Dr. James Lindsay is a mathematical and political commentator, author, and frequent public speaker. In this episode, Dr. Lindsay talks about the origins of Marxist ideas, how they spread across modern culture, and their impact on our understanding of the world. He also shares some of his own personal stories of travel and travel mishaps, including a near-death experience he had while on a plane, and the moment he realized he didn t speak English well enough to speak to a group of people in a foreign country. He also discusses his new book, The Grievance Studies Affair, which details how Marxist ideas can be used to justify the acquisition of power, and why it s important to understand how these ideas are used in order to achieve political power and influence in the modern world. If you re struggling with anxiety, depression, or another mental health condition, or simply don t know where to turn to turn, this episode is for you. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling, and offer a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. with decades of experience helping patients. In his new series, Jordan B Peterson offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, and shows that, while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone, and there's hope and there s a path to feeling better. . - Dr. B. Lindsay and Dr. P. Lindsay is here to help you find a way forward, and you deserve a brighter future that you deserve to feel better. Thank you for listening to this episode of DailyWire Plus. - The Dark Side of the Dark Side Of by Jordan Peterson. by Dailywire Plus by Dr. Lyndsay by P. Peterson in this episode is a podcast that helps you feel better, not better than you think you do so you can help you feel good about it by listening to the podcast by helping you get a better night out.
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening.
00:01:10.700Today I'm speaking with author, mathematician, and political commentator Dr. James Lindsay.
00:01:16.360We discuss Marxism, how it evolved from a singular ideology into a genus,
00:01:22.280spawning many oppressor slash oppressed dogmas across modern culture.
00:01:27.420Ideas such as equity, critical race theory, queer theory.
00:01:31.440We trace these sub-Marxist doctrines back past fundamental narrative into the theological realm
00:01:37.360and detail their utility in, what would you say, justifying the acquisition of power.
00:01:43.320We also discuss the Grievance Studies Affair, of which Dr. Lindsay was a co-author.
00:01:48.160So James, I kind of feel like I know you.
00:01:50.760I follow you on Twitter and watch all the trouble you cause, or some of it anyways.
00:01:54.300And we did do a podcast a number of years ago with Helen and Peter.
00:03:13.440And I got really conscious of slowing down and enunciating and trying to use simpler terminology to talk about, you know, neo-Marxism and postmodernism.
00:05:16.780Actually, it kind of lurked for a month.
00:05:18.620And then it exploded about a month later.
00:05:20.800And it's still just going crazy right now.
00:05:24.280And so you said you slowed down and you enunciated more carefully.
00:05:28.280But what do you think you hit on that made it so attractive as a speech?
00:05:33.180Well, the question of the whole conference, which is a three-meeting session that I was at the first one, was what is woke and what does it mean for Europe?
00:05:43.760And so I tried to give, in a sense, a genealogy of woke.
00:05:48.140And actually, a taxonomy is more accurate.
00:05:50.780I started off by saying, well, I think that woke is, in fact, Marxism that's evolved to attack the West.
00:05:56.740And the techniques it's using are reminiscent of Mao's cultural revolution.
00:06:00.480And so you can say that it's Marxist or Maoist.
00:06:03.680But then I said we can't understand that unless we understand Marxism in a bigger way.
00:06:08.800If we focus on his economic analysis and capital, we miss the entire picture.
00:06:13.380If we take a step back and say that he outlined an entire theory of man and the world and our behavior in it and the meaning of life and purpose, telos for our being, which is to transform the world into the socialist utopia, to advance history to its intended end, then you can see that the particular mode of analysis becomes fungible.
00:06:34.960If it's economic analysis for Marx, then you get classical Marxism.
00:06:39.880If it's race analysis for the critical race theorists, it's almost, you have to massage around the edges, but it's almost the exact same architecture.
00:06:46.480Well, that's certainly what it seemed to me to be.
00:06:48.620You know, one of the things that's been disturbing, I suppose, on the gaslighting front is whenever I draw a relationship between postmodernism and neo-Marxism, first of all, people say two things that I don't know what I'm talking about, which, by the way, is rarely the case.
00:07:02.940And second, that, you know, that's a conspiratorial misreading of the relationship, that there's nothing, that most postmodernism has nothing to do with Marxism.
00:07:11.920And, you know, I've taken that criticism seriously because it happens a lot.
00:07:15.760I think, well, you know, is there some manner in which I have this wrong?
00:07:19.400And then I go back as much as I can to the source documents, including Foucault and I think, and Derrida, and I think, well, they said they were Marxists.
