Wokeness is a Mind Disease but it Can be Beaten-Full Comment with Brian Lilley (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_712)
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Summary
Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador for Northwood University, and he joins me today to talk about his new book, The Parasite Mind, and why it s still a bestseller four years after it was published.
Transcript
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If you look around our society today and you think things just aren't right, well, you're
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not alone. Western societies around the world are changing dramatically and often not for
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the better. We are becoming less tolerant in the name of tolerance. We are adopting
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and accepting ideas that actually eat away at the foundations of a Western liberal democracy.
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Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and today
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our guest is Gad Saad, an academic and intellectual in the best sense of those words and someone
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who many of us have seen document the very issues and concerns that we're going to talk
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about today on his popular YouTube channel, on Joe Rogan Podcast and elsewhere, as well
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as in his bestselling books. Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador
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for Northwood University, and he joins me today. Gad, thanks for the time.
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Oh, I'm so glad to be with you, Brian. Thanks for having me.
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I want to open with a quote that I grabbed off the back of your bestselling book and recently
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became a bestseller again, and we'll talk about that. But I grabbed this off the back
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dust cover, and I want to read it to you and have you react. And tell me if you still feel
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the same way. The back of the book, and I don't think this was you writing it, this is the
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publisher's promotional bit, but it's kind of summarized a lot of what you wrote about
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in the book. It said, the West's commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has
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never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political
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correctness. Now, that's from a book in 2020. In 2020, you said we had never been under more
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Do you still feel that way, or has it gotten worse? Could you have imagined how bad it would
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I was trying to think where you were, I was trying to predict where you were going with
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this. No, it's, I guess one of the ways I could answer your question is saying that
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the book is still selling like hotcakes, which suggests that what I hoped would be the final
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mind vaccine and inoculation against all this nonsense has apparently not sufficiently worked
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because we are still facing the same issues, if not those issues having been exacerbated.
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So the book remains timely precisely because the phoenix of woke parasitic ideas keeps rising
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from the ashes, despite the fact that I keep hitting it.
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Well, over the summer, as I said, it came out 2020. I think the paperback early 2021.
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But this summer, you got a big endorsement. And I don't think you'd seen it yet. Elon Musk goes on
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X and, and says, you must read this book. And I sent you a message. And I said, I just said,
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how are sales going? And you hadn't seen it. I'm guessing they took off just after that.
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They did. Now that just to, if I may correct you, it's, it wasn't the first time that he had
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endorsed my book. He's been a fan of my work and of the, of the parasitic mind for a long time,
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but that specific post, I shouldn't say tweet that particular post. You are correct that you were
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the first one to bring it to my attention. I said, Oh, let me go check. And, uh, you are indeed
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correct that there is, I mean, more importantly than the Oprah bump, I think we need to revise our
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lexicon to the Musk bump because the book then entered two weeks in a row. I, I think it was the
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Toronto star, uh, Canadian bestseller list. So you're exactly right. A book that was a bestseller
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four years ago, returned to the bestsellers list four years later. Well, very well done. Walk us
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through, uh, the parasitic mind because there's been a lot of talk about that. I know that Musk has been
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a fan of your work and of the book, and he talks about the woke mind virus, and that can sound like
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it's, you know, sloganeering, it's jingoistic, a parasitic mind. Oh, but what is that? Yeah.
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So that's a great question. So let me give you sort of the background of how I developed the idea
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and then link it to the neuro parasitological framework. So the first time that I had sort
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of a Houston, we have a problem, uh, moment was in my scientific work. So for those listeners and
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viewers that are not familiar with my work, I apply evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology
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to study consumer behavior, economic. And you've written books on this. I've written many books.
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So yes, the consuming instinct right here, the evolutionary basis of consumption. This is an
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edited book. You've looked at how we react and interact with goods and why we purchase certain
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brands. And you've looked at that before that that's where you came out of before you got as
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politically as you are now. Right. But I was looking at the biological and Darwinian underpinnings
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of our consuming instinct, right? So for example, how do our hormones affect our food behavior? How do
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our hormones, you know, does a man's testosterone increase if he is using a, you know, driving a Porsche?
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I've literally done those studies. How does a woman's men's... It does. As a matter of fact,
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well, so I did a study with one of my former graduate students and I'll, I'll come back to
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the parasitic mind in a second. Uh, in 2009, I published a paper with, uh, John Vungas, who was
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one of my former graduate students, where we actually got men to not imagine driving a Porsche.
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We actually rented, try to get a scientific granting agency to give you money to rent a Porsche for science.
