The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Parasitic Ideas & Suicidal Empathy Are Killing the West - Northwood University (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_783)

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Northwood University monthly webinar series hosted by the Northwood University

00:00:10.120 Alumni Department. My name is Julia Damczyk and I will be your host today. We hope everyone had

00:00:15.940 a wonderful holiday and season and you're enjoying the new year. Today we are very excited to host

00:00:23.520 our very special guest, Dr. Gad Saad, best-selling author and visiting professor at Northwood

00:00:30.140 University. Today he will present for 25 minutes which will allow for around 15 minutes of Q&A.

00:00:38.880 We encourage you to use the Q&A chat box on the bottom of your screen. We'll get to many as many

00:00:45.180 questions as we can today. Today's webinar is also being recorded and we will email out the recording

00:00:52.220 to all participants this afternoon along with a short survey. So we encourage you to check that

00:00:58.760 out as well. Without any further ado, I'd like to introduce our moderator for today, academic vice

00:01:06.080 president and provost of Northwood University, Dr. Kristen Stayhauer. Dr. Stayhauer will introduce,

00:01:13.520 Gad, and moderate the Q&A today. Go ahead, Dr. Stayhauer. Well, thank you, Julie, and welcome to

00:01:20.080 all of you who've joined us for this very dynamic webinar this afternoon. Dr. Gad Saad is a best-selling

00:01:30.120 author and influential public intellectual known for applying evolutionary psychology to consumer

00:01:36.060 behavior. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon and is a survivor of the Lebanese Civil War and he's become

00:01:43.980 a prominent advocate for free speech and critical thinking. In August 2024, Northwood University

00:01:50.500 appointed him as visiting professor and global ambassador for the Northwood idea. His 2020 book,

00:01:57.200 The Parasitic Mind, which is here, which is also our OmniQuest for this year, critiques contemporary

00:02:04.860 academic trends and champions intellectual freedom. Saad has gained widespread recognition through media

00:02:12.600 appearances including the Joe Rogan experience multiple times and has over one million followers

00:02:18.040 on X. A vocal critic of what he sees as ideological conformity in higher education, Saad emphasizes the

00:02:26.360 importance of free speech, scientific method, and individual dignity. His life experiences and academic

00:02:33.040 work have made him a notable voice in discussions about intellectual freedom and cultural discourse.

00:02:39.080 Please join me in welcoming our friend here at Northwood University, Dr. Gad Saad.

00:02:46.520 Thank you so much for this lovely introduction, Kristen. I'm so excited to be here, although I wish

00:02:53.400 the weather, I don't know how it is right now in Midland, but in Montreal, I'm reminded of why I want

00:03:00.200 to leave Montreal. But in any case, I'm very excited to be giving this lecture. So let me start the timer so I

00:03:06.900 can adhere to the 25 minutes. So today's talk is largely on the parasitic mind. But I will also

00:03:12.740 speak very briefly about the book that I'm currently working on, Suicidal Empathy. And let me give you the

00:03:19.300 grand story. So in the parasitic mind, what I was arguing is that our cognitive system, our thought

00:03:26.600 processes could be parasitized by really bad ideas, which I call idea pathogens. And then I complete that

00:03:33.100 story in my next book in Suicidal Empathy, where I argue that our emotional system, right, we're both a

00:03:40.240 thinking and feeling animal. So what happens when both our cognitive system and our emotional system are

00:03:46.380 zombified, not good things happen. So today, I'll spend much of the time on parasitic mind. But I'll, as I said, I will

00:03:54.040 briefly speak about suicidal empathy. Oh, let me just make sure that the thing okay. So how did I come up with this

00:04:02.940 neuroparasitic framework? Well, it turns out that in nature, there are all sorts of interactions

00:04:09.900 between parasites and hosts. So for example, a tapeworm could parasitize your intestinal tract. A

00:04:16.800 neuroparasite, though, is a parasite that goes to the host's brain, altering its behavior to suit the

00:04:25.460 interest of the parasites. So here's some examples of, you know, parasitic relationships in nature.

00:04:32.940 So here you've got a spider wasp that once it stings, the much larger spider, it renders the spider

00:04:43.420 completely zombified. And it could very, very calmly take it to its burrow, it lays its eggs on the spider.

