00:00:25.000and this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people and a
00:00:31.820fascinating person we have for you today he's a returning guest to trigonometry he's one of the
00:00:37.580co-authors of the grievance hoax papers he's the man who's read all the critical race theory
00:00:43.620books that so you don't have to James Lindsay welcome back to trigonometry I'm glad to be here
00:00:49.880especially after that introduction oh james before we we start mate i've got to say you
00:00:54.680may have read all the books but more importantly did you post them to your instagram story
00:00:58.480no i actually can't figure out how to use instagram i have one and i like get these
00:01:03.360messages and i know how to reply to people and that's as far as i got i haven't figured out
00:01:06.840how to post anything yet i have okay well when you do make sure you post the black box because
00:01:11.660that's how you stop racism now it is that's the way right there's only one that's what it means
00:01:16.900symbolic action is everything well listen uh we spoke with you probably about a year ago i'm
00:01:25.120guessing we you you guys were in london we we had a very interesting chat with you and peter
00:01:29.400bogossian at the time i think the interview that we posted then was called social justice is a mind
00:01:35.100virus i'd say we're all pretty fucking infected at this point um is that is that a fair assessment
00:01:41.800of what's going on here well uh yeah it's it's uh really spread pretty quickly um it's uh
00:01:49.260mainstreamed at an incredible rate since uh the death of george floyd at the end of may
00:01:56.960and now i mean i basically can't find anybody outside of kind of the old people who don't
00:02:05.840talk about it all more or less all the time and uh obviously if you look at what's going on and
00:02:10.900like the media it's just become like a blatant circus of lies where you know oh here's a building
00:02:19.120being smashed in and on fire and they're like whiteness is property from cheryl e harris you
00:02:23.940know this is a very important piece of scholarship saying why you can burn down burn down a starbucks
00:02:28.560or something and so yeah um this is a particular way of thinking it is in a sense contagious and
00:02:36.760the contagion of moral values sense people are are brought into thinking this way because it
00:02:45.860leads them to feel like they're a good person rather than somebody who's failing to live up
00:02:49.920to goodness and it has very very rapidly uh spread it has very rapidly become a
00:02:57.480dominant if not the dominant contending moral force that's rising in the western world and
00:03:06.240is getting exported from there as well in an astonishingly short time so yeah um i mean we
00:03:14.420have like the perfect metaphor for what's going on like it was in these research labs and then
00:03:19.080some scientists weren't really careful with how they disposed of you know whatever and it got out
00:03:24.180and then all of a sudden you know you have to start closing countries down and i mean it's it's
00:03:29.700odd the parallelism here but yeah it is it has spread very much like a pandemic very rapidly
00:03:35.380and you know we're now you know hopefully close to the peak of the wave because people are starting
00:03:42.280to talk a bit differently. And James with every pandemic there are catalysts there are things
00:03:47.040that basically speed it up and what would you identify as a catalyst? Is COVID a catalyst or
00:03:53.320have there been other factors involved as well? I mean yeah COVID is probably actually a catalyst
00:03:58.480for a number of reasons one of which is that it drove us all indoors and we stopped socializing
00:04:04.360normally and we got kind of pent up and frustrated the fear the uncertainty around economics that
00:04:10.560came with it the lack of normal social interaction the lack of being able to go out and blow off steam
00:04:16.260in the normal ways that people do the shuttling everybody into online communication kind of
00:04:22.420constantly it's like there's a feeling that's not wholly wrong that that this change is like twitter
00:04:28.400having just exploded into the real world and everybody's interacting like they're on twitter
00:04:32.880constantly in some sense. And, um, that makes sense because everybody's been on Twitter constantly
00:04:38.940for months. And I know that's the case because I remember when the lockdown started, people were
00:04:43.560saying, wow, I don't really have anything to do. It's like a break and everybody, you know, I get,
00:04:48.620I have, it's like a good chance to remember how to slow down in life. And I'm like, my,
00:04:52.880my incoming crap went up by like 60% because all of the people who are now too online or who are
00:05:00.240not too online before, became too online and started sending me stuff. So it's like the amount
00:05:05.420of incoming messages and emails I had went up about 60% once the lockdowns began. And I don't
00:05:11.320think that that's a coincidence. People started to act online. There are lots of other, of course,
00:05:16.040catalysts that led to this, but I do think COVID was relevant. Obviously, there are shorter and
00:05:23.320longer term trends within kind of the socio-political sphere. Trump derangement has been
00:05:28.940ramping up for both good reasons and bad reasons. And I think is a huge contributor to this. And I
00:05:35.980do mean that Trump derangement. I think there are extremely legitimate reasons to be very concerned
00:05:40.120about and unhappy about President Trump. But there are also just histrionic, lunatic responses that
00:05:47.640don't match reality whatsoever. And we just mentioned symbolic action, you know, joking
00:05:53.420around. But so much of that, like I went to New York City last summer and we ended up staying
00:05:59.960near Trump Tower in Manhattan. And so I just walked up there just to go out for a walk one day.
