Facts don’t care about feelings – true. But at the same time, feelings don’t care about facts – also true. These aphorisms describe the dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity with regard to discourse and perception. Otherwise said, without a foundation of rationality, people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.
The question becomes, how we entertain ideas without allowing out thinking to be compromised by malignant ideology. I recently finished The Parasitic Mind – How infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad, a book that confronts danger of corrupt ideas are the way they hinder innovative thinking and restrain sensible discussion.
Gad Saad is not only a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University but also a master of sarcasm and satire – a seemingly lost art today. And as such, I’ve found a great deal of enjoyment in both his writing and wordplay. Dr. Saad is a voice of rational opposition to the groupthink spreading throughout the various institutions defining Western society.
Writes Dr. Saad in The Parasitic Mind:
“Any human endeavor rooted in the pursuit of truth must rely on facts and not feelings. Legal proceedings constitute one such domain. We do not establish the innocence or guilt of defendants using feelings; rather we rely on a broad range of available facts in making a case. The threshold for establishing guilt is set purposely high: the cumulative evidence must be beyond a reasonable doubt to convict someone. The evidentiary threshold for uncovering scientific truths is even more stringent than those within the legal arena.
“One problem we face today is that consequentialists make a virtue of having emotions cloud our judgements, not only to avoid hurt feelings but because emotion is seen as a sign of authenticity… Remember though that one’s heartfelt outrage seldom says anything about the truth or falsehood of one’s position.”
There is a place for both emotion and intellect – Gad Saad makes this case with the further argument that people who have infected with pathogenic ideas lose control of both their rational minds and tempering emotions. These pathogens spread rapidly and have become a threat to our free and civil society – censorship, identitarianism, subjective reality, reductionism, conflative rationalization and the all-encompassing postmodernism.
Addressing postmodernism directly, Dr. Saad writes:
“Sometimes people overestimate their understanding of complicated phenomena, which is what some scholars call the illusion of explanatory depth. A good example is how people will give greater authority to a scientific explanation that includes pictures of multicolored neuronal brain imaging patterns, even when these patterns offer little explanatory power. Postmodernism thrives in academic circles for similar reasons. Postmodern bullshitters like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault succeeded in academia with their charlatanism because of the assumption that if something is nearly impossible to understand, it must be profound (note that there are individual differences in the extent to which people are swayed by bullshit)… Beware of those trying to impress you with confusing word salads.”
There are rules of conduct and etiquette within society that obligate us to engage when we see the truth under attack – and in this effort, Dr. Saad encourages us to engage out inner Honey Badger. Truth and reality are worth defending against sophistry; politely, respectfully, with good cheer, but always with conviction and aggressiveness.
“Most people are too busy to notice the dangers of idea pathogens or wrongly assume that they are unimportant. The intrusion of anti-science, anti-reason and illiberal movements occurs slowly and incrementally without many people becoming aware of the larger problem. Hence, the slow and inexorable death of the West by a thousand cuts. Instead of ignoring the problem, recognize that while it affects others today, it could reach you tomorrows. You may not have children in college, but if you work for a firm or are perhaps a business owner, campus lunacy will affect your business soon – if it does not already – perhaps starting with your human resources department and enforcement of “progressive” government regulations that demand adherience to the cult of diversity, inclusion and equity.”
“…Let the honey badger serve as your source of inspiration. Never back down from those seeking to intimidate you into silence.”
In the arena of ideas, do not engage sophists on their terms - if we do so, we will not be able to govern ourselves or come to agreement about facts or events. Within the pages of The Parasitic Mind, Gad Saad offers a warning to readers of the dangers intellectual pathogens pose to us as individuals and as an open society. But he also offers the antidote in the form of individual courage, rationality and optimism.
There are infinite ways to interpret the world, but only a very few that allow up to navigate the natural environment and life effectively. I highly recommend both The Parasitic Mind and Dr. Saad’s podcast The Saad Truth as a means to maintain perspective in a world that has become ever absurd and difficult to navigate.