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So we rented a Porsche and we had a beaten up old car. So one is a high status product. One is a low
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status product. And we had young men drive these two cars, uh, either in downtown Montreal, where,
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where everybody can see you and on a semi deserted highway where few people could see you. And the
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dependent measure was we took salivary assays so that we could measure the fluctuation, the fluctuating
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levels of their testosterone, because, and actually that's a good segue to eventually answering your
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parasitic mind question. So one of the things that I do as an evolutionary psychologist is I
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look at the behavior of other animals to draw homologies and analogies with human behavior.
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So for example, the peacock, right, has evolved this big, beautiful tail that's otherwise very
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cumbersome and costly, right? It's from a survival perspective, that peacock's tail is costly.
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It increases your chances of predation, but the reason why it evolves, it does so through sexual
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selection, meaning that it confers a reproductive advantage to the peacock in exhibiting that signal.
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So I took that idea and I said, well, surely human beings engage in sexual signaling and I'm going to
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study it in the context of consumer behavior. And that's how I came up with the idea of studying it
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using Porsche. So the Porsche is the human equivalent of the peacock's tail. So coming back now to the
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parasitic mind, so I realized early in my career that what seemed profoundly obvious to me, which is
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that human beings are biological beings. And therefore, if we want to study consumer behavior
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perfectly and completely, we need to study the biological forces that compel us to be the consumers
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that we are. Well, that was complete crazy quackery. It was neo-Nazism, according to many of my social
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scientist colleagues and business school professor colleagues. And so right there, I said, well,
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this is strange. How could otherwise supposedly sophisticated, intelligent, intellectual professors
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be such imbeciles? So that was my first exposure to how ideology can cause you to have completely
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irrational thoughts. So that was nearly 30 years ago. And then as my academic career progressed,
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I saw the infiltration, the proliferation of these, what I call parasitic idea pathogens. But why do I use
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the framework to your very specific question? Why do I use the framework of parasitology? So in the animal
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kingdom, including humans, there is the field of parasitology, which studies how parasites interact
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with holes. So for example, the tapeworm goes into your intestinal tract, but a neuroparasite ends up in
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your brain, altering your circuitry to suit its reproductive interest. And therefore, I had my aha moment.
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I would then argue in the parasitic mind that not only can human beings be parasitized by actual physical
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brain worms, like toxoplasma gondii, but they could be parasitized by ideological brain worms,
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and hence my neuroparasithological framework. And what are some examples of these parasitic ideas?
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Postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism. Each of these
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parasitic ideas destroy the capacity of the infected person to think rationally. And so I go through all of
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these parasitic ideas, and then I offer a mind vaccine at the end of the book.
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You know, as I'm thinking about, you know, cultural relativism, I was just trying to look up her name,
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the Iranian dissident who lives in New York. She's had her life threatened. I'm sure you've seen her
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work. It just reminds escaping me now. And she's talked about that recently, about how we've got
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people in the Western world declaring themselves feminists. But they won't speak up for the women
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of Iran, who are being oppressed. They are fully on board with Hamas and Gaza and denouncing Israel,
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which is a state that actually puts these things forward. I said off the top, we have become
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less tolerant in the name of tolerance. Is that one of the parasitic ideas that you deal with?
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Oh, absolutely. Look, so cultural relativism was an idea that was first espoused by an anthropologist
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by the name of Franz Boas. And he wanted to create a new worldview of human behavior that abdicated
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biology as being relevant to the study of human behavior. In other words, because a whole bunch of
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bad folks had misused Darwinian theory. So for example, British class elitists argued that, well,
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it's a natural struggle between the classes. We're the upper class. If the lower class has to die from
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a pandemic of tuberculosis, and if they live in squalor and they all die out, well, that's just
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Darwinian. It's just the natural struggle between classes. The Nazis came along and said, hey, it's a
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natural struggle between the races. We are the Aryans. Sorry, gypsies. Sorry, homosexuals. Sorry, Jews.
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It's time for you to go. Hey, that's just Darwinian. Now, of course, it had nothing to do with Darwinian
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theory. But because all sorts of political cretins were misappropriating evolutionary theory, some
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idiotic professors, as often happens the case, said, hey, why don't we create a new worldview of
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humanity that completely abdicates biology and evolutionary theory being relevant to human beings?
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Therefore, cultural relativism does exactly that because it says that there is no universal human
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nature. There are no universal objective moral truths. Every culture has to be judged based on the
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idiosyncrasies of its own cultural trajectory. Therefore, who are you, Brian, white guy, Canadian
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imperialist racist, to tell us that the cutting off of clitorises of five-year-old girls is a bad idea?
