Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

Any human endeavor rooted in the pursuit of truth must rely on fact and not feelings.

Do not fear the loss of a friendship. Anyone who is willing to end a relationship because of a reasoned difference of opinion is not worthy of your friendship.

Science should be about the pursuit of truth, and not about the defense of one’s preferred political ideology or personal beliefs.

Why should people in a free country be afraid of saying what they believe? Think about that, and you will know the direction that the “progressives” want to take us.

To be a truly wise person requires that we recognize those domains best served by our intellect versus those best guided by our emotions.

E. O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist and evolutionary biologist, is reputed to have said of socialism: “Great idea. Wrong species.” Any system that is built on a false understanding of human nature is doomed to fail.

There is no "black mind" or "white mind", no "white male of knowing", there is only one truth, and we find it through the scientific method.

In the immortal words of George Orwell, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

We are both thinking and feeling animals. The challenge is to know when to activate the cognitive (thinking) versus the affective (feeling) systems.

The greater the number of people present, the less likely an individual is to help someone in need because it is easier to rationalize that someone else will do it.

The next time some academics tell you how important ‘diversity’ is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

The Ideological Conformity of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Progressives seem to believe that if they say the words “diversity, inclusion, and equity” often enough, all problems will be solved. But of course only certain types of diversity, inclusion, and equity matter. Diversity based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are foundational sacraments in the Cult of Diversity. On the other hand, intellectual and political diversity are heretical ideas that need to be expunged.

Anyone who is willing to end a relationship because of a reasoned difference of opinion is not worthy of your friendship.

Any system that is built on a false understanding of human nature is doomed to fail. Building a society where the primary objective is to protect one’s fragile self-esteem from the dangers of competition will only lead to a society of weakness, entitlement, and apathy. Life is necessarily competitive; society is necessarily hierarchical. It does no one any favors to pursue a utopian vision of society where no one’s feelings are hurt.

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” —John Stuart Mill1

Beware of those trying to impress you with confusing word salads.

Science is based on evidence, not politics. In science knowing is always preferable to not knowing.”37 But today in academia, progressive ideology trumps scientific facts.

Free societies do no recoil and the power of satire. They recognize that all beliefs and ideologies are fair game. Once we delimit what can be satirized, we are no longer living in a free society.

If you want to know what’s wrong with higher education, this reversal of traditional university priorities—with social justice now at the top and scholarship lower on the totem pole—is a good place to start.

Progressives seem to believe that if they say the words “diversity, inclusion, and equity” often enough, all problems will be solved.

We envy people whose traits compete with our desirability as a mate.

One problem we face today is that consequentialists make a virtue of having emotions cloud our judgments, not only to avoid hurt feelings but because emotion is seen as a sign of authenticity.

The problem arises when domains that should be reserved for the intellect are hijacked by feelings.

Those who believe in equality of outcomes receive top-paying administrative jobs. Those who believe in meritocracy are frowned upon.

Similarly, social justice warriors and their ilk are intellectual terrorists, and they can wreak havoc on reason and our public life, limiting people’s willingness to speak and think freely, without ever constituting a majority.

In the West, the ideological indoctrination is subtler. It is achieved by an ethos of political correctness and best enforced by creating university campuses that lack intellectual diversity. Political correctness is like the sting of the spider wasp. Recall that the afflicted spider is dragged to the wasp’s burrow in a zombie-like state and is subsequently eaten in vivo by the wasp’s offspring.

In a free society, people should have the right to criticize a religion; they should have the right to do so, and of course their criticisms are themselves open to criticism; that is the essence of freedom of speech and thought.

Incidentally, if you are a non-racist white person who does not appreciate being accused of supporting white supremacy, you undoubtedly suffer from white fragility

Trigger warnings are antithetical to a fundamental principle of exposure therapy, a well-researched therapeutic approach for combatting generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, phobias (like arachnophobia), panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The radical snake always ends up eating its tail. ISIS kills all Muslims who are not Muslim enough. Progressives denounce all those who are not progressive enough.