like parasites draining the host organism and making him behave in strange and sometimes even sound in danger in ways from identity politics to council culture to now emerging called big bang teenage girl edgy how do you seemingly normal compositions turn toxic well to discuss that i'm now joined by god saad a professor in marketing at concordia university and author of the newly released book the parasitic mind how infectious ideas killing commonsense chris aside it's a great pleasure for me to talk to thank you very much for making the time thank you so much for having me cheers now i've mentioned some examples of what you call idea pathogens thoughts that seem to be well intentioned at least initially until you recognise that they pave the way to how what are some others so also modernism is probably the ground daddy of all idea of the just because it reports that there are no absolute truths we are completely shadowed by subjectivity we are shackled

by our personal biases and as you might imagine there is a kernel of truth to that idea but when taken to the extreme it becomes very antiscientific because scientists do wake up every day under the working presumption that there are truths to be discovered so was modernism would be one feminism would be another it starts off as a great idea equity feminism is a good idea men and women should be equal under the law but then it meant the more for sizes and so a dreadful idea when it becomes men and women are biologically indistinguishable everything is a social construction so you start with an old idea and metamorphosis sizes and so that has been the mechanism of mutation here with the taking an idea out of proportion and i say let's mention the making absurd right nation did a search in the service of pursuing a originally noble goal. now the human mind has never been immunized against of d.d.t. i personally believe that long grass is prone to narcissism but is there something

about these time in history that. creates particular refer tell ground for this kind of process well i think so about 4050 years ago the idea of pathogens that i discussed in the book began to be spawn on university campuses and as you so rightly mention in the introduction it truly takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas especially here like i was quoting you by the way now yeah exactly. because they are fully coupled from the consequences of their pontification right the reason why for example the business school where i'm housed or engineering schools are not espresso ties by this idea that it is 'd is because we are grounded in reality 'd you cannot build bridges using postmodernism but in many other disciplines regrettably you could pontificate within the halls of academia and you're completely decoupled from the negative consequences of your stupidity now the professor sat do you see that as a sort of

a natural evolution of human thought we all have a right to make a mistake or is it more deliberate than that is there and here is there time behind this design i don't think it's a sort of a grand conspiracy where there is some paris apologists in chief that are spreading all this nonsense but i think it's take the perfect cocktail of all of these ideas pathogens coming together and this is why in the 1st chapter of the book i talk about death of the west by a 1000 cuts right one idea pathogen may not bring down the edifice is a reason to may not but put 101215 of them together and you lose your sense of what constitutes up or down left or right and i get a lot of these emails on a daily basis from people who say i no longer know what to say because i they don't they no longer have confidence in their folk psychology and they allowed. to say that only women menstruate or will i be considered transformed by well if in the

21st century this is something that causes you confusion we're not doing a very good job would reason now the subtitle to your book is how infectious ideas like killing common sense and common sense that is also very culturally specific what is sensical to canadian maybe a total b.s. to russian and the vice versa i mean for people who are watching as around the world from pakistan to south africa to where you are encounter that or where i am in russia is there is something that really can all call commonsense. only women menstruate that's common sense biology matters when it comes to understanding human phenomenon that's common sense so for example most social scientists reject what i just said because they accept that biology explains the behavior of every other species on it except human beings so they are simple principles that most people whether you said we are walking around in pakistan or in bolivia that understand that there is such

a thing as male and female there is such a thing as biology there is such a thing as only women straight but again all of these common sensical ideas have now become very dangerous and corrosive things to say on university campuses. now ultimately our encounter with any pathogen be effected on a virus or any bad idea depends on our immune system and if i interpret your book correctly you're arguing not only that we have this bunch of ideas released on us but that our collective social immune system is being deliberately set prast to prevent those ideas to be countered out in the open and here i can map imagine council culture shaming and all the other mechanisms of suppressing the discourse am i reading your correctly you're exactly right that the 1st things that dictators do when they want to suppress any resistance to sow their positions they don't get

rid of the guys with the big muscles they get rid of the guys with the big brains and the short of time strife this is why satire is something that scares a lot of dictators because satire has a way of cutting through ideological nonsense and so once you know and i keep mentioning universities but i should i should point that the bad ideas that start in universities then proliferate everywhere in society writes when leisurely for it everywhere in society i think there are now being politically instrumentalist and there you mansion that it's primarily a western affliction but i think the west is very deliberate in insisting that you know everybody else in the world should also subscribe to those ideas regardless of whether you believe in those in them or not you're it you're exactly right because i often state not not to be you know inflammatory but prime minister justin trudeau our canadian prime minister is a weighty matter but he's cute but he's gone and we're just here so we can forgive all those other bad ideas exactly jesse your other question universities are truly

