TRIGGERnometry - Social Justice Explained with James Lindsay

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00:00:19.140 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:22.280 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:23.900 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:25.000 and this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people and a

00:00:31.820 fascinating person we have for you today he's a returning guest to trigonometry he's one of the

00:00:37.580 co-authors of the grievance hoax papers he's the man who's read all the critical race theory

00:00:43.620 books that so you don't have to James Lindsay welcome back to trigonometry I'm glad to be here

00:00:49.880 especially after that introduction oh james before we we start mate i've got to say you

00:00:54.680 may have read all the books but more importantly did you post them to your instagram story

00:00:58.480 no i actually can't figure out how to use instagram i have one and i like get these

00:01:03.360 messages and i know how to reply to people and that's as far as i got i haven't figured out

00:01:06.840 how to post anything yet i have okay well when you do make sure you post the black box because

00:01:11.660 that's how you stop racism now it is that's the way right there's only one that's what it means

00:01:16.900 symbolic action is everything well listen uh we spoke with you probably about a year ago i'm

00:01:25.120 guessing we you you guys were in london we we had a very interesting chat with you and peter

00:01:29.400 bogossian at the time i think the interview that we posted then was called social justice is a mind 0.60

00:01:35.100 virus i'd say we're all pretty fucking infected at this point um is that is that a fair assessment 0.56

00:01:41.800 of what's going on here well uh yeah it's it's uh really spread pretty quickly um it's uh 0.85

00:01:49.260 mainstreamed at an incredible rate since uh the death of george floyd at the end of may

00:01:56.960 and now i mean i basically can't find anybody outside of kind of the old people who don't 0.98

00:02:05.840 talk about it all more or less all the time and uh obviously if you look at what's going on and

00:02:10.900 like the media it's just become like a blatant circus of lies where you know oh here's a building

00:02:19.120 being smashed in and on fire and they're like whiteness is property from cheryl e harris you 0.69

00:02:23.940 know this is a very important piece of scholarship saying why you can burn down burn down a starbucks

00:02:28.560 or something and so yeah um this is a particular way of thinking it is in a sense contagious and

00:02:36.760 the contagion of moral values sense people are are brought into thinking this way because it

00:02:45.860 leads them to feel like they're a good person rather than somebody who's failing to live up

00:02:49.920 to goodness and it has very very rapidly uh spread it has very rapidly become a

00:02:57.480 dominant if not the dominant contending moral force that's rising in the western world and

00:03:06.240 is getting exported from there as well in an astonishingly short time so yeah um i mean we

00:03:14.420 have like the perfect metaphor for what's going on like it was in these research labs and then

00:03:19.080 some scientists weren't really careful with how they disposed of you know whatever and it got out

00:03:24.180 and then all of a sudden you know you have to start closing countries down and i mean it's it's

00:03:29.700 odd the parallelism here but yeah it is it has spread very much like a pandemic very rapidly

00:03:35.380 and you know we're now you know hopefully close to the peak of the wave because people are starting

00:03:42.280 to talk a bit differently. And James with every pandemic there are catalysts there are things

00:03:47.040 that basically speed it up and what would you identify as a catalyst? Is COVID a catalyst or

00:03:53.320 have there been other factors involved as well? I mean yeah COVID is probably actually a catalyst

00:03:58.480 for a number of reasons one of which is that it drove us all indoors and we stopped socializing

00:04:04.360 normally and we got kind of pent up and frustrated the fear the uncertainty around economics that

00:04:10.560 came with it the lack of normal social interaction the lack of being able to go out and blow off steam

00:04:16.260 in the normal ways that people do the shuttling everybody into online communication kind of

00:04:22.420 constantly it's like there's a feeling that's not wholly wrong that that this change is like twitter

00:04:28.400 having just exploded into the real world and everybody's interacting like they're on twitter

00:04:32.880 constantly in some sense. And, um, that makes sense because everybody's been on Twitter constantly

00:04:38.940 for months. And I know that's the case because I remember when the lockdown started, people were

00:04:43.560 saying, wow, I don't really have anything to do. It's like a break and everybody, you know, I get,

00:04:48.620 I have, it's like a good chance to remember how to slow down in life. And I'm like, my,

00:04:52.880 my incoming crap went up by like 60% because all of the people who are now too online or who are 0.88

00:05:00.240 not too online before, became too online and started sending me stuff. So it's like the amount 0.82

00:05:05.420 of incoming messages and emails I had went up about 60% once the lockdowns began. And I don't

00:05:11.320 think that that's a coincidence. People started to act online. There are lots of other, of course,

00:05:16.040 catalysts that led to this, but I do think COVID was relevant. Obviously, there are shorter and

00:05:23.320 longer term trends within kind of the socio-political sphere. Trump derangement has been

00:05:28.940 ramping up for both good reasons and bad reasons. And I think is a huge contributor to this. And I

00:05:35.980 do mean that Trump derangement. I think there are extremely legitimate reasons to be very concerned

00:05:40.120 about and unhappy about President Trump. But there are also just histrionic, lunatic responses that 0.91

00:05:47.640 don't match reality whatsoever. And we just mentioned symbolic action, you know, joking

00:05:53.420 around. But so much of that, like I went to New York City last summer and we ended up staying

00:05:59.960 near Trump Tower in Manhattan. And so I just walked up there just to go out for a walk one day.

00:06:06.940 And I told my family, you know, I walked by Trump Tower and I saw Trump Tower and I took a picture

00:06:11.840 looking up how tall it is or whatever. And my family was like, why didn't you take a picture

00:06:16.940 of your middle finger pointed at it? And I was like, why would I do that? Like, what does that

00:06:20.780 accomplish in the world does that like end his presidency that i flipped off a building

00:06:24.100 it's like it doesn't make any sense so there was a lot of stuff going on with that and that's part

00:06:28.520 of a longer current if you look at the anger on the left in america um with feeling like the

00:06:34.540 republicans have been stealing our politics where of course the republicans on the other hand say

00:06:39.260 they were defending our politics from the radical left stealing our politics so now it's all kind

00:06:45.700 of very fraught. But these were all kind of antecedents and catalysts as well. But I mean,

00:06:50.580 the obvious proximate cause was that there was a cause celebrae that came up with George Floyd's

00:06:56.420 death at the hands of a police officer, which was pretty clearly like way out of the normal

00:07:01.500 acceptable range of behavior that everybody said, this is, you know, proof that something's wrong,

00:07:08.780 which very rapidly mutated into this is proof that our entire system is bogus feeding into a

00:07:14.420 narrative that's been being laid very effectively for i don't know seven or eight years now uh if

00:07:20.380 not longer and i remember you saying james that these clips act as i can remember you using them

00:07:27.400 almost like religious icons was i think the way that you put the miracle stories yeah miracle

00:07:31.620 stories so would you just touch on that because i think it's very very important how this miracle

00:07:37.380 story then became an example of how racism is effect is infected all our political structures

00:07:45.280 and our institutions yeah when you have a um kind of nascent faith coming into into the picture

00:07:52.520 even one that's well established uh when you have a set of beliefs in particular that are

00:07:58.860 i don't want to say just blatantly untrue it's more that they're really vague and so they're

00:08:06.780 they're true and untrue at the same time by virtue of not really saying

00:08:11.000 anything specific enough. Like our society is systemically racist.

00:08:14.780 What does that mean? Well, it means that outcomes are different.

00:08:17.180 Well, that doesn't really tell you anything. We already knew that, you know,

00:08:19.680 it's very vague. Or if you talk about, you know, God's love is everywhere.

00:08:23.340 Well, what does that mean? I mean, it's a God's love,

00:08:24.860 God loves us and it's everywhere. You know, it doesn't tell you anything.

