Are dangerous ideologies spreading through our universities and institutions like infections? What happens when emotion overtakes logic in academic and public discourse?
Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense presents a provocative diagnosis of society. Saad warns that certain progressive movements are undermining the core values that built Western civilization. His book examines how these ideas spread and what they mean for the future.
Read more to discover Saad’s framework for understanding modern intellectual conflicts and his prescription for defending reasoned debate.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons (License)
Overview of Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind
Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense argues that a small group of activists are threatening free speech and rational thought—the foundational principles of Western society. Over the past decade or so, activists have increasingly challenged—or outright rejected—these principles on the grounds of social justice. Saad, a psychologist, contends that society is sick, comparing these critiques to infectious diseases and suggesting that they’re spreading throughout society and threatening to completely destabilize the Western world.
(Shortform note: In Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay agree that progressive activists have started attacking free speech and science. They argue that, by the late 20th century, progressive movements had achieved their major political goals: the end of racial segregation, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and so on. Once they stopped having major political goals to fight for, progressives turned to smaller battles, such as the criticism and policing of culture and language—which eventually evolved into attacks on free speech and scientific inquiry.)
Our overview of the book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense will cover Saad’s definition of an enlightened liberal society, the ideas he believes threaten it, and the potential consequences of these ideas.
Part 1: An Enlightened Society
Saad begins by defining the two main principles at the foundation of an enlightened liberal society: free speech and rational inquiry. He argues that these ideas have been central to Western society for centuries and are the main contributors to the West’s technological, economic, and cultural development and strength. In this first part of the guide, we’ll explore what makes these two ideas so essential to Western society’s functioning and progress.
Free Speech
Saad explains that free speech is essential for an enlightened society because it encourages a process of “natural selection” for ideas:
- In a society with an open exchange of ideas, many different viewpoints and perspectives compete with one another.
- People compare these different views and adopt the ones they believe are better.
- Therefore, the best ideas thrive by convincing the most people, while ideas with less merit remain obscure or die off.
The open exchange of ideas that comes with free speech, Saad argues, is what fosters social progress—and has contributed to many of Western society’s biggest social, scientific, and technological advancements of the past several centuries. For example, in 1953, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Their theory was controversial, but free speech allowed them to present it and challenge other hypotheses. Eventually, their model proved accurate. At the same time, the Soviet Union under Stalin rejected much of mainstream biology and imprisoned thousands of dissenting scientists, seriously hampering its biological and medical research.
The natural selection of ideas also helps sharpen people’s minds, Saad explains. Having to compare many different opinions and choose the best among them trains people to develop informed worldviews—instead of blindly following whatever others tell them to believe.
Rational Inquiry
Saad argues that rational inquiry is crucial for an enlightened society because it helps us discover universal truths. He offers two reasons:
First, the rules of logic and the methods of science are the same for everyone and don’t change according to personal opinion. This means that we can use them to discover and broadly agree on objective truths instead of arguing over subjective opinions. These objective truths provide social stability along with scientific and technological knowledge.
Second, reason and science are rigorous, since every hypothesis requires many different sources of provable evidence before it’s accepted as fact. Furthermore, even after a hypothesis is accepted, reason and science are self-correcting and self-improving—researchers are constantly finding new evidence to strengthen or disprove existing hypotheses.
For example, the theory of gravity comes from reason and science—physicists drew a conclusion from mathematical equations and observed evidence. As such, people broadly agree that gravity exists and can use this theory to inform other scientific and technological advancements, like ballistics. Without a shared language of reason and science, though, there would be many different theories about why objects fall or enter orbit. Some of these ideas could be complete nonsense, but we’d have no way of definitely disproving them. And if nobody could agree on how gravity functioned, nobody would know which theory to base ballistics on.
Part 2: Ideas of the Social Justice Movement
After describing the pillars of an enlightened society, Saad turns to what he says are the dangerous ideas of the progressive left and social justice movements that threaten them most. He focuses on three dangerous ideas in particular:
- Emotion trumps reason.
- Victimhood is a virtue.
- Unpleasant evidence can be dismissed.
Idea #1: Emotion Trumps Reason
The first idea of the progressive left Saad discusses is that emotional comfort should take priority over the pursuit of the truth. According to this idea, theories that hurt people’s feelings or make them uncomfortable should be taboo—no matter how much data is behind them or how rational they are. The progressive left, he says, believes that the emotional negatives of discussing these ideas outweigh the positives of a truly open academic environment.
For example, former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers was forced to resign after giving a presentation in which he suggested that women are underrepresented in STEM fields because of biological sex differences. Saad points out that although Summers’s hypothesis was professionally presented, evidence-backed, and supported by some psychologists, it was considered punishable because it offended women and made them uncomfortable.
Idea #2: Victimhood Is a Virtue
The second dangerous idea of the progressive left is to treat victimhood as a virtue. This kind of victimhood comes from being oppressed (usually on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, or religion) by society. Saad writes that leftists who don’t belong to historically oppressed groups feel guilty about the privilege they believe themselves to have. In contrast, they lionize people who can claim victim status, seeing them as morally superior simply because they’ve experienced oppression.
