]By: Fern Sidman

In an era marked by intellectual timidity and cultural equivocation, few public thinkers have shown the courage, lucidity, and moral fortitude of Gad Saad. His recent post on X, titled with characteristic bluntness, “How to save the West from its death spiral,” is not mere provocation—it is a manifesto for civilizational survival.

How to save the West from its death spiral. pic.twitter.com/QKgCwZwX1R

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) November 13, 2023

Saad’s academic grounding is in evolutionary psychology, a discipline that seeks to understand human behavior through the lens of evolutionary pressures and adaptive functions. In his public-facing work, he often applies this perspective to critique cultural and political phenomena, arguing that certain contemporary trends conflict with human nature or long-standing social structures.

For years, Saad has stood as a bulwark against the corrosive effects of multicultural relativism, the ideology that insists all cultures, values, and belief systems are morally interchangeable. In his view—and increasingly in the view of a growing number of citizens across the liberal democratic world—this doctrine is not benign tolerance. It is a cultural solvent, dissolving the moral architecture that made free societies possible in the first place.

At the heart of Saad’s thesis is a simple, unfashionable truth: liberal democracies are not accidents of history. They are the product of a very specific civilizational inheritance—rooted in Greco-Roman rationalism, Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, Enlightenment reason, and a centuries-long struggle to secure individual liberty, freedom of expression, equality before the law, and the dignity of the individual.

Multicultural relativism, Saad argues, undermines this inheritance by refusing to make value judgments. In the name of “inclusivity,” Western societies have been taught to believe that no culture may be evaluated, no belief system criticized, and no ideology rejected—no matter how hostile it is to freedom, women’s rights, pluralism, or democratic governance. This, he warns, is not tolerance. It is civilizational self-negation.

Saad’s critics accuse him of being divisive. In reality, he is performing the essential task of intellectual triage. A society that refuses to distinguish between liberal and illiberal values will inevitably empower the latter. Free speech cannot survive when it is required to defend those who seek to abolish it.

One of Saad’s most controversial—and most necessary—assertions is that not all cultures and not all religions are compatible with Western values. This is not an expression of prejudice; it is an empirical observation grounded in lived reality.

Western societies prize freedom of conscience, gender equality, separation of religion and state, and the sovereignty of the individual. Yet many belief systems imported under the banner of diversity reject these principles outright, advocating instead for the subordination of women, criminalization of dissent, or the fusion of theology with governance.

To pretend these contradictions do not exist is to abandon reason itself. Saad insists that multiculturalism must never mean cultural surrender. A civilization has the right—indeed the obligation—to defend the moral foundations that allow it to exist.

Perhaps nowhere is Saad’s clarity more urgently needed than on immigration. He does not oppose immigration; he opposes unfiltered, values-blind immigration.

The fashionable dogma asserts that all immigrants will naturally assimilate, that exposure to Western societies is sufficient to internalize Western values. Saad demolishes this fantasy. Assimilation is not automatic. It is a cultural contract.

A nation that welcomes newcomers must be unapologetic about what is being joined. Immigrants who reject free speech, equality before the law, or the legitimacy of liberal democracy cannot be allowed to reshape those institutions from within. Saad therefore calls for immigration policies that privilege applicants whose values mirror those of the host civilization—people who genuinely seek to become part of the Western project rather than dismantle it.

This is not discrimination; it is civilizational self-defense.

Equally destructive, in Saad’s diagnosis, is the rise of identity politics—a form of collectivism that reduces individuals to immutable group categories and demands loyalty not to shared principles but to demographic affiliations.

This ideology corrodes the very notion of individual responsibility. It replaces merit with grievance, truth with narrative, and unity with factionalism. Liberal democracy cannot survive when citizens are taught to see one another primarily as racial, religious, or tribal avatars rather than as sovereign individuals endowed with equal rights and equal dignity.

Saad’s insistence on recommitting to individual liberty is therefore not nostalgia—it is necessity. Only a society grounded in universal principles can sustain genuine pluralism.

Finally, Saad issues a warning that polite society has been desperate to ignore: some ideologies are not merely different; they are seditious. They aim not to coexist with liberal democracy but to replace it.

A free society that tolerates movements dedicated to its destruction is not virtuous—it is suicidal. Saad’s call for zero tolerance toward such belief systems is not authoritarian; it is protective. Democracy is not required to host its own executioners.

Gad Saad is not calling for exclusion. He is calling for coherence. He is not advocating hatred, but hierarchy of values. He is not rejecting diversity, but defending the cultural prerequisites that make diversity sustainable.

The West does not face a shortage of wealth or technology. It faces a shortage of civilizational confidence. Saad’s message is that survival begins with self-respect—respect for truth, reason, liberty, and the individual.

The West is indeed in a death spiral and it is because it has forgotten what it is. Gad Saad is reminding it.