00:08:27.440 So a lot of times the way that, that, that profession of faith or the, the,

00:08:31.740 the belief is reinforced is by people seeking out confirmatory narratives or events that are like

00:08:42.420 miracles. So you see, you know, these funny stories where, you know, Jesus appearing on a

00:08:46.400 piece of toast, or you see these things where they see the, you know, the sun glare off of a

00:08:51.580 particular glass window looking like the Virgin Mary. And so obviously this is now a holy spot

00:08:58.260 and there's a miracle and somebody is like dripping water and saying, that's your tears

00:09:01.160 or something and they cook up these ideas and in the ancient world you could really see you know

00:09:05.420 oh this amazing thing happened and then they go tell people and there's no verification whatsoever

00:09:09.620 and so just the story can get bigger and bigger and this becomes like yeah the faith is true

00:09:14.700 because this thing happened and in our current era we get that primarily through mediated clips

00:09:21.060 we get a clip of something that happened in the case of the critical race narrative it has mostly

00:09:27.000 been clips of people acting in racist ways that are usually somewhat egregious, or clips of police

00:09:33.440 officers interacting with typically unarmed black people that end up in a fatality of the black, 0.52

00:09:41.680 I don't know what the right word is, I don't want to say, you know, perp or suspect or whatever,

00:09:46.420 but the person that they're interacting with anyway, that's on the other end of the law.

00:09:50.380 and the context of those the full context of those clips doesn't matter what matters

00:09:59.200 is the way that they fit within that broader narrative so on when i went on joe rogan's

00:10:07.100 podcast recently i brought up michael brown and i i said you know it looks as though um this

00:10:13.520 was this horrendous killing if you just watch the video the police officers way out of line

00:10:19.000 And the Black Lives Matter movement around Ferguson literally went to the point of blocking traffic and many of the same kinds of protests and riots and antics that we're seeing now.

00:10:28.120 And it turned out not to be based on reality whatsoever.

00:10:32.140 But that never got acknowledged, James, actually.

00:10:34.980 I remember at the time trying to say to people, like, what you're told about what happened isn't what happened.

00:10:41.600 And that's been verified scientifically.

00:10:43.700 It's been verified medically.

00:10:45.400 It's been confirmed by black and white witnesses.

00:10:48.140 It's been verified by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's like deep in the ideology that this was not a police murder. It was his statement about it. So, yeah, that's the thing is these narratives have the power to run off and take a life of their own.

00:11:01.780 I mean, when you tell somebody that the Virgin Mary appearing in the reflection of a car wash window isn't actually the Virgin Mary, it's just what the sun does when it hits glass of that shape, they tend not to accept that because it would be disconfirmatory.

00:11:17.940 If we want to get into kind of the psychological and philosophical thinking behind it, it's because when people have adopted a mythological way of thinking, you can't pick apart a myth.

00:11:26.520 To pick apart one strand of a myth is to tear the entire myth apart and to render it not true or not believable.

00:11:34.280 So you can't look at scientific validation.

00:11:37.000 You can't look at the full story.

00:11:38.180 You can't look at any of these kinds of things.

00:11:39.980 the more important thing is this event fits within the context of the myth and gives the myth

00:11:46.900 legs and because that narrative is so powerful people run with it and it almost can't be

00:11:54.160 unseated if you were to then go back and say yeah well you have a point you know the michael brown

00:11:59.240 incident uh and on joe's podcast i didn't know and joe kind of pushed back on me he's like actually

00:12:04.340 i don't know the details and i come home and i get like 5 000 emails telling me like here's

00:12:08.320 Ta-Nehisi Coates saying you know like okay that's good enough for me um I'll take that if you know

00:12:14.400 he said it and so it's like you can't though look at that and say well we have to now revise the

00:12:20.500 entire basis for our movement you instead have to find a way to reconcile that cognitive dissonance

00:12:26.540 either by downplaying it ignoring it or recasting it in some other more vague sense that still

00:12:33.160 confirms the narrative because the point of a myth is of mythological structure is that it can't be

00:12:39.660 torn apart it can't be taken apart and so when you think of these kinds of mediating events like

00:12:44.000 or mediated stories about events i should say pushing these narratives um you have to think

00:12:50.880 of that in terms of mythology you have to think of that in terms of the the the video the clip the

00:12:57.960 the the you know snippet of story the picture or whatever you have to think about that in terms of

00:13:04.320 how it fits within the story that's trying to be told and that people have taken on and nothing

00:13:09.140 else is going to be allowed to matter because that's that and that's also how you know that

00:13:13.020 when there's this outright rejection of any possible criticism of the foundations of the

00:13:17.900 story that you're dealing with something that's gone spiritual and it's all mythological at that

00:13:21.900 point well james let's you talk about the mythology and that's something i'd really like to dig into

00:13:27.420 But let's I wanted to ask you, first of all, just for anyone who's watching this and you've brought up Donald Trump and going to the tower and not being willing to flip it off on camera just for the sake of appearance and whatever.

00:13:38.560 Just very briefly, it may be in a sentence to remind people where you are politically, just so that people don't know you.

00:13:45.060 It's really funny. It's like apparently Twitter has media mediated me and I'm apparently like a famous racist now and I'm all kinds of alt right and super conservative.

00:13:56.940 I saw somebody saying welcome James I appreciate the love bomb no so the funny thing is though 0.74

00:14:05.240 it's like I even got an email the other day from some fool saying that it's like I didn't really

00:14:10.420 get my degrees from the colleges that I claim I got them from conservative bible college or 0.86

00:14:15.120 something like that and it's like what in the world is going on um no uh I actually fall pretty

00:14:22.800 far i mean my ideal i fall pretty far to the left so my ideal kind of government setup if i had

00:14:28.640 my way about it which i probably wouldn't because i don't like telling people what to do

00:14:32.960 um would be very close to norway which is you know not exactly known as a uh libertarian right

00:14:42.180 wing alt-right neo-nazi bastion of the world it's you know i would i still think honestly if we want

00:14:49.020 to get to a specific kind of thing, I still think that the proper highest income tax bracket should

00:14:55.660 be probably just around and maybe a little bit above 50%. So it's not like I'm one of these

00:15:00.820 kind of contractionist, small government, you know, drown it in the bathtub people. I'm certainly

00:15:06.580 not conservative. I'm not socially conservative in any regard. Like people can do whatever they

00:15:10.800 want. Like, you know, want to have sex with a banana being well wielded by a clown and that 1.00

00:15:16.740 makes you happy good for you who am i to judge i don't care it's quite a specific fantasy you've 0.99

00:15:20.980 got there mate well it's one i use as an example i read something from dan savage about cakes and

00:15:26.260 so it's like you know if i gotta think of something weird i just literally don't care

00:15:30.160 but but before we interrupt it's lovely to see that you accept me mate

00:15:33.900 see that's what i was really about he does get called a banana quite regularly but

00:15:39.200 i just wanted for people to know that because i i felt like the way we started the conversation

00:15:43.860 All right. So, yeah, let's make it really European social Democrat, I think, is what.

00:15:48.380 Yeah, that's probably right. Most of the people in my life who are on the right call me a communist, which is strictly false.

00:15:54.180 Also, it's just as false as the fact that I'd be on there. I mean, I'm really not a communist, but I do actually believe I am a proper traditional liberal who thinks that in the in an advanced democracy,

00:16:09.380 because of the nature of what an advanced democracy is. You do have to have a very strong

00:16:13.860 and stable social safety net. You do have to have strong social insurance programs.

00:16:18.340 You do have to, in the sense, let's just lay them out. I'm very Keynesian in the sense that I think

00:16:24.600 that that which the public sector can do most efficiently and most affordably, the public

00:16:28.540 sector should do. And the private sector should be able to do what it does most efficiently and

00:16:33.360 affordably. And the point of economic policy discussion is to determine what the boundaries

00:16:37.380 on those things are and to uh you know figure out which thing goes in which box and how to how to

00:16:43.000 deal with it um so yeah most of my positions are pretty pretty staunchly in the left they're just

00:16:49.580 not in the they're just not leftist right which is a different thing so so let let's now turn now

00:16:54.980 that we've got that out of the way i felt it was important for people to know that about you

00:16:58.660 let's turn to the mythology that you're talking about because this is i think really important

00:17:02.960 i'm going to take a little bit of time to set it out because i think it's important so

00:17:06.180 the mythology that you were talking about and and do correct me when you get the chance to

00:17:11.960 to do that if you need to is the following society is structurally unjust against minorities and

00:17:21.040 women and other oppressed groups and what that means is that uh different people are treated 0.96

00:17:27.140 differently in the same circumstances so a black homeless man is gets treated worse than a white

00:17:33.460 homeless man. A woman who is a CEO is treated less well or paid less than a man who is a CEO, 0.65

00:17:42.180 et cetera, et cetera. And as a result of that, we have a society that is structurally unfair.

