Straight Dope on Medicine: The Parasitic Mind

Some ideas need to die.

You cannot make a bridge out of jello.

Bridges are supportive and solid structures. Sound bridges do not give way. Jello does not possess these qualities.

Now let me go sharpen my jello chainsaw.

Gad Saad wrote The Parasitic Mind.

Steve Bannon interviewed Gad Saad in his War Room.[i] In the same way that animals can be parasitized by actual brain worms, the human mind can be parasitized by bad ideas. Take for example the mouse,

Prey animals don’t have to learn how to react when faced with a predator, even for the first time, the authors pointed out. Innate freeze or flee behaviors kick in, and these instinctive predator avoidance reactions represents a survival strategy that, if altered, could affect the prey’s chance of survival. Past studies have shown that T. gondii causes a phenomenon known as ‘fatal attraction’ in infected rodents. This manifests as a loss of fear of and aversion to cat odors, which is believed to then make the mice easier to catch and eat, and so increasing parasite spread. Prior studies have shown that this reduction in feline fear in T. gondii-infected rodents appears to the result of changes the neuronal level, the team noted. “The decreased aversion to felids is seemingly not resulting from an impairment of olfactory faculties but appears to be a consequence of complex neuronal and physiological mechanisms altering the perception of the host when facing a predation risk.”[ii]

Insane ideas do not help the human species.

At best, they can be useless and ineffective.

At worst, they can be maladaptive and lethal.

What happens in academia is that ideas get divorced from their consequences. Academics sit in their ivory towers and brainstorm good ideas and terrible ideas. There is no culling of the terrible ideas. No one says sarcastically, “Good job professor! Now why do you go out there and try it?!!!”

Reality does not intrude on their fantasy world.

Yet, everyone else has to live in the real world, where there are hard knocks.

The problem really manifests when the rotten, terrible, destructive ideas worm their way out of the confines of the ivory tower and begin to infect the general population. It all comes wrapped in a sparkling package with a pretty bow on top.

“This highly credentialled professor is advocating A. Here is government funding to put it into practice, and there will be more funding if you continue with it and recruit others to do the same.”

And then the jello bridges collapse.

"Seriously bad ideas, I’d argue, have a life of their own. And they rule our world.”

Paul Krugman, from Seriously Bad Ideas

“Some ideas are so stupid, that only intellectuals believe them.
George Orwell.

The Saad truth is that like the mice that run toward the cat because the brain worms make them sexually attracted to cat urine, human bad ideas (brain pathogens) are counterproductive, and maladaptive to our survival. We lose the ability to evaluate the soundness of our thinking, and mistakenly come to the conclusion that “It’s all good.”

No, it’s not.

Saad says that “the capacity of humans for disordered thinking has always existed. But the insanity of today like postmodernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, and identity politics were all spawned in the last forty/fifty years in the University settings. These bad ideas break out of the esoteric departments of the humanities and social sciences and begin to infect every nook and cranny of society.”

And the whole apple goes bad.

We’ve all heard the saying "one bad apple spoils the whole bunch," and have probably seen instances where it does apply to people, but does it actually happen with fruit?[iii]

Yes. As they ripen, some fruits, like apples and pears, produce a gaseous hormone called ethylene, which is, among other things, a ripening agent. When you store fruits together, the ethylene each piece emits prods the others around it to ripen further, and vice versa. (Fun tip: Want to quickly ripen an avocado? Stick it in a paper bag with an apple overnight.)

Getting back to the rotten fruit of the universities, their horrendous ideas are now in our military, journalism, in Hollywood, in our HR departments, and now our infestation is “full throttle,” and until people decide that they’ve had enough, it will get worse.

Gad asserts that the worst pathogen is postmodernism because it espouses that there are no objective truths. Everything is subjective and a matter of opinion.

If you think that 7-7 Manute Bol is shorter than 5-3 Muggsy Bogues, you are right! Measurement is not a corrective to your conclusion. No data or information can be brought to bear to persuade you otherwise.

Postmodernism.

Feelings and stupidity rule.

It’s not even possible to have a discussion, or debate.

Everyone has their own truth, and all of it is equally valid.

Science cannot function is this capacity. Scientist wake up every day, and think that there is a truth to be discovered. Objective truth. Our feelings and biases do not have a bearing on this truth. It exists independent of human desires, perspectives and ideology.