00:07:27.920That seems like, you know, proof, and the entire intellectual milieu at that time in France was Marxist, including people who should have known better, like Jean-Paul Sartre.
00:07:38.780So it's like that was the water in which those particular fish swam, and the postmodernists, when they themselves say that their, what would you say, that their intellectual effort is tending in the Marxist direction or is an extension of Marxism, I'm pretty much inclined to believe them.
00:07:59.760And so I don't understand how this notion that those two concepts are separate has come about.
00:08:12.000I've thought tremendously on this question, and I believe I have an answer.
00:08:16.920Kind of like yourself, if I open my mouth, usually I've thought about something before I spout off.
00:08:22.000And in this case, it's the nature of the way these theories evolve.
00:08:26.660They evolve through what technically is called dialectical critique.
00:08:30.880And so each descendant theory, say if we use Marxism as the common ancestor, and that's what I did, by the way, in the EU, as I said.
00:08:38.740Think of Marxism as a genus, and then you have all these species.
00:08:43.120Well, postmodernism is a species, but they evolve through dialectical critique.
00:08:46.500So for each new derivative that comes out, say postmodernism, they have to create themselves by giving a critique of the thing that they were before.
00:08:57.360So they start by saying, here's where Marxism is wrong.
00:09:01.100And academics hyper-focus on these distinctions, and they say, look.
00:09:22.000Yeah, so there's a level of analysis at which these, I think your genus and species metaphor is a good one.
00:09:28.180So there's a level of analysis at which these are all variations on a theme, and there's another level of analysis where they're, well, no, they're distinctly different, which is exactly what does happen in academic micro-arguments.
00:09:45.900And then also ignorance on the part of the critics, because they just don't know enough about what they're talking about to even know that there's a relationship between post-modernism and neo-Marxism and Marxism.
00:09:55.820I guess the other issue, too, is that, in principle, the post-modernists were skeptical of metanarratives, and it does seem not unreasonable to point out that Marxism is a grand metanarrative.
00:10:10.480And so if you're skeptical about metanarratives, you know, you might start out by being skeptical about Marxism, and if you just focused on the post-modern critique of metanarrative, then you'd say, well, it couldn't be allied with Marxism because Marxism is a metanarrative.
00:10:24.140But my response to that would be, what makes you think that incoherence ever bothered a post-modernist?
00:10:29.960In fact, they specialize in incoherence, and I think because it can sow discord and chaos most effectively.
00:10:36.200This is why this metaphor, the genus species, is so important.
00:10:39.700And for me, this, you know, while Marxism is a grand metanarrative, et cetera, this is almost like saying, imagine that the animal clade that we're talking about has something to do with cats, right?
00:11:02.080And so if we think of the tail as being a grand metanarrative, in fact, the broad historicism of classical Marxism, you find both neo-Marxism or critical Marxism and post-modernism are becoming skeptical of this kind of grand trajectory of history narrative that was kind of the early modern thought.
00:11:21.500And as we shift from modern thinking to post-modern thinking, away from the scientific and into the kind of blatantly mystical and romantic, which the post-modernists are wholly characterized by, you can just imagine it.
00:11:36.240I see, if we do this, you know, I said Marxism is economic, and critical race theory is race, and we can say that queer theory is the concept of who defines what's normal.
00:11:44.440Post-modernism is really a Marxist analysis of who gets to say what things mean.
00:12:01.760But the other core, more ideological and intellectual, would be the notion that every social interaction is best viewed through the lens of oppressor and oppressed.
00:12:12.660And so, then you can do that with economics, which is essentially what Marx did.
00:12:16.640But once you've established that pattern, well, it's all about victimization and power.
00:12:21.420So, I think it's actually the same claim that it's like a neo-Christian claim that emerged out of the Middle Ages because there was a doctrine in the Middle Ages among some strands of Christian thinkers that the secular world, the earthly world, let's say, was the domain of Satan himself.
00:13:12.300So, these sects that you're referring to in the Middle Ages of kind of bizarre Christianity were actually Gnostic heresies that were developing.
00:13:20.760And I think that actually by means of Hegel coming down through Marx who inverted it, I believe we actually are looking at a Gnostic heresy that got hidden inside of economics and social.
00:13:33.820In fact, if we read Phenomenology of Spirit from Hegel, 1807 is a publication, you get distinctly the sense that what he means by spirit is what he says he means by spirit.
00:13:47.620It's kind of the seed of sociology in a sense.
00:13:53.240And this social spiritual realm is, for Hegel quite literally, because he was a heretical theologian, is the working of the Holy Spirit in the world.
00:14:04.720It's not this transcendent third person of the Godhead.
