It’s what sunk her in 2024 and will keep her below water forever more.
If you don’t have a copy of Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy, buy one. My copy arrived last night and I am now sixteen pages into it. Fabulously good, it’s got me banging on all eight. What Saad offers is a theory of the emotions from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. Herewith, quotation, paraphrase, and a soupçon of commentary. All and only what is enclosed in double quotation marks are Saad’s ipsissima verba.
“Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign strategy was to precisely invoke people’s affective system (joy and fun) rather than their cognitive one, knowing full well that she didn’t stack well on substantive matters.” (10, split infinitive in original.) But the electorate did not fall for the “affective ruse” and so Trump won decisively. Saad goes on to say that suicidal empathy is a similar sort of “systems failure whereby a noble virtue [empathy] is hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis rooted in our reasoning faculty.” (10)
“Emotional dysregulation is a feature of many psychiatric disorders.” (10) Too much anxiety and depression, for example, can lead to clinical depression. Both negative and positive emotions are subject to emotional dysregulation. “Laughter is medically therapeutic . . . ” (11) but not in all situations and to every degree. You can now guess where our man is going with this.
“Emotional incontinence (pseudobulbar affect) is one such disorder where patients can laugh hysterically in profoundly inappropriate manners.” (11, hyperlink added) “The cackler Kamala Harris can go toe-to-toe with the Joker [in the eponymous movie starring Joaquin Phoenix] when it comes to cringey laughter.” (11)
Why did the Dems lose in ’24? You now have a good part of the answer thanks to Dr. Saad. You will recall that when ‘Border Czar’ Kamala was asked whether she had ever visited the Southern border, the risible airhead cacklingly replied, “No, and I’ve never been to Europe either.”
This silly goose has no business anywhere near the levers of political power.
This kind of emotional whizzing is nothing new, here is an excerpt from Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer, chapter 33: • • •
“Injun Joe was buried near the mouth of the cave; and people flocked there in boats and wagons from the towns and from all the farms and hamlets for seven miles around; they brought their children, and all sorts of provisions, and confessed that they had had almost as satisfactory a time at the funeral as they could have had at the hanging.
This funeral stopped the further growth of one thing — the petition to the governor for Injun Joe’s pardon. The petition had been largely signed; many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a committee of sappy women been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky water-works.”