Gad Saad

G ad Saad (often styled “Dr. Gad Saad”) is a Lebanese-Canadian academic best known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. Born in Beirut in 1964, he later settled in Montreal, where he pursued higher education and built a long teaching and research career in business and behavioral science.

Saad earned degrees from McGill University (BSc; MBA) and completed graduate training at Cornell University (MSc; PhD). He has been a Professor of Marketing at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business since the mid-1990s, and previously held a Concordia research chair focused on evolutionary behavioral science and “Darwinian consumption.”

Alongside academic publishing, he built a sizable public audience through media, long-running online writing, and his show/podcast “The Saad Truth.” He is also the author of popular books including The Consuming Instinct and The Parasitic Mind.

In 2025, Saad became a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi's Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom.

Dr. Gad Saad’s Good Ideas

Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind (Regnery, published October 6, 2020; ~256 pages) is a polemical-but-structured argument that modern Western societies have become vulnerable to “idea pathogens”: contagious beliefs and rhetorical habits that spread socially, impair critical thinking, and pressure institutions to privilege emotional or political conformity over truth-seeking.

Saad’s core metaphor is biological: just as parasites exploit a host’s resources while weakening it, certain ideologies exploit human social instincts (status signaling, tribal belonging, fear of ostracism) while weakening the cultural “immune system” that protects liberal democracy—open debate, scientific norms, and viewpoint pluralism. He frames the present moment less as a conventional left–right policy dispute and more as a “battle of ideas” over whether reason, evidence, and free inquiry remain non-negotiable public goods.

From political conflict to an “epidemic” of bad ideas

Early in the book, Saad positions the contemporary landscape as an escalation from ordinary political competition into a cultural civil war about epistemology—how we decide what is true. The enemy, in his telling, is not disagreement but a growing norm that disagreement itself is dangerous, “harmful,” or illegitimate.

He argues that idea pathogens gain traction because they offer psychological rewards:

• Moral certainty (you’re on “the right side of history”)
• Status within an in-group
• Simplicity (complex realities reduced to oppressor/oppressed scripts)
• Protection from the stress of ambiguity

The result is a climate where intellectual caution is replaced by performative certainty, and where institutions become more concerned with symbolic compliance than with evaluating claims.

Thinking versus feeling: truth versus “hurt feelings”

A central pillar of Saad’s critique is that public norms increasingly treat subjective offense as evidence of objective harm. He contrasts “truth” (claims that must answer to reality and evidence) with “felt” narratives that are insulated from correction.

He does not deny that words can be cruel or that social stigma can injure people; rather, he argues that elevating emotional impact to the level of truth criterion creates perverse incentives: it rewards strategic grievance, makes debate impossible (because refutation becomes “violence”), and encourages institutions to manage reputational risk through censorship rather than adjudicate competing claims. In his view, this shift erodes the philosophical foundations of liberal societies.

Non-negotiable elements of a free and modern society

Saad lays out what he sees as the civilizational “non-negotiables” that idea pathogens corrode free expression, academic freedom, scientific realism, and classical liberal principles (equal rights, due process, viewpoint diversity).

His basic claim is straightforward: you can’t have a functioning knowledge society if people are punished for asking forbidden questions, if scholarship becomes activism-by-default, or if institutions substitute moral theater for empiricism. Even if one sympathizes with activist goals, he contends that illiberal methods (coercion, deplatforming, compelled speech, fear-based HR regimes) ultimately damage the very groups they claim to protect because they undermine credibility, provoke backlash, and degrade standards.

Anti-science, anti-reason, and illiberal movements

Saad describes a spectrum of “illiberal” intellectual trends, especially within elite cultural institutions, that he believes share a common hostility to objective truth-claims and merit-based evaluation.

Here he blends cultural criticism with his background in evolutionary behavioral science: humans are not naturally optimized for truth; we’re optimized for social survival: belonging, reputation, coalition-building. In Saad’s framing, anti-scientific ideologies exploit these instincts, turning knowledge institutions into arenas for dominance contests and purity rituals. He highlights rhetorical patterns he sees as diagnostic: unfalsifiable claims, redefinition of terms to immunize beliefs from evidence, and moral intimidation that treats skepticism as malice.

Campus lunacy and the rise of the “social justice warrior”

The book’s most vivid sections focus on universities. Saad argues that campus culture incubates idea pathogens through:

• speech codes and bureaucratized grievance systems
• ideological monocultures in certain disciplines
• training students to interpret disagreement as trauma
• administrative incentives to avoid controversy by appeasing activists

He presents this as a self-reinforcing loop: a small number of highly motivated actors can reshape norms because institutions fear reputational damage and because most bystanders choose silence.

Whether or not a reader agrees with his diagnosis, Saad’s animating concern is institutional: universities are supposed to be society’s truth-finding engines. If they instead become conformity engines, downstream effects appear everywhere, in journalism, law, corporate governance, medicine, and public policy.

“Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome”: why smart people go along

One of Saad’s signature concepts in the book is Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS), his label for a pattern of strategic denial: people see problems (dogma, censorship, coercive norms) but “bury their heads” because acknowledging them would be socially costly.

OPS functions as his explanation for why idea pathogens can dominate even when many privately disagree: reputational threats, job insecurity, social shaming, and the human tendency to avoid conflict. He portrays OPS as particularly acute among professionals who depend on institutional approval, where dissent risks career penalties.

How to seek truth: “nomological networks of cumulative evidence”

Saad doesn’t only diagnose; he also proposes an epistemic remedy. He urges readers to lean on a nomological network of cumulative evidence—a research logic in which claims gain credibility not from slogans or anecdotes, but from converging lines of evidence across methods relying on experiments, field data, replication, and theory coherence.

This is his attempt to re-anchor debate in shared standards: reality pushes back; good explanations are constrained by data; and truth-seeking is a disciplined practice, not a moral identity. Even readers who dislike his politics can still recognize the methodological point: strong claims require robust evidentiary scaffolding, and institutions should reward that discipline.

Call to action: rebuilding the cultural immune system

The book closes with a direct call for intellectual courage and institutional resistance. Saad’s prescription is essentially a re-commitment to:

• viewpoint diversity and debate norms
• protection of academic freedom and open inquiry
• personal refusal to participate in coercive rituals (forced statements, compelled speech)
• a renewed public respect for science as a method rather than a tribal emblem

He argues that the cost of silence is cumulative: each concession normalizes the next, and over time the space for honest speech collapses.