00:14:09.380It is the functioning of human beings in the collective all and how that's moving through history.
00:14:19.000And so, if we relocate as a modern transformation of kind of this heretical Christian Middle Ages, you know, almost New Age movement of the time, mystical movement of the time, we have a very clear shift from the transcendental to the social, to the social universe representing the spirit.
00:14:38.940And so, then Marx, he actually figures out the code.
00:14:42.860He says, no, Hegel's got it upside down.
00:14:44.240We focus on the idea and the state will follow and the spirit will follow the state.
00:14:49.200And then the spirit will sublate and raise to – Alfhaben in German – and raise to a higher level and we'll have a new idea and blah, blah, blah.
00:14:55.840That's his trinity cycle, his dialectical cycle for Hegel.
00:14:59.740Well, Marx says, no, it's upside down.
00:15:12.240And then that will cause, as society changes, what he called the inversion of praxis, the social conditioning to rain down on people and actually reify the transformation of society.
00:15:23.720So this, I think, is where Marx had inverted Hegel.
00:15:27.700And this is where we have a shift from the pre-modern transcendental spiritual to the modern social spiritual.
00:15:35.040And this just becomes the playground of romantics and eventually the postmodernists who throw up their hands and say this whole thing is just this gigantic dynamic of power to where you and I converse.
00:15:46.600I mean, at one point, I remember maybe 10 years ago, some feminists, it didn't go very far, but they posited this very postmodern argument that there was no possibility ever for a woman to consent to sex with a man because there's always a patriarchal power dynamic.
00:16:03.660So there's always, no matter what, no matter how much, you know, she says she's interested or whatever, there is always, always her being coerced.
00:16:14.860So this is, I think, you know, kind of this huge shift.
00:16:19.040And you say, you know, academics get mired in these micro distinctions.
00:16:28.900There's an incentive structure there, yes.
00:16:31.120But this is, it's so important to realize that if we don't take a step back and understand this bigger picture, that this is a fundamentally theological architecture.
00:16:42.520Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:16:48.060Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:16:50.120But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:16:55.820In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:17:00.780Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
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00:17:20.860Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:19:12.800And the nefarious element is that, well, if it's all about power, then not only am I thoroughly justified in my use of power, because after all, that's just what you're doing.
00:19:23.440But it also justifies any accusation possible.
00:19:27.640Because you might come up with a claim, for example, that you're a proponent of free speech.
00:19:32.840And I can easily say, well, no, like as a white colonialist benefiting from the privilege of your position, you just use the argument that such a thing as free speech exists to justify your position in the power hierarchy.
00:19:48.200And so then I can take anything that you might claim as positive and just transform it with intellectual jujitsu into a manifestation of the power drive.
00:19:58.540You know, and it's fair to say that the drive to power is a human motivation, but it's not the only human motivation.
00:21:06.480You know, so if we take seriously the concept that this is a Gnostic heresy, and you look back, whether it's Jews pre-Christ—
00:21:12.920How did you come to that conclusion that it was a Gnostic heresy?
00:21:15.660Because I didn't know you had pursued this all the way back into the religious realm.
00:21:19.140Well, I stumbled on a recommendation onto a philosopher named Eric Foglin, who's got quite the reputation for having named Marx as a Gnostic.
00:21:28.300And then I went down a rabbit hole reading about Gnosticism and reading about Hegel and his relationship to this kind of mystical reinterpretation of Christianity.
00:21:37.580You know, Glenn Alexander, Mickey, Eric Foglin, these analysis—I read a little bit of Evola.
00:21:42.740I'm not a big fan of Julius Evola's writing, but I read a little.
00:21:45.980He makes these claims quite strongly as well.
00:21:48.800And then I just started to read the Gnostic texts myself and their hermetic texts.
00:21:54.560And so I stumbled—I mean, I've been claiming for a decade that this is a religious phenomenon, posing as sociology in some fashion, but this is what really finally allowed me to put it together.
00:22:11.240Gnosticism is, by its nature, parasitical.
00:22:14.660It's that we have discovered through whatever means divine, you know, revelation, whatever it happens to be, the secret salvific knowledge that they don't want you to know.
00:22:25.700So there's some higher truth that's hidden, and maybe there's a code written in the Bible that if you have the secret means of divining it, then you can determine what the Bible really means.
00:22:35.560And when you go and you talk to the priest and the priest says, you know, that's a heresy, they turn around and say, he just doesn't want you to know that.
00:22:41.600Which, when you say it goes back to Cain and Abel, it goes back further than that.