sterile echo chambers of groups think of conformity so rather than choosing professors for example who are intellectually navy seals who are courageous who are brave will go against the. we choose professors professors who are super specialized who stay in their early who never cause waves that's a terrible idea now as a russian and i want to believe a cultural harriss to dostoyevsky story and other giants of psychological intellectual is my i'm absolutely convinced that the western tradition has long instrumental ice or even weaponized shame as a social and geo political tactic and you can see that in attitudes towards my country you can see that in the calls to ostracize or shame or punish people who work for the trump ministration and at as unfair as it may be it's also fascinating

to see how these large scale shaming experiment 0 will resolve itself because it's it's now being brought in from a specific problem or a specific actor to a society as a whole the united states is now convulsing with blame and shame where do you think this old will lead. it's interesting that you say you talk about shame because the middle east where i come from actually has institutional forms of honor and shame raises for example your family's honor is tied to the sexual behavior of your daughters rice oh dear me it's dreadful that we are sick i mean some of the same respects although the the source of the shaming might be different right in the west we're not shaming our daughters to be virginal and chaste but we are using the universal mechanisms of controlling people by putting the big guns of shame over their head event imagine how many e-mails i received from professors who are afraid

to answer a single word out of the parts of mental meeting and a lecture as syllable that might be misconstrued and then they might be used as being homophobic islamophobia a message in a serious it's a dreadful way to live especially for someone who comes from a society that was hardly free in the middle east and then moved to the west and to see the same reflexes being implemented in the west it's tragic as i was reading your book it prompted me to look into the connection between shame and disgust and those disgust being an evolutionary mechanism against pathogens and they are separate but they're also related in some very interesting ways not discussed is it is an emotion that many other mammals have but there are one very unique human characteristic to it and it's called contamination sensitivity it's not only be the object the disgusting object that's revolting but everything it touches everything it's associated with and i think that's when it gets very dangerous because as you

pointed out it can get sterile or totalitarian very quickly when you are not only punishing the i.d.'s but also you know people in the institutions who are in directly not even supported but allow this idea to exist that controversial idea right. and i'm glad you raised this just because in one of the chapters of the book in the 2nd chapter i talk about feeling very sustained again and so the extended feeling is based on an aspect of system right on your emotional system oftentimes when people respond negatively to say donald trump they are using it discussed response a discuss he's repulsive i revive him they don't say anything about his positions or for example i may know of someone who truly supports many of the positions that donald trump is stating but because donald trump has a personal style that is the skies think all of those qualities go out the window

and so this is where i warn people against the danger of activating the wrong system of the runtime when i'm walking down a dark alley and i see a bunch of young men and in the round i might get a fear response which makes perfect evolutionary sense so in this case my emotional system has kicked in properly if i'm trying to solve a calculus problem how did my fear response kick in is probably not a good idea so when it comes to certain decisions like political decisions we should try to navigate carefully through these 2 systems if it is almost that p.r. suggesting that people do that. by an honest mistake but don't you think that there is a purpose behind making sure that 2nd policy positions. i've taken uncritically i mean you mentioned don't all comments true like he like he may be unpleasant on a human level but there are certain policy positions that at a legitimate the opposite would be brock obama or justin trudeau who seem to be

amicable people at marvel man i mean i would love to spend an evening with them but to discuss intellectual matters but when i look at their policy decisions let's say barack obama in in the area of the middle east he has he was. dreadful disaster is there but nobody's talking about that i picked up as you were speaking i think this is a memory stick but 1st i don't pretend that it is the cork of a wine bottle so i'm going to use now arabic although i'm going to translate it in english there's an expression in arabic that says getting drunk simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle in other words i don't actually drink the wine i simply get drunk by smelling the court why my mentioning this because when people succumb to the alert of the gorgeous hair of justin trudeau or the lanky my left you know make gestate nature of barack obama they are succumbing to the cork of the wine bottle right what they say is completely platitudinous vacuous nonsense but my god

they are so cute they're so handsome they're so presidential they're so cool whereas donald trump is a bull in a china shop he may say things that are perfectly spot on but my god to go back to your earlier point he disgusts me and what amazes me is that otherwise intellectually sophisticated people succumb to this bias which shows you that just because you are educated and doesn't mean that you won't succumb to the spice well as you said before it takes a intellectuals cut to come up with really stupid ideas professor side we have to take a very short break for the time being because we'll be back in just a few moments thank you. rick. problem drugs don't always come from unscrupulous dealers but from pharmacies to in

