Gad Saad is the Worst

This might be hard to believe but I used to be an angrier writer. Sometimes, I would get something close to a one-way vendetta against someone — not for being wrong (or wrong as I saw it) but for being a phoney. It was actively annoying that someone like Dave Rubin would sing the praises of “ideas” while talking as if he had never encountered, never mind articulated, an idea. I felt like the world had to know that he was a phoney.

I feel less like this now. People who might have wound me up more often make me laugh. Perhaps I take “the discourse” a bit less seriously. Or perhaps I’m just getting old.

But sometimes my bile ducts seethe. Enter Gad Saad.

Gad Saad is an anti-woke Canadian marketing professor. He appears to be Elon Musk’s favourite author. He is also perhaps the most self-satisfied man in the world. He is the living embodiment of the old joke, “Enough about me. What do you think about me?”

This is a claim that needs support, so let’s turn to Saad’s The Parasitic Mind (2020). Within the first few pages, Saad has announced himself to be an “ardent warrior against … destructive ideas” and declared himself to be “willing to tackle thorny and difficult issues”. “Why do I stick my neck out repeatedly?” Saad asks. Why indeed! Well, he is “a free thinker who is allergic to go-along, get-along group think”. (Saad writes at length about his “inquisitive nature”, “strong individuality” and “desire for intellectual freedom”. I like to think I am above-averagely curious and independent-minded but I think such self-assessments should be (a) qualified and (b) short.)

“Unlike the great majority of my highfalutin colleagues who take great pride in being ivory tower–dwellers,” writes Saad, “I am a professor of the people.” My sympathy is extended to his “highfalutin colleagues”. “While I am a jovial and warm person,” continues Saad, “I can become a combative brawler when I witness departures from reason.” This is a neat way of bragging about his personality and his intellectualism.

He’s humble too! Yes, Saad hates people having “zero epistemic humility”. “I am so offended by individuals who exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect,” he writes, “That is, a self-assuredness and supreme confidence despite one’s idiocy.” Naturally, here Saad takes the chance to talk about other people’s mistakes rather than his own.

As if all this was not enough, Saad is also quite the athlete! As a young man, Saad “developed into a very competitive soccer player with the potential to head to Europe to pursue a professional career”. I’m not saying this isn’t true — I’m just saying I don’t trust Saad’s assessment of whether it is true.

All this, mind you, comes in the few first pages.

Saad’s ego is massive but also fragile. When Bari Weiss wrote an embarrassing essay about various figures from the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018, Saad complained about a “glaring omission”: himself. “[Weiss] must have missed my engagement over the past 20+ years both in academia and in the public arena when few if any academics were speaking out against bad ideas,” Saad sniffed. He later insisted that he was “trolling”, adding “I don’t wish to belong to any self-important group”. As the old Groucho Marx saying didn’t go, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that wouldn’t have me as a member”.

Fast forward to now. Saad’s social media strategy appears to involve winding people up and then spending post after post marvelling at the fact that people have been wound up. “Why do women no longer wear any real clothes and instead are always in athleisure?” Saad posted this week. “It’s grotesque. Every single woman at the cafe is dressed in this manner.”

Now, I think it’s fine to have personal opinions about what constitutes appropriate dress — as long as you aren’t inflicting them on people in the street. I’m a natural slob, so it would be farcical for me to concern myself with how other people are dressed, but I don’t see anything essentially wrong with it. “Grotesque”, though? Firstly, it just seems like a weird claim (I’m going to be courageous enough to suggest that people can look good in gym clothes). Secondly, it’s downright obnoxious. Of course it’s going to wind people up.

But Saad spent post, after post, after post responding to “Camel Toe Karens” he had irritated. (A “Karen”, as I understand the concept, is someone complaining about something that is not their business. Surely Saad is the “Karen” here?)

He also insisted that he had been joking.

This is what pissed me off. I do strongly feel that people should take jokes less seriously. But Saad wasn’t joking. I challenge anyone to find the humorous or facetious content in his post. You might as well look for a restaurant in Antarctica. You won’t find it.

True, it’s still a waste of someone’s time and energy to get mad about a smug Canadian academic’s opinions on clothes. But Saad was absolutely trying to make people mad. It’s like slapping a bee nest and then huffing about the rudeness and sensitivity of bees.

What really irritates me about Saad, I think, is that I care about people being allowed to ask unfashionable questions, and I care about people being allowed to make provocative jokes. But the former takes humility and objectivity, and the latter takes a lightness of spirit. With his overwhelming narcissism and egotism, Saad makes it more difficult to do either.

Anyways, I feel better for writing that. This is the uncomfortable paradox of disliking people online, I know. We do dislike them. But there’s something pleasurably cathartic about expressing that.