who the villains are, who the victims are, and what kind of person we become, based on which side of this analysis we choose to line up on.
Best not to question the narrative or introduce countervailing evidence into the discussion. The reward of being woke isn’t only being ‘right.’ It’s being included. And the penalty for not accepting the woke narrative is excommunication.
Wokesters are primarily driven by fear of exclusion and ostracism. This deliberately cultivated psychological mechanism is far more sinister than it might at first appear.
When the woke encounter someone whose virtue credentials are not obvious, these must be established before all else, so it can be determined that being around them is “safe,” meaning they hold woke views, values, norms, and beliefs on a spectrum of issues.
If they are not from the same “community” or “culture” but give the correct virtue signal, then they are an “ally” and can be included in the woke world.
If they are not an “ally,” then they are an enemy not only of the wokester, but of the wokester’s Club Virtue membership, and hence a threat to the wokester’s place in the “community of the righteous.”
The most common wokester tactic to reassert lost control when confronted by an intellectually better–resourced opponent is argumentum ad hominem, or to use words that even a low watt bulb might understand: playing the man not the ball.
Disagreeing with a wokester means you are directly assaulting their self-image as a ‘good’ person. Thus, they feel entirely justified in personally attacking you in return, by labelling you a ‘bad’ person.
Once they have reclaimed the moral high ground in this manner, in their minds they do not have to engage with your actual argument.
Not buying into the woke narrative makes you racist, sexist, fascist, far right, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, or just plain stupid.
Since labels are not arguments but a sign that you don’t have one, rational discourse with wokesters is impossible. It simply can’t occur, because they are too busy evading any reality that disturbs their internalised self-narrative.
US political columnist Joe Sobran uses the metaphor of a hive of bees, united by a kind of “group mind,” to describe the largely informal body of Leftist groupthink to which these people belong. There’s no central direction as such, but the bees can sense an enemy, and know when to attack.
Sobran says: “To become a bee in this hive is to surrender, voluntarily and eagerly, your own personality: to submerge the self in a collectivity; to prefer the buzzing cliché of the group to individual thought and expression; to take satisfaction in belonging and conforming to a powerful mass while punishing others for failure to conform ... The similarity to an insect colony - where the individual exists only functionally, being both indistinguishable from and interchangeable with its fellows - is not superficial, it is of the essence. To be an insect is to be relieved of the burden of having a soul of your own.”
We encounter these emetics daily in our personal lives, our kindergartens, our schools, our universities, our health system, our workplaces, our churches, our government departments, our advertising industry, our entertainment industry, our HR departments and personnel agencies, our mainstream media, and pretty much anywhere else that they can ram their ideology into the public square.
Once wokesters colonise a place, they make sure that only the like-minded are hired. “Since everyone is ideologically biased,” they reason, “we are entirely justified in excluding competing world views and value systems.”
Every public square in the West has become a giant echo chamber for ideologies deliberately crafted and inserted to white ant ourJudeo-Christian post-Enlightenment culture in order to replace it with a model of the Hive’s own choosing.
When Hitler took over Germany, the majority of Germans were not Nazis. The majority of Germans were irrelevant.
When the Communists took over Russia, the majority of Russians were not Communists. The majority of Russians were irrelevant.
Nobody resisted these people until it was too late. It’s time for the silent majority to stand up and be counted. The only power the woke minority has is its control over the megaphones of our culture. Every individual act of resistance is a small step in wresting back that control.
Yup the Gadarene Swine analogy is most apt. This perfectly describes the leftard mindset that dominates the West’s public square.
As British author and historian, Dennis Wheatley reminds us: “Communists are swine. Tha vast majority Gadarene Swine who race headlong over a cliff to their destruction, The few, your ordinary voracious swine, who would eat you alive if you fell into their pen and couldn’t get out.”
In the pathological results and psychlogical forms that reached out to insane policies I agree. But, the reason for all of this is not some obscure understanding of any ancient religion but a very wide and costly analysis of the western mind and its perversion by mind control, prooaganda and knowledge of reversing healthy minds into sick ones. I know I was brainwashed by school, television, new age, and my parents also. Lets focus on getting real counterintelligence.
