Bill O’Reilly is puzzled by the popularity of South Korean popstar Psy’s “Gangnam Style” YouTube video (embedded in this post, after the jump) which has now been viewed more than 840 million times. So he called in Fox’s crackpot psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow, to psychoanalyze its success. Ablow seems to have done not a bit of research into the social satire behind the video before concluding that it’s about nothing and that its meaninglessness and unfeelingness are what people crave now, “sort of like a drug.”

Had Ablow done a simple Google search before going on O’Reilly, he would have discovered what Time wrote in its article called The Wholesome Hidden Message of ‘Gangnam Style:’

The song is catchy enough, and the video ridiculous enough, that you may not have realized that “Gangnam Style” mixes its silliness with social satire. Gangnam, you see, is Seoul’s richest and flashiest neighborhood, what one commenter describes as the Korean equivalent of “Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Beverly Hills, Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Miami Beach all rolled into one.” The video depicts Psy’s comically inept attempts to live large in Gangnam style, offering a satirical take on South Korea’s burgeoning culture of consumer excess.

“Remember the pony?” O’Reilly said, referring to an old 60’s dance. “(Psy’s) just doing the pony… 800 million views of this? What’s going on?”

Ablow said, “There will be those who dismiss this as having no meaning, just a good beat and a lot of fun.” But Ablow will not be one of those, he told us. He thought the extreme popularity showed that the video “perhaps” was “tapping into something.” What is that something?

“That people don’t want any meaning right now… The most popular music, apparently, is that without intelligible words to some extent. It simply conveys you to a distant place, beat-wise, doesn’t try to convince you of anything. It doesn’t try to raise your emotions. It just is sort of like a drug. And that seems to be what most people want right now. Not reality. Not feeling. Not meaning.”

“This is a little fat guy… and he’s jumping up and down,” O’Reilly said, comparing Psy unfavorably to other pop stars who, O’Reilly said, he “gets.” But, he added, “It looks to me like the internet is just the place where people want some kind of numb – they want to numb themselves to some degree.”

“Exactly right,” Ablow said. “Globally, folks are losing their center. They want not to be reminded of what they think and feel but more conveyed away from it.”

Still O’Reilly didn’t “see anything wrong with this (video)… if you want to waste your time.”

But Ablow wasn’t so sure. “To the extent that you revel in things that don’t speak to you, that you use something to transport you away from real thought and deep feeling. Yeah, there’s something wrong with it… It’s the same as getting high, in miniature.”