00:22:47.700God hath not said, you know, that you've got this emblem of all authority that has declared this thing.
00:22:55.260Then you have the subversive element that comes in and say, was that what he really said?
00:22:59.040So it seems to me that this is a way of conceptualizing the relationship between the religious and the philosophical and the sociological.
00:23:07.560So if you delve deeply enough into the battle between two idea sets and you keep going down, as you go down to more and more fundamental layers, you approach the religious because the religious is by definition the most fundamental.
00:23:25.240And so I think when you're looking at something like the culture war that's going on, you can see it as a battle between ideas.
00:23:37.220But then when you trace the ideas back, you see it as a battle between narratives.
00:23:41.060And when you trace the narratives back, you see it as a battle between fundamental narratives.
00:23:44.840And as you approach the most fundamental narrative, you are treading on religious grounds.
00:23:49.860So what happens in the story of Cain and Abel, of course, is that Cain makes second-rate sacrifices.
00:23:57.620And because they're second-rate and he's not all in, his sacrifices aren't accepted.
00:24:02.200And that's just a phenomenological truth, which is life is so difficult that unless you make the proper sacrifices, you're not going to succeed.
00:24:10.040And then he calls God out on that and says the cosmos is constituted in an ill-gotten manner because I'm not successful.
00:24:19.040And God basically says, well, if you did things right, things would work out for you.
00:24:23.760And instead of Cain accepting that as corrective information, his countenance falls, so goes the story.
00:24:30.680And he flies into a murderous rage and destroys his own ideal because he really wants to be able.
00:24:36.400And then the descendants of Cain become, he's murderous, Cain, obviously, because he kills Abel.
00:24:42.620And then the descendants of Cain become genocidal.
00:24:55.900So the biblical narrative portrays the battle between the spirit of Cain and Abel as the fundamental battle that rages in the human heart.
00:25:03.800So it's the battle between the spirit of proper sacrifice, which is what Abel represents, the spirit of improper sacrifice, that's Cain, and the cascading consequences of improper sacrifice.
00:25:16.000And then a metaphysical battle between those two spirits that characterizes, well, that's when history starts, right?
00:25:22.120So that's the central battle in history.
00:25:24.400And I think of Marxism as, I think, the French Revolution was a manifestation of the spirit of Cain, and that Marxism itself is a manifestation of the spirit of Cain.
00:25:34.960And then the postmodern enterprise that's besetting us now, another manifestation of the spirit of Cain.
00:26:29.200To paraphrase Larry Fink and his bloody black rock.
00:26:31.600Again, if we take this Gnostic concept seriously, the Gnostics believe that there is an all-good, transcendent God behind everything that's so good that he's completely pure spirit, completely uncorruptible.
00:26:44.020And therefore, anything material must not be of that.
00:30:48.520And he's the angel who, in God's heavenly hierarchy, rose the highest and fell the furthest.
00:30:55.180And that's definitely something that can characterize intellect because the human intellect is a remarkable spirit, you might say, capable of the greatest good.
00:31:05.800But it is also the thing that can fall the farthest.
00:31:08.240And that wounded intellect is the most vicious of spirits.
00:31:12.980And so that's sort of that combination of Cain and Lucifer.
00:31:16.540And it's also, you know, it's also the case in the biblical corpus, if you take the stories apart, that the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel is the wounded spirit of Lucifer and Cain, right?
00:31:28.300And that's erecting a technological alternative to God, but partly in an attempt to worship intellect instead of, well, instead of, well, instead of whatever God might be.
00:31:38.260The highest, it's something like the highest spirit of genuine self-sacrifice.
00:32:52.280And it's the same thing in relationship to your relationship to the world, is that if your sacrifices aren't being rewarded, the right question to ask is, how am I prideful and blind?
00:33:02.740Not, how is the world constituted in an ill-gotten manner?
00:33:34.180Because if something like that has got you in its grip, you think you've escaped from it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you've escaped from it.
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00:35:44.200Okay, and so why did you decide not to apply for academic jobs?
00:35:47.200So at the time, the last, so this is 2007 or 2008, I don't remember which year was first.
00:35:52.140The last couple of years that I was doing my PhD, we had all these, you know, teaching meetings, or I don't want to say faculty meetings because I was a grad student, but equivalent to a faculty meeting.
00:36:01.640And the new rule of the university was fail the smallest number of kids possible, one per course, no more.
00:36:08.820And I'm thinking, I teach math, what are we doing?
00:36:43.960If I can't teach where the students who succeed get treated for success and the students who fail, fail and have to try again or go somewhere else or do something different, I didn't want to participate in that.