00:04:52.180 And then as the offsprings hatch, they eat the poor spider in vivo. And so for example, I argue that

00:05:00.540 political correctness is exactly akin to the spider wasp sting, right? Quietly and merrily, we go to the

00:05:10.040 abyss of infinite lunacy. Here's another example of a neuroparasite, which can infect, by the way,

00:05:16.540 human brains. But the most classic example is when a mouse is infected by Toxoplasma gondii,

00:05:23.940 it loses its innate and adaptive fear of cats. It actually becomes sexually attracted to the cat's

00:05:31.400 urine, which is not a good attraction to have if you're a mouse. Here's another example of a brain 0.80

00:05:37.300 worm that parasitizes the brains of ungulates, deer, elk, moose. And when that animal is parasitized by

00:05:46.060 this particular neuroparasite, it will engage in all sorts of maladaptive behaviors. It will start

00:05:52.860 doing what's called circling behavior. It bobs its head up and down and circles. Even when the

00:05:58.600 looming predators are coming, it can't extricate itself from that behavior. And so once I saw this

00:06:05.960 framework that is prevalent throughout the animal kingdom, I had the epiphany of, okay, I will use

00:06:12.540 the neuroparasitic framework to argue that human brains can be, if you see here, human brains can be

00:06:21.780 parasitized not only by actual brain worms, but they could be parasitized by ideological brain worms,

00:06:28.840 right? So there are all sorts of pathogens that can affect our health, whether it be bacterium or

00:06:34.460 fungi or viruses or parasites. And so what I do in the parasitic mind is I argue that all of these idea

00:06:42.440 pathogens, postmodernism, radical feminism, social constructivism, cultural relativism, identity

00:06:49.520 politics and so on, each of these dreadfully bad ideas, all of which were spawned on university

00:06:57.480 campuses, and then they proliferated across every nook and cranny of society, they end up zombifying

00:07:07.220 our capacity to engage in reason and common sense and accepting reality. And so what I'll do for much

00:07:14.160 of today's talk is offer examples of some of these parasitic ideas. So here is one parasitic idea that

00:07:22.980 comes from diversity, inclusion, and equity to be contrasted with meritocracy. This is from the

00:07:32.000 University of Waterloo, which is a top Canadian university, very much known for its computer science

00:07:40.160 and engineering degree. So imagine it sort of like the MIT of Canada. In their computer science school,

00:07:49.080 I'm going to read to you what they were specifically looking for, for chaired professors of the highest

00:07:57.280 level. So this is called the NSERC, tier one Canada research chair. So this is the endower of these

00:08:05.340 chairs is the Canadian government. This stands for National Science and Engineering Research Council.

00:08:12.060 So it's the most prestigious chair you can have. There are two positions open for these chaired

00:08:17.780 professorship. And here's what they're looking for. They're looking for a professor in artificial

00:08:23.100 intelligence, but specifically who self-identify as women, transgender, gender fluid, non-binary,

00:08:32.620 or two-spirit. And then for position two, the call is open to all qualified individuals who self-identify

00:08:40.460 as a member of racialized minority. Now I have a undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer

00:08:47.760 science. And to my great shame, I wasn't aware that what I learned in the mid-80s could have been much

00:08:55.740 better informed had I been taught by a professor who was two-spirit or non-binary. This is what happens 1.00

00:09:02.400 when parasitic ideas take over even the esteemed echelon of academia. And in this case, contrary to

00:09:10.580 what people think, no, it's not specific only to some esoteric department in the humanities. This is in

00:09:17.420 mathematics and computer science and in engineering. Here is a case also, by the way, I'm just giving

00:09:25.360 examples from Canada, but it doesn't have to be Canada. I could have pulled out a million examples in

00:09:30.420 the United States, although in Canada, we tend to be a bit more woke than the United States.

00:09:36.640 Here's a professor from University of British Columbia, who was a law professor who repeatedly

00:09:43.160 kept being denied tenure because, you know, she wasn't getting promoted because she wasn't publishing

00:09:50.380 much. A fundamental feature of tenure is that you have to be a productive scholar. But then she is an

00:09:56.220 indigenous woman who filed a complaint saying that within my cultural tradition, we are an oral

00:10:04.000 tradition. And therefore, you know, this thing called writing is contrary to my culture. And rather

00:10:11.600 than laughing her out of town, it actually went to the Human Rights Tribunal under the argument that for

00:10:18.940 her to have published things would have been contrary to her indigenous culture.

00:10:25.900 Here is at what I say at my university, of course, my university today is Northwood University, I mean here

00:10:32.500 my home university. So Concordia University, which is one of the big research universities, 40,000 plus

00:10:40.720 students. Concordia launches a five-year strategic plan, where one of sort of the top mission statement of

00:10:51.500 the five-year strategic plan is to decolonize and indigenize the entire curriculum. So I could be a

00:11:00.900 neuroscientist, I could be a physicist, I could be an accounting professor. Across all curricula,

00:11:08.640 how can you as a instructor or professor or researcher, how can you indigenize your teaching?

00:11:19.100 Well, I, my areas of expertise, as Dr. Kristen mentioned, are in evolutionary psychology, consumer

00:11:27.220 psychology, psychology of decision making, I haven't yet found a way to indigenize those areas.