00:06:06.940And I told my family, you know, I walked by Trump Tower and I saw Trump Tower and I took a picture
00:06:11.840looking up how tall it is or whatever. And my family was like, why didn't you take a picture
00:06:16.940of your middle finger pointed at it? And I was like, why would I do that? Like, what does that
00:06:20.780accomplish in the world does that like end his presidency that i flipped off a building
00:06:24.100it's like it doesn't make any sense so there was a lot of stuff going on with that and that's part
00:06:28.520of a longer current if you look at the anger on the left in america um with feeling like the
00:06:34.540republicans have been stealing our politics where of course the republicans on the other hand say
00:06:39.260they were defending our politics from the radical left stealing our politics so now it's all kind
00:06:45.700of very fraught. But these were all kind of antecedents and catalysts as well. But I mean,
00:06:50.580the obvious proximate cause was that there was a cause celebrae that came up with George Floyd's
00:06:56.420death at the hands of a police officer, which was pretty clearly like way out of the normal
00:07:01.500acceptable range of behavior that everybody said, this is, you know, proof that something's wrong,
00:07:08.780which very rapidly mutated into this is proof that our entire system is bogus feeding into a
00:07:14.420narrative that's been being laid very effectively for i don't know seven or eight years now uh if
00:07:20.380not longer and i remember you saying james that these clips act as i can remember you using them
00:07:27.400almost like religious icons was i think the way that you put the miracle stories yeah miracle
00:07:31.620stories so would you just touch on that because i think it's very very important how this miracle
00:07:37.380story then became an example of how racism is effect is infected all our political structures
00:07:45.280and our institutions yeah when you have a um kind of nascent faith coming into into the picture
00:07:52.520even one that's well established uh when you have a set of beliefs in particular that are
00:07:58.860i don't want to say just blatantly untrue it's more that they're really vague and so they're
00:08:06.780they're true and untrue at the same time by virtue of not really saying
00:08:11.000anything specific enough. Like our society is systemically racist.
00:08:14.780What does that mean? Well, it means that outcomes are different.
00:08:17.180Well, that doesn't really tell you anything. We already knew that, you know,
00:08:19.680it's very vague. Or if you talk about, you know, God's love is everywhere.
00:08:23.340Well, what does that mean? I mean, it's a God's love,
00:08:24.860God loves us and it's everywhere. You know, it doesn't tell you anything.
00:08:27.440So a lot of times the way that, that, that profession of faith or the, the,
00:08:31.740the belief is reinforced is by people seeking out confirmatory narratives or events that are like
00:08:42.420miracles. So you see, you know, these funny stories where, you know, Jesus appearing on a
00:08:46.400piece of toast, or you see these things where they see the, you know, the sun glare off of a
00:08:51.580particular glass window looking like the Virgin Mary. And so obviously this is now a holy spot
00:08:58.260and there's a miracle and somebody is like dripping water and saying, that's your tears
00:09:01.160or something and they cook up these ideas and in the ancient world you could really see you know
00:09:05.420oh this amazing thing happened and then they go tell people and there's no verification whatsoever
00:09:09.620and so just the story can get bigger and bigger and this becomes like yeah the faith is true
00:09:14.700because this thing happened and in our current era we get that primarily through mediated clips
00:09:21.060we get a clip of something that happened in the case of the critical race narrative it has mostly
00:09:27.000been clips of people acting in racist ways that are usually somewhat egregious, or clips of police
00:09:33.440officers interacting with typically unarmed black people that end up in a fatality of the black,
00:09:41.680I don't know what the right word is, I don't want to say, you know, perp or suspect or whatever,
00:09:46.420but the person that they're interacting with anyway, that's on the other end of the law.