00:36:56.600Even, you know, having come from physics, I cared very much.
00:37:00.180If I certify somebody as being competent in calculus and they go on in an engineering program and they're not competent in calculus, I'm doing actually a grave evil.
00:37:09.680And if the university is telling me I have to do this or show up and talk to the dean and explain why I failed a third kid in the class, I don't want to participate in this system anymore.
00:37:48.600My wife is one, so I had an in to the profession, you know, and a direct line where I understood what it is and what it does.
00:37:55.080And secondly, I had injured myself doing jujitsu early in my 20s, and it turned out that massage therapy was what actually fixed it where all these doctors I had seen weren't able to figure out how to sort out that what I had actually done is messed up my psoas muscle.
00:38:10.140And so the massage therapist was able to massage the problem out of my psoas and the subsequent problems out of my lower back muscles and glutes and thighs, and it fixed it.
00:38:19.580And I no longer had, you know, these terrible episodes of lower back pain, so I said, I want to do this for people, so let's go.
00:38:26.540And so I started studying simultaneously medical textbooks on muscle pain and going to massage school, which is a little less rigorous, and did this for a number of years.
00:38:37.120Well, being academic, I became a little academically bored.
00:38:41.380This is a fine career, and I enjoyed what I did and was very helpful and rewarding, but I needed some academic stimulation.
00:38:47.480So I started to read philosophy of science.
00:38:49.520I started to get in discussion forums online.
00:38:51.180This is where I discovered kind of the feminism, you know, explosion that was kind of happening in blog spaces all over the internet, and everybody's getting accused of this.
00:39:00.360And I got involved in, a little bit regretfully now, with the new atheism movement and got caught up in all of that for a few years.
00:39:41.680But, of course, in the woke era we live in now, we don't have as much, you know, these pagan gods as they were construed in the pre-modern.
00:39:50.380We have power dynamics, racism, systemic racism.
00:39:54.460Well, the Irish are going to sacrifice 200,000 cows to Gaia.
00:41:27.740And so, I think maybe just in general that trying to get engaged in these academic activities, starting to try to write books and trying to get, you know, paid attention to it wasn't coming.
00:41:39.980The world's not laying itself out at my feet.
00:41:42.120My sacrifice isn't being honored, if you will.
00:41:45.040But I got really, like, I remember telling my wife a couple of times, like, I work so hard.
00:42:09.000I felt the New Atheism movement was like a breath of fresh air for me because it was the first place I felt that I found in the world where I could say what I thought without, you know, whatever long set of problems it would create for me.
00:42:21.980You know, everybody when I grew up in the South.
00:42:24.220Well, the thing about people like Dawkins, too, and Harris, for that matter, is they are characterized by a certain clarity of thinking.
00:42:31.320Right, and, you know, I have some, what would you say, sympathy, certainly for both Dawkins and Harris.
00:42:37.820I think they're both good people in some fundamental sense.
00:42:41.220I mean, I know Harris was trying to ground a transcendental ethic in what he regarded as unshakable truth, and he thought the unshakable truth was essentially objective reality.
00:42:50.480And I also have some sympathy for that perspective because it's the postmodern critique of that, in part, that's led us to where we are.
00:42:57.200But the problem is, is that, well, we can't go into that.
00:43:01.920There's lots of problems, and you've started to stumble into that, obviously, looking at the strange tangle of religious ideas that have produced the conundrum that we see before us.
00:43:11.580Okay, so you were keeping body and soul together, you and your wife, by working on the massage front.
00:43:15.880You said that that didn't provide enough stimulation for your ravenous intellect, and you weren't getting a lot of purchase on that front, and that was making you bitter.
00:43:26.880And so, how did you, when did you realize that?
00:43:32.800What makes you think you have done something about it?
00:43:35.160Well, I didn't realize it until after the fact, so that helps me think that maybe I have done something about it, because it's one of these things I look back at, and I say, wow, I really was a different person.
00:43:48.920Getting beat up by life, not physically, losing over and over and over again, and finally accepting that maybe I have to do something different.
00:43:59.100Well, that's interesting, because another thing that can happen if you get beat up over and over again and lose is that you can get more and more bitter.
00:44:52.400I can't abstract yourself out of that.
00:44:54.200But I think the kind of magic secret sauce, besides getting beat up with all the repeated, you know, attempts and failure, attempt and failure, was that I actually just got really busy.
00:45:05.460I didn't have time to ruminate on this because I picked up the grievance studies affair.
00:45:19.720So Peter and I had this wild-brained idea to write as many fake academic articles for feminist theory, gender studies, you know, all of these kind of woke postmodern journals.