00:11:33.780 I put this up, I unfortunately probably don't have time to give you the really cool storytelling

00:11:42.380 version of this, but let me, let me, it's become sort of part of the, the lore, the folklore on the

00:11:48.360 internet. It's such a viral story. This is a story that stems from one of my former doctoral students who

00:11:55.220 had just defended his doctoral dissertation. This is in 2002. And then we had gone out to dinner to

00:12:01.040 celebrate. And he warned me that he was bringing a date to that dinner. And that that date was a

00:12:09.980 graduate student in postmodernism, women's studies, and cultural anthropology, to which I answered, 0.99

00:12:17.220 ah, so the holy trinity of bullshit. And so, but the reason why he was warning me is because he knew 0.98

00:12:23.680 that, you know, the conversation can, can go wild. I said, oh no, no, don't worry. Mom's the word. I'm

00:12:29.240 going to be on my best behavior. This is, it's your night to celebrate, which of course was a complete

00:12:34.060 lie because about halfway through the dinner, I turned to this lady in question. I said, oh, you're 1.00

00:12:39.300 a postmodernist. So there are no universal truths, correct? Because by the way, that's the fundamental

00:12:44.900 principle of postmodernism. We know there is no such thing as capital T truth. Everything is shackled by our,

00:12:52.700 our biases, our idiosyncrasies, and so on. And I won't go through the whole story because it will take too

00:12:58.300 long. The first example I gave her was, is it not the case that only in the human context, only women

00:13:05.400 bear children? This is not transgender stuff. This is 2002. This is 23 years ago now. That's why I have 1.00

00:13:12.460 a photo here of Arnold Schwarzenegger being pregnant. I said, so is it not a human, a human universal that

00:13:18.840 only women bear children? And she looked at me, scoffed at my imbecility and said, absolutely not. I said, 0.98

00:13:24.280 how is that? She said, well, because there is a Japanese tribe off some Japanese island whereby

00:13:31.680 within the cultural and folkloric realm, it is the men who bear children. So by you restricting it to

00:13:38.160 biological realm, that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant. And so after I recovered from the 0.99

00:13:43.780 mini stroke that I had at that level of stupidity, I said, okay, well, maybe it's too controversial to, 1.00

00:13:48.880 for me to say that only women bear children. How about the fact that since time immemorial, 0.99

00:13:54.140 only sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Is that

00:14:00.360 not true? And so here she used something called deconstructionism. Language creates reality.

00:14:06.740 She said, well, what do you mean by east and west? And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call

00:14:11.500 the sun, I might call dancing hyena. That's why I have a dancing hyena. I said, well, fine,

00:14:17.900 the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west. She said, well, I don't play those label

00:14:22.920 games. Why do I always refer to that story? Because it perfectly captures what happens to a parasitized 0.98

00:14:30.360 mind. This was a graduate student at one of the leading universities in Canada who wasn't able to find

00:14:37.040 a common place of understanding with me, such that we could agree that only women bear children 0.96

00:14:43.900 in a sexually reproducing species, and that there is such a thing called the sun, the star called the

00:14:49.900 sun. If we can't agree on that, you could then imagine how that could lead us down the abyss of

00:14:56.740 infinite lunacy. Here's another example of two idea pathogens that are closely linked. Social

00:15:04.660 constructivism basically argues that everything is due to a social construction. The human brain is

00:15:11.520 born as an empty mind, tabula rasa, and it's only socialization that then teaches us all of our

00:15:20.100 preferences. So, hey, there are no innate differences between boys and girls, and this is what I call

00:15:27.920 biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs. So, look how progressive this company

00:15:34.400 is. You see the little boy, he's playing with a doll, and the little girl is playing with a gun.

00:15:41.420 Well, that is an actual set of ads. That campaign failed, because universally, boys and girls do have

00:15:51.200 sex-specific toy preferences. And the way that I can prove that, although again, I'm looking here,

00:15:56.100 I'm already halfway through my talks, I'm going to try to go quickly. This is called a

00:16:00.160 pneumological network of cumulative evidence, something that I discuss in this paper and also

00:16:05.560 in chapter 7 of the parasitic mind. I can give you evidence from across cultures, from across time

00:16:14.240 periods, from across species, showing you that those sex-specific patterns happen. So, I can get you data

00:16:21.120 from vervet monkeys, from rhesus monkeys, and from chimpanzees, showing you that little boys in those

00:16:27.840 species have the exact same preferences as little human boys. So, that puts a bit of a damper on the

00:16:35.160 idea that it is all due to social construction. So, there is a way, there is a way by which we can

00:16:40.220 get to a truth by systematically generating a triangulation of distinct lines of evidence.