No disrespect to Gad and his good work, which has given clarity to a monumental issue in our collective world. The real cause, however, of the West’s glide path to suicide is not empathy but abandonment of the godly principles bequeathed to us by those who put their lives on the line living according to His ways and laws as recorded for us in the holy Scriptures.
Having turned our backs on God, instead of taking responsibility for adjudicating properly the multitudinous assaults on our society and its laws (not to mention preventing the circumstances leading to it), we took the craven and cowardly route of abdication self-righteously dressed up as empathy to justify ourselves.
The punishment for this sin is upon us, proceeding rapidly.
Listening to Leftist podcasters in my friend's car, they are claiming that Dr. Saad is saying that empathy is suicidal, when they must know that he is only against empathy for those who wish to destroy us. I can't get my friend to listen to or read anything that her "trusted sources" don't approve of. They also say he's a racist bigot. This is 100% proof positive for her.
A popular slogan of the totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his well-known dystopian novel, “1984,” is “Ignorance Is Strength.”
This perfectly sums up the ignorance of woke—a collective blindness and historical amnesia that admits of nothing outside its own self-reinforcing paradigm.
Wokeness divides people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed.’ It tells us who the villains are, who the victims are, and what kind of person we become, based on which side of this analysis we choose to line up on.
Best not to question the narrative or introduce countervailing evidence into the discussion. The reward of being woke isn’t only being ‘right.’ It’s being included. And the penalty for not accepting the woke narrative is excommunication.
Wokesters are primarily driven by fear of exclusion and ostracism. This deliberately cultivated psychological mechanism is far more sinister than it might at first appear.
When the woke encounter someone whose virtue credentials are not obvious, these must be established before all else, so it can be determined that being around them is “safe,” meaning they hold woke views, values, norms, and beliefs on a spectrum of issues.
If they are not from the same “community” or “culture” but give the correct virtue signal, then they are an “ally” and can be included in the woke world.
If they are not an “ally,” then they are an enemy not only of the wokester, but of the wokester’s Club Virtue membership, and hence a threat to the wokester’s place in the “community of the righteous.”
The most common wokester tactic to reassert lost control when confronted by an intellectually better–resourced opponent is argumentum ad hominem, or to use words that even a low watt bulb might understand: playing the man not the ball.
Disagreeing with a wokester means you are directly assaulting their self-image as a ‘good’ person. Thus, they feel entirely justified in personally attacking you in return, by labelling you a ‘bad’ person.
Once they have reclaimed the moral high ground in this manner, in their minds they do not have to engage with your actual argument.
Not buying into the woke narrative makes you racist, sexist, fascist, far right, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, or just plain stupid.
Since labels are not arguments but a sign that you don’t have one, rational discourse with wokesters is impossible. It simply can’t occur, because they are too busy evading any reality that disturbs their internalised self-narrative.
US political columnist Joe Sobran uses the metaphor of a hive of bees, united by a kind of “group mind,” to describe the largely informal body of Leftist groupthink to which these people belong. There’s no central direction as such, but the bees can sense an enemy, and know when to attack.
Sobran says: “To become a bee in this hive is to surrender, voluntarily and eagerly, your own personality: to submerge the self in a collectivity; to prefer the buzzing cliché of the group to individual thought and expression; to take satisfaction in belonging and conforming to a powerful mass while punishing others for failure to conform ... The similarity to an insect colony - where the individual exists only functionally, being both indistinguishable from and interchangeable with its fellows - is not superficial, it is of the essence. To be an insect is to be relieved of the burden of having a soul of your own.”
We encounter these emetics daily in our personal lives, our kindergartens, our schools, our universities, our health system, our workplaces, our churches, our government departments, our advertising industry, our entertainment industry, our HR departments and personnel agencies, our mainstream media, and pretty much anywhere else that they can ram their ideology into the public square.
Once wokesters colonise a place, they make sure that only the like-minded are hired. “Since everyone is ideologically biased,” they reason, “we are entirely justified in excluding competing world views and value systems.”
Every public square in the West has become a giant echo chamber for ideologies deliberately crafted and inserted to white ant ourJudeo-Christian post-Enlightenment culture in order to replace it with a model of the Hive’s own choosing.
When Hitler took over Germany, the majority of Germans were not Nazis. The majority of Germans were irrelevant.