00:45:33.020Put them in the highest ones we could get and see how many we could get published.
00:45:41.220Our goal was that we were going to start in August of 2017 writing these things as fast as we could write them, and we were going to write until sometime around a year later, some summer 2018.
00:45:52.200We would stop writing and finish the academic process on wherever we got, and we'd see what happened.
00:45:57.020So when we wrote the 20th paper, which we finished in June of 2018, we called it.
00:46:34.540I wish I could remember who it was, but soon after this happened, and he said that he anticipated that either four or five of those seven, based on what the peer review had said and the quality of them, four or five of those seven probably would have been accepted as well.
00:46:46.700But the ones that wouldn't were also the earliest among that batch of 14.
00:46:51.460So you got good at writing fake articles.
00:47:43.600We thought that, you know, once we started to get success, it was very clear that we had figured something out that was proved against the real world.
00:47:55.740I mean, academic peer review isn't exactly the real world qua the real world.
00:48:00.800But it is the system, the actual system, where the real thing that certifies knowledge or whatever we pretend this corrupt system does, where that is.
00:49:28.320There are 13 different branches of mathematics.
00:49:30.820I'm what's called an enumerative combinatoricist—that's a lot of syllables.
00:49:36.360Enumerative combinatorics gives these very kind of Baroque counting arguments.
00:49:40.520A combinatoricist will be upset that I called it Baroque.
00:49:43.640All the rest of the mathematicians will cheer that I said this, that I've confessed this.
00:49:48.220But we give these things that are called counting arguments so that we say that an equation is true, an identity is true, because both sides of it count the same thing in two different ways.
00:49:57.920And so you describe—it counts on this side of the equation, it counts it this way.
00:50:02.240On this side of the equation, it counts it that way.
00:50:03.800A simple example, without doing a bunch of math, is that if you don't know, that the square numbers—1, 4, 9, 16, so on, 25—the square numbers obviously count the number of squares in a square grid, n by n.
00:50:18.720Well, it turns out that the square numbers equal the sum of the first n odd numbers.
00:50:23.100So 1, then 1 plus 3 is 4, 1 plus 3 plus 5 is 9, 1 plus 3 plus 5 plus 7 is 16, and add 9, get 25, and you can see how it goes.
00:50:30.400But what that is, is you count the corner, that's 1, then you count the 3 that go around it, that's 3 more.
00:50:35.280Then you count 1—well, it's 2 by 2, so there's 2, then there's 2, and there's 1, so that's going to be the next odd number.
00:50:40.800And then it's 3, 3, and 1, so two 3s and a 1.
00:51:18.760And then when you're starting to ask about whether two things are the same or different, you're asking about the nature of reality, and you're also asking about the nature of measurement.
00:51:28.540And what psychologists concluded, essentially, was that to establish something as real—imagine there's a pattern there—you needed a set of qualitatively different measurement techniques, all of which converged on an emphasis of the same pattern.
00:51:43.260Because your senses provide five qualitatively distinctive reports, and if they converge, you presume—it's like a definition of real—five converging reports using qualitatively distinct measurement processes constitutes reality.
00:51:58.080So it seems to me there's an analog there of the equation issue, that it's true if one counting method produces this result, and another counting method produces this result, that constitutes an equation.
00:52:07.840And those two things are, what would you say, is equal the same as real there?
00:52:14.300I don't know if that's a fair thing to say.
00:53:08.380Because whatever we say is a definition, all of the logical conclusions of that definition in the axiomatic system are necessarily true by consequence forever universally.
00:53:18.900So if you get it wrong a little bit, if you say, for example, a prime number is a number that's divisible by one in itself.
00:53:25.220That's a very common, you know, elementary school definition.
00:53:28.740That's not adequate because it leaves open the question, is one prime?
00:53:33.280And the answer to that is no, one is not a prime number.
00:53:36.220So the actual definition of prime, when you get very cautious, is it is a number with exactly two factors.
00:53:40.980Which sounds like the same thing, but it's not the same thing because it removes that one question of ambiguity, upon which all expressions of things like the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.
00:53:51.800So partly what you're doing as you're diving into the underlying religious substrate is to go farther and farther down into the axioms.
00:53:58.380Well, yes, but it also, I have the ability to read them, and when they misuse words, I can figure out what they must mean by the word they're using.
00:54:09.140And then I can go start to check that to see.
00:54:21.420It's really useful to figure out what those words mean.
00:54:23.820So that STEM mind ends up having been, it was trained in kind of these two particular skills, and I think I had a proclivity.