00:16:48.980 Unfortunately, I don't have the time to go through all this, but that's a very, very powerful way

00:16:53.740 to construct arguments to demonstrate the veridical nature of your position. So, there is a capital

00:17:01.060 T truth that we can get at. Now, that doesn't mean that science does, is not provisional in that what

00:17:07.800 we thought was true 50 years ago, we updated, right? Science is autocorrected, so it's not a revealed truth.

00:17:14.480 It's not, it's true forevermore. But we do operate under the premise that science does have the

00:17:21.720 epistemological capability to seek truth. Postmodernism says, no, that's impossible.

00:17:29.080 All right, let's go on. Here is a, here is how woke enters the area of medicine. This is the actual

00:17:37.200 oath. So, forget about this guy called Hippocrates, where you have to go through the Hippocratic oath.

00:17:43.540 In this one, the students in their white coat ceremony say things like, we will work hard to

00:17:50.560 defeat white supremacy and colonialism and the gender binary, right? Sex, male and female for 0.98

00:17:58.920 sexually reproducing species. These are your future physicians and surgeons. They do a land 0.99

00:18:04.600 acknowledgement. They say that they're going to fight against the binary, antiquated binary,

00:18:09.740 that they're going to incorporate indigenous ways of healing, that Western medicine has been,

00:18:17.320 you know, parasitized. They don't use the word parasitized, but has been taken over by

00:18:21.420 white supremacy and so on, right? They recognize that this thing is happening on Dakota and Ojibwe land

00:18:29.680 and so on. This is medical students taking this oath. They're not taking the Hippocratic oath.

00:18:35.860 So, anyone who thinks that these parasitic ideas are only reserved for, you know, dance theory,

00:18:42.720 feminism classes, no, it's everywhere. Here is your last, your most recent entrant into the U.S. 1.00

00:18:53.820 Supreme Court who didn't have the epistemological security when asked by this senator to define what

00:18:59.920 a woman is. Hey, I don't, I don't know. I'm not a biologist. So, until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion

00:19:08.520 people who had existed on earth were perfectly able to navigate through the very difficult conundrum

00:19:15.540 of what constitutes male or female, but now because we are super progressive and we've got a good U.S.

00:19:22.700 Supreme Court justice here who can't weigh in on what constitutes. She can sit in on cases involving 1.00

00:19:29.200 men and women, but she can't tell with definitive assuredness what a woman is because she's not a 0.88

00:19:36.160 biologist. Here are some interactions. I won't go through all these. Here are some interactions I had

00:19:41.880 with an actual, this is the actual photo of a physician who's an anesthesiologist who chastised me

00:19:49.920 on, on social media for saying that no, men cannot menstruate. And when I referred to some scientific

00:19:59.920 papers that I had published in prestigious journals where I studied how the menstrual cycle affects

00:20:06.320 women's behavior, she said to me, you know, I'm mansplaining her. I don't, I don't have the capacity 1.00

00:20:14.300 as someone who doesn't have female genitalia to weigh in on something as elaborate as the menstrual 0.82

00:20:22.660 cycle. And because she's a physician and I'm not, she's confirming that men do menstruate, unlike

00:20:29.860 my simpleton mind. Here is what we had at Concordia University last year where we held a one-day scientific

00:20:39.380 symposium on menstrual equity because menstruation is a human right. I didn't know that in Canada

00:20:47.700 women were not given equal right to menstruate. So we held a one-day seminar symposium to study how we

00:20:57.560 can have menstrual equity in Canada. This, this is the most prestigious anthropological society in

00:21:07.420 Canada and the United States. They ended up canceling a session with five female anthropologists

00:21:16.640 who wanted to argue that it is very important in anthropology and in archaeology that we not get rid

00:21:24.840 of the binary, meaning male and female. So for example, when you're doing an archaeological dig

00:21:30.080 and you're a physical anthropologist, you can tell if that skeleton is female or male. So

00:21:36.520 it's silly to get rid of this antiquated fixed binary called male and female. That session was 0.98

00:21:44.240 canceled in the anthropological meeting because it was transphobic. Here is three separate physicians.

00:21:53.160 Here they are. Here's their, here are their names who basically said that this woman who happens to have

00:21:58.920 a penis and testicles is absolutely a woman. And they can confirm that because they have the imprimatur 1.00

00:22:06.060 of being specialists. In some cases, they are gynecologists. So gynecologists are confirming

00:22:12.660 that some women who have testicles and penises are indeed women. 0.99

00:22:17.860 Now I'm going to switch just a bit to talk about suicidal empathy and then I'll come back and wrap 1.00

00:22:25.840 it up. I only have five minutes left. I might have to go a bit over. So this, this issue of feelings

00:22:32.220 versus facts goes back to my earlier point about the cognitive system versus the affective system,

00:22:38.400 which speaks to my next book. In my next book, I argue that, look, empathy is a wonderful thing.