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That's cultural imperialism. And that's, by the way, exactly what, since this is a Canadian show,
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so let's link it to Justin Trudeau. If you remember, when Justin Trudeau was a parliamentarian,
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before he became prime minister, Stephen Harper's government had released a sort of an edict or a
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pamphlet saying, look, we do not condone barbaric practices like female genital mutilation,
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child brides, honor killings in Canada. And if you remember, in a very theatrical and obnoxious,
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bombastic way, Justin Trudeau got on TV and kind of huffed and puffed and moved his hair and said,
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you know, I will not tolerate that these things be called barbaric.
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Yeah, he was upset at the use of barbaric, not the barbaric practices.
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Exactly. Well, what allowed him to have the goal to do that is precisely cultural relativism. Who are
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you to judge what others do? No, no, no. I will judge. There is no context under which cutting off
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the clitorises of little girls so that they could never experience fully the joys of intimacy is ever
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a good thing. So each of those parasitic ideas, Brian, started off in a university setting for a
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noble cause, right? So in a sense, I'm being charitable here. It's not as though the people
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who espouse and spawn these ideas say, let's just destroy the edifices of reason just for fun. They
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usually start off with a noble reflex, but then in the service of that noble reflex, if we have to
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murder and rape truth, so be it. I remember a colleague going back years ago, I was in radio
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in Ottawa, and he made a comment that there was objective truth. And there were a pile of other
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people in the newsroom that couldn't believe that he said that. And they said, no, there is no truth.
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There's only your truth and my truth. And he said, well, no, but there has to be a truth that we can
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have our views, we can have our opinions. But there, I mean, beyond cultural relativism,
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there is a desire to say there is no truth anymore. And right, that's beautiful. That's a
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beautiful setup for my next anecdote. Maybe some of the viewers and listeners have heard it, but even
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if they have, it's worth hearing it again. And for those who've never heard it, fasten your seatbelts.
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So the reason why I call postmodernism the granddaddy of all idea pathogens is precisely because that's the
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root parasitic ideas from which all of the other parasitic ideas can flourish. If we can espouse the
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idea that there are absolutely no objective truths, then you're not constrained by your genitalia when it
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comes to your biological sex. Who are you to say what constitutes male or female? As the most recent
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addition to the Supreme Court, when she was being confirmed and asked, what is a woman? She said,
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well, I'm not a biologist. Well, until 15 minutes ago, until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people
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that had existed on earth were perfectly able to navigate through the very complex conundrum of what
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constitutes male or female. But she wasn't able to say it. Did you see the the head of the
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International Olympic Committee? Yes. He was at a news conference. And of course, there was all the
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debate about the women's boxing and where their biological males in it wasn't, you know, they did
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not handle it well. They could have settled all the debate by being upfront and honest. So one of the
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journalists just asked a very relevant question, will you handle this better next time? Will you find
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ways of talking to the public and and and being upfront with them so that there isn't this controversy
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around sex? And he said, there is no scientific way to determine what is a man and what is a woman.
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Absolutely. This is the head of one of our biggest global bodies.
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Well, I was fortunate enough when I chose what I thought was a woman to start my family. And then
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we ended up having children. It's by the complete, complete vagaries of stochastic life that I ended
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up because I could have easily chosen a woman with a nine inch penis to have children with.
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But luckily, I came out on the right side. But just so that I don't leave your viewers and
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listeners hanging, can I go back to telling? Yeah, go back to your story. Yeah. So the best way to
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describe what a cancerous form of intellectual terrorism, postmodernism is, to your point about
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your colleagues who were saying, what is this? There is no objective truth. In 2002, one of my
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doctoral students had just defended his dissertation. So we were going out to celebrate. And have you
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heard this story before? No. Okay. So I'm glad because it's always exciting when someone hears it
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for the first time. So we were going out for a celebratory dinner, myself, my wife, my doctoral
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student, and he was bringing a date with him. So a few hours before the date, before the dinner,
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he calls me up and he says, oh, I just wanted to give you a heads up that the lady that I'm bringing
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for the dinner is a graduate student in anthropology, postmodernism, and women's studies. And I said,
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ah, okay, so the holy trinity of bullshit. And so, but of course, the reason why he was calling me to
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say this is like, let, you know, please, can we not get into this big, you know, I said, oh, no, no,
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I got you. I'm going to be on my best behavior. Mom's the word. I'm going to be good, which of course
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was a complete and utter lie, because about halfway through the evening, I turned to the lady and I say,
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oh, I, I hear that, you know, you're, you're a graduate student in postmodernism. Yes. Oh, so there are
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no objective truths, of course, other than the one objective truth that there are no objective
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truths, but nevermind that internal cognitive inconsistency. Do you mind if I propose what I
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think are universal truths and then we can discuss it and you can tell me how I'm, I'm wrong. She
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says, yes, go for it. Now this is 2002. So this is way before the transgender stuff. This is 22 years
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ago. I said, is it not true that within Homo sapiens, humans, that only women bear children?