00:09:50.380and the context of those the full context of those clips doesn't matter what matters
00:09:59.200is the way that they fit within that broader narrative so on when i went on joe rogan's
00:10:07.100podcast recently i brought up michael brown and i i said you know it looks as though um this
00:10:13.520was this horrendous killing if you just watch the video the police officers way out of line
00:10:19.000And 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.
00:10:28.120And it turned out not to be based on reality whatsoever.
00:10:32.140But that never got acknowledged, James, actually.
00:10:34.980I remember at the time trying to say to people, like, what you're told about what happened isn't what happened.
00:10:41.600And that's been verified scientifically.
00:10:45.400It's been confirmed by black and white witnesses.
00:10:48.140It'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.
00:11:01.780I 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.
00:11:17.940If 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.
00:11:26.520To pick apart one strand of a myth is to tear the entire myth apart and to render it not true or not believable.
00:11:34.280So you can't look at scientific validation.
00:11:38.180You can't look at any of these kinds of things.
00:11:39.980the more important thing is this event fits within the context of the myth and gives the myth
00:11:46.900legs and because that narrative is so powerful people run with it and it almost can't be
00:11:54.160unseated if you were to then go back and say yeah well you have a point you know the michael brown
00:11:59.240incident uh and on joe's podcast i didn't know and joe kind of pushed back on me he's like actually
00:12:04.340i don't know the details and i come home and i get like 5 000 emails telling me like here's
00:12:08.320Ta-Nehisi Coates saying you know like okay that's good enough for me um I'll take that if you know
00:12:14.400he said it and so it's like you can't though look at that and say well we have to now revise the
00:12:20.500entire basis for our movement you instead have to find a way to reconcile that cognitive dissonance
00:12:26.540either by downplaying it ignoring it or recasting it in some other more vague sense that still
00:12:33.160confirms the narrative because the point of a myth is of mythological structure is that it can't be
00:12:39.660torn apart it can't be taken apart and so when you think of these kinds of mediating events like
00:12:44.000or mediated stories about events i should say pushing these narratives um you have to think
00:12:50.880of that in terms of mythology you have to think of that in terms of the the the video the clip the
00:12:57.960the the you know snippet of story the picture or whatever you have to think about that in terms of
00:13:04.320how it fits within the story that's trying to be told and that people have taken on and nothing
00:13:09.140else is going to be allowed to matter because that's that and that's also how you know that
00:13:13.020when there's this outright rejection of any possible criticism of the foundations of the
00:13:17.900story that you're dealing with something that's gone spiritual and it's all mythological at that
00:13:21.900point well james let's you talk about the mythology and that's something i'd really like to dig into
00:13:27.420But 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.
00:13:38.560Just very briefly, it may be in a sentence to remind people where you are politically, just so that people don't know you.
00:13:45.060It'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.
00:13:56.940I saw somebody saying welcome James I appreciate the love bomb no so the funny thing is though
00:14:05.240it's like I even got an email the other day from some fool saying that it's like I didn't really
00:14:10.420get my degrees from the colleges that I claim I got them from conservative bible college or
00:14:15.120something like that and it's like what in the world is going on um no uh I actually fall pretty
00:14:22.800far i mean my ideal i fall pretty far to the left so my ideal kind of government setup if i had
00:14:28.640my way about it which i probably wouldn't because i don't like telling people what to do
00:14:32.960um would be very close to norway which is you know not exactly known as a uh libertarian right
00:14:42.180wing alt-right neo-nazi bastion of the world it's you know i would i still think honestly if we want
00:14:49.020to get to a specific kind of thing, I still think that the proper highest income tax bracket should
00:14:55.660be probably just around and maybe a little bit above 50%. So it's not like I'm one of these
00:15:00.820kind of contractionist, small government, you know, drown it in the bathtub people. I'm certainly
00:15:06.580not conservative. I'm not socially conservative in any regard. Like people can do whatever they
00:15:10.800want. Like, you know, want to have sex with a banana being well wielded by a clown and that
00:15:16.740makes you happy good for you who am i to judge i don't care it's quite a specific fantasy you've
00:15:20.980got there mate well it's one i use as an example i read something from dan savage about cakes and
00:15:26.260so it's like you know if i gotta think of something weird i just literally don't care
00:15:30.160but but before we interrupt it's lovely to see that you accept me mate
00:15:33.900see that's what i was really about he does get called a banana quite regularly but
00:15:39.200i just wanted for people to know that because i i felt like the way we started the conversation
00:15:43.860All right. So, yeah, let's make it really European social Democrat, I think, is what.