When the Communists took over Russia, the majority of Russians were not Communists. The majority of Russians were irrelevant.
Nobody resisted these people until it was too late. It’s time for the silent majority to stand up and be counted. The only power the woke minority has is its control over the megaphones of our culture. Every individual act of resistance is a small step in wresting back that control.
‘Woke’ is in fact a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology.
The idea that whites are permanently tainted by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally self-flagellating for it, is the ‘woke’ version of original sin.
Consideration as to whether an opinion is “problematic” is equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous.
Cancel culture’s collective beatdown social mauling of the person with “heretical” thoughts and views parallels the excommunication of the heretic.
What we might call “public virtue signalling” channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of faith in Jesus.
Much of the ‘woke’ cancel culture regarding identity politics displays an almost performative joy in dog-piling onto the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is entirely predictable.
When some ‘wokester’ attests to his white privilege with his hand up in the air, palm outward—which I have observed more than once—the resemblance to testifying in church is clear.
The ‘woke’ secular humanist who views Christians as superstitious kooks reveals himself as, of all things, a parishioner.
I love your reference to the Gadarene herd. Could there be a kind of civilizational demonic possession? The possessed swine were overwhelmed so that the strong instinct to live and instead are driven to mass suicide. This is of course the first mention of deviled ham in the Bible (tongue firmly in cheek). In all seriousness there seem to be forces and impulses that result in suicidal behavior. Have we lost our civilizational will to live? I can't remember the source, but someone said that our Constitution and its freedoms are not a suicide pact. In what world can the freedom to kill ourselves be freedom?
The Ideological Defense Institute’s review of Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy is an exercise in advocacy journalism rather than scholarly critique. It frames empathy as a civilizational "pathology" to justify the exclusion of Muslims and migrants, using a pseudo-scientific veneer to dress up "clash of civilizations" tropes.
Centrally, the review misrepresents global refugee hosting. Contrary to the IDI’s claims, Muslim-majority nations like Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon host the world’s highest per-capita refugee populations, far exceeding Western levels. Furthermore, the review misapplies evolutionary psychology, committing the "naturalistic fallacy" by using biological descriptions to dictate discriminatory political "oughts." By relying on animalizing metaphors and anecdotal evidence, the text ignores base-rate data in favor of emotionally charged generalizations.
Crucially, this framing wages war against the Gospel’s message of love, justice, and reconciliation. While the review invokes the "Gadarene swine" to pathologize compassion, it ignores Christ’s radical command to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39) and His blessing of the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). By casting the vulnerable stranger as a "viper," the text repudiates Jesus’ explicit identification with the marginalized (Matthew 25:35). It replaces the transformative justice of the Cross with a fearful, survivalist exclusion that treats the "other" as a contagion rather than the Imago Dei.
Ultimately, the review pathologizes compassion to serve a pre-existing political agenda of religious antagonism. We must recognize these arguments as ideological, not scientific. A genuine commitment to Western values requires the very empathy this review seeks to dismantle.
V.A, Mohamad Ashrof, Kerala, India
A popular slogan of the totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his well-known dystopian novel, “1984,” is “Ignorance Is Strength.”
This perfectly sums up the ignorance of woke—a collective blindness and historical amnesia that admits of nothing outside its own self-reinforcing paradigm.
Wokeness divides people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed.’ It tells us who the villains are, who the victims are, and what kind of person we become, based on which side of this analysis we choose to line up on.
Best not to question the narrative or introduce countervailing evidence into the discussion. The reward of being woke isn’t only being ‘right.’ It’s being included. And the penalty for not accepting the woke narrative is excommunication.
Wokesters are primarily driven by fear of exclusion and ostracism. This deliberately cultivated psychological mechanism is far more sinister than it might at first appear.
When the woke encounter someone whose virtue credentials are not obvious, these must be established before all else, so it can be determined that being around them is “safe,” meaning they hold woke views, values, norms, and beliefs on a spectrum of issues.
If they are not from the same “community” or “culture” but give the correct virtue signal, then they are an “ally” and can be included in the woke world.
If they are not an “ally,” then they are an enemy not only of the wokester, but of the wokester’s Club Virtue membership, and hence a threat to the wokester’s place in the “community of the righteous.”