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She looks at me, can't believe at what a simpleton I am and says, that's absolutely not true. I said,
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oh, what do you mean? How is that? How is that? She goes, oh, because there is some Japanese tribe
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on some Japanese island whereby within their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear the
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children. So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us,
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you know, whatever, barefoot and pregnant. So after I recovered from the mini stroke I had at
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listening to such gibberish, I then said, okay, well, you know what? Maybe it was too controversial,
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too incendiary for me to mention something as controversial as only women bear children. So
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let me give you another example. And then let's see if we can agree on this one. She goes, yeah,
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go for it. I said, is it not true since time immemorial that sailors have relied on the premise
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that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? And there she used a variant, Brian, of
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postmodernism. It's called deconstructionism. It's Jacques Derrida. Language creates reality.
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So she said, what do you mean by east and west? And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call
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the sun, I might call dancing hyena. Exact words. I said, well, fine. The dancing hyena rises in the
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east and sets in the west. She goes, I don't play those label games. Now that became known. It's not
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part of the lore of the internet, the dancing hyena story. Why do I always recount that story
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is because it perfectly captures what happens to a graduate student at a leading, arguably the leading
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Canadian university who is parasitized by postmodernism. If she can't sit at a dinner
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and agree on the fact that women bear children and that there is such a thing as east and west
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and the sun. And the sun. What can we do? Like, where can we go from there? It's a Darwinian
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epistemological dead end. There is no value to postmodernism, right? So that gives you a
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sense of why I wrote the parasitic mind, because yes, universities can be wonderful places, but they
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can also be where reason goes to die. But OK, so these ideas start in the university. Yes, sir. They
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don't stay there. It's not like a, you know, a bad weekend in Vegas. It doesn't stay in Vegas. It comes
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back with you like a venereal disease from Vegas and it infects everybody. This talk about how that has an
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impact on on the wider society, because Western liberal democracies, I think we're going pretty well. We, you
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know, we had elevated society. Um, and now we seem to be going backwards. And so how do these ideas that
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infect the minds of just academics at the start undermine our entire society? I love that you set
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up the question that way, because one of the most frequent blowback that I would receive early in my
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career as I was standing on top of the mountain warning people is, oh, come on, Dr. Saad, why are you
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exaggerating? So there is some esoteric department in the humanities that is promulgating these ideas.
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So what? It's not going to make it to medicine. It's not going to make it to mathematics. It's not
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going to make it to the business school. I said, no, exactly to your point. I said, the virus
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eventually breaks free from the lab, as we think we know with the lab leak theory of COVID. So yes,
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you're right that the dreadful parasitic idea starts off in some nonsensical department in the,
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in the humanities, but it doesn't stay there. You know what it becomes eventually? It becomes the
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prime minister of Canada, right? So you're exactly right. Bad ideas don't have a geographical
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limitation. That's what makes them so dangerous. That's why I repeatedly say in my social media
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engagement, and earlier you mentioned Elon Musk, he completely agrees with me. We've had
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private conversations where we've confirmed this to each other, where there is nothing more dangerous
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in, on earth than a parasitized mind. Yes, a tsunami can cause great devastation, but that's a quote,
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act of God. But most of the tragedies that are imparted throughout human history start off with a bad
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idea, right? There is a little Austrian guy with a small mustache who said, Hey, you know what the
00:24:20.980
big problem in, in our culture is? It's the cancerous parasitic Jew. And if we only excise that
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from our society, then we will all live in a utopia. And a bunch of people said, yeah, that sounds like
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a great idea, Adolf. So, so, so to your point, that's why I stood up and kept screaming and screaming,
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because I knew that those ideas were going to eventually escape and become our journalists,
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our pop culture, our actors, our prime ministers. And so, yeah, that's, that's what happens when bad
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ideas infect entire societies. Gad, before we jump back into the conversation about parasitic ideas and
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how they don't just stay in the sociology department somewhere, you've got a new title,
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you're visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwoods University. I don't know Northwoods
00:25:14.560
University. Give me a, give me your elevator sales pitch on this. What are you doing there? What, what,
00:25:19.780
tell me about this change? Yeah. So, uh, I was approached by the president of Northwood
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University there in a, apparently I, I haven't yet gone in person. I will be going soon in person to,
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to meet the folks, uh, there in Midland, uh, Michigan. He approached me and said, look, we're,
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we're big fans of your scientific work. And of course you're free thinking. Uh, we are known as
00:25:42.800
the free enterprise university. So their entire, you know, ethos is rooted in freedom and we would
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love to see if we can, uh, work together. And so in, in all frankness, I had never heard of,
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uh, Northwood either, but boy, am I glad that I now have, because, uh, you know, it's, it's really,
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we're all human beings. And so we'd like to say that, you know, Hey, I, nothing phases me and so
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on, but you also want to be at a place that shares your, uh, general sense of how a university should
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be run that is not infested with parasitic ideas. And so it's been very, very refreshing for me in the,
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in the few weeks that since I've joined them to be able to interact with people, you know, who I
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don't have to discuss whether the sun exists or not, or whether it's called dancing hyena or not,
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or I don't have to do land acknowledgements before saying hello. And I don't have to submit a diversity
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inclusion and equity statement before I apply for a grant. So it's been very, very liberating. And I
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really look forward to my visiting professorship there. Well, let me know how, uh, Midland,
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Michigan is, um, beautiful part of the, uh, the, I haven't stopped in Midland, but I love that the
00:27:00.200
area of that, um, part of the state that it's in. So I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Uh, and go in the fall
00:27:05.580
because, you know, campus is in the fall. There's just something picturesque about it.
