Fund welcome to worlds apart be my guest today likes to say that he takes intellectuals to come up with really stupid ideas ideas that down spread across society its like parasites draining the host organism and making him behave in strange and sometimes even south in danger in ways from identity politics to Council Culture to now emerging call that 19 age old how do seemingly noble propositions toxic well to discuss that im now in joined by god saad a professor in marketing of Concordia University and author of the newly released book the parasitic mind how infectious ideas killing commonsense chris aside its a great pleasure for me to talk to thank you very much for making the time you so much about me cheers now i mentioned some examples of what you call idea pathogens thoughts that seem to be well intentioned at least initially until you. Recognize that they pave the way to how what is some other case so also modernism is probably the granddaddy of all idea i have that 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 not as it would be one militant feminism would be another it starts off as a great idea like equity feminism is a good idea men and women should be equal under the law but then it metamorphosis into a dreadful idea when it becomes men and women are biologically indistinguishable everything is that theyre so focused russian so you start with a noble idea and that metamorphosis and so they seem to makin is not me tayshaun here would be taking ad an idea out of proportion and i say lets mention anything about 3rd right needing to serve in the service of pursuing a originally noble goal. Now to be here my 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 many examples. Because they are fully coupled from the consequences of their pontification right the reason why for example the Business School where im 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 youre 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 are here is there time behind this design i dont think its a sort of a grand conspiracy where there is some barrister tala just in chief that is spreading all this nonsense but i think its 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 dont 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 were not doing a very good job good reason now the subtitle to your book is how infectious ideas that killing common sense and common sense that is also very culturally specific what is sensical to canadian may be 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 we can all call common sense. Only women menstruate thats common sense biology matters when it comes to understanding human phenomenon thats 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 but his son are 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 are arguing not only that we have this bunch of ideas released on us but that our collective social immune system is being deliberately except craft 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 youre exactly right that the 1st things the dictators do when they want to suppress any resistance to d their positions they dont get rid of the guys with the big muscles they get rid of the guys with the big brains and the sharp turn strike this is why satire is something that scares a lot of dictators because satire has a way of cutting through ideological nonsense and so what you know of 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 the users are literate everywhere in society i think theyre now being politically instrumentalist and theyre your mansion that its primarily a western affliction but i think that 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 and not europe youre exactly right because i often state not not to be you know inflammatory but Prime MinisterJustin Trudeau our canadian prime. There is a walking manifestation of every idea pathogen that i described in the book live to see if q. Of a maybe hes too but hes gone and were just here so we can forgive all those other body has its ups and downs or your other question universities are truly there ill echo chambers of group think of conformity so rather than choosing professors for example who are intellectual navy seals who are courageous who are brave will go against your philosophy we choose professors professors who are hyper specialized who stay in their lane who never cause waves thats a terrible idea now as a russian and i want to believe a cultural harriss to dostoyevsky tell a story and other giants of psychological intellectual is my im absolutely convinced that the western tradition has long instrumental ice or even weaponized shame as a social and geo political tactic and it 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 its also fascinating to see how these large scale shaming experiment 0 will resolve itself because its its now being brought in from a specific problem or a specific actor to a society as a whole the United States is now convulsing the blame and shame what do you think this overleap. Its 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 familys honor is tied to the sexual behavior of your daughters rice oh dear me its 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 were 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 emails 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 to being homophobic islamophobia massaging a status on its 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 its 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 theyre 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 its called contamination sensitivity its not only the object the disgusting object thats revolting but everything it touches everything its associated with and i think thats 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 im glad you raised this just because in one of the chapters of the book in the 2nd chapter i talk about feeling very sustained game 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 discussion hes repulsive i revive him they dont 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 sky staying all of those qualities go out the window and so this is where i warn people against the danger of activating the wrong system at the runtime when im walking down a dark alley and i see a bunch of young men hanging around i might get a fear response which makes perfect evolutionary sense so in this case my emotional system has kicked in properly if im 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 dont you think that there is a purpose behind making sure that 2nd policy positions. Ive taken and critically i mean you mentioned dont 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 the rock 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 that policy decisions lets say barack obama and in the area of the middle east he he was. Thats for disaster is there but nobodys talking about that guy picks up as you were speaking i take this this is a memory stick but 1st i dont pretend that it is the cork of a wine bottle so im going to use now arabic although im going to translate it in english theres an expression in arabic that says getting drunk simply by smelling the cork of the wine bottle and other words i dont 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 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 theyre so handsome theyre so president ial theyre 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 doesnt mean that you wont succumb to the spice well as you said before it takes a intellectuals cut to come up with really stupid ideas professes that we have to take a very hard break for the time being but it will be back in just a few moments if they can. So what weve got to do is identify the threats that we have its crazy. Let it be an arms race is often skeery Dramatic Development only to be going to resist i dont see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and tom. Welcome back to worlds apart bit gods are evolutionary psychologist and author of the caris to dig mind how infectious ideas i killing 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 under cobbett 19 restrictions as people stay at home one on one with ideas perhaps hungry for emotional contact for sounds of emotional rather than intellectual community how do you think its 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 youre 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 im asking this is because maybe its too early to say but its my perception that many of those ideas pathogens you mentioned before like i have you know identity politics or cultural relativism theyre 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 its no longer about science its 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 a homeostasis or victimology so if you look at your thermostat in your room its a homeostatic system what does that mean you senate at 25 degrees 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 that 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 cant 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 its a mite the topic then and if im 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 didnt 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 its very disheartening now how does that relate to you would have thought that when you actually faced a endemic 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 of whining theyre also sort of morally. Laden terms bet. Arest 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 its almost like not an app an actual choice a conscious choice but if youre bored to you 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 im 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 the but the reality is you seldom find people who come from difficult backgrounds supporting a lot of his nonsense it takes people who are orgiastic in their freedoms to then manufacture false narratives now i want to specifically ask you about the corona virus and the new ethics around that because i think if more than anything else calls for a debate on the socalled 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 big brutal impute a full thing about it is that its 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 dont want to minimize the tragedy associated with this and demming but isnt 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 dont know maybe it is that i mean what i think were 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 im 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 a haphazard parenting where you dont know if your ch