Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Everyone, and welcome to the 77th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jennifer Anjou Grossman. My friends call me Jag. I am the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun, creative ways like animated videos and graphic novels.
Wanted to let you know that we're very grateful. This episode of the Atlas Society Society Ask is brought to you in part thanks to the honorary sponsorship of Larry Abrams, a longtime supporter of our work and the author of the Philosophical Practitioner. It's available for sale on Amazon and we're going to provide the link to purchase his book in the chat below and in the description section of whatever platform you're viewing this episode.
Today we are going to talk about another book and we're joined by its author, Professor God Saad. Before I introduce Dr. Saad, I wanted to let you know we will be able to take just a few questions this time.
If you have some burning questions, please do keep them short.
Dr. Saad is a Lebanese Canadian professor of marketing at Concordia University and an evolutionary behavioral scientist who applies biology toward understanding consumer behavior. He is the author of the Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, the Consuming Instinct, and his latest book, the Parasitic How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which examines how certain destructive ideas have managed to take hold in places like academia and popular culture. He is a honey badger on social media, and we will get to explaining what that means. He fights cheerfully but fiercely for reason, intellectual freedom and common sense. Dr. Saad, welcome again. Thanks for joining us.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Great honor to be with you. Thank you for having me.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: So perhaps we could start with a bit of an overview of some of the key points in your book and also some of the frameworks that you are using to explain this phenomenon. You use a neuroparasitological framework to understand IDEA pathogens, the thinking versus feeling dichotomy, the homeostasis of victimology. I thought that was particularly interesting. And the ostage parasitic syndrome. So perhaps if you could just start with an introduction and your approach in this book.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Right. So one of the things that evolutionary scientists do is they try to look at other animals to understand something within the human condition. And so if I want to understand toy preferences within humans, I can study toy preferences amongst our primate cousins and show that the sex specificity of their toy preferences is very similar to ours and therefore demonstrating that there's a homology between our behavior and that of our animal cousins.
And so as I was trying to come up with a framework for how brains can be parasitized I said, well, let me go into the animal literature and study the neuroparasitology framework, which is basically the study of how parasites end up in a host's brain, altering its behavior to suit its reproductive interests. So, so, for example, Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that when it infects the brains of mice, the mouse loses its innate fear of cats and it becomes sexually attracted to the cat's urine, which is not a very good attraction to have if you're a mouse. And so I had had my epiphany. I found the framework that I would use to then argue that humans, of course, we can actually succumb to actual brainworms like the Toxoplasma gondii, but we can also be infected by another class of what I call idea pathog are dreadful parasitic ideas that in a sense metaphorically, is like the mouse walking up to the cat. It drives us to the abyss of infinite lunacy. It causes us to lose our ability to think rationally, not care about science based thinking and so on. And so that's the framework that I use. And so then in the book I argue, well, what are examples of these idea pathogens? Where do they originate from? And then how could we inoculate our minds against such dreadful ideas? So that's the general story of the book.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: So let's go to some example. What are some of these infectious ideas and where did they come from?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: So most of them have their genesis in the last 40, 50 years in academia, typically in disciplines that are perfectly uncoupled from reality. Right. It takes, as I'm sort of paraphrasing Orwell here, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas. And so a lot of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, not an engineering school, not in business school, which are wedded to reality, but, you know, in esoteric fields, in the humanities and in the social sciences and so on, where people can pontificate, unshackled by any concerns with whether it has any downstream effects, you know, in reality.
So what are examples of these? Cultural relativism, militant feminism, social constructivism, and maybe I'll explain some of these in a second for our viewers who may not know, of course, the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, because it attacks the epistemology of truth would be postmodernism, because it purports that there are no objective truths. It's silly to talk about some truth with a capital T because we are completely shackled by subjectivity, by Our personal biases. Everything is relative. So it is a perfectly anti scientific position to take because scientists wake up every day under the working assumption that there are natural regularities to be discovered. Now, in science, truths are provisional. What we thought was true 300 years ago May no longer be considered true today. But we do operate under the premise that there are some natural laws to be uncovered. And as an evolutionary psychologist, I do believe that there are certain invariant properties of human nature. So there are truths. Postmodernism says, no, there is no such thing. Social constructivism says we are born with empty minds, with all with equal potentiality. And it's only the nefarious or liberating forces of socialization that either make me be the next Lionel Messi, Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein. There is no innate quality. There are no biological imperatives that would have made me who I am. I'm born tabula rasa. So each of these idea pathogens share one thing in common. They're very different. It's like having different cancers. But all cancers share one property that is same across all of them. They all have unchecked cell division. Well, what is common to all these idea pathogens is that they start off with a noble cause, but then it metamorphosizes into lunacy in the service of that noble cause. So be damned if we murder the truth in the pursuit of that noble cause.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: So it's interesting when you talk about how it spreads and the metastasis you have also talked about in your book runaway selection and the same process that drives the evolutionary emergence of such greatly exaggerated traits like the peacock's tail.