00:15:48.380Yeah, that's probably right. Most of the people in my life who are on the right call me a communist, which is strictly false.
00:15:54.180Also, 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,
00:16:09.380because of the nature of what an advanced democracy is. You do have to have a very strong
00:16:13.860and stable social safety net. You do have to have strong social insurance programs.
00:16:18.340You do have to, in the sense, let's just lay them out. I'm very Keynesian in the sense that I think
00:16:24.600that that which the public sector can do most efficiently and most affordably, the public
00:16:28.540sector should do. And the private sector should be able to do what it does most efficiently and
00:16:33.360affordably. And the point of economic policy discussion is to determine what the boundaries
00:16:37.380on those things are and to uh you know figure out which thing goes in which box and how to how to
00:16:43.000deal with it um so yeah most of my positions are pretty pretty staunchly in the left they're just
00:16:49.580not in the they're just not leftist right which is a different thing so so let let's now turn now
00:16:54.980that we've got that out of the way i felt it was important for people to know that about you
00:16:58.660let's turn to the mythology that you're talking about because this is i think really important
00:17:02.960i'm going to take a little bit of time to set it out because i think it's important so
00:17:06.180the mythology that you were talking about and and do correct me when you get the chance to
00:17:11.960to do that if you need to is the following society is structurally unjust against minorities and
00:17:21.040women and other oppressed groups and what that means is that uh different people are treated
00:17:27.140differently in the same circumstances so a black homeless man is gets treated worse than a white
00:17:33.460homeless man. A woman who is a CEO is treated less well or paid less than a man who is a CEO,
00:17:42.180et cetera, et cetera. And as a result of that, we have a society that is structurally unfair.
00:17:47.620And what we need is a movement which is called social justice, the point of which is to address
00:17:54.840some of these hidden instances of discrimination and indeed the fact that all of us are prone to
00:18:01.340discrimination particularly those of us who are from the traditionally speaking privileged groups
00:18:07.100those of us that are men those of us that are white those of us that are straight those of us
00:18:11.460that are not trans etc that's the mythology and it's the notion of this myth is that we must all
00:18:19.000look to address the the the biases within us to make society better and fairer for people who
00:18:26.680are historically disadvantaged, to eliminate discrimination, to make sure that people are
00:18:31.360no longer oppressed, and to make sure that power is equally distributed between the different
00:18:36.560groups, right? Now, most people listening to that actually, I suspect, would go, well,
00:18:41.160there's an element of truth to that. I mean, we've all got prejudices. We're all probably a
00:18:45.400little bit racist. We might have inherited sexist stereotypes from our parents and grandparents.
00:18:50.520um society is a little bit unfair if you you know police probably are sometimes treating black
00:18:58.160suspects harsher than white suspects women have had it uh bad of a history uh you know slavery
00:19:04.960was definitely an evil and that surely would have left some sort of legacy uh so if you're just an
00:19:10.100ordinary person who's listening to this um and going i see this guy on twitter james lindsey
00:19:15.780trying to take all this stuff apart like what you know if i'm an ordinary person why should i
00:19:22.240be why should i have a problem with quote-unquote social justice okay so you did a good job outlying
00:19:29.960or laying out not outlying i don't know what i'm talking about outlying counties or something no
00:19:33.720you did a good job laying out the um very friendly although still not without issue
00:19:42.420understanding of the mythology. You, in fact, did a very good job of the social justice aspect.