every state in the united states we see me very sharp increase in the number of people seeking treatment for addiction to prescription opioids invaded america under the banner of medicine persisted with the pain but instead of trying to wean him off though she just goes after dose after dose after dosed and really became his drug dealer so who's to blame patients doctors manufacturers other governments and. welcome back to worlds apart bit gods are evolutionary psychologist and author of the terrorist sitting in mind how infectious ideas i healing common sense professor side before the break we were talking about this link. shame and disgust and one

thing that they have in common is that both of them are encouraging avoidance of social interaction beach is an interesting thing to ponder while we are all on their call that 19 restrictions as people stay at home one on one with the ideas perhaps hungry for emotional contact for sounds of emotional rather than intellectual community how do you think it's going to change this. flow of landscape. well i think people have short memories sob like to think that eventually ruler turn to our as usual normalcy but you're right that people do need contacts i try to make sure to at least meet colleagues close colleagues friends at least once or twice a week even to go for a walk because it is very isolating i mean in my career i could oftentimes go into my cave and from writing the book i meet without all that i may be in the room

alone by myself for a week at a time but it does take a psychological and emotional toll and so we really have to work hard to retain our human society now the reason i'm asking this is because maybe it's too early to say but it's my perception that many of those ideas pathogens you mentioned before like i have you know identity politics or cultural relativism they're sort of being more threat now and pushed out a little bit by all those new ideas about call that 19 which share many of the same features take for example mastering controversy it's no longer about science it's a moral lesson contest is it really about the substance of those ideas or is it perhaps out more about the energy of what i would call a righteous victimization that is simply looking for ways to get out of the system . so several ways that i can answer this i mean definitely victimology is something that i discuss in the book. i talk about actually something called the homeostasis

of victimology so if you look at your thermostat in your room it's a homeostatic system what does that mean you center that 25 degree celsius and then it will adjust up or down once it sees that the temperature is not aligned with that exact set point well i owe you the victimology in the west at least it exhibits a similar principle i said the the hunger stay says of what i desire as a as a collective victimhood at a certain point and if i can't find it within my society i will read the fine what i mean by victimhood so that i can always reach that set system and by the way victimology has now become the key currency by which i ascend the hierarchy is no longer my accomplishments it's a mite the topic then and if i'm not a victim then i will manufacture a victimhood story this is what i call munchausen syndrome i collect the ranches and now this is very offensive to someone like me because i was

a true victim escaping the lebanese civil war i didn't have to run for my lights so when i see the ingratitude in the west where everybody is surviving to be there the leader of the mileage it's very disheartening now how does that relate to you would have thought that when you actually faced a pandemic it might cost people to alter their whining the reality is it has only emboldened the social justice warriors but you know terms like ingratitude don't whining they're also sort of morally. laden terms but. i rest i was wondering whether it may also be a sort of a consequence of society growing safe and poor at because and that by the way would explain why all these ideas with lose their charge in the face of a real problem like call that 1000 while they would all all of a sudden. every focus i mean it's almost like not an app an actual choice a conscious choice but if you're bored do you still need that energy to get out of

the system and then you come up with you know ideas that can be a vehicle for that into the world yes i mean maybe i mean i'm being slightly facetious but maybe we need to send people in the west to live in other societies where there is true hardship so they could then return and actually appreciate the freedoms that they have i mean i say this just issues sleep but the reality is you seldom find people who come from difficult backgrounds supporting a lot of this nonsense it takes people who are orgiastic in their freedoms to then manufacture false narratives now i want to specifically ask you about the coronavirus and the new ethics around that because i think if more than anything else calls for a debate on the so-called safety culture not only at any university settings but more broadly in life how much safety and how much risk we are willing to take

and i think the brutal and puter for thing about it is that it's not entirely up to humans nature has its own way of imposing its risks on ask of at 19 would be one of them i don't want to minimize the tragedy associated with this and demming but isn't also in a way every alley to check a humble pie that we as a species have needed for it for for a long time. well i don't know i mean maybe it is that i mean what i think we're frustrated about the quality of not exactly and change it washable of us history of the globe it is the somewhat haphazard way by which these edicts come from top right as a man of science i'm perfectly happy to accept the way you should have this type of store clothes versus that but it has to be rooted in scientists so i compare it to say parenting right healthy parenting is when your children know the. sets of consequences that will result in a reward or a punishment if you have haphazard parenting where you don't know if your child