00:54:33.480There's definitely, why does anybody become a kind of fringe branch of mathematics where it's hard to get a job if you apply for them because there's just not that many of them?
00:55:05.540I really enjoyed getting to think that way, challenging myself to think that way about patterns.
00:55:09.980And you were able to, you think you were able to take that proclivity and then apply it to what you were doing in the humanities.
00:55:15.720And oddly enough, what you ended up doing in the humanities was producing parodies of humanities papers.
00:55:23.780And so you found that intellectually compelling.
00:55:28.240What was your motivation outside of the intellectual compulsion?
00:55:33.540Now, you talked a little bit about the fact that you were annoyed about the fact that when you were teaching at the university, you were called on essentially to falsify the teaching process.
00:55:42.220So that must have been lurking around in there in the background somewhere.
00:55:44.960But what were you and Pluckrose and Boghossian conspiring about, so to speak, when you were producing these false papers?
00:56:24.720We would offer these criticisms, and you know what we would get back?
00:56:27.780If we didn't get called white or male or something stupid, we would get the most substantive criticism we would get is you're not credentialed.
00:56:37.440So we thought, well, you can delegitimize a fraudulent enterprise.
00:56:42.860We started to read the papers and thought that they were fraudulent, and it was an emergency because they were dipping into the sciences.
00:56:47.240Yeah, well, that made you weird to begin with, that you were reading the papers because I think 80 percent, is it 80 percent of humanity's papers are never cited once.
00:57:05.420And she sent me a feminist theory paper about sexism.
00:57:09.480And I read it, and I came back to her, and I said, okay, I kind of get this concept, but why don't you say this is systemic sexism and distinguish from what most people think of as sexism?
00:57:32.400You know, it also means, it's interesting too, it also means that all these, see, I've noticed this tendency among creative liberal types, right, is that they're very, very good at producing ideas.
00:58:28.620And you're supposed to kill your stupid ideas before you act them out.
00:58:31.840And you do that with critical thinking.
00:58:34.040And if these papers aren't being read, or they're not being criticized, that also means that the people who are producing the ideas don't get to hone their ideas.
00:59:46.700Right, well, we can point out for everyone who's watching and listening, too, that you could—this is a rule of thumb, and it's a rough one.
00:59:53.380But it's not so bad if you're trying to understand this, is what's a PhD equivalent to?
00:59:58.240And essentially, a PhD is equivalent to three published papers.
01:00:02.860So because in most universities, certainly in the social sciences, if you publish three papers in reasonably well-regarded journals,
01:00:12.120and then you aggregate them into a single document, add an introduction and a discussion, you have a PhD that will be acceptable to your committee.
01:02:29.000I was so depressed at this attack on—that a journal with an impact factor so high—it was a seven, for those who know what that means—would publish a paper this off course about what the sciences are about.
01:02:42.180I mean, it was suggesting that the sciences are sexist unless they bring in feminist art projects.
01:02:46.560It was saying that in addition to studying—and these are true—if I tell you what's in this paper, nobody believes.
01:02:51.100In addition to studying satellite photography of glaciers, which are the God's eye view from nowhere and literally called pornographic pictures because it's, you know, the satellite is a pornographer staring down in—
01:03:06.940And I use that G word very intentionally.
01:03:10.840They went on to say that unless we take paintings done by women in specific of glaciers and study those as well, beside the satellite photographs, then it's not a comprehensive science.
01:03:23.540It shuts out all these other perspectives, other means of knowing.
01:03:27.140If we don't include indigenous perspectives and mythologies about why ice is the way that it is and why it moves, then we're obviously being colonialist and masculinist and all these horrible things.
01:03:37.000And I was shocked that a high—not some fringe, goofy little, you know, qualitative studies journal, but a high-impact factor journal would publish this brazen of an assault on the scientific methodology at all.
01:03:51.180I had no idea how corrupt it was until I saw that.
01:09:24.180So now you go down the axiom hierarchy, and the farther down you go, the closer you get to the sacred, essentially.
01:09:30.320And I think the reason that it's sacred, by the way—so axioms constrain entropy.
01:09:37.000That's a good way of thinking about it, right?
01:09:38.980And so the reason that you have to hold some things as sacred is because the things you hold as sacred are the things that constrain the most entropy in your conceptual system.
01:09:48.340So if you blow an axiom, you free the entropy.
01:09:51.900That's what happened to you when you read that paper.
01:10:19.720You have no idea what's going to happen when the people who swarmed the humanities—and those people were partly political, the humanities professors, so they had some defense.
01:10:28.820You wait till they land up on your shores.
