Book Review, “The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas are KIlling Common Sense” Gad Saad

Gad Saad is a Lebanese Jewish (he states he is an atheist of “Jewish heritage”) person whose family was one of the last to leave Lebanon because of the civil war. They left because the multi-cultural, religiously tolerant society collapsed, their safety was no longer possible.

Gad remembers in elementary school hearing a classmate say they wanted to grow up to be a Jew killer.

His family moved to Canada where others of his family had established themselves. He went to college at McGill University for his first two degrees and then Cornell for his PhD in marketing. He is known for his work in evolutionary psychology in the marketing and consumer behavior fields. He has taught in Canada and the US but has come under pressure in Canada for his views on the conflict in Israel.

His book was fascinating, published in 2020. I heard of it from a podcast on “Honestly”,the podcast series from Bari Weiss.

From the summary on Amazon. “There’s a war against truth… and if we don’t win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty.
The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness.
Dr. Gad Saad, the host of the enormously popular YouTube show THE SAAD TRUTH, exposes the bad ideas—what he calls “idea pathogens”—that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated in our universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms—including freedom of thought and speech.
The danger is grave, but as Dr. Saad shows, politically correct dogma is riddled with logical fallacies. We have powerful
weapons to fight back with—if we have the courage to use them.
A provocative guide to defending reason and intellectual freedom and a battle cry for the preservation of our fundamental rights, The Parasitic Mind will be the most controversial and talked-about book of the year.”

The book helped me think about the factual basis of my opinions so to avoid glamming on to the rhetoric of my information sources. Every issue we face today has two sides. The overwhelming majority of people in the Lavant want a safe place to make a living and raise their families. Both sides are pulled towards opinion by “their” side of the issue versus finding common ground underlying a solution. Sound familiar to our current political milieu?

This was not a heavy read but highlighted common tendencies in all of us and offers a way out to solutions.

THe Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathon Rauch wrote a readable thesis concerning our society’s foundation of establishing knowledge. He likens this to the constitution of our government, the rules and procedures to establish our governing system are the same as  those to establish knowledge that engenders trust in the resultant body of work.

Today our foundation is being eroded by those who don’t mind lying, manipulating facts, creating their own facts, punish anyone who decides to disagree with you, etc. Both the right and left use methods unique to each to control the messaging.

He wrote this during the first Trump administration and gets off track by only giving examples of misdeeds by him and his folks, openly admitting he does that, page 180. My opinion is that takes away from the argument as both sides of the aisle are equally guilty.

He follows this with a condemnation of cancel culture, a  creation of the left, and does a good job doing so. The left totally owns this disease of our society.

He uses quotes from folks that have been exiled to the trash bin of history in a positive fashion. FBI director Comey. Peter Strzok, FBI agent, who wrote to Lisa Page a FBI attorney in a FBI email that they needed to find a way to stop Trump. Anthony Fauci. Erwin Chemerinsky, law dean at Berkeley who wants to trash the constitution and start all over. All credited with standing up to the Trump administration when they were all actually suppressing the truth.

He mentions with praise many things I respect. Braver Angels. Jonathon Haidt. FIRE. And many more. He spends too much time on gay rights and the struggles he and others faced, he should have given other references.

He credited many supporters, including the Koch’s and other conservative groups amongst the overwhelming progressive supporters. At least they were mentioned.

Both sides of the aisle  should be concerned about how our society sifts through information to create truth. Both sides of the aisle should have the courage to admit fallibility, accept empirical proof, work to persuade versus impose ideas–all these strengthen our republic by creating common ground.

Social media has done a great thing bringing everything to everybody, and a terrible thing at the same time. The old aristocratic stranglehold of media has been broken and it appears we must all now find our own trusted sources of truth. Many options are not truth.

This could be a good thing, but we as citizens must step up to this new responsibility. There is a great deal of junk being pushed at us, it could destroy trust in the institutions that hold the republic together.

Let us pray.