00:27:10.640
That's exactly what the president told me, by the way, he said, we want to get you here before
00:27:14.360
winter breaks precisely for the reasons that you said. So we were talking about parasitic ideas.
00:27:21.580
We were talking about how, uh, they don't just stay in the sociology department. And I want to
00:27:28.520
give you one glaring example. Uh, and then, you know, we can move from there into what happened to,
00:27:34.400
uh, Jordan Peterson and the college of psychologists a little while ago, but this is, this is actually
00:27:40.900
from, uh, one of the organizations that determines, uh, uh, how doctors are trained in this country.
00:27:48.800
The Royal college of physicians and surgeons of Canada put out a notice a little while ago that
00:27:54.800
they want to change how medicine is taught and practiced. And it said, quote, a new model of
00:28:01.720
can meds would seek to center values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism and social justice
00:28:09.480
rather than medical expertise. I don't give a flying, you know, what about my doctor's political
00:28:17.080
views. I want to know, are they competent? My, my GP, I happen to be friends with, and we share
00:28:23.040
political views, but I really don't care when I'm being treated medically, how they view, uh, you know,
00:28:29.580
the state of Canadian politics or what have you, I want to know, are they competent? And these guys
00:28:34.120
want to put everything else ahead of competence. Yeah, that's, uh, I've, I've actually weighed in on
00:28:39.480
that exact new training of Canadian physicians. Look, there, there are certain professions and
00:28:46.420
certain bodies, the FBI judicial system, the medical associations that should transcend politics,
00:28:57.360
right? I mean, that's right. The Hippocratic oath should be first do no harm. Now, of course,
00:29:04.220
the woke physicians will say, but no, we are doing no harm by teaching you about anti-oppression. No
00:29:10.320
nonsense, right? If anti-oppression comes before your ability as a physician to perform an operation,
00:29:19.760
you're doing harm. You're exactly right. All right. So look, uh, I mean, that issue arises not only
00:29:27.320
in, you know, at that, you know, with physicians, it starts at the first point where, for example,
00:29:34.800
they're now arguing that the grading of physicians when they're in medical school creates undue
00:29:43.460
pressures and stress on physicians. And therefore we should move to a more empathetic pass fail system
00:29:53.660
so that people are not competing against each other and worried. Guess what? I want my emergency
00:29:59.880
room physician who by definition is facing some of the most stressful moments where this, the decision
00:30:07.460
tree that he or she follows over the next five minutes will cause that child to either die or not.
00:30:13.900
I want them to have been exposed to stressors, right? Seneca and in my, in the happiness book,
00:30:20.700
I talk about anti-fragility, which is a term that was coined by a fellow Lebanese Nassim Talib,
00:30:26.640
right? Seneca, the ancient, uh, philosopher Stoic said, I'm paraphrasing that the strongest trees
00:30:34.680
are those that have been exposed to a lot of wind stressor. Therefore their bark and their roots
00:30:42.040
are stronger. The trees that haven't been exposed to wind stressors end up being brittle and they
00:30:47.420
break and they, they, right? So let's apply that, the concept of the wind stressor to your physician.
00:30:54.100
Do you not want them to have faced stressors so that they can be trained to deal with stress?
