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.