3… 2… 1. Off we go. Dr. Gad Saad’s book, The Parasitic Mind, tackles topics that tend to elicit passioned discourse between interlocutors. He candidly discusses race, sexuality, religion and other institutions of similar ilk that strive to exist above critique. These institutions hide behind the high walls of the fortress “political correctness” wherein not only can you have your own opinions but you may help yourself to your own facts as well. You can have “your truth.” This is oxymoronic. If I can hold my own SirLushaba truth that is mutually exclusive with the next person’s truth then the word, truth, that is meant to demarcate reality from fiction, loses meaning. We need not ascribe similar intellectual weighting to truth as we do non-truth as this would undermine language altogether. We may as well just return to barking and grunting.
Allowing truth to be fluid such that it can be manipulated to fit the agenda of whomever observes it is dangerous on its own. Dr. Saad echoes the point made by the illustrious George Orwell in the 20th century classic, 1984, that there are downstream effects to removing meaning from words; one of which is that debate becomes impossible. If we cannot interrogate each others’ arguments then there’s no way to guarantee consistent selection of the best ideas. The suppression to extinction of good ideas is the actual apocalypse ladies and gentlemen.
Bad ideas are like parasites. They gnaw away at the fabric of society and if they are not promptly confronted with the intellectual equivalent of anti-parasitic drugs then soon there may be nothing left to save. The progress that humanity has made over its 200 thousand-year history will be expunged. We will struggle to distinguish up from down, left from right. There are at least two biological parasites that are discussed in Saad’s book. One zombifies rats so that they find cat urine sexually stimulating; the other is planted by a wasp in a spider to essentially turn the arachnid into a nest for its eggs. Upon hatching, the wasp larvae devour the spider from the inside out. These biological examples serve to alert the reader of the seriousness of espousing bad ideas. We are playing host to parasites that will cause behaviour that is detrimental to society. They are consuming our sanity from the inside. We’re moving at warp speed towards infinite lunacy.
In a land far, far away, a famous actor from the hit show Empire imagined a hate crime and asked the police to investigate it in 2019. I know that sounds crazy and that’s because it is. He reported an assault against him that did not happen. He was counting on his strong hand in victimology poker of being black and gay in America. Victimology poker, sometimes referred to as the Oppression Olympics, is when marginalised groups compare their pain to see who has it the worst. The goal is to be viewed as the most oppressed so as to solicit the most sympathy. People are fighting tooth and nail to be viewed as victims as if it were a virtue. The actions of the Empire star attracted so much media attention and world famous individuals publicly voiced their support , only for them to be embarrassed months later to find out that it was all an act. He thought he was still on set maybe 🤷🏾♂️. This inflicted real damage on the black American community, the gay community as well as the City of Chicago. The police used up resources estimated at approximately 200 thousand dollars to conduct an investigation on a crime that had only happened in someone’s head.
It seems like ngumkhuhlane walengesheya but American culture is as contagious as their hashtags. It’s a parasitic idea to hold victims in the esteem of heroes. It’s a mistake to incentivise human beings to climb victimology mountain. People are now engaging in identity politics as if it were a sport. There’s a multi-dimensional tug of war for rights between racial minorities and queer communities; Transgender people versus those subscribing to less trendy faiths and religious doctrines; this marginalised group against that disenfranchised group and on and on it goes. Intersectionality, whereby one belongs to not just one marginalised group but multiple, gives you a strong hand in this game. You can demand for more rights. If a 13 year-old kid tells you that they identify as a 21 year-old, you have to let them into your nightclub. If someone else you meet identifies as a tree, you have to water them. That’s how it works, or risk getting cancelled. There’s even a self-appointed fraternity that exists to make sure that everyone abides by these abstract identity rules, the so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJW). They give you a red card if you express views contrary to the orthodoxy that they have devised out of thin air.
This ideology of post-modernism is far reaching. Universities are pressured to prioritise the protection of people’s feelings above the pursuit of knowledge and truth. It is now more important for a university to be a “safe space” than a marketplace for good ideas. Dissenting opinions are silenced on grounds of being “offensive” to those 10 people over there, rather than on their factual merits. A Canadian university removed a weighing scale from its gym floor after a student described it as “triggering.” Taylor Swift was struck down by SJWs after she weighed herself on a scale in her own music video that returned the word “fat” on the meter. The very mention of obesity gets you cancelled in the modern day; insinuating that one can be healthy at any size. This stance renders obsolete decades of research into obesity and its health effects. This sort of denial of truth is reminiscent of the period preceding the ‘Age of Enlightenment.’ During this period, great scientific discoveries that challenged the status quo were greeted with severe hostility.
Galileo Galilei had the temerity to suggest that our solar system was heliocentric i.e. the planets orbit the sun; against the religious orthodoxy that maintained human beings as the most special entities in the universe to arrive at the forgone conclusion that everything rotated about Earth i.e geocentric. Galileo was charged with heresy for his view and lived the rest of his days behind bars. 300 years later, society caught up and it turns out Galileo was right. He had to pay with his freedom for speaking the truth. Giardano Bruno who had been born a generation before Galileo suffered a more regrettable fate as he was burned at the stake for holding the same beliefs about the universe. Hippasus was thrown overboard and drowned to his death for discovering that some numbers could not be expressed as fractions. A society of fanatics that are afraid of truth and debate is dangerous.
The Age of Enlightenment formalised the pursuit of knowledge by means of reason and evidence. Society is better for it. This is how we built modern medicine, schooling and democracy. The concept of “human rights” traces its beginnings to this era. The life expectancy of a human being has doubled since; the human population has grown 8-fold. This was considered impossible once upon a time. Thomas Malthus argued that food production would not be able to keep up with the growth of the human population. He was way off because we have gotten so good at producing food that more people die from overeating than starvation in the present day. Our information repositories grow by 2.5 quintillion bytes (18 zeros) daily; and, the greatest threat to human life is another human. This is the sort of progress that is compromised by a society that feels more than it thinks. The search for objective truth is noble. There is no long-term advantage to be gained from regarding opinions with the same veneration as we do truth. When alternative “facts” are served, they should come with a side of dissenting voices. That these dissenters have hurt your feelings should be secondary to how faithful the argument is to objective reality.
But it's so easy to play the victim.