00:19:48.100I would tell you that the actual movement that we call maybe woke or whatever is a combination of
00:19:55.420three schools of thought. And one of them is social justice, which is this kind of egalitarian
00:20:01.200thing. So the mythology you laid out has a little bit of the critical aspect, but it's mostly what
00:20:07.280you laid out was one that's egalitarian and tipping occasionally into a radical egalitarianism
00:20:13.400so that's one aspect but wokeness is actually the intentional combination of critical theory
00:20:21.920which has its own mythology post-modern theory which has its own mythology and uh doing those
00:20:29.580for the purpose of uh creating social justice which has its own mythology and the the you have
00:20:37.080to understand that when you just laid out like the egalitarian picture that even tips into the
00:20:43.540radical egalitarian picture here and there meaning that yeah we really do need to kind of you know
00:20:48.720flip the script so egalitarianism would be obviously that everybody's view gets taken
00:20:53.440seriously radical egalitarianism would be that we're going to make up for past injustices or
00:20:59.040even current injustices by forwarding people extra to that have been historically or are
00:21:04.580currently discriminated we're going to take those people more seriously than we otherwise would and
00:21:09.260so you that's kind of the social justice mythology when you said that you know oh so there's you know
00:21:14.220if you're straight you're white you're male what you're talking about in general these kind of
00:21:17.200what are classified under the critical theory school of thought as oppressor classes versus
00:21:24.300oppressed classes which would be racial minorities sexual minorities gender minorities and we can go
00:21:28.960as Judith Butler, one of their chief theorists put it, that exasperated, et cetera, of identity
00:21:35.300categories. So the critical theory school, we have to add that in. And the critical theory school
00:21:40.540has the mythology that the world is separated. This comes actually from Marx. So the world is
00:21:46.340separated into stratified groups. That's what you were describing. And these groups, this is the key
00:21:53.300observation are actually in zero-sum conflict for the access to resources and opportunities
00:22:00.120in society. There is no everybody's ships rise together in the critical theory view. There is
00:22:06.140instead the view that there is a relatively permanent underclass that is seeking liberation
00:22:11.900from its oppressors, who are the elite status groups. As history wound on, the elite status
00:22:19.440groups became identity groups rather than you know the actual societal right so we go from
00:22:24.820Marx which is workers of the world unite overthrow the bourgeoisie right and become the owners of
00:22:33.900the means of production of capital of whatever it is of power in other words you take the power
00:22:39.460that has been taken from you historically and you are now owners of it because you've united
00:22:45.020as a group of oppressed people to fight off and defeat the oppressors right and so the the view
00:22:50.920there is that um where marx was worried about the means of economic and material production
00:22:57.580the critical theorists became more interested in the means of uh social cultural um information
00:23:05.580production so they became very interested in things like education faith media pop culture
00:23:11.780elements of middle culture and saying that those things were creating an ideology to hold down
00:23:17.680the proletariat to keep them in their place. And then that later in the 1960s, in particular 50s
00:23:24.640and 60s, fragmented into being very specific about identity politics. As I say, the civil rights
00:23:30.000movement in the United States started to reach a peak, the identity politics aspect became very
00:23:33.820prominent. It was kind of present earlier than that. It became very prominent in the 1960s.
00:23:38.940And 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?
00:24:00.560There'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.
00:24:11.380So part of the critical mythology is that everybody doesn't know how to act in their best interests.
00:24:18.060And 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.
00:24:25.200So 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.
00:24:40.240And if you really cut down to the original critical theorists, what liberation from oppression means is liberation from anything that's not communism.
00:24:49.540So 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.
00:25:09.780So 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.
00:25:21.360It needs to be awakened to how terrible their lives are.
00:25:25.080So 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.
00:25:46.240And postmodernists were technically not the same kind of thing as the critical theorists.
00:25:51.020If we get really formal, the critical theorists were called neo-Marxists.
00:25:55.100They were looking at Marxism in a new way.
00:25:57.060They were very critical of old original Marxism, so they became something different.
00:26:00.540But they were ultimately still Marxist at heart in terms of much of how they thought.
00:26:04.680The postmodernists are classified as post-Marxists.
00:26:07.840They 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.
00:26:18.360They 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.
00:26:28.320So, a lot of nihilism came out of that.
00:26:29.940And 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.
00:26:45.160So 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.
00:27:01.920And 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.
00:27:22.140Literally, that we don't live in a world where we have access to objective or close to objectively understanding the world.
00:27:31.380We 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.
00:27:55.640So 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.
00:28:18.920So 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.
00:28:39.580So 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.
00:28:54.480We don't have to get deep into Jacques Derrida.
00:28:56.160But his general point was that meaning cannot actually be conveyed properly in language.
00:29:03.400Words, 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.
00:29:18.340They only refer to the words that they are related to either in direct fashion.
00:29:25.180So if I say something like, you know, maple, because the trees outside my window are maples.
00:29:30.920If 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.
00:29:38.800But then also in terms of how words are related by not being a thing.
00:29:43.100So 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.
00:30:00.160Those 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.
00:30:14.280And these two ideas combined to a new aspect of mythology that our friend Mike Naina refers to as a metaphysics of discourse.
00:30:24.720So 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.