00:17:47.620 And what we need is a movement which is called social justice, the point of which is to address

00:17:54.840 some of these hidden instances of discrimination and indeed the fact that all of us are prone to

00:18:01.340 discrimination particularly those of us who are from the traditionally speaking privileged groups

00:18:07.100 those of us that are men those of us that are white those of us that are straight those of us

00:18:11.460 that are not trans etc that's the mythology and it's the notion of this myth is that we must all

00:18:19.000 look to address the the the biases within us to make society better and fairer for people who

00:18:26.680 are historically disadvantaged, to eliminate discrimination, to make sure that people are

00:18:31.360 no longer oppressed, and to make sure that power is equally distributed between the different

00:18:36.560 groups, right? Now, most people listening to that actually, I suspect, would go, well,

00:18:41.160 there's an element of truth to that. I mean, we've all got prejudices. We're all probably a

00:18:45.400 little bit racist. We might have inherited sexist stereotypes from our parents and grandparents.

00:18:50.520 um society is a little bit unfair if you you know police probably are sometimes treating black

00:18:58.160 suspects harsher than white suspects women have had it uh bad of a history uh you know slavery 1.00

00:19:04.960 was definitely an evil and that surely would have left some sort of legacy uh so if you're just an

00:19:10.100 ordinary person who's listening to this um and going i see this guy on twitter james lindsey

00:19:15.780 trying to take all this stuff apart like what you know if i'm an ordinary person why should i

00:19:22.240 be why should i have a problem with quote-unquote social justice okay so you did a good job outlying

00:19:29.960 or laying out not outlying i don't know what i'm talking about outlying counties or something no

00:19:33.720 you did a good job laying out the um very friendly although still not without issue

00:19:42.420 understanding of the mythology. You, in fact, did a very good job of the social justice aspect.

00:19:48.100 I would tell you that the actual movement that we call maybe woke or whatever is a combination of

00:19:55.420 three schools of thought. And one of them is social justice, which is this kind of egalitarian

00:20:01.200 thing. So the mythology you laid out has a little bit of the critical aspect, but it's mostly what

00:20:07.280 you laid out was one that's egalitarian and tipping occasionally into a radical egalitarianism

00:20:13.400 so that's one aspect but wokeness is actually the intentional combination of critical theory

00:20:21.920 which has its own mythology post-modern theory which has its own mythology and uh doing those

00:20:29.580 for the purpose of uh creating social justice which has its own mythology and the the you have

00:20:37.080 to understand that when you just laid out like the egalitarian picture that even tips into the

00:20:43.540 radical egalitarian picture here and there meaning that yeah we really do need to kind of you know

00:20:48.720 flip the script so egalitarianism would be obviously that everybody's view gets taken

00:20:53.440 seriously radical egalitarianism would be that we're going to make up for past injustices or

00:20:59.040 even current injustices by forwarding people extra to that have been historically or are

00:21:04.580 currently discriminated we're going to take those people more seriously than we otherwise would and

00:21:09.260 so you that's kind of the social justice mythology when you said that you know oh so there's you know

00:21:14.220 if you're straight you're white you're male what you're talking about in general these kind of

00:21:17.200 what are classified under the critical theory school of thought as oppressor classes versus

00:21:24.300 oppressed classes which would be racial minorities sexual minorities gender minorities and we can go

00:21:28.960 as Judith Butler, one of their chief theorists put it, that exasperated, et cetera, of identity

00:21:35.300 categories. So the critical theory school, we have to add that in. And the critical theory school

00:21:40.540 has the mythology that the world is separated. This comes actually from Marx. So the world is

00:21:46.340 separated into stratified groups. That's what you were describing. And these groups, this is the key

00:21:53.300 observation are actually in zero-sum conflict for the access to resources and opportunities

00:22:00.120 in society. There is no everybody's ships rise together in the critical theory view. There is

00:22:06.140 instead the view that there is a relatively permanent underclass that is seeking liberation

00:22:11.900 from its oppressors, who are the elite status groups. As history wound on, the elite status

00:22:19.440 groups became identity groups rather than you know the actual societal right so we go from

00:22:24.820 Marx which is workers of the world unite overthrow the bourgeoisie right and become the owners of

00:22:33.900 the means of production of capital of whatever it is of power in other words you take the power

00:22:39.460 that has been taken from you historically and you are now owners of it because you've united

00:22:45.020 as a group of oppressed people to fight off and defeat the oppressors right and so the the view

00:22:50.920 there is that um where marx was worried about the means of economic and material production

00:22:57.580 the critical theorists became more interested in the means of uh social cultural um information

00:23:05.580 production so they became very interested in things like education faith media pop culture

00:23:11.780 elements of middle culture and saying that those things were creating an ideology to hold down

00:23:17.680 the proletariat to keep them in their place. And then that later in the 1960s, in particular 50s 0.94

00:23:24.640 and 60s, fragmented into being very specific about identity politics. As I say, the civil rights

00:23:30.000 movement in the United States started to reach a peak, the identity politics aspect became very

00:23:33.820 prominent. It was kind of present earlier than that. It became very prominent in the 1960s.

00:23:38.940 And so it kind of changed into an identity politics thing. But the key thing there is that there's been with critical theory, there's a shift in ethics that you have to see everything that occurs in the world through a lens of does this maintain oppression or does it provide the access to liberation from oppression?

00:24:00.560 There's the belief now that people are brainwashed by society, by the elite narratives of society to accept and internalize their oppression in a form of false consciousness that they have to be awakened from.

00:24:11.380 So part of the critical mythology is that everybody doesn't know how to act in their best interests.

00:24:18.060 And it's the job of the critical theorists, the awakened few, to go around in consciousness rays, as they call it, and wake people up.

00:24:25.200 So this mythology, when you add in the critical element, includes the idea that all the normal people out there are asleep, that they're being brainwashed by the powerful elites of society to work against their own interests and in the interests of the elites who are going to continue to oppress them.

00:24:40.240 And if you really cut down to the original critical theorists, what liberation from oppression means is liberation from anything that's not communism.

00:24:49.540 So the oppression is that which is not communism. And so you kind of have this huge shift conceptually when you start integrating the actual critical theory side of the mythology into the underlying social justice mythology that you laid out correctly.

00:25:09.780 So now that radical egalitarianism starts taking on literally mind reading that everybody has, you know, internalized the status quo and wants to maintain it for selfish reasons.

00:25:21.360 It needs to be awakened to how terrible their lives are.

00:25:25.080 So there's this new thought that only the elites have a good life and everybody else has a terrible life and needs to be awakened to it because they don't even realize it.

00:25:32.340 That's part of the mythology.

00:25:34.000 And that's where it's almost like the influence of the devil is in everybody comes into the picture.

00:25:39.180 Then, and I know this is long and complicated.

00:25:41.480 No, no, carry on.

00:25:42.280 Keep going.

00:25:42.820 Keep going.

00:25:43.080 It just is what it is.

00:25:44.180 Then you get the postmodern aspect.

00:25:46.240 And postmodernists were technically not the same kind of thing as the critical theorists.

00:25:51.020 If we get really formal, the critical theorists were called neo-Marxists.

00:25:55.100 They were looking at Marxism in a new way.

00:25:57.060 They were very critical of old original Marxism, so they became something different.

00:26:00.540 But they were ultimately still Marxist at heart in terms of much of how they thought.

00:26:04.680 The postmodernists are classified as post-Marxists.

00:26:07.840 They were people, they were French philosophers for the ones that we're interested in, who had basically seen communism fail everywhere it was tried and just went into this sort of despair.

00:26:17.340 Nothing can be good.

00:26:18.360 They also were being French, picked up with French philosophy that was very prominent at the time, you know, from just ahead of their time, I should say, which would include existentialism.

00:26:28.320 So, a lot of nihilism came out of that.

00:26:29.940 And then structuralism, which was this view that the way that language is structured leads to how people think and how people will then build the power dynamics of society.