00:22:46.200 That's great. Empathy is part of our evolutionary repertoire so that we're able to have human

00:22:54.060 sociality, right? We're a social species. So it makes perfect evolutionary adaptive sense

00:22:59.300 that we have evolved the emotion of empathy. The problem is when empathy misfires, when empathy

00:23:08.480 targets the wrong targets, when it is orgiastically hyper activated, right? So you get the types of

00:23:15.580 inequalities such as illegal immigrants coming from, who are MS-13 gang members from El Salvador,

00:23:23.960 carry more empathy in our hearts and in our compassion than, say, legal citizens or American vets.

00:23:32.620 Criminals are more important than victims. We have to give criminals, never mind a second chance,

00:23:38.280 an 87th chance, because the criminals have already been victimized by a nasty society. So to now put them

00:23:45.380 in prison would be double victimizing them. Squatters, we have to be more empathetic towards them than

00:23:51.900 homeowners. The homeless people, we have to be more empathetic to them than the taxpayers who paid to

00:23:57.520 have parks free of, you know, contaminated needles, and so on and so forth. So what I do in this book

00:24:05.920 is I argue that many of the policies that we see as being today disastrous in the West, so take,

00:24:13.980 for example, the current resurgence of the British grooming gangs. Over 250,000 British white girls

00:24:24.780 were raped by largely Pakistani Muslim men, but the police and the government repeatedly said, 0.99

00:24:33.200 shut up, don't report this, keep your mouth shut, because we need to maintain group cohesion, 0.98

00:24:41.300 we need to maintain community cohesion, and we need to not appear as though we're bigoted and 0.99

00:24:46.880 Islamophobic. So empathy is great, but as Aristotle said, everything is about activating something in 0.94

00:24:55.080 the right amount, at the right place, at the right time, and therefore that's the topic of my next book,

00:25:01.860 what happens when our emotional system is parasitized.

00:25:05.400 The perfect manifestation of both the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy is our noble, almost-to-be

00:25:15.960 ex-leader. He recently stated that he was going to be resigning. Well, we've sat under his parasitized

00:25:23.380 mind for the past nine years. Luckily for you, you haven't had to face someone like that, but

00:25:30.260 be forewarned. It can easily shift. I'm going to skip this because it would take a bit too much time.

00:25:39.140 Here, what I want to talk about very briefly, which is something that, of course, Northwood would

00:25:43.620 understand, building echo chambers where it is construed as anybody who has a deferring opinion

00:25:50.780 from mine as a form of violence is not a good idea. That's not how you train students to be critical

00:25:57.160 thinkers. And here there's a beautiful analogy from evolutionary medicine, right? Your immune system

00:26:03.640 has evolved to be challenged by allergens. So it turns out, by the way, that kids who grow up with

00:26:12.280 allergens in their environment, say pet dander or on a farm, end up having fewer autoimmune diseases,

00:26:19.780 such as asthma, than those who grew up in very sterile environments, precisely because your immune system

00:26:26.820 expects to be challenged in order for it to maximally operate, maximally respond to allergens.

00:26:34.940 Well, now the analogy is that opposing ideas are ideological allergens. I develop better arguments

00:26:44.200 if I'm able to be exposed to counter arguments so I can better hone my arguments. So I don't need to be

00:26:52.220 lecturing about this to Northwood. They've already internalized these ideas within the fabric of their

00:26:59.040 DNA. But of course, most universities are not Northwood. And this argument is particularly apropos

00:27:06.140 for most universities. Now, we are starting to see a shift away from some of this lunacy. But please

00:27:12.720 don't think that just because Donald Trump has come in that all woke stupidity, all suicidal empathy 1.00

00:27:20.060 is going to magically disappear. It took 50 to 100 years for this lunacy to take a foot in all of our 1.00

00:27:27.560 institutions. It will take a while for us to eradicate them. I'm almost done. This simply shows

00:27:33.160 the ratio of male and not male, uh, Republican to conservative professors at American leading universities.

00:27:44.640 108 to 0, 56, these are ratios, 133 to 1, even the, the least biased, which is engineering is still 1.6 to

00:28:00.360 1, which in other areas of science would be a huge effect. But this shows you the extent to which

00:28:07.920 our universities are tilted towards one particular ideological bent. I'm almost done. I try to stick

00:28:16.020 to the 25 minutes. So how do we save our universities? Let me just read these to you.

00:28:22.460 Number one, we pursue knowledge unencumbered by ideological activism. Universities are not there

00:28:28.620 to train activists. They're, they're there to enrich you intellectually. You could study Shakespeare and be

00:28:35.260 enriched. You could study art history and be enriched. You could study pure mathematics, but the goal of a

00:28:41.100 university is not to train little activist warriors. Leave that for some other institution. No knowledge

00:28:48.460 is forbidden if gathered objectively. No more identity politics. No more, you know, collectivism.