00:30:33.300And that's actually a political process. And so the outgrowth of postmodern mythology is that literally everything is politics.
00:30:41.220And 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.
00:30:48.980And 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.
00:30:57.820Um, 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.
00:31:25.380So 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.
00:31:42.160or if we learn to take the right discourses up, literal agents of liberation. And so who we happen
00:31:49.200to be politically, not in terms of say your skin color, being black isn't enough. You have to be
00:31:54.820politically black. Being gay is not enough. You have to be politically queer. When you take up
00:31:59.360the right politics, your identity itself, which is where your lived experiences becomes the
00:32:05.780the epistemological forward claim and so that's a long ride away from that nicer but still a little
00:32:12.660bit like there's some questions in that you know mythology of social justice that you laid out
00:32:17.440all right so just to put that all into simple language what you're really saying is we have
00:32:23.340been told or some people have been convinced that we are in a battle between groups of people
00:32:31.180one of which is good and one of which is bad right and we have no there is no truth there
00:32:41.680is only a battle over words and if you whoever wins that battle is the one that that gets to
00:32:48.020determine what the truth is and the argument is that the powerful bad groups have been determining
00:32:52.960what the truth is by abusing language therefore what must now happen is we must agree that there
00:32:58.260is no truth other than what i feel and if i feel that you are oppressing me by staring directly
00:33:05.860into the camera and i am from a minority group and you're a straight white man that means you
00:33:12.640are oppressing me right that's exactly right the in that last part so important that the hierarchy
00:33:18.980of identity which is really rooted in what's called ethno-historicism so identity combined
00:33:25.180with how that identity has been treated both presently but more importantly historically
00:33:29.240determines the valence of what directions oppression can operate in so dominant groups
00:33:35.620i could never if i'm you know labeled as a member of a dominant group relationally to you i could
00:33:41.340never claim oppression uh because i you can't possibly oppress me because oppression requires
00:33:47.940systemic power right so if 10 people from my group were to chase you down in the street because of
00:33:52.900your skin color and beat you up uh and call you a white whatever that still wouldn't be oppression
00:33:58.860that would be that's right exactly because there's no systemic power so the kind of mythological
00:34:03.720object is systemic power as it has been literally crystallized in the so-called matrix of domination
00:34:09.800laid out you know in the foundational documents of intersectionality in 1990
00:34:14.000um and it's set up so that that can't change because there's always the constant appeals
00:34:21.860to either A, history, or B, that structuralist idea or post-structuralist idea from the postmodern
00:34:30.240school that says that when you create a culture, until you completely overthrow that culture,
00:34:37.840all of its biases and political power and all of those things are baked into the discourses.
00:34:43.000So we could have a system where we're literally under the boots of the most radical,
00:34:47.820um say black lives matter activists that represent maybe one percent of the population
00:34:53.380in terms of their views i mean genuinely radical people who don't represent almost anybody in
00:34:57.460terms of what they think and yet everybody that they genuinely oppress would not be able to
00:35:02.240consider themselves oppressed because they would have an appeal to say well the system we still
00:35:08.720have to operate in was generated by cultural mores that were generated in white western european
00:35:15.420contexts all right francis now i'd like you to please summarize what james has been talking about
00:35:20.040in three sentences go well to me to me it just proves my number one rule of life which is you
00:35:25.800should never trust the french but anyway so uh but what i wanted to ask you james is this so
00:35:32.380what we've done is is we've analyzed the structure the way that it works the thought processes
00:35:37.300i'm very interested in the emotions behind this now we talk about mythology mythology had a purpose
00:35:43.3602000 years ago to explain things that at that time we had no concept of or an understanding of
00:35:50.100why certain things happen why the road why the sun rose why it set all the rest of it
00:35:54.340why do we have this mythology now i think it's actually because whereas the physical sciences
00:36:01.140have matured quite successfully so we understand why the sun rises and why the sun sets um the
00:36:07.520social sciences have not. The social sciences are still quite opaque. The methodologies are
00:36:12.880not worked out. We don't know what rigorous looks like. The rising replication crisis,
00:36:19.760especially in social psychology, has shown that the methods that we believed in were very easy
00:36:26.640to hack and to create lots of successful papers out of thin air, more or less. And so the social
00:36:35.640sciences are in their infancy um that doesn't get to the the emotional side of it but the social
00:36:41.440sciences are in their infancy so they're not actually well developed very mature uh lines