And you've said that there's a similar dynamic that is at work in driving increasingly extreme manifestations of identity politics and some of the other pathogens. So how does that work with regards to this sort of ever exaggerating manifestation? Does it have to do with the homeostasis of victimology?
[00:08:19] Speaker B: No, that's. That's a separate thing which we can talk about if you want me to address first, the runaway selection. So runaway selection was proposed by a statistician, British statistician, by the name of Ronald Fisher, Sir Ronald Fisher, who basically argued that if you want to explain secondary characteristics, that of a particular of typically of males in a species like the, the massive burdensome tail peacock tail.
Well, how could that evolve? Because it couldn't have evolved by natural selection, because it actually reduces the likelihood of survivability of an organism that has such a burdensome tail. It makes it more difficult for you to fly it makes you more conspicuous to predators. So by all metrics, it's not a good thing to have. Well, runaway selection is the mechanism whereby you have a correlation between those traits and, and female preferences for those traits. And that feedback loop then creates a runaway form of selection. Now there is another related mechanism that might explain why these traits evolve. This is something that I also talk about in the parasitic mind. It's called Zahavian signaling, which basically argues that for a signal to be an honest one, it has to be costly because otherwise all of the imitators could mimic the signal. Right. The peahen has a serious problem. She has to be able to identify who are the truly superior genetic specimens and who are the imitators, the fakers. And one of the ways that you do that is you have the evolution of signals that only those who are truly fit could carry the burden of that signal. It's a neon sign saying, hey, if I have that tail and I'm still sticking around, doesn't that demonstrate to you that you should be mating with me? And so I take this again, look how I'm trying to link animal behavior to human behavior. Humans are just one other form of animal with a big prefrontal cortex. And so what I argue is that a lot of the purity tests that you see in wokeism and with the progressivism becomes a form of ideological runaway selection. Right. The purity of how progressive I am goes to completely exaggerated. It's a form of ornamentation, but. But ideological ornamentation. So it's in that sense that I'm drawing a comparison between the two.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Okay, so I'd love to get a little bit to your story, your narrative, which you share a bit of in your book. Cause it's pretty dramatic and unique.
And I was wondering if there's a connection between some of your early life and your own immunity to some of these pathogens. I mean, you've spent your entire career pretty much in academia, and yet you've avoided infection with these idea pathogens. Is it your disposition?
Is it experiences in your childhood or were you inoculated by particular book or a mentor?
[00:11:21] Speaker B: I mean, I definitely think that if I were to assign know importance weights to each of those different variables or sources that you describe overwhelmingly, it would be my disposition, meaning that the random combination of genes that constitute my personhood makes it that I am, you know, innately allergic and offended by bs. I'll just use the acronym I cannot stand violations to truth. It's, it's as if, you know, if you see someone Being mugged in an alley, who is that's crying for help? There are two types of folk. Those who pretend that they didn't hear the cries and furtively move along, and those who say, wait a minute, there's a woman that seems like she needs the help and I'm going to step in and help her. Well, I'm that one. And except that in the alley, that which is being mugged is the truth. And so I get angry, I get honey badger, I get frustrated. That indignation is not. It's not my disposition to be acerbic. My disposition is to be, you know, an affable, funny, joking, I'm lighthearted. But I also have this flip side of my being that is very pure. And that's why I talk in chapter one about my purity bubble.
Truth and freedom are fundamental precepts by which I live my life. That's why I get angry sometimes on social media when someone attacks my integrity. Because to attack my integrity is to attack everything is to attack my personhood. Attack me for being overweight when I used to be overweight. Fair enough, but don't you dare ever attack my integrity. So I think a lot of it. So to answer your question, along with the way it comes from my disposition, although one can't extricate themselves from their environment. And so I do think that having grown up in Lebanon, the reason why I share my personal history in chapter one is because I want people to know that I have lived through the perfect society. When it comes to organizing a society along identity politic lines, everything in Lebanon is viewed through your tribal allegiance, your identity. In the case of Lebanon, it's your religion.
Who becomes president or prime minister is determined in the constitution by your religion. How many people serve in the parliament, how many seats are reserved is based on your religion. You walk inside the country with a internal ID card. In Arabic it's called Hawiyya, which basically we don't care about your height or your eye color. We care about what is your religion that you belong to. And the Jews. We are Lebanese Jews. It wasn't even written Jew or Yahudi in Arabic. It was written Israeli, which even creates greater animus. You're an Israelite, you're not even. You lose your Lebanese identity. Even though we had nothing to do with Israel, we were fully Lebanese, obviously.
And so I saw what happens to a society when. When your neighbors with whom you were playing with your entire life suddenly want you dead because you know the winds have changed. And so then when 40 plus years later, I see that the west is saying, hey, you know what would be great? We should adopt the model of Lebanon. We should adopt the model of the Balkans. We should adopt the model of Iraq, of Rwanda, where. I mean, it's just. It's hallucinatory for me to think that here we are immigrants who are warning the west that it is not a good thing to give up individual dignity for collective tribalism. But you've got one political party in the US who is committed to replicating the Lebanese experience. So in that sense, my background has me perfectly situated to talk about many of these idea pathogens.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And then coming to Canada, and then I'm assuming that you.