Further, Saad argues, the progressive left perceives oppressed groups to have a type of special knowledge about oppression because of their experiences, and it believes their arguments should therefore carry more weight than those who have suffered less oppression. For example, a straight person who treats victimhood as a virtue might assume that LGBT people know more about all matters related to sexuality—thus, they’d defer to LGBT people on those topics.
Manufactured Victimhood
Saad argues that people who believe victimhood is virtuous often create narratives that emphasize their victimhood. These narratives may not accurately reflect reality; they serve to make the victim feel and appear more virtuous. For example, a person of color might assume that a white cashier’s rudeness toward them is racially motivated, even if it has nothing to do with their race. By telling the story through the lens of racism, they emphasize their victimhood and therefore their virtue.
Idea #3: Unpleasant Evidence Can Be Dismissed
The third dangerous idea of the progressive left is a refusal to accept evidence that contradicts their cause. Saad says leftists feel very strongly about their beliefs and don’t want to be wrong; as a result, they deny or ignore scientific data and logical arguments that go against them. This, he argues, is a form of self-deception and cognitive bias.
For example, Saad notes how progressives deny the effectiveness of religious, racial, or ethnic profiling for law enforcement. He explains that profiling is based on statistical realities—if one specific group is statistically more likely to commit crimes, then logically, law enforcement should be particularly vigilant when it comes to that group. Even so,progressives argue that profiling is racist and discriminatory and deny its usefulness.
Part 3: Social Consequences
After describing the progressive left’s dangerous ideas, Saad elaborates on how these ideas spread far enough to pose a threat to enlightened society. He also discusses how to fight back against them.
How Dangerous Ideas Spread
Saad explains that the progressive left’s ideas spread like illnesses, starting from small groups of dedicated activists and then branching out exponentially. Because these ideas rely heavily on emotion and personal experience, they offer compelling narratives that appeal to people’s irrational sides—a story about being oppressed is more likely to move someone than an analysis of data on oppression, for example. As a result, these ideas spread quickly.
Once these dangerous ideas become widespread, others buy into them simply because they’re mainstream. It’s easier and more socially rewarding to go along with the crowd than to risk isolation or backlash by dissenting. Specifically, Saad suggests that young men adopt progressive ideas as an evolutionary mating strategy. By taking on the beliefs of their female peers, they engage in a form of mimicry to attract more women—a behavior seen in many different species.
Why the Progressive Left’s Ideas Are Dangerous
Saad explains that once they’ve spread and become mainstream, the ideas of the progressive left attack free speech and rational inquiry. Since these are the foundations of an enlightened society, this threatens to halt social and scientific progress while also making society less free and open.
Dangers to Free Speech
Saad says the progressive left’s ideas threaten free speech by forcefully shutting down any dissent. He provides many examples of progressive leftists using “cancel culture” to punish people who disagree with them—by harassing them online, insulting them, and even getting them fired. This incentivizes people to self-censor any dissent that might otherwise convince people to abandon the progressive left and their dangerous ideas.
Saad explains that self-censorship and punishment for dissent disrupt the natural selection of ideas—since many ideas are no longer up for discussion, people have an incomplete picture when choosing which theories are best.
Dangers to Rational Inquiry
Saad notes that by deemphasizing reason and logic in favor of emotions and personal experiences, dangerous ideas run contrary to rational inquiry. Emotions and personal experiences don’t provide an objective standard people can use to obtain knowledge. Instead, they offer individual, subjective truths that might not reflect reality. When everyone goes by their own subjective truths, communication breaks down, and obtaining new knowledge becomes impossible.
Fighting Dangerous Ideas
After explaining the risks posed by the progressive left, Saad concludes with advice on how to fight their dangerous ideas. He suggests actions you can take personally as well as broader social changes to accomplish this.
Personal Action: Challenge Dangerous Ideas
Saad’s main advice for fighting dangerous ideas is to publicly and frequently argue against them. The dangerous ideas of the progressive left become prominent in part because people self-censor or hide their beliefs. Speaking up for yourself and your views helps disrupt this cycle by inspiring others to think rationally and speak up, too. Saad says that people may turn against you for arguing against dangerous ideas—but if they do, they aren’t worth spending time with anyway.
Social Change: Fix Universities
Saad also suggests fixing the source of many dangerous ideas—university campuses. He argues that leftist professors are one of the main forces popularizing these ideas, and that they create environments where students can’t push back against them. At the same time, leftist students stage protests demanding that their schools demonstrate progressive values. These students also demand that their studies be made easier; they don’t want to engage with ideas that make them uncomfortable or work hard for their education. Universities capitulate to these demands because they rely on tuition dollars, so students never learn to think rationally, and universities churn out graduates who blindly accept and promote dangerous ideas.
To solve the problems he describes, Saad argues that universities must rededicate themselves to high standards and academic freedom. Higher academic standards require students to develop their rational faculties, making them more likely to reject irrational, dangerous ideas. Supporting academic freedom (rather than bowing to progressive protests and intolerant leftist professors) creates an environment where students and faculty feel free to engage in the natural selection of ideas, pursuing any theory that has merit.