comes into the house not knowing whether they want to be hugged or beaten that doesn't result in healthy adults later in life and i compare that to what's happening now with when i wake up in the morning i don't know what the new edicts are going to be that's going to keep me trapped in my house and i think a lot of people are getting a lot of the school with fatigue and so unless we raise our scientific communication and support of why we are doing the things that we're doing we're going to have a mutiny on a once as at some point so let me share with you what bugs me about this whole call of at 19 the most at this ever expanding definition of moral hazard because people who are asymptomatic carers and most likely they are asymptomatic carriers because of that on the individual efforts to take care of their own bodies or perhaps because they haven't had enough time to ruin they've completely be an outsider seen as sinister agents who can kill others while people with type 2 diabetes species

that totally a lifestyle disease i'm sorry to say but it's a consequence of your life choices they're portrayed as this innocent victims. do you think we will. do you think this color deal will lead us towards redefining what we mean by individual and social responsibility well you know what you spoke of when you talk about type 2 diabetes is actually in a sense one of the idea it comes from one of the idea passages 'd i discuss in the book where there is no longer personal agency and personal responsibility right so for example when it comes to criminal behavior many of the progressive ideas are much more concerned about protecting the cruel than they are to protect the perspective of if there is a criminal is a criminal it must be because society did something wrong to him so somehow personal agency and the same way that it is removed from the type 2 diabetes suffer it is removed from the criminal now what's the idea pathogen that drives this comes from social constructivism the idea that we are all born with empty slates and it's

only it is only socialization that causes us to be whoever we become which is of course run your child is not as likely to become the n.l. messy as leo messi was to become the in our message now i know that you are not a big fan of course modernism especially its french father michel foucault but i find some of his ideas very resonant for example his idea about bio power and how the human body is this sort of an object of power exercised by the state and to some extent i mean over the last past year of or so many of us have been reduced to a biomass but the government's. essentially determining how much sunlight how much fresh air we can get you know how much risk we are allowed to take to see our loved ones and whether or not we are allowed to take that risk maybe post more than is to not that useless after all when anything well answer this a broken clock is correct twice

a day right so so yes there might be one or 2 kernels of insights within plus minus but the general framework of postmodernism in dane's way too much nonsense now going back to the evolutionary science. to some extent i would argue that covet 19 is this evolutionary water shad because it marks in that pretty vivid ways the transition from the millenia of deficit and all our evolutionary missionary is geared towards covering and meeting that deficit to add era of abundance with all the downsides of a the basics year over eating metabolic dishonest hands being sound of those and that era of abundance will require a totally different skill set from all of us obviously our evolution cannot help us at this point of time but what do you think are some of the skills some of the adaptations that we can develop relatively quickly to or you know maybe of the new

challenge well so actually what you speaking about is a really important evolutionary principle there's something called the mismatch hypothesis which from some evolutionary medicine which argues that the top i think is the top 9 chillers health killers are related to a mismatch between 'd the environment in which we we evolved to be adapted for and the current environment and hence the mismatch so for example diabetes or heart disease are in large part due to the fact that there's a mismatch between an environment that we evolved in a caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity and today's environments where the only uncertainty i have is how long is it going to take me before i walk and buy the juicy burger and so i think it's what we would do well to better rate actually my physician has joked that he said you know your body type is ideally suited for a previous evolutionary environment right what happens is are just a story prefaces love fatty foods but the problem is we don't have to work

uncertainties of day and so therefore we gorge and we develop diabetes and heart disease so your general point is one that evolutionary scientists are certainly studying and hopefully will will manage this mismatch better moving forward i want to ask you one last thing about the of personal strategy of countering these parasitic ideas and you talk a. about invoking your in there honey badger and now i had a badger is one of the most fearsome animals and the one but they are also very strategic about the way they attack i read the other day that when they meet them male predator they go for the testicles when they meet a female predator they go for the underbelly of the ice is that something that you're actually recommend i mean going for the most vulnerable parts and your opponents well i wasn't pushing the analogy back far it's well it wasn't the strategic target of why it was more what you did that 1st which is that the fierceness the for us it's not backing down backing out if you truly are if you

truly have principles that are founded on foundational bedrock values that you can i'll take a late and defend then never back down so oftentimes people ask you about them you're not cancellable well there are several reasons one of which is that people realize that there is a cost of coming after me because if you call my ass or me and your ducks are not in order i'm going to come after you i'm going to ask you your ancestors and then if i'm asking you don't answer says metaphorically speaking in other words i never shy away from defending what i believe in not when i don't know something i'm also very humble if you ask me about the legalization of marijuana i will tell you unfortunately i don't know enough about this topic to make a comment but what i know i know and i will defend my positions like a honey badger and people have to have that research well professor side we have to leave it there but it's been absolute delight for me to talk to thank you very much for your time cheers likewise and thank you for watching us hope to see her again next week and all the parts. are.

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