You were. How long ago did you.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: I came when I was 11, so 45 years ago, about.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Okay. And then you said that these ideas kind of became pathologized and more infectious over the past 40 years. So have you seen it? Is it kind of continuing at a steady rate? Is it accelerating?
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Some of them are accelerating. Some of them are starting to, you know, slow down a bit.
So I can maybe discuss a few.
I first. So just to back up a bit, I.
In chapter one of the book, I talk about two great wars that I have faced. First, the Lebanese Civil War. As Lebanese Jews, we had to leave Lebanon under imminent threat of execution. And the second great war was the war on reason that I experienced as a professor of nearly 30 years.
My first experience with the departure from reason came in my scientific work. It wasn't really part of the culture wars, yet it's when I was trying to Darwinize the business schools. I am housed in a business school. And as you kindly mentioned in the introduction, I seek to apply evolutionary biological principles and evolutionary psychology to the study of our consummatory nature. And so, of course, the argument is you can't study employee behavior and employer behavior and traders and consumers bereft of their biology, and yet you can get your mba, you can get all degrees in the business school without ever mentioning the word biology. And so when I was first on that scientific mission to try to infuse evolutionary thinking in the business school, I saw the kind of, you know, reaction that it would engender in my colleagues who thought that it was insane. How dare you say that humans are driven by biological forces? Biology is relevant for the mosquito, it's relevant for the zebra, it's relevant for your dog. But surely we transcend our biology, Professor Saad. No, we don't. We don't exist on a supra plane that is outside of biological reality. And so this was the first opportunity or chance where I saw perfectly otherwise, perfectly reasonable and educated people become infected with one of these idea pathogens. In this case, I called it biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human behavior. There's actually a term, this is not my term, called the human reticence effect. Human reticence in the sense that you are reticent to use the same evolutionary principle that explains the behavior of all other species. Somehow humans are outside of that influence, Right? Or in other cases, people are perfectly happy to use evolution to explain everything of who we are, as long as it stops at the neck. Meaning we use evolution to explain our opposable thumbs. We use evolution to explain why our pancreas are the way they are. But don't you dare say that our human mind is due to evolutionary forces. Well, where do you think it came from? Through magic? Through song? Through God? And so that's where I first saw this departure from reason.
And I hate to say it, I don't think the social sciences have been inoculated against that parasitic idea. Postmodernism seems to be a bit less powerful. About 10, 15 years ago, you couldn't see a single grant in the social sciences or the humanities that wasn't laden with postmodernist gibberish. You see less of it today. So on some fronts it's a bit better. On some fronts it's a lot worse. But here's the good news. If everybody who is a member of the silent majority were to speak up in unison, we'll get rid of all these ideas by next Tuesday.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: I find that very encouraging, very hopeful, and first time I've heard the perspective that postmodernism is perhaps on the wane. Because in some sense I just see with regards to the manipulation of language, that seems to be particularly tenacious.
And postmodern is a theme for us at the Atlas Society. We have many themes, so I'm willing to let it go.
Part of that is due to our having on our faculty Professor Stephen Hicks.
And he of course, wrote the Explaining Postmodernism.
One of the challenges, of course, we've had is taking such a vast subject and trying to make it accessible. We've tried to do that through.
My name is postmodernism. It's one of our Draw My Life animated videos, the Pocket Guide to Postmodernism.
And yet I think because it spans so many different fields, everything from literature to.
To art to language, it can be kind of difficult to boil down.
In addition to the relativism and the sort of rejection of reality that you mentioned. There also seems to be a oppositional dynamic, a kind of oppressors versus oppressed that Professor Hicks at least argues that was somehow kind of a hand me down from failed Marxism. But I'd be interested to see how you would boil it down beyond just the rejection of reality and maybe what are some of the ways that it is infected both academia and our culture?
[00:20:44] Speaker B: So I'll give you a few. I mean, I can give you a highfalutin, you know, professor.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Stories. Stories, exactly.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: But I think the audience would be a lot more interested in tangible, concrete stories that represent the general phenomena. So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had defended his PhD dissertation, and so he had said, hey, let's go out. And every time I take off my glasses, I realize that I can't see anything.
My eyesight is deteriorating at an exponential rate.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: You're doing postmodern performance art.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. Well said.
So he had invited us, or not invite us. He said, let's go to dinner. I think I probably picked up the tab as his professor. I'd like to think I did, but I don't remember.
So it was myself, my wife, him, the doctoral student, and his date for the evening.
So prior to us going out that night, he called me up and, and said, you know, heads up, the. The lady that I'm bringing tonight is a graduate student in cultural relativism, you know, cultural anthropology, women's studies, and postmodernism, to which I won't repeat. But I said, oh, so the holy trinity of bs.
And so he, he knew where this could lead. He said, you know, let's. Let's have a nice evening. I said, oh, don't worry. I'm going to be on my best behavior. This is, this is your night. Celebrate.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Right? Well, if he knew you at all.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Exactly. So.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: He knew that with a grain of salt.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Exactly. So. But. But I was very nice about it. About halfway through the evening, I. I turned to. To the lady in question. I said, well, I hear you're, you know, you're a postmodernist.
