Dr. Gad Saad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist and a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University. He s also the best-selling author of The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, one of my personal favorite books, and has recently been released in Hebrew here in Israel. Dr. Saad s known for his fearless critiques of political correctness, radical Islam, and Western appeasement culture, he s also a powerful advocate for free speech and a staunch defender of Israel and Jewish identity within the Western world.
00:00:00.000Welcome to Viewpoint on ILTV, where we bring you leading voices from the Middle East and beyond.
00:00:05.380In this special, we're taking you inside the Israel-Gaza war and global anti-Semitism.
00:00:09.620From here to here, from thought leaders and cultural critics shaping today's discourse.
00:00:13.980I'm Emily Schrader, and today we're speaking with Dr. Gad Saad.
00:00:31.460Dr. Saad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist and a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University.
00:00:38.120He's also the best-selling author of The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,
00:00:44.080one of my personal favorite books, and has recently actually been released in Hebrew here in Israel.
00:00:49.620Now, Dr. Saad is known for his fearless critiques of political correctness, of radical Islam, and Western appeasement culture.
00:00:56.580He's also been a powerful advocate for free speech and a staunch defender of Israel and Jewish identity within the Western world.
00:01:03.720He also hosts the popular podcast, The Saad Truth, and has become a major voice challenging the rise of ideological conformity in academia and beyond.
00:01:13.140Dr. Saad, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:01:15.840Just to start, now, you've built a career calling out dangerous ideologies, from radical Islam to identity politics.
00:01:23.360What was your breaking point? I mean, when did you decide enough is enough and that you had to speak out about this more publicly?
00:01:30.000You know, well, first, thank you for having me.
00:01:31.740It's been really an ongoing opening up of my eyes, so to speak, from when I first became a professor.
00:01:40.060So my original work in academia was to try to incorporate evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior.
00:01:50.000And I was shocked to see that many of my colleagues who were social scientists, business school professors,
00:01:57.120were dead set against the idea that biology matters to human beings.
00:02:01.200And I thought, how could it be that otherwise intelligent, educated people so parasitized by these kinds of imbecilic thought processes?
00:02:10.680So it really started probably around 1994, but it has been growing like a tsunami ever since.
00:05:29.920And so what happens in this case, to your question,
00:05:32.800you know, the noble Muslims are always the peaceful victims,
00:05:37.880even though in every country that Islam leads, the religious minorities end up suffering.
00:05:44.360But according to our Western, you know, bien pensant, as we say in French,
00:05:48.960the politically correct thinkers, it is always the nasty, colonizing Jews that are the mean ones.
00:05:56.520And so it simply can't be inherently that beautiful, peaceful Muslim people could ever cause instability.
00:06:02.860And that's what is being taught in universities.
00:06:05.720And so it doesn't surprise me that people are unable to understand the reality of the geopolitics of the region.
00:06:12.760Well, we'll get to suicidal empathy in a bit, but I do want to talk first about the parasitic mind.
00:06:17.800I mean, in the book, you warn that Western civilization is essentially on life support.
00:06:23.140Would you say that the Hamas support that we've seen in the streets of the West
00:06:26.760is a symptom of this sort of late stage cultural collapse?
00:06:30.660And if so, is there a cure for these parasitic ideas that have taken root?
00:06:38.300I mean, of course, what we're seeing in terms of the pro-Hamas stuff is a manifestation of parasitized thinking.
00:06:45.060Look, I think that there is a cure, but the problem is that for me to be able to administer vaccine to you,
00:06:52.620you have to be willing to come to the station and receive the vaccine.
00:06:56.400And so what ends up often happening is that people go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.
00:07:01.240And so my attempts to try to shift you from your anchored positions fall on deaf ears, literally.
00:07:07.720So in the abstract, I think that there is a way to alter people's thinking.
00:07:14.100But it's really, really a difficult thing.
00:07:15.880I mean, about a year ago, I was invited on a show hosted by a British psychiatrist.
00:07:21.020And at the end of the show, he asked me, in your 30 plus years as a professor,
00:07:25.360what has been the thing that has most surprised you about, you know, human nature?
00:07:30.100And so I paused for a second and I said, probably the inability to get someone to change their opinion once it is deeply anchored.
00:07:39.340And so while on the one hand, I wake up every morning hopeful that I can change people's opinions.
00:07:45.460On the other hand, I realize that it's a Herculean task.
00:07:48.840Now, you are living in Canada where we've seen enormous pro-Hamas demonstrations.
00:07:53.820We've seen an influx of IRGC terrorists.
00:07:57.060We've seen many cowardly responses from the government, the Trudeau government before.
00:08:02.040Is Canada uniquely weak when it comes to confronting this radicalism?
00:08:08.080It is uniquely weak in that, you know, on the woke meter, it scores very, very highly.
00:08:15.540Some of the other ones perhaps might be Sweden could originally, one could have argued was, you know, pretty high on the woke meter.
00:08:22.040But Justin Trudeau, who's no longer prime minister, but was for nine years, is a walking manifestation of every parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind, right?