00:28:56.540 Celebrate the dignity of the individual. No more oppression Olympics. No more victimology poker and so on.

00:29:01.720 No more coddling of the culture of offense and the ethos of perpetual victimhood. I don't have to

00:29:08.000 indigenize my curriculum, right? I don't try to Lebanese Jewify my curriculum. I'm Lebanese Jewish,

00:29:15.680 right? Evolutionary psychology exists independently of my identity. That's what's beautiful about science.

00:29:23.960 It liberates us from the shackles of our personal identities. Well, not according to my home university,

00:29:29.640 which expects me to indigenize psychology of decision-making. A just society is rooted in the

00:29:36.520 ethos of meritocracy. We are not social ants. The reason why I say this is because social ants are

00:29:42.440 communistic. Social ants have a reproductive queen. They have a bunch of soldier ants and a bunch of

00:29:50.920 worker ants. So they are indistinguishable from each other with one reproductive queen. Well,

00:29:56.460 humans are not that. Some are tall. Some are short. Some are harder working. Some are not harder

00:30:00.780 working. The way you create human dignity is by recognizing the value of the individual. And the

00:30:08.240 way you achieve that is through an ethos of a meritocracy. Promote an ethos of intellectual and

00:30:15.040 political diversity. Nothing is forbidden from scrutiny. All ideas, beliefs, ideologies are open to

00:30:22.840 criticism, debate, mocking, ridicule, and other forms of scrutiny, right? No more speech codes, no hate

00:30:30.340 speech. Now, don't get me wrong. The First Amendment already incorporates certain revisals. You cannot

00:30:37.840 engage in direct incitement to violence. So you cannot say, let's head off to the corner of Broadway and

00:30:44.500 Seventh Avenue. And when the Jews come out of the synagogue, let's beat them up and kill them. But if you 1.00

00:30:50.200 want to say the entire curses of Jewish philosophy is complete garbage, in a free society, you're allowed 1.00

00:30:58.560 to say that. Nothing is sacrosanct. And finally, science, reason, logic, and a commitment to evidence-based 0.99

00:31:05.620 thinking trumps, you know, your preferred ideology, your hurt feelings, and all kinds of fashionable

00:31:11.840 anti-science, faux-intellectual gibberish like postmodernism. I went to 28 minutes. Forgive me. I tried to

00:31:18.580 speak very quickly. I will stop sharing, and I will turn it over to Dr. Kristen to field any questions.

00:31:24.460 Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much, Gad. And I don't know if you can see the

00:31:30.160 reactions, but there's clapping and likes and hearts and all sorts of things floating on the

00:31:36.260 screen in reaction and response to your talk. Wonderful. So thank you for that. And we have a number

00:31:42.060 of very interesting questions asked with a lot of perception. So here's one, and you alluded to this

00:31:49.700 a little bit during your talk. Do you see society correcting itself, and that's in quotes, as things

00:31:55.960 go too far? The recent election in the United States said, we've had enough of the lunacy of woke

00:32:02.060 progressivism. I do, and you're right that I did allude to that, but it's not, you know, it's not

00:32:08.760 Donald Trump comes on his savior white horse, and that's it. There's no longer any polio because

00:32:15.120 we've given the vaccine and polio has effectively, officially been eradicated. No. Someone else will

00:32:24.200 come after Donald Trump, and that person might not be as committed to many of the things that he has

00:32:29.900 autocorrected. So what you need is a eradication of a lot of these ideas forevermore, right? So

00:32:38.700 we need to return to a commitment to individual dignity over identity politics. That has to be

00:32:44.680 a non-starter in a place like the United States or Canada. That's what made the West great, right?

00:32:50.180 That's why Martin Luther King, in his I Have a Dream speech, said exactly that. So no, I don't think

00:32:57.840 that the battle is over, but boy, it's a good first step that Donald Trump won rather than the

00:33:04.060 alternative. So here's another question that has multi-parts, and it gets at some of these dynamics.

00:33:12.760 Does the West stand a chance considering the declining birth rates in Europe, 1.5 children

00:33:19.540 per women, mass migration of young men who are hostile to Christianity in places like Scandinavia,

00:33:25.480 Germany, France, and the UK, welfare that breeds fatherless children, and anti-American government

00:33:31.260 schooling here? What is the most effective antidote to the pervasive misanthropic elitist propaganda

00:33:37.440 pushed on young people by entertainment channels, major corporations, mainstream media, and the public

00:33:43.420 sector? Lots there to unpack, but you can pick which aspects you believe are most germane today.