00:30:59.420
So not only are you infusing to your, to your original question, all of this woke nonsense in the
00:31:06.420
practice of medicine, but just in the original training of physicians, you're incorporating this
00:31:12.500
very loving, I love you. You love me. We all win trophies. No, we don't. I want the physician to have
00:31:20.600
suffered during medical school because that makes them anti-fragile.
00:31:27.140
At the medical school level, here's just a couple of things. This is from, uh, uh, my colleague, uh,
00:31:33.060
uh, uh, Jamie, uh, Sarkinak at a national post. She writes about the university of Calgary created
00:31:39.120
a special admissions pathway for black students, entitling applicants to have their admission
00:31:44.140
essays evaluated by non-white assessors. McGill, the university of, uh, Alberta and Dalhousie
00:31:50.680
have all done the same, uh, and similar routes are being opened up for indigenous students.
00:31:55.880
Uh, I'm all for having diversity in terms of who's getting into medical school,
00:32:01.640
but it is an insult to indigenous and black students to say, well, you should be held to a
00:32:08.620
lower standard. Indeed. I mean, it's, it's, it's simply, isn't it, do you wake up in the morning,
00:32:15.220
Brian, and say, I simply, I mean, I wrote the parasitic mind and I don't cease to be amazed every
00:32:21.680
day at the level of collective lunacy that we are seeing. It's really breathtaking, right? Because
00:32:27.980
you'd like to think that there's, there are certain ideas that were defeated. Let's say
00:32:32.880
judging people based on immutable traits. We call that racism. We call that bigotry. And we did a
00:32:39.900
great job over the past 100 years to remove those systematic barriers, right? And of course that speaks
00:32:46.400
to, I know you know this, but maybe some of your listeners and viewers don't, the distinction between
00:32:51.760
equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes, which of course the current contender for the
00:32:57.280
presidency of the United States, Kamala Harris doesn't seem to understand that difference, right?
00:33:01.220
She believes that to the extent that there is any differences across people in terms of the,
00:33:08.640
in terms of outcomes, it must be a nefarious cause that created that difference. And therefore we need
00:33:16.580
to fix that so that we all end up at the same final place. I mean, those are literally almost her
00:33:21.940
identical words. You know, what creates equality of outcomes, socialism and communism, right?
00:33:28.120
But yeah, we all end up poorer and more. We all end up poor. We all end up at the same breadline.
00:33:33.720
We all end up as, as hungry as each other. We all end up dying of famine together, equally dead from
00:33:41.040
the famine as Lysenkoism showed during the Soviet union era, right? Because the argument there is,
00:33:48.240
there are fewer women who are professors of mathematics at Brown university. Aha. That's
00:33:55.960
where the part that the patriarchy is demonstrating its machinations, but it never goes the other way.
00:34:03.580
When I was a kid, there were a lot more men as teachers. Elementary schools are 85 to 90% women as
00:34:13.880
teachers. Um, you always found more men in high school teaching positions, but even that is
00:34:19.200
shrinking. Uh, there were fewer men in nursing. Uh, nobody says we've got to get more men into
00:34:24.480
these professions. Yeah. Well, not only that, Brian, once the patterns of the, of the narrative
00:34:33.220
of oppression is no longer present, people don't adjust their prior. So let me explain that. That
00:34:39.680
sounded like a lot of fancy talk. So let me break it down into a concrete example. There used to be a
00:34:44.820
time where women were discriminated from entering veterinarian school and from entering medical
00:34:51.600
school and entering. When my mother came here in 1968, she had been working on computers in the UK.
00:34:58.000
She got to Canada and was told only ladies can't do that job. I'm not, uh, you know, I'll never say
00:35:03.400
there was not discrimination and oppression and things to change, but we've got a weird view of it.
00:35:08.540
So now let's fast forward to today. So I would, I would receive at my university, endless emails.
00:35:15.140
You know, how are you going to be an ally to women? What's your contribution to allyship to women?
00:35:20.620
As if the email was happening while we all lived in Waziristan and the tribal territories of Pakistan.
00:35:27.940
Now let me draw the line of what the current data shows. So this is from U.S. data, U.S. government
00:35:36.520
data, looking at four levels of educational attainment. So in the U.S. you have what's
00:35:42.560
called an associate's degree, which is like half a bachelor's, imagine like community college.