00:10:04.340It's wonderful that he came to power and that the alternative would have only worsened the reality.
00:10:11.180But it took 50 to 100 years, to your question, it took about 50 to 100 years for many of these parasitic ideas to be spawned on university campuses
00:10:19.840and then to eventually become our prime ministers and our leaders and so on.
00:10:23.620So it's not going to be a magical vaccine where in four years that Donald Trump is in power, we're certainly going to have everything eradicated.
00:10:39.420It doesn't all begin and end with Donald Trump.
00:10:41.820Now, speaking of the universities, I have to ask, have you personally faced pushback from within academia for challenging this sort of ideological orthodoxy that we see on campus?
00:10:53.640I mean, even as a student, I got some grief for pushing back.
00:10:56.600So I can only imagine what you've gone through as an actual professor on some of these campuses.
00:11:15.120I mean, thank God that I've got a thick skin and thank God that I'm a combative guy, because otherwise I think I would have wilted decades ago.
00:11:23.160Look, one of the reasons, the main reason why I'm currently a visiting professor in Michigan is precisely to your point.
00:11:30.260It was becoming just impossible to be a high profile Jewish professor at Concordia.
00:11:35.680Concordia has been referred to colloquially as Gaza University well before October 7th.
00:13:03.600And I'm right now appearing on Israeli TV.
00:13:05.700So hopefully this doesn't shock people what I'm about to say.
00:13:08.680Someone with my background and with my fierce defense of the Jewish people and Israel and so on still defends the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their nonsense.
00:13:19.520So in that sense, I'm a free speech absolutist.
00:13:22.800But that doesn't mean that you're allowed to incite direct violence against Jews, right?
00:14:11.260It's that they actually held these protests that they took over building.
00:14:14.860So I think it's a little bit disingenuous, at least in my view, to say that this is a free speech issue, even if one is a free speech absolutist like you're mentioning.
00:14:26.000I want to talk a little bit about the idea of this woke ideology that we're hearing so much about on campus.
00:14:32.840And I want to ask you your opinion, why is there this connection between this sort of progressive cult of the woke ideology that's taken root in these campuses and anti-Semitism and totalitarian ideologies?
00:14:50.260Well, I alluded to this in, I think, my previous answer.
00:15:00.120They each, for different reasons, wish to bring down the current system.
00:15:05.260And so let's lay in bed together for a while, and then later we will decide who ends up winning.
00:15:10.820And so this is the really orgiastically evil union of two groups that are equally committed to the destruction of the West.
00:15:20.400By the way, in my latest book, my previous book on happiness, I talk about political orientation and happiness.
00:15:26.800And I argue that one of the reasons why research consistently finds that conservatives are happier than the progressives, progressives wake up every day with the idea that the current system that they live under is transphobic, Islamophobic, hateful.
00:15:55.320That's why when Islam goes to a new land, it destroys all of the lyrics of the previous society, right?
00:16:04.320All the artifacts, the Buddhist statues.
00:16:07.380And so in that sense, both of these ideologies share their common animus towards the West.
00:16:14.780Now, I said I would talk about suicidal empathy, so I'm going to ask you, can you just explain a little bit about what this is and maybe even give a couple of examples of how prevalent it's become, especially in the aftermath of October 7th, just in recent months?
00:16:29.360Right. So let me first begin with an analogy. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a psychiatric disorder, but that is rooted in an otherwise evolutionary beneficial process.
00:16:42.940So the idea that I should scan the environment for threats, if I meet you and you sneeze in your hand and then you shake my hand, I might quietly go to the bathroom to wash my hands because I don't want to catch your cold.
00:16:56.860That makes perfect evolutionary sense.
00:16:58.580If I now spend eight hours in the bathroom cleaning my hands until my skin starts falling off, that becomes a manifestation of germ contamination OCD.
00:17:09.240So what started as an adaptive process becomes maladaptive when it misfires.
00:17:15.560And so I use this exact idea to argue that, of course, empathy is a beautiful and noble emotion.
00:17:22.640Empathy is necessary for a social species like Homo sapiens, so that's fine.
00:17:27.700The problem is when empathy misfires, when it becomes hyperactive, when it targets the wrong targets of empathy.
00:17:37.760No, I shouldn't have more empathy for MS-13 gang members coming in from El Salvador illegally than I should have for American vets who lost their legs fighting for my country.
00:17:48.960In a dream world, I should provide empathy to everyone, but we exist in the real world where there are trade-offs and therefore it makes sense that my emotional system would be strategic in how it mets out empathy.
00:18:03.900If there are two children that are about to be hit by a bus, no one would say that I'm evil if I were to worry more about my biological child than the random child.
00:18:16.060I would love to save both of them, but if given a choice, I'm likely to choose my biological child.
00:18:21.880That doesn't make me evil, it makes me a Darwinian being.
00:18:24.960And so the entire book looks at that misfiring of empathy, and then it argues that many of our domestic policies and foreign policies arise as a result of this misguided, misplaced empathy.