00:26:45.160 So they got very interested in language, very interested in knowledge, very interested in what they categorized as discourses, the underlying discourses of society, started to form the structures by which society is organized and power plays out and power operates in a dynamic way.

00:27:01.920 And so what the postmodernists added to the mythology is that somehow language, how we speak about things, what we consider legitimate, what we will consider true and false are somehow central to the organization of material reality and our experience in material reality.

00:27:22.140 Literally, that we don't live in a world where we have access to objective or close to objectively understanding the world.

00:27:31.380 We can't do scientific experience and really determine what's true because we are caught up in what Michel Foucault called regimes of truth that are political apparatuses at kind of the superstructural in the Marxian sense that that level that dictate how people are going to decide to authenticate statements as true or false.

00:27:55.640 So Foucault's point, a lot of people don't understand this, is that whether or not a truth claim is actually true is irrelevant. It might be. That's fine. It might not be. And that's also fine because the point isn't that. The point of interest and relevance is that there was a political process that determined somebody's ability to say that it's true or false.

00:28:18.920 So if you say, no, no, no, it's the rigor of the experiment and the method and no, well, that was decided by a political process too. So for Foucault, it was politics and power games all the way down. And so humans just live in regimes of truth that shape their views of reality. And so we don't have direct access to understanding anything outside of our own lived experience.

00:28:39.580 So now you have this shift away from being able to know anything and into the personal lived experience of whatever it happens to be as being the genuine, authentic experience of the world.

00:28:51.860 That's Foucault's view.

00:28:53.240 You can look at Derrida's view.

00:28:54.480 We don't have to get deep into Jacques Derrida.

00:28:56.160 But his general point was that meaning cannot actually be conveyed properly in language.

00:29:03.400 Words, like if I say something like, you know, Zoom meeting or computer or microphone or tree, things that I'm actually looking at right now, those words don't actually refer to those things at all in any intelligible way.

00:29:18.340 They only refer to the words that they are related to either in direct fashion.

00:29:25.180 So if I say something like, you know, maple, because the trees outside my window are maples.

00:29:30.920 If I say maple, that word's related to tree, that word's related to plant, that word's related to life, that word's related, you know, we can get on and on.

00:29:38.800 But then also in terms of how words are related by not being a thing.

00:29:43.100 So a tree is, say, not a bush, and a bush or a plant is not an animal. And so all meaning is just caught up in the relationships between words. And his claim, having drawn off of the structuralist school, was that power is hidden in those relationships.

00:30:00.160 Those relationships between words are the discourses. They dictate how words gain meaning. But what this is, is actually a removal of meaning from language. And so you can't use language to derive stable meaning.

00:30:14.280 And these two ideas combined to a new aspect of mythology that our friend Mike Naina refers to as a metaphysics of discourse.

00:30:24.720 So now it's that the way we speak about things, the way that's considered legitimate to speak about things, actually shapes what is and is not true.

00:30:33.300 And that's actually a political process. And so the outgrowth of postmodern mythology is that literally everything is politics.

00:30:41.220 And so since literally everything is politics, it's all a matter of whose politics are on the right side of history versus whose are on the wrong side of history.

00:30:48.980 And matters like truth and falsity, while they're not technically irrelevant, they're way down the list of importance so that you can then pick and choose.

00:30:57.820 Um, what we see with wokeness is a deliberate combination of the critical theory mythology with this aspect of postmodern mythology about knowledge and truth and language and meaning so that you could use postmodern theory to deconstruct systems of power, but not to deconstruct the lived experience of oppression, which is considered properly basic now because that's where they move everything.

00:31:25.380 So you have this much more elaborate mythology where literally, and this is a postmodern contribution, literally the words that we use, the way that we think, what we consider true infects us and makes us literal agents of the oppression that the critical theory school sees.

00:31:42.160 or if we learn to take the right discourses up, literal agents of liberation. And so who we happen

00:31:49.200 to be politically, not in terms of say your skin color, being black isn't enough. You have to be 0.97

00:31:54.820 politically black. Being gay is not enough. You have to be politically queer. When you take up 1.00

00:31:59.360 the right politics, your identity itself, which is where your lived experiences becomes the

00:32:05.780 the epistemological forward claim and so that's a long ride away from that nicer but still a little

00:32:12.660 bit like there's some questions in that you know mythology of social justice that you laid out

00:32:17.440 all right so just to put that all into simple language what you're really saying is we have

00:32:23.340 been told or some people have been convinced that we are in a battle between groups of people

00:32:31.180 one of which is good and one of which is bad right and we have no there is no truth there

00:32:41.680 is only a battle over words and if you whoever wins that battle is the one that that gets to

00:32:48.020 determine what the truth is and the argument is that the powerful bad groups have been determining

00:32:52.960 what the truth is by abusing language therefore what must now happen is we must agree that there

00:32:58.260 is no truth other than what i feel and if i feel that you are oppressing me by staring directly

00:33:05.860 into the camera and i am from a minority group and you're a straight white man that means you

00:33:12.640 are oppressing me right that's exactly right the in that last part so important that the hierarchy

00:33:18.980 of identity which is really rooted in what's called ethno-historicism so identity combined

00:33:25.180 with how that identity has been treated both presently but more importantly historically

00:33:29.240 determines the valence of what directions oppression can operate in so dominant groups

00:33:35.620 i could never if i'm you know labeled as a member of a dominant group relationally to you i could

00:33:41.340 never claim oppression uh because i you can't possibly oppress me because oppression requires

00:33:47.940 systemic power right so if 10 people from my group were to chase you down in the street because of

00:33:52.900 your skin color and beat you up uh and call you a white whatever that still wouldn't be oppression 0.51

00:33:58.860 that would be that's right exactly because there's no systemic power so the kind of mythological 0.79

00:34:03.720 object is systemic power as it has been literally crystallized in the so-called matrix of domination

00:34:09.800 laid out you know in the foundational documents of intersectionality in 1990

00:34:14.000 um and it's set up so that that can't change because there's always the constant appeals

00:34:21.860 to either A, history, or B, that structuralist idea or post-structuralist idea from the postmodern

00:34:30.240 school that says that when you create a culture, until you completely overthrow that culture,

00:34:37.840 all of its biases and political power and all of those things are baked into the discourses.

00:34:43.000 So we could have a system where we're literally under the boots of the most radical,

00:34:47.820 um say black lives matter activists that represent maybe one percent of the population

00:34:53.380 in terms of their views i mean genuinely radical people who don't represent almost anybody in

00:34:57.460 terms of what they think and yet everybody that they genuinely oppress would not be able to

00:35:02.240 consider themselves oppressed because they would have an appeal to say well the system we still

00:35:08.720 have to operate in was generated by cultural mores that were generated in white western european

00:35:15.420 contexts all right francis now i'd like you to please summarize what james has been talking about

00:35:20.040 in three sentences go well to me to me it just proves my number one rule of life which is you

00:35:25.800 should never trust the french but anyway so uh but what i wanted to ask you james is this so

00:35:32.380 what we've done is is we've analyzed the structure the way that it works the thought processes

00:35:37.300 i'm very interested in the emotions behind this now we talk about mythology mythology had a purpose

00:35:43.360 2000 years ago to explain things that at that time we had no concept of or an understanding of

00:35:50.100 why certain things happen why the road why the sun rose why it set all the rest of it

00:35:54.340 why do we have this mythology now i think it's actually because whereas the physical sciences

00:36:01.140 have matured quite successfully so we understand why the sun rises and why the sun sets um the

00:36:07.520 social sciences have not. The social sciences are still quite opaque. The methodologies are

00:36:12.880 not worked out. We don't know what rigorous looks like. The rising replication crisis,

00:36:19.760 especially in social psychology, has shown that the methods that we believed in were very easy

00:36:26.640 to hack and to create lots of successful papers out of thin air, more or less. And so the social

00:36:35.640 sciences are in their infancy um that doesn't get to the the emotional side of it but the social

00:36:41.440 sciences are in their infancy so they're not actually well developed very mature uh lines

00:36:47.720 of reasoning so in a sense the social process is how power actually works in society when we started

00:36:53.340 at the beginning talking about how these narratives run away from us that's something that the