00:33:52.140 Yeah, so that's a fantastic question. I do tackle things like the declining fertility rate and

00:34:00.040 suicidal empathy. So there is something called the birther movement, which basically, so those folks

00:34:06.860 are so empathetic about Mother Earth. They're so kind, they're so compassionate, unlike all of you

00:34:12.720 degenerates who wish to have children. You know, the most fundamental goal in life for any species,

00:34:18.980 certainly a sexually reproducing species, is to first survive. But if you survive, but then don't

00:34:24.480 reproduce, the genes end with you, right? So life is a two-part game, first survival and then mating,

00:34:31.440 right? That's the whole enchilada. And now imagine if you've got a movement that says, no, no, no,

00:34:37.080 the way that I can aspire to be the best human that I can be is to shut off my reproductive imperative

00:34:44.480 because I want to protect Mother Earth from being raped. So there are all sorts of reasons why many

00:34:51.300 of the things that the question asks are happening, but I do tackle those. And to the point of the

00:34:56.660 question, it's the confluence of all of these craziness, the indoctrination in campuses, the

00:35:03.360 indoctrination in popular culture, the reduced fertility rate across the West. Roughly right now,

00:35:10.540 the replacement rate, I think, is 2.17. In other words, you have to have at least, on average, 2.17

00:35:16.840 children to replace the death, right? Now, if immigration is replacing fertility from the host 0.79

00:35:26.240 society, and exactly to the point of the question, those who are coming in are astoundingly hostile

00:35:33.760 to Western values, then it doesn't take a fancy evolutionary behavioral scientist to predict for you

00:35:39.540 what the long-term trajectory of the society is. That's why I'm not the one who came up with this

00:35:45.320 motto, but demography is destiny is exactly right. This is why you're seeing the kinds of changes and

00:35:54.440 dynamics in the West, for example, when it comes to Jew hatred. For many years after I moved from 0.59

00:36:01.640 Lebanon to the West, whether it be to Canada or to the United States, I experienced very little Jew

00:36:07.680 hatred. And it was wonderful. It was in the rear view of my life. But then recently, I've seen a

00:36:14.680 massive and exponential growth in Jew hatred in general and Jew hatred directed at me. Well,

00:36:20.940 what could explain that? Well, if you let in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people

00:36:26.700 who come from cultures where, according to Pew surveys, right? Pew is a non-partisan survey group.

00:36:34.600 When they sample people from those societies, the percentage of people who report endemic Jew hatred

00:36:44.060 varies from 95 to 99% of polled people. Now, let me step back and explain this. If it were 10% of the

00:36:53.740 polled people, you would say, my God, this is a problem. But one out of 10 people coming in have

00:36:59.040 genocidal Jew hatred as part of their the fabric of their identity. No, it's 95 to 99%. Well, then, 0.95

00:37:06.820 is it so surprising that you have this massive uptake of Jew hatred in the West? My God, what could

00:37:12.940 explain this? So I'm not sure what the I mean, each of these factors has a different solution. I'm trying

00:37:21.560 to work on deeper, deworming the ideological landscape, right? That's my part. We have to

00:37:29.480 convince women and men that no, no, it's okay for you to have children. You're not an evil mother earth

00:37:36.580 rapist because you want to have children. So there are many different multi-pronged approaches. But you

00:37:41.620 are right. If we don't solve this, the death, the death of the West will happen. Now, it won't happen

00:37:46.800 within our lifetime. But inshallah, another 50 or 100 years, we'll be living in a different society.

00:37:55.340 There was a follow up about sharing the source of the survey on anti-Semitism. I'm sure you can do 0.99

00:38:01.420 that because it comes from the Pew. It's 2010, by the way. So if you just enter Jew hatred 2010 Pew,

00:38:10.360 you will get exactly that study. And in fact, there was a question. This is really

00:38:16.580 shifting gears, but did your grad student get a second date with the dancing hyena person?

00:38:25.120 So I don't know if he went on a second date, but I can tell you that he didn't marry her.

00:38:31.680 Let's put it that way.

00:38:34.780 Okay. That individual also asked another question about where and when does the original idea,

00:38:43.220 such as the bite occur that then gets reinforced over time and cognitive bias reinforced?

00:38:52.040 Yeah, great question. So in the parasitic mind, I actually try to address that in the following

00:38:56.600 way. So if you were an oncologist, so a cancer researcher, you might say, okay, well, there are

00:39:03.500 many, many different types of cancers that behave in many different ways.

00:39:07.340 But there is at least one thing that we can agree that all cancers have, which is the unchecked

00:39:15.300 division of cells. So that would be at the most fundamental a similarity across the different

00:39:21.860 cancers. Excuse me. So what I try to do is say, okay, all of these parasitic ideas, whether it be

00:39:28.840 postmodernism or cultural relativism or radical feminism or so on, they're very different.