00:35:47.840
So there's associate's degree, bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctoral degree. So there are
00:35:53.600
four levels of educational attainment across five racial groups, whatever, uh, Hispanic, white,
00:36:00.940
black, and whatever. So there are five. So, so the matrix is a four by five matrix. Okay. In each of
00:36:08.280
those cells, the government has provided the ratio of male to female, right? So let's assume we were
00:36:18.460
the time when your mother came, or let's go further back to make, to go back to when there was real
00:36:24.360
full on orgiastic discrimination. 20 out of the 20 cells would have shown that men outnumber women in
00:36:32.660
each of the 20 cells. Yeah. Guess what the current data was? Go give it to me, Brian. Oh, it's all women.
00:36:38.900
20 out of 20 cells, women outnumbered men. So let, let me, I get, I'm not trying to talk down to your
00:36:47.720
audience, but it's important to, to explain. Meaning that I couldn't make up data that were,
00:36:55.420
that was more of a falsification of the narrative that women are being held back in universities.
00:37:02.860
Therefore it offends me as a professor of 30 years to receive an email of how are you going to be a
00:37:10.980
better ally to women? My Dean is a woman. This is at my home university. My chair is a woman. The
00:37:17.420
associate Dean of research is a woman, but yet I'm being sent emails as if I lived in Waziristan,
00:37:23.200
Pakistan. That's the dishonesty of the woke narrative, which is it is impervious to incoming new data that
00:37:31.660
the victimhood narrative must persist. La, la, la. I don't want to hear of any progress.
00:37:38.420
What's the anecdote. Is there an anecdote? I mean, I know you've got anecdotes in your,
00:37:45.260
or antidotes, sorry, I'm saying anecdotes. What's the antidote. I'll learn to speak one day.
00:37:50.720
English is my second language, I guess, after Glaswegian. The, you know, how do we cure this?
00:37:56.920
You put the book out four years ago. It hasn't worked, God. Well, I'd like to say. Give me some
00:38:02.820
little work. I mean, it has worked in the sense that I receive, I mean, literally receive
00:38:10.720
thousands of emails from people saying I was the biggest blue haired wokester possible. Then I
00:38:19.580
read your book. I started consuming your content. Thank you so much. So, so in the grand scheme of
00:38:26.620
things, I haven't been able to administer the vaccine and all stupidity has ceased to exist.
00:38:32.420
And I don't think any mind vaccine could ever do that because regrettably, I think the architecture
00:38:37.940
of the human mind is built to be parasitized. The only thing that's unique about the current period
00:38:44.180
are the specific idea pathogens that we are now seeing, right? Cultural relativism was not an idea
00:38:51.620
pathogen 500 years ago, but there were other idea pathogens then, right?
00:38:56.660
You look, look back to the 1930s. They thought eugenics was great. Even, even Tommy Douglas did his,
00:39:03.340
um, his thesis on, you know, sainted Tommy Douglas did his thesis on eugenics in favor of it.
00:39:11.420
So yeah, bad ideas have been around a long time.
00:39:13.300
So bad ideas are around. Regrettably, there's always an allure to these bad ideas so that they
00:39:20.540
can quickly infect and parasitize many human minds. There was a time where we threw women into the
00:39:26.540
water and if they swam, they were witches. And if they didn't and drowned, then oops, I guess they
00:39:32.560
weren't witches. And people thought that that was a great test to do. That was a diagnostic test to
00:39:38.420
determine whether my neighbor, Angela was a witch or not. Right. So we've done that to Dr. Jordan
00:39:45.200
Peterson. By the way, in the water, he swam. So we must be a witch and he's got to go to a
00:39:51.460
reeducation camp. Have you seen the clip, the satirical clip that I released where I feigned
00:39:58.720
that the Ontario college of psychologists has had declared me as his reeducation mentor. Have you seen
00:40:06.080
that clip? I mean, that that's now I think my second or third most viewed clip of all of my
00:40:12.400
clips. So this demonstrates to you, by the way, the power of satire, sarcasm and humor, right? Because
00:40:19.440
the dictators don't usually eliminate the guys with the big muscles because we can handle those
00:40:27.900
because we own all the guns. I'm speaking not if I were the dictator, the guys that really are
00:40:32.640
dangerous to me as a dictator are the guys with the sharp tongues, the guys with the sharp pen. Those
00:40:38.720
are the bastards that I have to eliminate. So the satirist is the biggest danger to the dictator. We
00:40:44.700
have, he goes first to the chopping blocks. So oftentimes I will get some smarmy, obnoxious
00:40:50.600
professor that I'm talking to who tells me, oh, but you know, aren't you demeaning your professorial,
00:40:56.560
you know, image when you do all of that satirical stuff? I say absolutely not because I'm in the game
00:41:04.380
of trying to persuade people to better think. I will use any weaponry within my arsenal of weapons
00:41:11.260
to try to achieve that goal. Sometimes I will be professorial. Sometimes I will be scientific.
