‘Parasitic’ Ideas and Why Rational People Fall for Them

'It’s easy to infect people with bad ideas, especially when those bad ideas are alluring,' Gad Saad says

Professor Gad Saad. (Courtesy of Gad Saad)

“It takes professors to come up with some of the dumbest ideas,” says Gad Saad, a Lebanese-Canadian professor of marketing at Concordia University and author of “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.”

“The fact that you are educated doesn’t mean you have properly administered the mind vaccine against all these idea pathogens.”

Saad recently sat down with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek to discuss the “idea pathogens” behind such recent phenomena as wokeism, the COVID dogmas, and postmodernism.

Jan Jekielek: “The Parasitic Mind” has been on my reading list for some time, but what really caused me to pull the trigger was your commentary about the Sam Harris “TRIGGERnometry” podcast. I’ve taken in a lot of really interesting material from your book. And for those in the audience who might not be aware, Harris has talked eruditely on numerous topics including wokeism. In that “TRIGGERnometry” episode, he actually calls it a woke apocalypse, a big threat to society. At the same time, he has voiced some extreme views about former President Donald Trump, which is where your commentary comes in.

Gad Saad: Harris demonstrates that intelligent people aren’t inoculated from parasitic thinking. As I explain in “The Parasitic Mind,” all the idea pathogens that have parasitized the West originally stem from the university. It takes professors to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. The fact that you’re educated doesn’t mean you have properly administered the mind vaccine against all these idea pathogens.

Harris encapsulates this kind of parasitic thinking. So what is it? In Chapter 2 of “The Parasitic Mind,” I talk about the distinction between thinking and feeling, which is a false dichotomy. It’s not that humans are thinking animals or feeling animals. We’re both. We can trigger both systems. The challenge is to know when to trigger what system.

When it comes to Trump, what should be triggered is your cognitive system. What are the policies of Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama that you agree with or disagree with? When we’re choosing a president, we should be triggering our cognitive system. On the other hand, when you look at all of the reasons that people use to justify why Barack Obama is so beautiful and why Trump is such a threat, they’re based on emotional responses. People will say of Trump: “He disgusts me. He’s grotesque. He’s cantankerous. He speaks like an eighth grader from Queens.” All the things they despise in Trump have nothing to do with his views on monetary policy or immigration policy.

The first problem with the “parasitic thinking” of Harris is that he’s succumbing to the triggering of the wrong system, the emotional system instead of the cognitive system. The second important thing that he’s violating is the distinction, which I talk about in the book, between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.

Deontological ethics are absolute statements of truth. For example, if I say to you, “Jan, it is never okay to lie,” that would be a deontological statement. If I were to say, “It’s okay to lie when your spouse asks you, ‘Do I look fat in these jeans?’” In this case, I would be putting on my consequentialist hat. I’d like to remain married. I don’t want to hurt the feelings of my spouse.

Most of us put on our consequentialist hats on many different occasions. But the fundamental principles of Western society should be based on deontological ethics. Harris basically says on the podcast: “Sure, the media should be honest and fully report all stories. But suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story was perfectly OK because, otherwise, Donald Trump could have won, and that wouldn’t have been good.” In this instance, he was taking a deontological principle and was violating it for consequentialist goals. That’s morally grotesque.

Mr. Jekielek: Later in the podcast, Harris says, and I’m paraphrasing here, “All bad things are a matter of people’s minds being out of control.” He goes on to mention that so much of daily conflict and misery is born of people being captured by their own thoughts and unable to be skeptical of their own opinions. I thought, “You’re so right about this, so what just happened 10 minutes ago?”

Mr. Saad: I have a code of conduct where I try not to go after people I know out of loyalty and friendship. So for years, as Harris was becoming utterly unhinged about Trump, I kept quiet. But that silence was pitted against my deontological love for the truth. Should I be loyal to someone I know, or should that be superseded by defending the truth at all costs? I’m happy to report that truth won.

A lot of people thought I had a personal animus against Harris. Nothing could be further from the truth. But if you’re walking around positioning yourself as this great mediator, this dispassionate pursuer of rationality, and then you become the exemplar of hysteria, I’m going to call you out on your hypocrisy.

Mr. Jekielek: I feel we owe Harris a debt of gratitude for revealing this kind of thinking, which seems prevalent among certain groups of people. To some extent, it helps us to understand this craziness and why these contradictions can exist. Do you think people actually get programmed through propaganda and marketing by people who already had this mind virus themselves?

Mr. Saad: It’s easy to infect people with bad ideas, especially when those bad ideas are alluring. One serious problem is that most people are cognitive misers. A cognitive miser is someone who doesn’t make the necessary cognitive effort to come to a valid decision. For example, they might say: “If Barack Obama or George Bush says that Islam is a religion of peace, then it’s case closed. The president has said it; therefore, it’s good.” They didn’t expend the necessary effort to test the veracity of that statement.

Mr. Jekielek: Several experts on public health I’ve spoken with believe we killed public health policy during COVID. We stopped looking at the evidence, the body of information, and the consequences that came as a result of enacting certain policies. Everything had to be based on the eradication of COVID, and forget all the other consequences. Effectively, that’s what happened.

Mr. Saad: To be charitable, a lot of these errors in public policy were due to the fact there was a fog of war going on, and people were just trying to respond in any way they could. But my non-charitable side suggests that, in many cases, the policies enacted were willfully diabolical. As you may remember, Jan, hundreds of health professionals with Ph.D. and M.D. after their names wrote a letter essentially saying, “From a public health perspective, regarding a gathering of 50,000 people, because it supports BLM, the pros and cons of the health effects downstream are such that we should permit the gathering.” That’s how politics can even parasitize something as noble as public health policy.

Mr. Jekielek: I’ve seen an internet video clip where a state department-type person is explaining to some Afghan women that the Duchamp urinal is art. It’s up on a screen and in the eyes of the women, you can see them asking, “What is this?”

Mr. Saad: Those Afghan women are demonstrating, unbeknownst to them, that they disdain postmodernism. Postmodernism, as I explain in “The Parasitic Mind,” is an idea pathogen. Other examples of idea pathogens would be social constructivism, biophobia—the fear of using biology to explain human phenomena—cultural relativism, and militant feminism. These and others I describe in the book are forms of idea pathogens, but the most insidious and worst is postmodernism, because it fundamentally attacks the epistemology of truth. It’s not simply spreading specific falsehoods. Postmodernism rejects the possibility of seeking truth. It basically says we are always constrained by our personal biases, that there is no truth with a capital T.

I always tell people: “Stop worrying about being canceled at your job. Stop worrying about being unfriended on Facebook. Truth is more important than you being canceled.”

Mr. Jekielek: There’s a moral courage that you’re describing, though it’s not quite courage. It’s more a feeling where you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t do the right thing or be as honest as you could.

Mr. Saad: I call it existential authenticity, and one of the ways you can truly achieve happiness is to be authentic. If, at the end of your life, you look back with little regret, it’s probably because you really lived by that internal compass that had driven your life. When I lie down at night, I need to feel that I was true to truth, that I never equivocated. Authenticity is the way to happiness and liberation.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.