00:36:47.720of reasoning so in a sense the social process is how power actually works in society when we started
00:36:53.340at the beginning talking about how these narratives run away from us that's something that the
00:36:56.920postmodernists would have been very interested in it's very closely related to postmodern theory
00:37:01.260and so in general what we've seen and we can get to the emotions in a second with this what we've
00:37:05.520seen it through history is that there's kind of mythology leading into natural philosophy
00:37:10.560or really philosophy leading into natural philosophy leading into science and so what
00:37:15.800we have is kind of a hardening up from mythology into philosophizing where now reason becomes more
00:37:21.060important that hardens up into let's look at the world to base our reason to let's actually use
00:37:26.540experimentation and falsification and get really hard rigorous methods and it turns out that a
00:37:31.720human beings and human thought are very complex. And then human social behavior is, of course,
00:37:38.420another order of complexity higher than that. So it's very difficult. It's not like tracking
00:37:43.840a baseball shot out of a cannon or something like that, you know, the projectile motion physics
00:37:48.100equation or figuring out, you know, how we're going to even send a rocket to the moon. These
00:37:52.000are very straightforward calculations using relatively hard, but relatively simple underlying
00:37:57.440formulas it's hard math but it's the principles aren't so social sciences are much more complex
00:38:03.940and so we we have this problem where we're we're still quite early on and the so we're moving from
00:38:11.680mythology and if you look at say freud freud was very and even jung you're talking like those are
00:38:18.620considered the forefathers of psychology this is a hundred years ago and they were very mythology
00:38:25.960like that was that was just the very beginning of bringing philosophy into the picture of the
00:38:32.120social sciences and it's just 100 years ago and it's such a complex subject and now you know you
00:38:37.080might say that we're we're in this weird phase where there's some of its philosophy but like
00:38:41.600ethics some of it is natural philosophy where we're very closely looking at the world and some
00:38:47.200of it is you know closer to hard science where people are being very rigorous and there's this
00:38:51.140kind of spectrum of rigor happening and in the process of this first of all a lot of it's not
00:38:56.980working out a lot of it's not giving us the answers when we try to do experiments like the
00:39:01.040great society where we're going to now base our societies on social scientific research but the
00:39:06.160social scientific research is really early on you're going to make some bad mistakes and it
00:39:10.120doesn't work out and people are going to get upset but there's a second process happening besides all
00:39:15.560of this confusion from a national scientific process and we might be still even with the
00:39:19.780advent of ai which will be i think necessary to understand psychology and sociology properly even
00:39:25.840with the advent of that we might still be a hundred or fifty years away from a robust social
00:39:29.700science a properly rigorous one but in addition to this this shift from um you know mythology
00:39:37.560through philosophy to more natural philosophy to actual science this never ever ever ever
00:39:44.040progresses without the people on the weaker end of that epistemologically without them losing their
00:39:49.260shit. The turf wars get insane. So what you actually see is this rise of the prominence
00:39:55.060of the social scientists. And then you have these people who are closer to philosophers
00:39:58.840working in humanities departments, gender studies, for example, ethnic studies, African-American
00:40:04.400studies. These people don't have the slightest idea about doing statistics. They don't have the
00:40:08.280slightest interest in doing statistics. And they become jealous. If you read back CP Snow's The
00:40:14.900two cultures, you can see that there's this great jealousy between the philosophy side of things and
00:40:20.340the science side of things as that transition happens. Because basically, the philosophers who
00:40:25.260held themselves in high esteem and had good elite jobs become pretty much irrelevant. They're just
00:40:29.880people sitting in an armchair making shit up. And the scientists are finding out the real truths of
00:40:34.380the world, and nobody likes that when they're the one getting excluded. And so, there's actually
00:40:39.060been in this kind of this combination of it lacking success in the the application realm
00:40:44.160and then in the sense that it's still so new but we're you have the humanities people losing
00:40:49.580prestige there was a pushback for the humanities and philosophy types to gain prestige and they
00:40:55.940actually went backwards rather than applying rigorous philosophy they started to build a
00:41:00.140more and more mythological structure and i think the reason for that on top of their envy and
00:41:04.860hatred of the sciences that are stealing their their importance and their inability to produce
00:41:10.520reliable results rigorously and be taken seriously on top of that there's the the problem that
00:41:17.180because they've adopted these ideas like conflict theory from marx and these ideas about you know
00:41:22.640these kind of very simplistic ideas about how individuals operate within the context of identity