No objective truths, right? No, no objective truth other than, of course, the one truth, that there are no objective truths. I said, okay, well, do you mind if I maybe propose what I consider to be universal truths and then you can correct me? She said, yes, go for it. I said, okay. Is it not true? So look, I'm here, by the way, look how prophetic it is. I am about 20 years ahead of the eventual trance craze of, you know, sometimes men get pregnant. So listen to the story.
So I say, is it not true that within Homo sapiens, humans only women bear children? Is that not a universal. Could we not take that to the bank?
She said, no.
I said, would you? So it's not true that only women bear children? She said, no. I said, how can you explain? She goes, well, there is some Japanese tribe of some Japanese island where within their folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear children. So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant. So after I recovered from the mini stroke of such imbecility, I then said, okay, well, let me take a lesson. Dangerous and corrosive example like only women bear children. Because that's too controversial. Let's give kind of a cosmological example. Is it not true that from any vantage point on earth, sailors have relied since time immemorial that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? And there she used. Earlier you mentioned language and how you deconstruct language. She used a trick from the Magic box of Jacques Derrida where language creates reality. And she said, well, what do you mean by east and west? Those are arbitrary labels. And what do you mean by the sun? That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena. Exactly her words. I said, well, okay. Well, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west. I put on dancing hyena lotion when I go to the Caribbean, so I don't get that hyena burn. She said, well, I don't play those label games. So when I was sitting with a fully functioning adult who is a graduate student at a prestigious university, and we can't agree on two realities. Women bear children, and there is such a thing as east and west, and there is such a thing as the sun. She wasn't an escapee from a mental institution. Although studying postmodernism can lead to that.
She was just aping the exact position, the exact epistemological positions of a well committed postmodernist.
So imagine then, if you take that framework, where does it lead you? What can you do? Can you understand mathematics better? Can you understand the human condition better? Now, in some very, very restrained cases in art in design, because there are certain historical trends, you could talk about a post modernist trend where you are putting a timestamp on a particular aesthetic.
In that case, fine, there's postmodernist art, but even there it's completely nihilistic. So for example, in the book I talk about invisible art.
Now this is not gad sad satire. There has been an exhibit at a major museum where you just walk in and you just interact with invisible art, which is very liberating because then you could imagine the art to be whatever you want it to be. And so in the draft that I had submitted of the parasitic mind to my publisher, I had put satirically, well, you know, for my next book, I'm planning on just having two empty pages, you know, the top and bottom of the book and then the rest will be empty.
The reader can decide what it is. So it'll be a book that I can write very quickly. And then he writes to me. Well, that book has already been written by Michael Knowles. And so it was a book that's titled reasons why you should vote for democrats. And then the book, of course is empty.
And so that's what you get with postmodernism. Music doesn't have to have any rhythmic cadence or any rhythmic rules. It's just random stuff that an elephant can do. Art can be anything you want it to be. You can throw urine on a wall and that becomes art because it's postmodernist and liberating. So this is what I talk about in the book, that all of these idea pathogens liberate us from the shackles of reality and none does it better than postmodernism. It's a form of intellectual terrorism. I say that the 911 hijackers flew planes onto our buildings. Postmodernists are intellectual terrorists who fly building planes of BS into our edifices of reason.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Well, yeah. And you've analogized the asymmetric damage that can be done by a small group of terrorists as in the 911 attacks, where the, you know, you've compared that with a similarly outsized impact of leftist extremists on social media.
And the impact is not just in the deep platforming and the ostracism of targeted individuals, but I think even perhaps more chilling, the self censorship and the silence of those who are intimidated from speaking out at all. You know, they fear the immediate consequences, but haven't perhaps fully accounted for the longer term consequences if we allow these friends to continue.
So you said something earlier on in the interview about, you know, this would all be over if the silent majority would be more vocal. How do you, how do we, how do you motivate people to speak up? Because, you know, I know people write to you and they say, please don't use My name and thank you for what you're doing. But they're not. They're not willing to do it themselves.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: So before I answer that question, which is a very important question, because you really want to diagnose the problem, but you want to offer people a solution to the problem, right? So I was very cognizant of that fact. I don't want to just be the. The guy who diagnoses what's. What's ailing us. You've got to. You can't go to your physician and he or she says, here is your disease. Good luck. Right.
You need to have some. So. So I'll answer that in a second. But just to speak to your earlier point in the lead up to that question about self censorship and so on, look, last week, I'd like to share another again. Anecdotes are very powerful ways to convey important points.
So I shared a story that I thought was actually one that would have the perfectly opposite response to what it ended up having. My wife and I were at a cafe, a cafe that we go to every day. We go for a long walk. It's an hour walk to the cafe and back to our house. We have a coffee, and we come back. We just got an hour of exercise.