The most common wokester tactic to reassert lost control when confronted by an intellectually better–resourced opponent is argumentum ad hominem, or to use words that even a low watt bulb might understand: playing the man not the ball.
Disagreeing with a wokester means you are directly assaulting their self-image as a ‘good’ person. Thus, they feel entirely justified in personally attacking you in return, by labelling you a ‘bad’ person.
Once they have reclaimed the moral high ground in this manner, in their minds they do not have to engage with your actual argument.
Not buying into the woke narrative makes you racist, sexist, fascist, far right, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, or just plain stupid.
Since labels are not arguments but a sign that you don’t have one, rational discourse with wokesters is impossible. It simply can’t occur, because they are too busy evading any reality that disturbs their internalised self-narrative.
US political columnist Joe Sobran uses the metaphor of a hive of bees, united by a kind of “group mind,” to describe the largely informal body of Leftist groupthink to which these people belong. There’s no central direction as such, but the bees can sense an enemy, and know when to attack.
Sobran says: “To become a bee in this hive is to surrender, voluntarily and eagerly, your own personality: to submerge the self in a collectivity; to prefer the buzzing cliché of the group to individual thought and expression; to take satisfaction in belonging and conforming to a powerful mass while punishing others for failure to conform ... The similarity to an insect colony - where the individual exists only functionally, being both indistinguishable from and interchangeable with its fellows - is not superficial, it is of the essence. To be an insect is to be relieved of the burden of having a soul of your own.”
We encounter these emetics daily in our personal lives, our kindergartens, our schools, our universities, our health system, our workplaces, our churches, our government departments, our advertising industry, our entertainment industry, our HR departments and personnel agencies, our mainstream media, and pretty much anywhere else that they can ram their ideology into the public square.
Once wokesters colonise a place, they make sure that only the like-minded are hired. “Since everyone is ideologically biased,” they reason, “we are entirely justified in excluding competing world views and value systems.”
Every public square in the West has become a giant echo chamber for ideologies deliberately crafted and inserted to white ant ourJudeo-Christian post-Enlightenment culture in order to replace it with a model of the Hive’s own choosing.
When Hitler took over Germany, the majority of Germans were not Nazis. The majority of Germans were irrelevant.
When the Communists took over Russia, the majority of Russians were not Communists. The majority of Russians were irrelevant.
Nobody resisted these people until it was too late. It’s time for the silent majority to stand up and be counted. The only power the woke minority has is its control over the megaphones of our culture. Every individual act of resistance is a small step in wresting back that control.
Yup the Gadarene Swine analogy is most apt. This perfectly describes the leftard mindset that dominates the West’s public square.
As British author and historian, Dennis Wheatley reminds us: “Communists are swine. Tha vast majority Gadarene Swine who race headlong over a cliff to their destruction, The few, your ordinary voracious swine, who would eat you alive if you fell into their pen and couldn’t get out.”
In the pathological results and psychlogical forms that reached out to insane policies I agree. But, the reason for all of this is not some obscure understanding of any ancient religion but a very wide and costly analysis of the western mind and its perversion by mind control, prooaganda and knowledge of reversing healthy minds into sick ones. I know I was brainwashed by school, television, new age, and my parents also. Lets focus on getting real counterintelligence.
I just read this about 2 months ago!! It is very true!!! Go Gadd Sad!!!
No disrespect to Gad and his good work, which has given clarity to a monumental issue in our collective world. The real cause, however, of the West’s glide path to suicide is not empathy but abandonment of the godly principles bequeathed to us by those who put their lives on the line living according to His ways and laws as recorded for us in the holy Scriptures.
Having turned our backs on God, instead of taking responsibility for adjudicating properly the multitudinous assaults on our society and its laws (not to mention preventing the circumstances leading to it), we took the craven and cowardly route of abdication self-righteously dressed up as empathy to justify ourselves.
The punishment for this sin is upon us, proceeding rapidly.
Listening to Leftist podcasters in my friend's car, they are claiming that Dr. Saad is saying that empathy is suicidal, when they must know that he is only against empathy for those who wish to destroy us. I can't get my friend to listen to or read anything that her "trusted sources" don't approve of. They also say he's a racist bigot. This is 100% proof positive for her.