The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, by Gad Saad

The most compelling part of this book is the author’s own personal story and how that story shaped his understanding of what is necessary for a free society to survive. Coming from a Jewish background in Lebanon, the author and his family were forced to evacuate when the Paris of the Middle East fell into civil war and, lamentably but predictably, various militias turned their violence and hatred towards minority populations like the Jews, who had to flee all of the sudden to Israel and other places. The author and his family went to Canada, where the author became a researcher and scientist of a decidedly rationalist bent. What is striking about this book is that the author sees in the woke ideology of the left the same sort of threat to the well-being of society–and probably also of Jews and other religious and cultural minorities–as radical Islam did. When one looks at the way that the radical left and radical Islam have an alliance of convenience against the cosmopolitan liberal society of the West, this insight is in fact a very valuable and worthwhile insight, and I think the author is spot on to draw this connection between the chaos of his childhood in Lebanon’s self-destruction and our own present state in the West.

That is not to say that I view this book with any sort of complacency about the author’s approach, though. The author’s anti-religious bias is itself a problem, and even if he turns his rationalism and his scorn on the right target, there is still a great deal in this book that leads this reader at least to think that the author has at least a few problems recognizing the flaws in the scientism that he espouses. For one, the author wildly overestimates the explanatory power of evolution and creates the common (if unacceptable) flaw of conflation in viewing the proliferation of genetic diversity within populations and the stepwise development of life from lesser to greater complexity as being the same process of evolution rather than being two very different things–one of them obviously true and the other quite dubious. Similarly, the author takes a swipe at those who are hostile to vaccines without recognizing the way that vaccines (especially with the change in definitions as a result of the Covid crisis) have turned the issue into a deeply political one that disrupts the clarity that the author seeks in his definitions and logical thinking. If this is a good book, largely because it aims at the irrational left, it is by no means a perfect book and I am not sure at all that I would appreciate what the author has to say about other subjects.

In terms of its contents, this book is made up of eight chapters that take up a bit less than 200 pages of core material. The book begins with a preface, before the author takes us on a tour of his own life from his youthful experiences of civil war in Lebanon to the battle of ideas in the contemporary world (1). After this the author talks about the contrast between thinking and feeling and between truth and hurt feelings (2). This leads into a discussion of various non-negotiable elements of a free and modern society, which of course include a devotion to scientific truth as well as an openness to free expression that leads to experimentation and technological and intellectual progress (3). This is followed by a discussion of the anti-science, anti-reason, and illiberal movements that the author associates most strongly with the illiberal contemporary left, though I am sure not only there (4). This is followed by a discussion of the lunacy of the social justice warrior of the contemporary college campus (5) as well as the departures from reason that we see in what the author views as ostrich parasitic syndrome, another problem of the contemporary left (6). After this the author discusses how to seek truth through nomological networks of cumulative evidence–the author is quite demanding as to what counts as evidence (7), before closing the book with a call to action on the part of all right-thinking people against the left (8). The book then ends with acknowledgments, notes, and an index.