And at the cafe, when she went up to order the coffee, there was a server with whom she had a very nice interaction, who, you know, potentially appeared to be transgendered. And as she was communicating with that individual, who was a new barista who was having a hard time with the machine, she wanted. She turned to her call to the colleague to say. She wanted to say, you know, he'll get the hang of it. But then she restrained herself because she didn't know if she should say, he'll get the hang of it or they'll get the hang of it. But if she says they, she then told me she would be concerned. But what if he does identify as male? So then I wrote a tweet where I said she was frozen in fear. Now, frozen in fear doesn't mean she was literally frozen in fear the way we would have been when we were running from execution in Lebanon. It's a euphemism for she was frozen and that she didn't want to hurt this person's feelings. It was a testament to how dignified and kind and sensitive she is. And then I just mentioned that these kinds of linguistic barriers between us create a chilling on natural dynamics. There was nothing controversial in what I said. It was meant to demonstrate how laudable my wife's behavior was. There was nothing controversial, as I just explained.
I had about 26 million tweets, views, most of them wishing me death, wishing me that I kill myself, saying, what a bigot. I was saying that they wish the same thing that happened to Richard Dawkins. He had a stroke, befalls me.
So imagine the darkness of one's heart that me posting such a completely innocuous tweet that, if anything, is demonstrating that we are allies in our sensitivity. Turns to be. And Valerie Bertinelli, the, you know, the child actress from the 1970s, then brings her pronoun Taliban brigade against me. And it goes on and on. Now, in my case, as we mentioned earlier, I am lucky to have the predisposition that you do that to me. I only double down now. I do more stuff. I tweet more stuff that gets. And then they literally lose their heads because they don't have the ability. Because usually if they did that, you either commit suicide or you close your Twitter account or you go into hiding. And so I mock them by hiding under my table. I was so afraid of the pronoun Taliban that I hid in fear under my table. And I argued that nothing that happened to me in Lebanon was nearly as scary as the pronoun Taliban.
But imagine most people who don't necessarily have that spine or that fortitude, they're going to succumb to the pressure. That's a grotesque way to organize society. We shouldn't be tolerating this kind of nonsense. Okay, so having said that, how do we fight against it? There are many ways to do so. The number one way, although we could discuss several that I talk about in chapter eight of the book, is what I refer to a battle cry of activating your inner honey badger. And the reason why I say that is because of all animals, arguably none is as fierce and ferocious as the honey badger. It is the size of a small dog, and yet it could withstand the attack of eight of six adult lions. I say six because there's a clip on. On. On YouTube where one honey badger is keeping six lions at bay. How does it do it? It is just outrageously intimidating. It walks as though it's 100ft tall. And so I actually released a clip a few days ago where I'm recounting the story of another honey badger. The honey badger, in this case, was in the death grip of a. Of a python. When you. When you are in the death grip, you almost have zero chance of getting out. So you already. You're almost guaranteed to die. Not Only does it get out of the death grip of a gigantic python at that point. When it gets out and it is completely dazed because it had almost suffocated to death, it doesn't run away because it could now live for another day. It is so angry that it says, I'm going to kill you. And it goes back and attacks the python, kills the python. While two jackals are coming after it to steal the python. It drives the PI. The jackals away. So what does it mean when I say activate your inner honey badger? It means that if you have first principles that are deontologically valid, that you can defend, that are well articulated, that are based on reason, then be a honey badger. The reason why I never tweet something and worry about the consequences is because I know that I can defend my position. And if you're going to come after me, you better not miss, because I'm coming after you. And so, regrettably though, most people don't walk through life with that self assuredness. If you just go, boo. They suck their thumb, they go into a fetal position in a corner and they cry and watch Bridget Jones Diary. That's not the way to live life. A life of dignity and certainly not one where there is a massive ideological warfare that's taking place. So look at what happened yesterday in Virginia.
Why did the Virginia thing happen? Because a bunch of honey badgers. Who are the honey badgers? It's Christopher Ruffo, who wasn't a CRT guy, he wasn't a critical race theory guy, but it fell on his lap and he decided, okay, I'm taking this cause on. It's because of Asra Nomani, a Muslim liberal feminist who now started the movement, the Mama Bear movement. Right? You're not going to indoctrinate our children. So these honey badgers said, no, no, no, not on my watch. I'm not going to diffuse the responsibility to GAD Saad and Jordan Peterson. I'm going to get involved. You are not going to indoctrinate my child on my watch. They did it and look what happened. So there is no magic recipe. It's not rocket science.
The silent majority despises these idea pathogens. They write to me in huge numbers telling me that they despise it, as you said, but they don't want to speak.
Find your spine, find your testicular fortitude, and we will get rid of this problem by next Tuesday. If not, as I recently mentioned on Tucker Carlson, it'll be a long train ride to hell. It's that simple.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: Well, speaking of the Virginia race last week, as part of the denouement leading up to the election, there were operatives, you can call them Log Cabin Republicans or what have you, the Lincoln Projects. Excuse me, Republicans. But clearly they've identified the people in the photo, many of whom had social media tags affiliating them with the McAuliffe campaign.
But it was a hoax that just really quickly disintegrated.
A bunch of people in Charlottesville dressing up and trying to impersonate Trump supporters or white nationalists with tiki torches.