Postmodernism is fuel for the current gender craziness. Whatever I feel like I am. If I wake up and feel like I’m a woman, then society and reality must align with my personal truth. Surgeries must be performed and pronouns observed. Otherwise, it is a hate-crime and I have been eternally violated!

Tomorrow I’ll feel like a middle-aged, Bactrian camel, and the whole identity circus can begin again.

Because this disordered thinking of postmodernism is so blinding, in 1996 Alan Sokal wrote a bogus article in which he argued that gravity is a “social construction,” and had it accepted by a postmodernist, high-brow academic journal.

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

Biographical Information: The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. He has lectured widely in Europe and Latin America, including at the Università di Roma ``La Sapienza'' and, during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernández and Jürg Fröhlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992).[iv]

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics1; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility2; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''.3 It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics4; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science5; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics6; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.7

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -- among them, existence itself -- become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

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Underlining and bold print are my additions to the text. I wanted to identify and emphasize the justification that he brought to this lunacy.

Sokal told them, after publication, that it was all a big joke.

What are universities like?[l1] 

Beyond being purveyors of anti-science (postmodernism) and science denialism (biophobia), universities serve as patient zero for a broad range of other dreadfully bad ideas and movements. In the immortal words of George Orwell, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”” The proliferation of many of these bad ideas has yielded reward mechanisms in academia that are upside down. The herd mindset is rewarded. Innovative thinkers are chastised. “Stay in your lane” academics are rewarded. Outspoken academics are punished. Hyper-specialization is rewarded. Broad synthetic thinking is scorned. Every quality that should define intellectual courage is viewed as a problem. Anything that adheres to leftist tenets of progressivism is rewarded. Those who believe in equality of outcomes receive top-paying administrative jobs. Those who believe in meritocracy are frowned upon. If they go unchecked, parasitic idea pathogens, spawned by universities, eventually start to infect every aspect of our society.[v]

What is Parasitic?

Answer: thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, and mindsets that parasitize one’s ability to think properly and accurately.

Postmodernism rejects the existence of objective truths; radical feminism scoffs at the idea of innate biologically-based sex differences; and social constructivism posits that the human mind starts off as an empty slate largely void of biological blueprints.

These mind viruses all reject truth in the defense of a pet ideology.

The inoculation against such cancerous mindsets comes in the form of a two-step cognitive vaccine: 1) providing OPS (Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome) sufferers with accurate information, and 2) ensuring that OPS sufferers learn how to process information according to the evidentiary rules of science and logic.

Death of the West by a Thousand Cuts

In addition to the nefarious universities, what else is leading us down the primrose path to destruction?

Such forces include political correctness (as enforced by the thought police, the language police, and social justice warriors), postmodernism, radical feminism, social constructivism, cultural and moral relativism, and the culture of perpetual offense and victimhood (microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces on campuses, as well as identity politics).

The poison leaks from the universities into the culture.

This has created an environment that has stifled public discourse in a myriad of ways.

There will be forbidden topics and forbidden thoughts. If you don’t intuit them or abide by the politically correct zeitgeist, you will be exposed, shunned, ridiculed and could lose your job.

None of these tactics is a rational argument.

Ultimately, any attempt to limit what individuals can think or say weakens the defining ethos of the West, namely the unfettered commitment to the pursuit of truth unencumbered by the shackles of the thought police.

Saad has survived some harrowing episodes in life. His parents were abducted by Fatah. He was fortunate to get them back. He lived through part of the 1975 war in Lebanon.

Through his life and educational experiences, he arrived at two foundational ideals: truth and freedom.

John 8:32

and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Academic lunacy is anathema and a threat to both of those. That is why he fights, and why he writes.

Saad ends by saying we are all going to have to be a honey badger in this fight. Don’t rely on others to defend your rights and principles. A honey badger is a fierce animal that can defend itself against six lions. The battle for reality and common sense is on.

We dare not lose.

[i] [i] https://rumble.com/v3cbzeq-dr.-gad-saad-how-infectious-ideas-are-killing-common-sense-10821.html

[ii] https://www.genengnews.com/news/toxoplasma-infection-in-mice-reduces-generalized-anxiety-not-just-feline-fear/#:~:text=Past%20studies%20have%20shown%20that,and%20so%20increasing%20parasite%20spread.

[iii] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31666/does-one-bad-apple-really-spoil-whole-bunch

[iv] https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

[v] https://archive.org/details/2020-gs-the-parasitic-mind/page/26/mode/2up

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