00:36:56.920 postmodernists would have been very interested in it's very closely related to postmodern theory

00:37:01.260 and so in general what we've seen and we can get to the emotions in a second with this what we've

00:37:05.520 seen it through history is that there's kind of mythology leading into natural philosophy

00:37:10.560 or really philosophy leading into natural philosophy leading into science and so what

00:37:15.800 we have is kind of a hardening up from mythology into philosophizing where now reason becomes more

00:37:21.060 important that hardens up into let's look at the world to base our reason to let's actually use

00:37:26.540 experimentation and falsification and get really hard rigorous methods and it turns out that a

00:37:31.720 human beings and human thought are very complex. And then human social behavior is, of course,

00:37:38.420 another order of complexity higher than that. So it's very difficult. It's not like tracking

00:37:43.840 a baseball shot out of a cannon or something like that, you know, the projectile motion physics

00:37:48.100 equation or figuring out, you know, how we're going to even send a rocket to the moon. These

00:37:52.000 are very straightforward calculations using relatively hard, but relatively simple underlying

00:37:57.440 formulas it's hard math but it's the principles aren't so social sciences are much more complex

00:38:03.940 and so we we have this problem where we're we're still quite early on and the so we're moving from

00:38:11.680 mythology and if you look at say freud freud was very and even jung you're talking like those are

00:38:18.620 considered the forefathers of psychology this is a hundred years ago and they were very mythology

00:38:25.960 like that was that was just the very beginning of bringing philosophy into the picture of the

00:38:32.120 social sciences and it's just 100 years ago and it's such a complex subject and now you know you

00:38:37.080 might say that we're we're in this weird phase where there's some of its philosophy but like

00:38:41.600 ethics some of it is natural philosophy where we're very closely looking at the world and some

00:38:47.200 of it is you know closer to hard science where people are being very rigorous and there's this

00:38:51.140 kind of spectrum of rigor happening and in the process of this first of all a lot of it's not

00:38:56.980 working out a lot of it's not giving us the answers when we try to do experiments like the

00:39:01.040 great society where we're going to now base our societies on social scientific research but the

00:39:06.160 social scientific research is really early on you're going to make some bad mistakes and it

00:39:10.120 doesn't work out and people are going to get upset but there's a second process happening besides all

00:39:15.560 of this confusion from a national scientific process and we might be still even with the

00:39:19.780 advent of ai which will be i think necessary to understand psychology and sociology properly even

00:39:25.840 with the advent of that we might still be a hundred or fifty years away from a robust social

00:39:29.700 science a properly rigorous one but in addition to this this shift from um you know mythology

00:39:37.560 through philosophy to more natural philosophy to actual science this never ever ever ever

00:39:44.040 progresses without the people on the weaker end of that epistemologically without them losing their 0.99

00:39:49.260 shit. The turf wars get insane. So what you actually see is this rise of the prominence 1.00

00:39:55.060 of the social scientists. And then you have these people who are closer to philosophers

00:39:58.840 working in humanities departments, gender studies, for example, ethnic studies, African-American

00:40:04.400 studies. These people don't have the slightest idea about doing statistics. They don't have the

00:40:08.280 slightest interest in doing statistics. And they become jealous. If you read back CP Snow's The

00:40:14.900 two cultures, you can see that there's this great jealousy between the philosophy side of things and

00:40:20.340 the science side of things as that transition happens. Because basically, the philosophers who

00:40:25.260 held themselves in high esteem and had good elite jobs become pretty much irrelevant. They're just

00:40:29.880 people sitting in an armchair making shit up. And the scientists are finding out the real truths of 0.99

00:40:34.380 the world, and nobody likes that when they're the one getting excluded. And so, there's actually

00:40:39.060 been in this kind of this combination of it lacking success in the the application realm

00:40:44.160 and then in the sense that it's still so new but we're you have the humanities people losing

00:40:49.580 prestige there was a pushback for the humanities and philosophy types to gain prestige and they

00:40:55.940 actually went backwards rather than applying rigorous philosophy they started to build a

00:41:00.140 more and more mythological structure and i think the reason for that on top of their envy and

00:41:04.860 hatred of the sciences that are stealing their their importance and their inability to produce

00:41:10.520 reliable results rigorously and be taken seriously on top of that there's the the problem that

00:41:17.180 because they've adopted these ideas like conflict theory from marx and these ideas about you know

00:41:22.640 these kind of very simplistic ideas about how individuals operate within the context of identity

00:41:26.960 categories when you have something that's not true the only thing that you can really do is

00:41:31.900 start to lean more and more heavily on the force of story and they decided to lean straight into

00:41:38.240 that and started to create a very mythological view if you follow like in our books helen and

00:41:44.580 i just wrote it's about to come out cynical theories we actually talk about that in a sense

00:41:49.500 which is that um over the years we just focused on post-modernism but over the years since the

00:41:55.840 1960s when post-modernism came into the picture what you actually see is something that was very

00:42:00.640 complex, first getting packaged up so activists could use it and then becoming very simple and

00:42:06.480 concrete so that when you read somebody like Robin DiAngelo, who obviously is a huge rock

00:42:10.840 star figure right now in the field, it literally comes off like she's like a 10 year old could 0.99

00:42:15.400 read it. It's very simple. It's very straightforward. It's very condescending. And that's

00:42:20.120 because the oversimplification and kind of dogmatic authoritarianism, the mythological

00:42:28.880 backing becomes the thing that makes up for the fact that they don't have rigor so there's this

00:42:34.940 rather than them saying oh i'm going to learn statistics and try to do this right

00:42:38.540 they just you know went the other way and started to say statistics is part of the evil in the world

00:42:44.240 and so we're going to avoid that on principle and and call it a master's tool and you know become

00:42:50.020 more story driven etc and so there's this really weird um kind of retrograde development

00:42:58.440 And the failure of social science to be rigorous enough and to have this replication crisis and so on coming into the picture led there to be a lot of room for, well, obviously, the scientists people don't really know what they're talking about.

00:43:12.800 So we'll tell a story that fills that in.

00:43:16.980 And I think that's what happened.

00:43:18.100 And James, there's another question I wanted to ask. It's because it seems to be the younger generations who seem to be infected and believing these narratives. Why do you think that it's the younger generation in particular and not the older generations as a result?

00:43:36.900 Is it because of the college? Is it because at that age you simply know less, therefore you tend to be more malleable? Or is it because more and more young people are realizing that the capitalism they're being exposed to isn't really working for them when it comes to things like whole ownership, the gap between rich and poor, etc., etc.?

00:43:57.980 Yes. It's all of those things. It is. It is actually all of those things. So this kind of like pernicious and cynical analysis has the critical theory analysis has actually been a fundamental part of primary, secondary and university education now for a number of years.

00:44:16.000 For whatever set of reasons, our schools decided to focus, at least in the United States, on self-esteem initiatives rather than accomplishment initiatives.

00:44:23.840 And this has created people that weren't, you know, if you read like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanoff, you see that this has created individuals who are not as resilient and not as capable of dealing with their lack of understanding of the world.

00:44:38.000 So when you have your, you know, normally young people are very, like, just becoming sort of, I guess, politically conscious, and they get caught up in these things. And then you can add in to what you said, all the things you said, I don't really have to repeat them. But you can add into this one extra element, which is a general loss of meaning in a society that's bent on the idea of progress.

