Guest Speaker – Gad Saad

I found the speaker to be extremely interesting. Through the discussion of his book, the Parasitic Mind, he brought up some points that confused me. Specifically, in relation to the class idea of the intellectual class. In his book, there were some sections that focused on applying his ideas of the parasitic mind to modern far-left ideals. He touched on these ideals during the discussion. One that stood out to me, was when he mentioned that he doesn’t believe social situations impact our society in the way that certain intellectual groups believe they do. He explained that believing this has to do with the parasitic mind, since people are not choosing to focus on biological science. He believes that biological science trumps social science in this sense. He gave another example explaining that, “He would not want his children to see a transgender person twerking on TV when they are young,” explaining that it is not because of homophobia, but just because he believes young children should not be exposed to that at a young age. This was something that was hard for me to understand, because I do not really understand how this has anything to do with the intellectual class or the parasitic mind that his book is about. To me, this seemed like more focusing on left ideals and how he believes they are infiltrating society and intellectuals. Especially since he used many more examples in his book such as focusing on the election of Donald Trump and how the intellectual class reacted, as well as Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed for the supreme court. He focused on the reactions of the intellectual class when discussing these national events, explaining that he believed they were uncalled for and further proved his point of the parasitic mind. When I asked about this and expressed my confusion on what he was trying to prove, he said that I had misinterpreted the chapter. This was confusing to me, because when giving many examples of leftist ideas existing and being taken to an extreme level because of the parasitic mind, it would only make sense that the author is trying to express that when discussing the parasitic mind he believes it is applied more heavily in leftist ideals.