I don't know if that speaks more to the homeostasis of victimology which you've discussed, or if it's more just the weaponization of race to win political points, but why don't more people see through such shenanigans? Or maybe they do.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So let me mention what homeostasis of victimology is, because I think it's a very, if I may say, powerful mechanism to explain this orgiastic need to compete along victimology scores.
So homeostasis is basically a form of equilibrium. So our bodies are made up of many homeostatic systems. Right. If my blood sugar goes below a certain threshold, it sends a signal to my brain that says, find food, go eat. And then that recalibrates homeostatically my blood sugar level. The thermostat in a hotel room is a homeostatic system. I set it at 69 degrees. If it gets too hot or too warm warm, the thermostat takes corrective actions accordingly. So what do I mean when I say homeostasis of victimology?
So progressives want to set the threshold of the collective victimology score of the United States to be. At a certain point, we are a racist, Islamophobic, transphobic, bigoted, misogynistic, patriarchal, evil society. Right. And therefore that threshold has to be maintained.
If we can't find instantiations that support that homeostatic threshold, then we will redefine what it means to be a victim so that we can recalibrate to that threshold. So in that sense, it's homeostatic. Let me give you two again, tangible examples of that that are so insane that you would think I'm making them up, but of course I'm not, because they're all cited very profusely in my book.
So, example, one Jewish Israeli student, and the reason I mentioned she's Jewish is because it's relevant to the story. She's a graduate student who wants to demonstrate that the idf, the Israeli Defense Forces, are engaging in rampant rape of the noble Palestinian women.
That's her study. And so she proceeds to do the study and to her chagrin, finds out that. That there's not a single documented case of the IDF raping Palestinian women.
Did that cause her to maybe take stock of her hypothesis? Oh, no. Let me explain to you how we reach homeostasis of victimology.
It turns out that the IDF are so bigoted, they so other Palestinian women that they weren't even worthy of being raped. So. So if they had raped the women, they would have been rightfully so ogres. But that they did not rape women was also a manifestation of how devastatingly bigoted they were. So that's story one. And she won, by the way, some award for that paper. Study 2, or example 2. Canadian student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and Canada wanted to demonstrate that Canada is a rampant Islamophobic. You know, Islamophobia is rampant in every nook and cranny of Canadian society. So she decided to don the hijab, I think it was for 18 days, the hijab, the head covering in Islam, because she wanted to then demonstrate that, you know, there's just rampant Islamophobia. Well, again, to her great chagrin, it turns out that the Canadians were incredibly kind and sweet and polite. They didn't care. They were just lovely.
Now that she decided, aha, wow, that's amazing. They're not Islamopolitan. Oh, no. Oh, no. She decided that their internalized Islamophobia was so great that they overcompensated for their hatred via being so kind and tolerant and sweet. Therefore, the fact that they were kind was a manifestation of Islamophobia. Well, we know from Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, that anything that doesn't adhere to the falsification principle doesn't fall within the realm of science. Right? Because then how can I falsify any position? Right. Destiny, for example, doesn't fall within Popperian falsification, because if I come out of my house and I'm hit by a truck, it was my destiny. If I come out of my house and I'm not hit by a truck, it was my destiny. So there's no way for me to escape my destiny. So it's not within science. Well, all of this woke stuff, the woke calculus, is an epistemology that is unfalsifiable. And that's what I mean by homeostasis of victimology. Someone like, as Dave Chappelle says, the French actor Jussie Smollier, also known as Jussie Smollett wasn't happy in being a D rated actor who was making $1 million an episode or whatever. For him to truly have street creds, he had to have a victimology narrative. That's how I ascend the hierarchy of victimhood. That's how I win in victimology poker. And so in his case, if he doesn't have a victimology narrative, no problem. I will construct one, I will manufacture one, and then I could finally get my ego strokes that I'm so deserving of. That's a terrible way, again, to organize society. Right? We should be having competitions in terms of who has the greatest merit, whereas now we compete on who's got the greatest victim narrative. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, why it's difficult to cancel me or for all sorts of people to come after me, because I always use their calculus against them. I say, be careful. If you play this game against you, I'm always going to win in victimology poker. And usually they run away because they're such cowards, they realize that they can't outrank me. Right. You grew up. You're a black person who grew up in San Diego. Boo hoo hoo. I escaped execution of Lebanon. Go away, little boy. And then they go away. But so instead of judging me based on the veracity and the merits of my arguments, they say, oh, he's got a bigger victimology story than me, therefore he wins. It's grotesque.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's, that's interesting that you're talking about this sort of set point of the amount of grievance or the amount of victimhood in society and the need to supplement it when there isn't enough real racist incidents to manufacture them.
We recently had Wilfred Riley on the webinar to talk about the hoax crimes. The hoax crimes, yeah.