00:39:35.880 But what unifies them? And so what I came up with is the following. They all start from a noble

00:39:43.140 place. And in the pursuit of that noble goal, if you have to murder truth, so be it. So this is what

00:39:51.340 I call a consequentialist ethic to truth. Whereas I argue that truth should be deontological. Deontological

00:39:58.480 means it's an absolute truth. If you say it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological

00:40:05.300 statement. If you say it's okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, that would be a consequentialist

00:40:10.980 view of truth. Now, so let's take a specific example. Equity feminism is a great idea. It 1.00

00:40:18.000 basically says, hey, there should be no institutional mechanisms by which men and women are not treated

00:40:24.280 equally under the law. Well, based on that definition of feminism, most of us in this Zoom meeting would 1.00

00:40:31.080 say, yeah, yeah, sign me up. I'm an equity feminist. Then the problem comes along where radical feminists 1.00

00:40:37.260 say, well, but in the service of eradicating and squashing the sexist status quo patriarchy,

00:40:46.360 why don't we promulgate the idea that men and women are indistinguishable from each other? That all 0.95

00:40:54.340 differences between men and women must be due to social construction because that could accelerate 0.86

00:41:00.020 our fighting the patriarchy. So in the service of fighting what was originally a noble goal,

00:41:06.400 men and women should be treated equal under the law. If we end up raping and murdering truth in that

00:41:11.560 service, so be it. So that's what is common to all of these idea pathogens. It's a consequentialist

00:41:19.120 perspective on how you handle the truth. So transgender activism does the same thing, 0.68

00:41:25.500 right? We need to make sure that transgender people are treated fairly. Most of us would say,

00:41:32.040 of course, I subscribe to that, but I don't have to from this side of my mouth then say, no, no,

00:41:38.360 but there are no innate biological differences between men and women. So when it comes to athletic

00:41:43.960 competitions, the six foot four, 280 guys called Gary yesterday, who became Linda tomorrow has no innate

00:41:52.020 advantage. That's insane. So that's the general framework by which all of these idea pathogens link

00:42:00.300 up. There are so many more great questions in the Q&A. I can stay longer if you need me to. I know.

00:42:05.820 I'm going to ask one more and we're probably going to have to ask for a quick summary,

00:42:10.260 just a headline out of it. And I'm sure, Gad, that you have made many interested in watching for the

00:42:17.500 release of Suicidal Empathy and also picking up your book, The Parasitic Mind. So here it is.

00:42:24.120 What evidence would you provide to those who argue that the appearance of irrational ideas

00:42:28.620 is typical of a conversation among many different perspectives and may not necessarily indicate a

00:42:35.080 lasting shift away from rational thinking? I'm not sure I follow the key gist of this.

00:42:42.220 Do you want to? Yeah. So I think they're asking, is this just dialogue and debate or is this actually

00:42:48.420 a shift away from rational thinking? No, because what for so, for example, postmodernism, which I call

00:42:54.580 the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas is not just a shift. It's not half empty, half full. It's that's

00:43:01.280 why I call it intellectual terrorism, right? The 9-11 hijackers took a bunch of planes and they flew

00:43:08.340 them onto buildings. Well, what postmodernists do is they fly planes of intellectual terrorism on our

00:43:19.980 edifices of reason. Because if we can't agree that only women bear children, and if we can't agree that 0.95

00:43:27.580 there is a thing called east and west and that there is the sun that goes from the east and sets

00:43:33.060 in the west, then that's not a shift in perspective. Shift in perspective is what are the pros and cons

00:43:40.160 of having the death penalty? There are very good arguments on both sides of that equation, but this

00:43:45.300 is much more than that. That's why they're parasitic ideas, right? They drive us off the abyss, I mean,

00:43:53.140 off the cliff into the abyss of irrational lunacy. Thank you so much. It's unfortunately, it's time

00:44:01.220 to wrap right now. Gad, as always, thought-provoking, enlightening. We appreciate you very much.

00:44:08.980 Thank you so much. Happy New Year to all, and I'll toss it over to Julia Damczyk to wrap things up.

00:44:14.500 Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Stayhower, for moderating, and

00:44:19.020 Gad for that amazing, enlightening presentation. Can't wait for your next book to be out.

00:44:27.600 Reminder that we're going to be emailing this out to everyone, the recording and the slides,

00:44:32.320 and we'll have a short survey, so please do take that short survey for us, and we hope to see you

00:44:37.560 next month. We do a webinar monthly, and next month it'll be on February 6th, where our special

00:44:43.120 guest will be certified health and wellness coach, Alina Warner. Thanks again, everyone, for joining

00:44:48.940 us today, and have a great afternoon. Thanks, everybody. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - January 13, 2025

Parasitic Ideas & Suicidal Empathy Are Killing the West - Northwood University (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_783)

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