How Fashionable Delusions Spread
Gad Saad's The Parasitic Mind shines its light on the modern plague of intellectual corruption
Somewhere in the tangled depths of thought, a creeping contagion has taken root. It is slow but relentless, spreading with the insidious air of a whispered deception. Picture the parasitic wasp: laying its eggs in the soft underbelly of an oblivious host until one day, a hatchling bursts forth, ravenous and hungry for more. Such is the phenomenon that Gad Saad, evolutionary behavioral scientist and cultural raconteur, captures in The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. The book—a full-throated jeremiad wrapped in the sly wit of a man equal parts scholar and provocateur—shines its light on the modern plague of intellectual corruption, of bad ideas so fatuous, yet so fashionable, that they stand cloaked in their counterfeit profundity.
To read Saad’s latest work is to walk a minefield littered with terms like “intellectual terrorism”—a phrase the author coins to expose the stifling tyranny of thought masquerading as moral high ground. The metaphor here is not for the faint of heart. For terrorism does not merely assert itself: it coerces, silences the rational skeptic with threats of ostracism or worse. Saad, who is no stranger to the barricades of unpopular opinion, identifies this form of tyranny as not only external—imposed by an army of ideological inquisitors—but internal, too. The parasite, once welcomed into the mind, distorts perception so completely that even the patient begins to believe in the beauty of his own cognitive collapse. Bad ideas rarely ask for permission; they infect without apology.
Saad’s treatise is built with academic rigor yet delivered with the no-nonsense gallows humor of a man who sees the absurdity of our intellectual moment and cannot help but chuckle through the frustration. He is at once playful and unflinching, mocking the so-called “sacred cows” of our age while issuing a serious warning: society is playing host to ideological parasites that cloak themselves in language designed to insulate them from scrutiny. Ideas like postmodernism, identity politics, and radical relativism have become untouchable, sacrosanct, their vacuity made obscure by their sheer volume. Speak against them, and you risk being labeled a heretic, cast into the digital void, or drowned under a tidal wave of moral indignation.
And so, Saad mounts a defense of reason, of truth, of common sense—concepts that seem, in his telling, both endangered and laughably uncomplicated. Like a man who has wandered into a hall of mirrors, he marvels at how simple propositions (“2+2=4”; “There are biological differences between men and women”, etc.) are now considered controversial, derided as relics of an unenlightened age. It is, as Saad suggests, a collective intellectual regression, a willingness to abandon the empirical and rational in favor of performative allegiance to fashionable nonsense.
Where The Parasitic Mind truly shines is in its dissection of the forces that allow this cultural absurdity to persist. Saad likens bad ideas to viruses, and his diagnosis is bleak: they thrive because they exploit our innate psychological vulnerabilities. Humans crave belonging; we fear ostracism. In this environment, the parasite flourishes, because to reject it outright is to court social and professional death. Saad introduces the concept of idea pathogens, ideological strains that have jumped from the petri dish of academia into the bloodstream of society. Once unleashed, they metastasize into movements that demand conformity under the guise of compassion, inclusivity, or progress.
And yet, Saad is not here to whimper into the abyss. He is not content to bemoan the problem without proposing solutions. If bad ideas are parasites, he argues, then critical thinking is the antidote—a vaccine developed through courage, intellectual humility, and an unwavering commitment to truth. He exhorts readers to engage in what he calls “idea inoculation”: an intentional fortification of the mind against the viral onslaught. It begins with skepticism, with questioning the high priests of ideology who insist that dissent is a form of violence, and it ends with what Saad calls the pursuit of nomological networks of cumulative evidence (a mouthful, yes, but one that encapsulates his call for rigorous, reality-based thinking).
For all its blistering critique, The Parasitic Mind remains hopeful—a battle hymn for those who refuse to be bullied into intellectual submission. Saad’s prose cuts sharp but never descends into bitterness; his humor remains his ally, as though he recognizes the absurdity of a world where stating the obvious can feel like an act of rebellion. And so he writes not merely for those already converted but for the silent majority still scratching their heads, wondering when exactly the emperor lost his clothes.
Michael S. Rose is author of the New York Times bestseller Goodbye, Goodmen (Regnery), Ugly As Sin (Sophia Institute), The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Benedict XVI: The Man Who Was Ratzinger (Spence), and other books.