00:45:02.440 and why i say that is because while you have you have this confluence of events where things are

00:45:09.140 definitely not perfect and there are definitely observable problems say with regard to race with

00:45:13.980 regard to sex with regard to trans issues and so on and so forth are definitely observable problems

00:45:18.960 stuff isn't figured out and perfect some of the stuff may never be perfect but at the same time

00:45:23.620 the big civil rights battles were actually already fought and those are kind of the big heroes of our

00:45:29.340 of our time you know that's two generations removed from from the world today and so the 1.00

00:45:36.320 big heroes we look back to were the civil rights giants oh you know we made life better for black

00:45:40.900 people and that was like the greatest thing possible martin luther king is and i do think

00:45:44.620 that of course martin luther king was did insanely good work and some of the most important work in

00:45:49.220 the history of the western world but at the same time you get a bunch of people hop young people 0.96

00:45:55.060 hopped up on this vision that creating civil rights success is the big thing to do and then

00:46:01.000 the battles are like well do you like add an extra bathroom for trans people like what do you do

00:46:06.940 like it's it's like because the whole trans thing came out and people are like some people are trans

00:46:11.340 and everybody was kind of like okay like there was no fight there was no drama it was just they

00:46:16.500 had to make fights about bathrooms and sports which genuinely create you know there are genuine

00:46:21.960 issues there but for the most part it's like well be trans if you want it's like i remember with one 0.98

00:46:28.580 of my kids like she went through this whole series of different changes you know we were all atheists

00:46:33.660 and so all of a sudden she became christian and she was like i'm a christian now and we're like

00:46:38.460 okay you want me to go to the store and buy you a bible and she was like ah you didn't get mad at

00:46:44.180 me that proves you don't love me and it's like okay you know you're a 14 year old girl aren't

00:46:49.360 you and then it was like then it was like i'm bisexual and we're like yeah we kind of always

00:46:54.840 thought that and then she's like ah you didn't try to disown me you don't really love me and it's

00:47:00.300 like it's just you know there has been so much successful civil rights progress that when these

00:47:05.800 new civil rights issues come up there are like with the trans issue around safe bathrooms and

00:47:11.560 around sports and around a handful of other kind of concerns there are specifics that have to be

00:47:16.180 figured out and worked out and that are actually genuinely difficult in that case fine

00:47:20.420 but in the principle everybody's like yeah okay expand rights oh yeah gay people normal okay

00:47:28.580 and so there's there's this burning need in the young people to be civil rights heroes

00:47:36.700 there's visible problems of imperfection and then the really like profound and meaningful fights

00:47:44.680 are easy so there's no meaning in it you're like we're here for gay rights and everybody's like

00:47:50.080 okay have a parade cool like let's set that up you know it's like there's not nobody shows up

00:47:55.640 with fire hoses or anything like this and so they're looking for a big fight but no one wants

00:48:00.640 to fight them back nobody needs to fight yeah so it's like and that genuinely does create a crisis

00:48:05.480 of meaning and then if you couple that with what with what you said francis where um if you couple

00:48:11.740 that with the fact that the world genuinely, especially like post 2009 recession and financial

00:48:20.760 crisis, and then whatever the universities have been doing to these poor kids, and I don't mean

00:48:25.360 mentally, I mean, financially, like they're properly screwed. And so you tie into that

00:48:30.640 level of like resentment that the society has cheated them and stolen from them. And so you

00:48:35.620 have this kind of very, I have a bunch of friends actually, who are like Bernie people, and they

00:48:39.040 don't like the woke at all and they think that the woke is like totally excessive and insane

00:48:44.420 but they're like 100 occupy wall street and they're just mad as hell that occupy wall street 0.78

00:48:49.080 didn't work and the republicans are stealing our future from us and these big business interests

00:48:52.960 and the corrupt corrupt politicians are stealing our future from us and there's like a lot of kind

00:48:57.220 of truth to that and then now after this is all blown up they don't know what to do because it's

00:49:02.600 like they kind of they're like well the woke are busting everything up so we're on their side now

00:49:06.700 even though we don't like them. And so there's this weird fight, but they don't know where the

00:49:12.740 real fight is. And then there's an issue that's gaining traction. So they latch onto it and get

00:49:17.340 all worked up. And it's a very confusing time, I think, to be under 35, not least because the

00:49:22.560 schools have literally been mindfucking them pretty much the entire time so that they think

00:49:26.140 in weird poisonous ways to find where oppression and bad things are happening and to not trust the 0.94

00:49:32.480 system or understand how the system works and so on so really like so when you ask the question

00:49:37.260 you listed a bunch of stuff it's like yes it's a it's a bunch of stuff at once and james we're now

00:49:44.480 hit this catalyst which is covid we have now seen the black lives matter movement we've now seen

00:49:50.900 you know writing you know destruction of property and it's very very it's a tricky question to ask

00:49:58.020 hold on before you say rioting we learned yesterday that the proper term is in intensified

00:50:04.920 peacefulness okay that means rioting and arson yeah courthouse burned down as literally the

00:50:14.320 the news report said um a courthouse got burned down and something else was badly damaged and

00:50:21.140 police officers were injured when a peaceful demonstration intensified yeah so the peacefulness

00:50:27.960 intensified as a result of which property got destroyed and people got injured so we've seen

00:50:32.840 a lot of peacefulness francis is what you were saying yeah mate i yeah i i i burnt uh uh the

00:50:39.320 dinner last night so i saw some intense for intensified peacefulness at last night's dinner

00:50:44.540 but anyway the point is james is where do you think this is going to end up do you think what

00:50:50.560 do you think is a natural progression for this that's hard and scary every people keep asking

00:50:56.960 me this and it's like it's so non-linear i wish you would just ask me the easy question like what's

00:51:01.360 their end goal and it's like i don't think they have one but somebody that's behind them probably

00:51:05.800 does so we'll see who tries to scoop up like i'm starting to get the impression that the woke are 0.98

00:51:10.660 the useful idiots for somebody who's not as not as uh politically lost and internally contradictory 0.99

00:51:16.720 and they are basically the bulldozers leveling the ground so that some somebody who actually 1.00

00:51:22.480 wants to build something scary in the world can come in and fill that space. But I don't know for

00:51:29.480 sure what will happen now. I think a lot of people have been awakened to wokeness and many of them

00:51:36.140 are the liberal type who need to fight back against it with reason and trying to claim

00:51:43.840 the mantle of moral and epistemological authority and high ground that comes with that and to fight

00:51:52.440 for putting our society back on the track of genuine you know proper progress but at the same

00:52:00.080 time there is what people kind of refer to as the sleeping giant and last time we spoke we you asked

00:52:06.780 about this and we actually talked about it we talked about whether or not there was going to

00:52:09.220 be a rise of genuine racism a rise of genuine sexism and that's the sleeping giant which is

00:52:14.760 are majority groups going to be awakened to full bear um zero-sum identity politics and

00:52:24.840 i genuinely think at this point that the giant is stirring and has one eye open and that's a

00:52:30.700 bad place to be so no reasonable person wants this the woke's game is to claim that there's 0.76

00:52:37.640 no such thing as a reasonable person and so everybody who is against them does want that

00:52:42.080 and that's ridiculous which is why the three of us are all all right and blah blah blah because

00:52:48.500 you can't oppose them without being smeared and tarnished so that no reasonable person can oppose 0.85

00:52:54.420 them because therefore own all reasonable people would agree with them right that's because of the

00:53:00.920 mythology which the first tenant of which if it's a critical race mythology says that racism is the

00:53:06.660 ordinary state of affairs in our society not aberrational and so that translated into robin

00:53:11.520 d'angelo condescending speak is the question is no longer did racism take place but how did racism

00:53:16.340 manifest in that situation because the racism is to be assumed so um that's part of the mythology

00:53:21.780 that racism is in every possible interaction if you look at just that aspect so if that infects

00:53:29.520 the sleeping giant and the sleeping giant wakes up and you start to see these like

00:53:34.440 militia groups going crazy or white identity politics rising, I don't see any solution other 0.64

00:53:43.460 than civil war, which will be a very nasty one, because that's a thing that's very hard to stop 1.00

00:53:50.780 once it starts happening. It's very hard to get that resentment and anger back under control.

00:53:56.060 And the woke have the narrative on their own side that that resistance is to be expected.

00:54:02.220 Resistance is a predictable result of doing this work, blah, blah, blah. So they think that they're genuinely unmasking people who are always alt-right, you know, evil racist lunatics, and they'll use it as evidence. You see this happening in these cities in America. These protesters know what they're doing. They're not idiots. They actually know what they're doing. 0.97

00:54:21.600 Their objective when they go and agitate, say, a federal building in Portland last night, their objective is to try to get law enforcement to react.

00:54:30.420 Their goal is to try to get the police or even better the feds to step in and try to control them, at which point if it's the police, they'll say, look, fascists.

00:54:37.500 And if it's the feds, they'll say Trump is now seizing power.

00:54:40.880 He's the dictator that we've been telling you he is for four years.