But that's why I was thinking that this need, this competition, this vacuum to fill could be in part what was explaining sort of these manufacturing of these different new grievances in addition to the runaway selection effect that you had identified. But you're talking about your example about the woman who donned the hijab and had to kind of refangle her thesis to, as you say throughout the book, all roads, you know, lead to Islamophobia, all roads lead to sexism. All roads lead to racism. But in thinking about, you know, the Canadian society, Canadian culture, I have just noticed, I mean, it's not a particularly large selection.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: I know where you're going with this desk.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Yeah. We have on, you know, as I mentioned, one of our senior scholars, Professor Stephen Hicks, Canadian. You're Canadian. Jordan Peterson, Canadian, two big supporters of the Atlas Society. Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon. Canadian. Peter Cops is also a Canadian. Is there something in the water there or what accounts for this sort of overrepresentation of Canadians in the ranks? You know, some my views, objectivists, but others, you know, that are defending reason, individualism and freedom.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: You know, I don't think that there is a, you know, systematic reason for it, perhaps other than the fact that.
And here I'm really thinking on my feet. So it's a very speculative explanation. So I don't even necessarily believe it myself. But since you asked me, let's brainstorm.
Perhaps because we don't have the same binary system of politics. Red team, blue team.
Now, I think though that frankly, even if we did have that system, you know, I can't speak for the third gentleman you mentioned, Stephen Hicks, but certainly Jordan, who's a good friend of mine, I think again, it boils down to our personhood more than the fact that we are Canadian, that we're just dogged defenders of the truth. But I can't help but think that the fact that our system as a parliamentarian one, it makes it more difficult to be myopically tribal. Right. I think one of the idea pathogens that is easy to succumb to is just our innate need for coalitional thinking. And so the US system is perfectly suited to that parasitic mindset, which is there is us, there is them, there's blue team, there's rest team, there's the in group, there's the out group.
It's tougher to pull that off in Canada. So maybe that has some small part to do with it, but otherwise I just think that it's just the random combination of genes that made us who we are.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: Yes, well, I had not thought of it in quite the way that you just suggested. I do think that that could possibly be a factor. I know Chip Wilson, who I mentioned is the founder of Lululemon and he's gonna be joining us at our gala tomorrow. And he was our honoree two years ago and he kind of got canceled from his company through a series of events. But one cardinal sin was he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged. He read it on the Alaskan pipeline, you know, when he was working there. It had a big influence on him when he had this world dominating yoga company. He thought, well, I'm going to put who is John Gault on a Yoga bag. And boy, he wasn't prepared. So maybe there was just less of that sort of politicization or that there was almost a naivete.
So that's one possible explanation. The other one is, I have sometimes noticed, at least within the United States, there is a certain brand of libertarians or conservatives that come from Massachusetts. I grew up in Massachusetts. Grover Norquist grew up in Massachusetts. It's one of the bluest, most liberal states in the country. And I don't know, perhaps there's something about the pressure of being able to withstand being in the minority, withstand criticism that just like diamonds created out of coal under pressure, perhaps in Canada, to the extent maybe it's a little bit more socialistic or a larger welfare state. So there could be a reaction to that as well.
But given that you are a Canadian, you had no dog in the race the last two presidential elections here in the United States. You had mentioned your very humorous series that you do of cowering under your desk in your videos.
And one of those, if I recall, was after the election, surprise election of Donald Trump. And in your book, you recount how you witnessed in 2016 this, quote, mass psychogenic hysteria that engulfed your academic colleagues and the majority of people in your circle.
We just had a conversation about this on Clubhouse yesterday.
Rob Tracynski, also a senior fellow at the Atlas Society, saying, well, it's a reaction to, to his style, to his language. I think it's maybe something a little bit more. But you talk about this in the book and you talk about peripheral processing. And so maybe just whether as an outsider or as, you know, given your discipline with consumer behavior, maybe you can describe why this was just unlike anything, just a complete, you know, cataclysmic meltdown for so many people.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: Sure. So several things to say. Thank you for asking this question because it's going to cover a lot of, I think, important points. So when you mentioned peripheral versus central cues, this is something that is studied in psychology of persuasion. A peripheral cue would be, you know, jennifer Lopez says, I should buy this perfume.
It's not really relevant to the perfume. It doesn't talk about the chemical properties, but just the fact that there's this peripheral cue. A beautiful celebrity endorser who says, buy this perfume, I'll buy it.
A central cue would be, Here are the 17 reasons why you should invest in my mutual fund. It engages your cognitive machinery. Right. Peripheral typically deals with your affective system. And so in chapter two, I talk about thinking versus feeling, and I argue that it's actually a wrong dichotomy, but because humans are not a reasoning animal or a feeling animal, they're both. The challenge is to know when to activate which system. That's the problem, is when there is an incongruity between which system you're activating at which time. So if I am drive, if I'm walking down an alley because I want to take a shortcut to get home, it'll save me 10 minutes and I see four young men loitering in the dark alley, my heartbeat will go up, my blood pressure will go up, maybe my breathing will become a bit more labored. That fear based response, that affective response is perfectly adaptive. It is evolutionarily expected. I should have that response. If I am trying to do well on a calculus exam and I have a fear based response, it's probably not going to lead me to the right places. So now let's take this insight to the land of Donald Trump.