00:41:17.080
Sometimes I will be satirical. All bets are off when it comes to trying to change human minds.
00:41:23.120
Well, we're seeing in the United Kingdom what we're worried about here. And this is something
00:41:29.600
that Elon Musk is fighting back against. He has definitely turned Twitter now X around in terms of
00:41:37.320
being a place for free speech. We just had Mark Zuckerberg admit that, yeah, he had downplayed the
00:41:43.720
Hunter Biden laptop story and he was smothering true things that were being said about COVID at the
00:41:51.040
behest of the government, the Biden administration, because it went against their views. But in the
00:41:56.580
UK, we're seeing people being arrested for memes posted on Facebook. I'm worried about that coming
00:42:03.160
here if we don't have a change in government. That sort of thing, you know, if you had told me 20 years
00:42:10.420
ago, in Britain, they'll be arresting you for jokes, I would have laughed. I mean, the cradle of
00:42:16.440
the best of Western civilization comes from the UK, the Americans, Canada, the Australians,
00:42:24.840
New Zealand, we all draw inspiration from there. And they are now once great Britain.
00:42:31.480
Yeah, I mean, life comes at you fast to your point about how quickly things change.
00:42:35.560
I have a quote in the parasitic mind. I don't have it in front of me. So I don't I'm going to sort of
00:42:39.440
paraphrase it. Ronald Reagan famously said, and I'm sure you probably know which passage I'm talking
00:42:44.120
about where he basically said, Look, every generation, there has to be an assiduous fight
00:42:49.680
for freedom and freedom of speech, because the bad folks are always coming to bring down those,
00:42:55.800
those majestic, you know, foundational values that define the greatness of the West. And so
00:43:02.280
in the past, we had a stronger sense of our identity so that we were able to push back against
00:43:09.080
intrusions against freedom. But because of all this cocktail of parasitic ideas, there's no longer
00:43:14.660
any defense against it. So that a place, as you said, a cradle, the bastion of the Western tradition,
00:43:20.220
Britain, is now looking more like Orwell's worst nightmare. And if I may, I don't think I've ever
00:43:27.020
mentioned this to you. I didn't mention this in our last conversation. There is a distinction in ethics
00:43:34.120
between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. And I'll link it back to, you know,
00:43:39.640
the 11 year old that's being arrested in Britain. So bear with me. Deontological ethics refers to
00:43:46.920
absolute statements of ethical conduct. So for example, if I say it is never okay to lie,
00:43:53.700
that would be a deontological statement. Consequentialism, on the other hand, is another
00:43:58.500
ethical statement that says that you judge the morality of an action based on its consequences. So
00:44:03.960
then if you say, it's okay to lie if you're trying to spare someone's feelings. And so I often joke
00:44:09.420
that if you want to have a long, happy marriage, if you ever hear the following question, do I look
00:44:14.260
fat in those jeans? Put on your consequentialist hat very quickly. Okay. Now for many, many things in
00:44:21.320
life, we are all consequentialists and that's perfectly fine. But, so now I'm going to tie it back
00:44:26.740
to your original question. When it comes to foundational values that define the Western tradition,
00:44:33.340
those by definition have to be deontological. If you say something like, I believe in freedom
00:44:40.020
of speech, but, the second you say, but, you're a degenerate asshole. Because what's going to come
00:44:46.260
after the but is going to be exactly some consequentialist ethos. Yes, you should be able
00:44:52.060
to criticize religions, but you should maintain group cohesion or community cohesion. That's what
00:44:58.820
causes people to then argue that Islamophobia should be a hate crime. No, no, no. In a free
00:45:04.140
society, as long as it's not defamation, libelous, you know, incitement for child pornography, direct
00:45:11.800
incitement for violence, screaming fire in a theater, there are, all bets are off. I am Jewish with a very,
00:45:19.300
very tragic childhood in Lebanon. And yet I support the right, Brian, of Holocaust deniers to spew the most
00:45:27.160
offensive and insulting stuff humanly possible, which is the rejection of a historically documented reality
00:45:34.960
where an entire people were extinguished. I support their right to exhibit such offensive language. So,
00:45:43.980
that's the problem of what's happening now in Britain. They've put on a consequentialist hat when it should be
00:45:51.260
the deontological framework that originally made Britain great.
00:45:57.540
Well, you and I will continue to be out there on the good fight pushing back against bad ideas. We could talk for
00:46:03.940
another hour, but I know you've got another appearance to make. So, Gad, thanks so much for your time. Keep up the good
00:46:10.940
That's wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
00:46:13.540
Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host. This episode was produced
00:46:18.820
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