01:10:31.020You people have no idea what's coming your way.
01:10:33.780They're going to go through you like a hot knife through butter.
01:10:40.080Well, they say 75 percent—this is so horrible—75 percent of new applicants to STEM positions in the University of California State Systems have their applications, their research dossiers are unread because their DEI statements aren't sufficient.
01:11:15.340And you can reduce that to a DEI statement, and then you can let the dimwits who evaluate DEI statements decide which mathematicians get to practice math.
01:17:38.540So if you can come after conservatives with compassion and you can say, you're not doing your duty on the compassionate front, instead of the conservatives going, you're a serpent, they go, oh, no, you know, we could be a little better.
01:17:50.580And, of course, they could because, like, who's perfect on that front?
01:17:55.120Well, we were talking just before we started this podcast about some of the new psychological research on left-wing authoritarianism.
01:18:01.160And so I read a paper here a week ago.
01:18:03.640There's not a lot of papers on this front.
01:18:05.100There's only about 10 because the social psychologists denied that left-wing authoritarianism existed for seven decades, right, till 2016, before I got, what would you say, disenfranchised from the university.
01:18:17.900My lab did a study on left-wing authoritarianism.
01:18:20.300And the first thing we did was to see if there was a clump of ideas that were statistically related that you could describe as both left-wing and authoritarian.
01:19:26.640While simultaneously claiming, well, of course we can do this because every single social relationship in the world is predicated on nothing but power.
01:19:33.240And if you don't accept that, that just means that you're a malignant liar.
01:20:19.500I've been trying to convince—well, convince.
01:20:22.380I've made a case on social media multiple times that platforms like Twitter, for example, should separate the anonymous people from the real people.
01:20:31.080They should put them in different categories.
01:21:52.360So you don't have to subject any of your ideas to critical evaluation or to take any of the weight of what you say on yourself.
01:21:57.420Right, or compare it against a pattern of established thought.
01:22:00.540I like the idea that I—I do understand why some people have certain risks they're not willing to take, but I try to encourage them to take those risks.
01:23:24.060And then that's not so bad because the next thing that happens is a horrible creature from the darkest part of the abyss comes up and swallows him and takes him down to the bottom.
01:23:33.300And so what that means is that if you hold your tongue when you're called upon to speak, not only do you put the ship at risk and then likely drown, but then something will happen to you that will make you wish you drowned, right?
01:24:28.880And I'm nowhere near afraid as afraid of the people who would want to compel my language as I am afraid of the consequences of not saying what I have to say.
01:24:50.220Of course, in a totalitarian state, everybody holds their tongue.
01:24:53.280And that's this turning point that I was telling you about because I'm getting this feedback from these peer reviewers that have now pulled this mask off of themselves.
01:25:54.160You know, I wrote a paper with one of my students who had gone to visit the mass grave sites in Eastern Europe, by the way, before she became one of my students.
01:28:03.300And so I wrote myself a salary check at month number 16 that was the whopping total for 16 months of effort to try to build the beginnings of this of $2,000.
01:29:20.820The critical race theory would be the most accessible and relevant to start exposing first.
01:29:25.180So I dove into that full blast, full bore, and I fortunately created a library of decoding critical race theory in advance of George Floyd dying for the preceding eight months.
01:29:49.580But what I found I thought would be most important, and this goes back to that mathematical comment I made earlier about the definitions, was I knew they were misusing words.
01:30:47.320If we say the woke, we generally know that we're speaking about people who think in certain ways, that they've adopted some of this power analysis.
01:31:50.320I got about a third of the way through it, and I thought, no, I just can't do this anymore.
01:31:54.360The Great Narrative, his second book that he wrote—well, it's his fourth, really, but the second book he wrote in that series is much more poignant.
01:32:02.760But the way that he writes is it's, you know, maybe 130 pages of a book or, I don't know, it's not that long.
01:32:53.800So here in the middle, almost squarely in the middle of The Great Narrative for a Better Future, which is the follow-up book to The Great Reset.
01:33:00.460It's called Narrative for a Better Future.
01:33:02.140The Great Narrative for a Better Future.
01:33:07.180And so right in the middle, he has a set of paragraphs.
01:33:09.480It's maybe five paragraphs, but it covers three ideas.
01:33:12.380And number one, we're going to force all of the corporations to adopt ESG standards.
01:33:18.160And we're going to do that through top-down manipulations with a public-private partnership, governments, and big business working together.
01:33:26.400With the NGOs being the coordinating entities.
01:33:29.240So the World Economic Forum is a hub that connects these things, which means there's something probably behind it that's a different they that's really organized.