The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

by Gad Saad

A fair society ensures that its members have equality of opportunities and not equality of outcomes as mandated by DIE edicts.

social justice warriors and their ilk are intellectual terrorists, and they can wreak havoc on reason and our public life, limiting people’s willingness to speak and think freely, without ever constituting a majority.

There is an ever-increasing ideological pressure to come up with more egregious departures from reason, as a signal of one’s progressive purity.

The quest for truth should always supersede one’s ego-defensive desire to be proven right. This is not an easy task because for most people it is difficult to admit to being wrong. This is precisely why science is so liberating. It offers a framework for auto-correction because scientific knowledge is always provisional. An accepted scientific fact today might be refuted tomorrow. As such, the scientific method engenders epistemic humility.

Confucius was correct: “To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.”

The inoculation against such cancerous mindsets comes in the form of a two-step cognitive vaccine: 1) providing OPS sufferers with accurate information, and 2) ensuring that OPS sufferers learn how to process information according to the evidentiary rules of science and logic.

The desire to divide the world into binary forms is at the root of the thinking versus feeling dichotomy, and this creates a false either-or mindset. We are both thinking and feeling animals. The challenge is to know when to activate the cognitive (thinking) versus the affective (feeling) systems.

The problem arises when domains that should be reserved for the intellect are hijacked by feelings. This is precisely what plagues our universities: what were once centers of intellectual development have become retreats for the emotionally fragile. The driving motto of the university is no longer the pursuit of truth but the coddling of hurt feelings.

There are two fundamental ethical orientations that guide people’s daily behaviors: deontological and consequentialist ethics.

As British prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple observed: “[I]s it not the case that we live in an age of emotional incontinence, when they who emote the most are believed to feel the most?”14 Remember though that one’s heartfelt outrage seldom says anything about the truth or falsehood of one’s position.

“A consistent supporter of polylogism would have to maintain that ideas are correct because their author is a member of the right class, nation, or race. But consistency is not one of their virtues. Thus the Marxians are prepared to assign the epithet ‘proletarian thinker’ to everybody whose doctrines they approve. All the others they disparage either as foes of their class or as social traitors.”27 Current social justice warriors engage in similar ideological thinking. “I disagree with you” is thus replaced with disparaging labels: climate change denier, white nationalist, New Atheist, white supremacist, Alt-Right, and so on, demonizing dissenters from progressive orthodoxy as nefarious and evil.

“The next time some academics tell you how important ‘diversity’ is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

But freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in America where men were free.51

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” —Voltaire