00:18:39.160Now, I want to ask you something a little bit different about Israeli society.
00:18:43.640You mentioned your earlier book about happiness.
00:18:46.520Israel consistently ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world, and this is, of course, despite the fact that we have endless terrorism,
00:18:54.380that we've been fighting for our existence for 74, 75-plus years, and even before that, fighting to return to our homeland here in the land of Israel.
00:19:03.780How do you explain that a country that's under so much attacks constantly, both diplomatically, physically, mentally, in every single way,
00:19:13.560how do we still have such a happy society, and what's your advice going forward in the post-October 7th reality that's become such a challenge for the Israeli society?
00:19:23.340So I think one of the reasons why Israel, I mean, not Israeli academics, I think they are just as prone to be parasitized as other academics,
00:19:32.420but the reason why the larger Israeli society seems to be a bit more inoculated, if not a lot more inoculated, to these parasitic ideas
00:19:41.060is because you can't afford the luxury to succumb to, you know, suicidal empathy and parasitic thinking
00:19:48.320when you are in such a dangerous and nasty neighborhood.
00:19:51.260It kind of distills your focus to focus on the really important things.
00:19:55.320And so I think by that same mechanism, because Israelis are facing existential threats every day coming at you from every corner,
00:20:05.240when I now go to the beach in Kikar Atarim, I might actually enjoy that time there because I realize what's awaiting.
00:20:13.780It really causes me to have this existential gratitude.
00:20:17.380So I suspect that that might be one of the reasons why Israelis are so happy.
00:20:45.140It's interesting to see the comparison when you look at the norm for happiness or lack thereof in many other Arab countries.
00:20:52.560I mean, we see a lot of the opposite, even sometimes in very wealthy Arab countries.
00:20:57.880Aside from war, what is your take on this?
00:21:00.200Would you tie that back to what you mentioned before about this ideology where, you know,
00:21:05.440there's always something better that you can't really live in the moment and appreciate what you have?
00:21:09.840Well, and the fact that if you don't have the most basic freedom, so in many Islamic countries, you know, the most basic sexual impulses that people have are difficult to ever explore because you have such segregated societies.
00:21:26.700You can't even look at a woman, talk to a woman.
00:21:30.680And so anything, any ideology that reduces my personal freedom, my personal dignity, my personal agency, it doesn't take a fancy professor to tell you that it's probably not going to lead to downstream happiness.
00:21:43.820And so if there is a way for us to free the region from all of these ideological shackles, the potential, the human potential in the Middle East is truly infinite.
00:21:57.860I want to ask you about what you referred to a little bit before, and that is the concept of luxury beliefs that we don't have in Israeli society here, but we see so prevalently on campuses in particular.
00:22:10.120We're at a very interesting time when the threats that face Israel, in fact, do threaten the United States and some of the most powerful, well-armed countries in the world, specifically with the Islamic regime in Iran.
00:22:23.260And I'm wondering how, what your advice would be to speaking to students or community members in the Western world who don't realize that that is a luxury belief they have, that those things aren't going to affect them.
00:22:36.300How do you, how do you show people that this actually is an urgent issue?
00:22:42.780It's one of the great challenges because regrettably, the architecture of the human mind prefers to ignore problems until it really, forgive me for saying, bites you in the ass, right?
00:22:54.820So there is no diabetes until I get diabetes.
00:22:58.740Until then, it's just some abstract disease that's over there.
00:23:02.060Other people get it, but I don't get it.
00:23:04.100Because, look, life is scary, and so it's better to just put your head in the sand, as I explain in the parasitic mind.
00:23:11.920I call it ostrich parasitic syndrome, right?
00:23:31.380This is why I write the books that I do.
00:23:33.100This is why I accept lovely invitations like yours, because I hold out hope that by consistently speaking, I can get people to pay attention before it actually does bite them in the rear end.
00:23:44.640All right, and just for fun, as a last question, if you had to choose one idea pathogen to exile to a remote island where it could do no harm, what would it be?
00:23:56.800I think I know what you're going to choose just based on your earlier answers.
00:23:59.900Would it be postmodernism, DEI and all its associated bureaucracy, or Justin Trudeau?
00:24:06.660Well, I don't know what your answer would be, but if I answer seriously, it would actually be postmodernism, because postmodernism, I refer to it as the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, because it is the framework that allows all of the other parasitic ideas to flourish, because it purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth that there are no objective truths.
00:24:33.160That's what then allows people to say, men are women, up is down, Jews are evil, left is right, slavery is freedom.
00:24:40.920And so it is that nihilistic intellectual terrorism framework of postmodernism that leads to all the others.
00:24:48.940So let's exile that to the island to never be seen again.
00:24:52.940All right, I was going to guess Justin Trudeau, because it incorporates everything.
00:24:56.980But, you know, I'll let you, you made a good case for postmodernism.
00:25:00.100All right, well, we are unfortunately out of time, but I want to thank you so much for joining us today.
00:25:05.780And I want to encourage all of our viewers to go out and purchase actually all of your books.