00:54:43.600 And it's this weird thing where there's enough people who believe that narrative.

00:54:47.620 And again, this is that relevance of that Trump derangement that I was talking about.

00:54:51.220 that when they say it, a huge proportion of left-leaning under 35s are all going to believe

00:54:57.240 it. Yep. That's it. Um, my friend, for example, recently got very upset with me on my Bernie,

00:55:02.580 one of my Bernie friends. And he said, you know, what do you think's going on? And I told him,

00:55:06.240 and he just got really mad at me and then said, you've shot your arrow and painted the target

00:55:09.500 around it. And I was like, okay, conversation over. Um, if that's how you're going to think

00:55:15.320 about this uh fine but that's kind of what's going on it's like you literally have people who are so

00:55:22.420 convinced that trump is a dictator and waiting and i will admit there are concerning signs there

00:55:27.400 are concerning possibilities around that claim um and it's clear uh the the so with his the most

00:55:36.200 concerning one for me is nothing to do with his policy it's the kind of like a loyalty based

00:55:43.520 attempt to fill his government only with people who are loyalists to his cause right so there's

00:55:48.260 like these purges happening within different government departments to try to get them on

00:55:53.140 side that stuff makes me concerned his policies not so much he's not even really like gone nuts

00:56:00.160 too much with the executive orders or any of these kind of things he's not doing anything

00:56:04.280 overtly like that but when you start trying to make a purity campaign within your own government

00:56:08.260 rather than an ideological diversity campaign, that's a different thing.

00:56:12.620 Well, isn't that just a businessman's way of doing things?

00:56:15.880 And if you run a business, you don't want people who fundamentally disagree with the mission statement of your business.

00:56:22.380 Right. So something being concerning isn't the same as something being proved.

00:56:26.220 Right. So there are signs that it's possible.

00:56:29.640 I genuinely think it's unlikely that Trump is actually dictatorial in his ambition.

00:56:35.780 it's more likely that he's dynastic and Trump wants to try to rig the system so that say his

00:56:41.000 kids become president next and you know there's this kind of that wouldn't be all that unusual

00:56:45.900 for the United States let's be honest no kidding no kidding do we need another Bush or Clinton to

00:56:51.380 come in and save the day right maybe a couple Roosevelt's or something all right James look

00:56:56.020 just to wrap up it's an interesting it's a fascinating not just interesting fascinating

00:56:59.700 talking to you about this but I want to make for the last five ten minutes of the interview just

00:57:04.140 turn this right into the real world which is people are now starting to see we've had it in

00:57:11.320 this country people being fired for criticizing the this movement people being ostracized what's

00:57:18.700 called cancel culture uh people a lot you know 62 percent of americans now say in the latest cato

00:57:25.300 poll that they are scared to express their political opinion publicly 46 percent of people

00:57:31.580 in britain but say that they we we have less free speech uh than we did a few years ago versus 20

00:57:38.960 that say we have more so the direction of travel is this movement has taken hold of all the

00:57:46.020 cultural institutions the education system television news media etc people are feeling it

00:57:52.380 and if someone is watching the show and and they've they've sat through 40 minutes of us

00:57:58.800 talking about critical race theory and Foucault and they're going okay well I feel all this is

00:58:04.400 happening around me what the hell do I do right so unfortunately there's not like oh you know go

00:58:13.460 register with this and you're done you know and it's hopefully not so grim as learn Chinese

00:58:18.600 but I mean but the the long and short of what you you actually do have to put in some legwork

00:58:26.860 if you want to do something. There are two options. Do you want to take it on or do you

00:58:30.860 want to do something different? And both of those things are success vectors. If you want to take

00:58:37.480 it on, you have to learn some of it. You have to. The stuff that we just talked about, you have to

00:58:42.320 become at least basically conversant in it. You have to learn to see the word games, the setups,

00:58:50.820 because that's what these are. It's built out of setups. I've said it over and over and over again,

00:58:54.640 just as a very quick idea, but this will come into every context in your life with, say,

00:58:59.980 critical race theory. It assumes racism is in everything. Therefore, say you run a shop and

00:59:04.820 a white person and a black person enter at the same time, you have to pick one customer to help 0.95

00:59:08.500 first. If you pick the white person, the racism must be present. And so the reason you pick the

00:59:15.500 white person is because you think white people are first-class citizens and black people are 0.99

00:59:18.620 second-class citizens and you're a racist. If you pick the black person first, it's because you 0.99

00:59:22.140 don't trust black people to be unattended in your store while you help the other customer. 1.00

00:59:25.860 Then you want to get them out of your store as quickly as possible. And you're racist because 0.99

00:59:28.980 racism must be present in every situation. So when you start to see that the thing is playing

00:59:33.980 a game with you to set you up, to keep you on your heels, to make you feel stupid, to make you feel 0.95

00:59:38.100 immoral, to make you feel like you're on the wrong side of history, to make you feel like you're not 0.99

00:59:41.200 part of where the crowd is going. Once you see that, then you can find your own feet. But you

00:59:46.800 do have to learn a little bit about how the ideology thinks, how it uses language, what it

00:59:51.200 means by its words there's a little bit of legwork put it to put into that i made new discourses to

00:59:56.000 provide resources for that you can use it you can use other ones i'm not like i'm the only correct

01:00:01.940 voice on this or people speaking up it's good so um you have to learn something and then you have

01:00:08.160 to start talking with other people find people who agree with you start to organize and actually

01:00:12.260 start showing up if you're going to be an activist you have to show up activists show up that's why

01:00:16.420 these people are in so many bureaucracies. They're on so many committees. They're installing

01:00:21.460 policies. And that's where it's happening is they're changing the world at the level of

01:00:25.720 administrative policy so that people are stuck having to behave or they'll get fired or something

01:00:30.860 like that. So you have to show up and push back the other way. Get on the committee. Volunteer

01:00:35.020 with your boss to help lead the diversity leadership initiative that everybody has to

01:00:40.700 take up now and try to steer it away from this nonsense and toward more productive venues so

01:00:45.400 that you can tackle the real problems. On the other hand, if you're like, I can't learn, like

01:00:50.200 a lot of my even very smart friends, very academic friends, like, I just can't think like that. I

01:00:57.120 can't think wrong stuff. Okay, great. Maybe you should learn a little bit of it just to have

01:01:03.680 some background, do what you can, don't stress. What you actually need to do, you do need to

01:01:09.260 understand the way that it does shakedowns on people. But other than that, you need to go build

01:01:12.800 the thing go build the thing if it's in our schools people need alternatives they need other

01:01:17.920 ways to get educated to educate their kids in the united states is going to be a godly number of

01:01:23.300 people doing homeschooling those people are going to need resources they're craving the reason

01:01:28.060 they're doing the homeschooling is they want not woke resources educational resources so go build

01:01:32.460 a thing that offers that if you're going to work you know in law you know leave your current law

01:01:37.540 society if it's going woke and go create one that isn't and you know don't put like proudly racist

01:01:42.780 since 2020 on the side but you know proudly not woke is actually a thing right now you know you

01:01:48.960 know you'd have to find the right wording obviously but totally i know what you mean i said this the

01:01:53.080 other day like if you if your small business comes under attack from these woke people now the best

01:01:57.900 thing you can do the best thing you can do right now is just double down and go my mars bars are

01:02:04.160 for non-woke people, and you're going to get way more money than you would have done otherwise.

01:02:09.060 It's absolutely true. So people who are looking at this world do need to understand that giving

01:02:16.980 into this will not satisfy the problem. It is an unsatisfiable black hole of a problem.