When we are judging which president we should choose, we should be engaging our central route of persuasion. Here are the seven policy positions of candidate A versus Candidate B. And candidate A is more in line, more congruence with my positions. Therefore I should pick them. But that's not what people do. What people do is they solely engage their peripheral cues.
Noble prophet Barack Obama is lanky. He is tall, he has the radiant smile. He. He speaks with a mellifluous voice. Every single syllable that he utters is empty, vacuous platitude. But my God, is he charming the way that he does it. So he must be profound. On the other hand, ogre, fat queen's boy, grade seven level vulgar trump. He may be saying things that are perfectly aligned with my principles, but my God, is he vulgar. So he is what I call an aesthetic injury.
So especially to the anointed class. I don't know if it was Thomas Sowell who first used that term.
The great guys on top of the ivory tower that are looking down on the great unwashed, the rubes and the plebs don't like to have someone holding the highest position who speaks in this vulgar manner because it invalidates their existence, right? We speak with an elitist lisp. We have certain progressive affectations that demonstrate that we are the anointed ones. And this guy is an ogre. He discussed me. There's. If I may, if you may indulge me for a second. Imagine for a second that this is the cork of a wine bottle, okay? Just bear with me. Experiment.
There's an expression in Arabic that says to get drunk Simply by smelling the cork bottle. What does that mean?
It means that I am so weak that it doesn't actually require for me to drink the wine to get drunk. I just have to take a whiff and I'm already drunk. Okay, well, this is what's happening, right? I'm smelling the noble prophet Obama and my God, is he mellifluous? He must be profound. Or I smell the disgusting smell of Trump. He must be disgusting. So therefore I am triggering my affective system. Repulsion, disgust, those are all affective responses, rather than saying, well, wait a minute, if I am for individual dignity, who is more in support of that? Trump or the collectivist tribal folks? If I care about the dignity of the borders of my nation, who supports that more? If I care about the dangers of Islamization, who supports that more? Well, those things don't matter once I am getting drunk by the cork bottle. So it's a very, very dangerous trap when you have a misalignment between which system is being triggered, for what purpose. What really upset me amongst my colleagues, some of whom have made a career and have made tons of money pretending to be intellectuals and reasonable, is seeing the level of hysteria that they experienced when Trump came to power. There was, and as a matter of fact, I've had falling outs, regrettably, not because of my own doing, but with people, people who are household names, who stopped being my friends because I dared not say that Trump was going to usher a nuclear holocaust. He was going to eat your children, he was going to institute martial law, Democracy would end. No more economic system. We were going to return to a Pleistocene barter system, or where I trade the fig leaf on my genitalia for a fish because the market was going to end. There was going to be no more economy. That wasn't hyperbole. They were saying that. So imagine how parasitized your mind must be when you think that Donald Trump coming in would have resulted in all these things. And it is that which I find galling. And this is why, when I go on social media, affable gad can sometimes become honey badger Gad because you're pissing me off.
[00:54:52] Speaker A: Well, on that, we have just a couple of more minutes left. I'm going to give apologies to some of our loyalists. I know you mentioned that we'd take some questions, but I think we've run out of time. And I was exercising my executive prerogative with this interview because I have been wanting to interview this honey badger for quite a long time.
Professor Saad, is there anything that we didn't cover that we should have, or perhaps maybe the next book that you're going to be working on are the best places to follow you.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: So my next I mean, there are many other things we could have talked about, but thank you so much for giving me this wonderful forum to share my ideas. The next book that I'm working on is quite different. So if Parasitic Mind is about these negative mindsets that cause us to walk slowly to the abyss of infinite lunacy, the next one is more positive. It's what are some mindsets that we can adopt and some decisions that we can make that at least can increase our chances of living happy, content and fulfilled lives.
Now you might say, well, many people going back to the ancient Greeks have written about that and that's certainly true. But they are, again, my personal anecdotes coupled with my scientific areas of expertise when we've together will hopefully offer something nice for people to read.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: Spectacular. Well, thank you. And if you are not following Dr. Saad on Twitter, I highly recommend you do it. It's a lot of fun and we get great ideas, great quotes, many of which you'll be seeing as memes in the Atlas Society's feedback. So Professor Saad, thank you very much.
[00:56:40] Speaker B: Thank you. So great.
[00:56:41] Speaker A: Again, everyone, his book is the Parasitic Mind. Highly recommend. Although it's not narrated by him, it does have an excellent narrator on Audible.
Joe Rogan and I disagree on that.
So thank you everyone for joining us. Remember, the Atlas Society is a nonprofit. If you like content like this, if you like the work that we do in terms of connecting with young people and providing content to them that is accessible and that's entertaining, please consider making a tax deductible donation to the Atlas Society. I mentioned Professor Steven Hicks earlier in the interview.
If you guys are still interested in hearing a little bit more from the Atlas Society in an hour and a half, he is going to be joining me on Clubhouse. So hope to see you there. And then next week, of course, we're going to have Alan Dershowitz on the show to talk about his new book. So thanks everybody for joining us. Thank you, Dr. Saad, thank you so much.
[00:57:50] Speaker B: Cheers.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: Bye.