01:02:24.080 Giving in to something that's shaking you down or extorting you is an invitation for them to

01:02:28.620 shake you down or extort you again later. And that's really what this is. It's using

01:02:32.680 fancy terminology, a claim on the current of history, and agitations about people's moral

01:02:42.040 standing rather than, say, physical intimidation to bully them. It's using administrative policies

01:02:47.280 to try to get people fired. So yeah, build the thing. Go build the thing. We're going to be a

01:02:52.960 company that's not going to be woke. We're going to get harassed, and we're going to endure the

01:02:56.860 harassment to give people a place they can work and if you're going to build a company you will

01:03:01.940 out compete your competitors because they're going to have to divert an increasing amount

01:03:07.360 of resources to wokeness if they let it into their company because it's not satisfiable it just keeps

01:03:12.020 coming for another shakedown another as you know it's very mafia logic it's like kicking the

01:03:17.340 kicking it up to the to the to the mob boss and so do the thing we need like if we if you say oh

01:03:25.700 my gosh everything's fallen there's two ways to look at that that's you know chicken little the

01:03:29.980 sky has fallen or whatever and there's this is an opportunity and i'm about to about to blow this

01:03:35.860 thing up so just if you don't want to learn this and take it on head-on you don't want to be an

01:03:40.660 activist just go do the thing and like you said stand strong double down you this is what so i

01:03:47.000 know your last question is coming it was the thing that nobody's talking about i'm gonna steal your

01:03:51.740 thunder and just jump right to it go for it take that francis take that i got my banana for you

01:03:59.240 right here i thought you'd never ask mate yeah no but no that's the thing is nobody's talking

01:04:05.740 about the fact that the liberal perspective the one that we've built our modern world out of

01:04:10.380 has the moral high ground it is it is the right way to think about these issues it's not to say

01:04:16.680 that it's perfect it's not to say that we can't do better at listening or whatever else but it

01:04:21.200 holds the moral high ground it has the also epistemological high ground because it actually 0.89

01:04:25.540 gives a shit what's true which is a different i mean you read this paper allison bailey 2017 0.93

01:04:31.340 something about i can't remember the title tracking privilege preserving epistemic pushback 0.99

01:04:35.560 something shadow texts and philosophy classrooms or some shit like this and in there she literally 0.62

01:04:41.680 writes that epistemic adequacy is a master's tool epistemic adequacy is academic speak for

01:04:50.680 knowing what you're talking about that's all like literally knowing what you're talking about is

01:04:55.440 racist sounds pretty racist sounds racist so you have the high ground to say no and nobody's talking

01:05:02.800 about that everybody's kind of like how do we make them happy you don't you don't you say no

01:05:08.640 i'm actually in the right here i talked to a guy the other day and he's you know we had a

01:05:12.500 conversation like two hours on a podcast and he's like at the end he's just kind of sitting there

01:05:16.580 and he gets this look on his face he's like i think i've just come to the point where somebody's

01:05:19.600 going to say you know hey you're racist and i'm just going to say no no i'm not okay i'm not and

01:05:27.820 that's it like you do so if you want to ask me the question i'll make up another one by the way 0.96

01:05:33.240 though yeah i'm gonna do it purely out of spite james i knew you would with your smile that hides

01:05:40.420 all your spite your mask is slipping yeah i'm nothing if not work so uh what is the one thing

01:05:47.300 that we're not talking about that we really should be do you mean like everybody because i could just

01:05:52.240 say like that the lays dill pickle potato chips are like next level good nobody talks about that

01:05:57.080 i never hear anybody say that at all yeah they're good well okay now two people are saying it and

01:06:03.880 then we have a skeptic no um so what i don't hear people talking about that i think people

01:06:16.160 do need to talk about is regular stuff like not being political for once regular stuff

01:06:24.340 like i know that they're trying to cram it i saw that the opening of the baseball season it's like

01:06:29.880 everybody's on their knees and crying in the field or something and they got black lives matter on

01:06:33.880 the on the home run fence and all this crap and it's like but nobody's just talking about the 0.90

01:06:39.680 baseball game nobody's talking about nobody's going to work and just talking about how to do

01:06:44.060 the job. What are we not talking about that we should be? Normal stuff, everyday stuff,

01:06:51.060 like getting together with your family and not having a political argument and just talking to

01:06:55.640 each other as human beings without the politics injected. So I know that some people are doing

01:07:00.580 this, but what we really all need to be doing is ratcheting down how much we're obsessing about

01:07:06.000 what's on the news, how much we're obsessing about what's on social media, how much we're

01:07:09.520 obsessing about the political valence of this, the political valence of that, and remembering that

01:07:14.020 we can just be normal people with each other also and that that's really where life is right that's 1.00

01:07:21.520 the heart that's the beating heart of social life these i might swear fucking woke idiots piss me off 0.99

01:07:29.260 because they're like we need to have authentic cross-racial relationships by focusing on the 1.00

01:07:34.100 most divisive possible thing in the relationship constantly and bringing it up and calling each

01:07:38.300 other out. That's the least authentic way to have a relationship ever. The most authentic way to have

01:07:44.240 a relationship is for me to look you in the eye and say, you're a person that I can relate to.

01:07:48.980 You can look me in the eye and say, you're a person. You wouldn't really say that because

01:07:51.600 it's weird. But we're people that can relate to each other. And let's just be friends on terms

01:07:57.000 that have something to do with our lives. And let's not turn this into like a political argument.

01:08:01.760 So the thing that people aren't talking about, but should be, is everything else. Everything

01:08:07.160 that's not what they're yelling about on Twitter that day. That's a really good point, James. And

01:08:11.980 I've been trying to say this to people for some time now is like, racism doesn't diminish because

01:08:17.220 you got admonished on TV by somebody. It diminishes when people meet in the same space and

01:08:24.780 connect and find out about each other's background and culture and just connect as people and talk

01:08:31.000 about family and movies and play sports together and do stuff together when they actually take a

01:08:37.140 moment to not think about race to not think about any of that stuff and just connect as human beings

01:08:43.520 um and it's a really important point you make very bad for trigonometry yeah but but a good

01:08:49.600 don't listen to what james said basically guys yeah listen everybody watch trigonometry and

01:08:56.520 send them money that's that's what you really that's nobody's talking about your patreon right

01:09:01.120 right well fortunately some people are fans are helping us find a new studio after we lost

01:09:07.760 our previous one not to be due to not being quite woke enough but james listen it's been an absolute

01:09:12.280 pleasure uh people should definitely definitely check out cynical theories the the book that

01:09:17.160 you've just written with heather uh helen pluckers not i do it all the time my wife's name is heather

01:09:22.420 and it's just a nightmare i'm mixing them up in my head all the time well that that there's an

01:09:26.800 extra dimension to that that we're not not as people just the names very clear on who's who

01:09:32.020 yeah uh so with helen pluck rose who's a former guest of ours as well also people should check

01:09:37.520 out new discourses they should follow you on twitter if they do want to to hear more about

01:09:42.220 all this crazy race stuff um and uh is there anything else that you you want people to know

01:09:47.380 about that you do um no that's pretty much all i do now uh but i did if people are are listening

01:09:53.660 and you know whatever i actually got i bought a domain name cynical theories.com so you don't

01:10:00.420 have to remember like go look up cynical theory you can go cynical theories.com just redirects

01:10:05.280 to the amazon link now so now you can just go buy it no problem i don't think it works in the uk

01:10:09.620 though i think it's the us one you can only put one all right okay perfect and before we finish

01:10:14.800 i've got a very one last important question what was the name of those potato chips again

01:10:18.260 Lay's dill pickle. Lay's is the brand. Dill pickle flavor. They are the perfect amount of

01:10:24.800 dill pickle flavor and vinegar and salt. It's like salt and vinegar, but better with the dill.

01:10:29.160 It's great stuff. But Francis, you're not getting anywhere near crisp for the rest of your life,

01:10:32.920 mate. You're on a diet. Yeah. Get in shape, man. He actually did during the lockdown. This is the

01:10:39.040 thing. I used to make fun of him for being fat and now he's not fat. Oh, very good. It's kind

01:10:43.520 of disappointing. Disappointing. But anyway, James, thanks so much for coming on the show.

01:10:47.660 it's been an absolute pleasure make sure you check out cynical theories and uh the news

01:10:52.760 discourses website as well and it's been a pleasure speaking with you uh enjoy the rest

01:10:57.800 of your day if you are in the middle of a day enjoy your evening if you're in the evening and

01:11:01.860 we'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream absolutely and our

01:11:07.040 episodes and live streams go out on tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday

01:11:11.740 always at 7 p.m uk time at 7 p.m uk time see you soon guys

01:11:17.660 We'll be right back.

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TRIGGERnometry - August 12, 2020

Social Justice Explained with James Lindsay

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