00:41:26.960categories when you have something that's not true the only thing that you can really do is
00:41:31.900start to lean more and more heavily on the force of story and they decided to lean straight into
00:41:38.240that and started to create a very mythological view if you follow like in our books helen and
00:41:44.580i just wrote it's about to come out cynical theories we actually talk about that in a sense
00:41:49.500which is that um over the years we just focused on post-modernism but over the years since the
00:41:55.8401960s when post-modernism came into the picture what you actually see is something that was very
00:42:00.640complex, first getting packaged up so activists could use it and then becoming very simple and
00:42:06.480concrete so that when you read somebody like Robin DiAngelo, who obviously is a huge rock
00:42:10.840star figure right now in the field, it literally comes off like she's like a 10 year old could
00:42:15.400read it. It's very simple. It's very straightforward. It's very condescending. And that's
00:42:20.120because the oversimplification and kind of dogmatic authoritarianism, the mythological
00:42:28.880backing becomes the thing that makes up for the fact that they don't have rigor so there's this
00:42:34.940rather than them saying oh i'm going to learn statistics and try to do this right
00:42:38.540they just you know went the other way and started to say statistics is part of the evil in the world
00:42:44.240and so we're going to avoid that on principle and and call it a master's tool and you know become
00:42:50.020more story driven etc and so there's this really weird um kind of retrograde development
00:42:58.440And 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.
00:43:12.800So we'll tell a story that fills that in.
00:43:18.100And 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?
00:43:36.900Is 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.?
00:43:57.980Yes. 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.
00:44:16.000For whatever set of reasons, our schools decided to focus, at least in the United States, on self-esteem initiatives rather than accomplishment initiatives.
00:44:23.840And 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.
00:44:38.000So 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.
00:45:02.440and why i say that is because while you have you have this confluence of events where things are
00:45:09.140definitely not perfect and there are definitely observable problems say with regard to race with
00:45:13.980regard to sex with regard to trans issues and so on and so forth are definitely observable problems
00:45:18.960stuff isn't figured out and perfect some of the stuff may never be perfect but at the same time
00:45:23.620the big civil rights battles were actually already fought and those are kind of the big heroes of our
00:45:29.340of our time you know that's two generations removed from from the world today and so the
00:45:36.320big heroes we look back to were the civil rights giants oh you know we made life better for black
00:45:40.900people and that was like the greatest thing possible martin luther king is and i do think
00:45:44.620that of course martin luther king was did insanely good work and some of the most important work in
00:45:49.220the history of the western world but at the same time you get a bunch of people hop young people
00:45:55.060hopped up on this vision that creating civil rights success is the big thing to do and then
00:46:01.000the battles are like well do you like add an extra bathroom for trans people like what do you do
00:46:06.940like it's it's like because the whole trans thing came out and people are like some people are trans
00:46:11.340and everybody was kind of like okay like there was no fight there was no drama it was just they
00:46:16.500had to make fights about bathrooms and sports which genuinely create you know there are genuine
00:46:21.960issues there but for the most part it's like well be trans if you want it's like i remember with one
00:46:28.580of my kids like she went through this whole series of different changes you know we were all atheists
00:46:33.660and so all of a sudden she became christian and she was like i'm a christian now and we're like
00:46:38.460okay you want me to go to the store and buy you a bible and she was like ah you didn't get mad at
00:46:44.180me that proves you don't love me and it's like okay you know you're a 14 year old girl aren't
00:46:49.360you and then it was like then it was like i'm bisexual and we're like yeah we kind of always
00:46:54.840thought that and then she's like ah you didn't try to disown me you don't really love me and it's
00:47:00.300like it's just you know there has been so much successful civil rights progress that when these
00:47:05.800new civil rights issues come up there are like with the trans issue around safe bathrooms and
00:47:11.560around sports and around a handful of other kind of concerns there are specifics that have to be
00:47:16.180figured out and worked out and that are actually genuinely difficult in that case fine
00:47:20.420but in the principle everybody's like yeah okay expand rights oh yeah gay people normal okay
00:47:28.580and so there's there's this burning need in the young people to be civil rights heroes
00:47:36.700there's visible problems of imperfection and then the really like profound and meaningful fights
00:47:44.680are easy so there's no meaning in it you're like we're here for gay rights and everybody's like
00:47:50.080okay have a parade cool like let's set that up you know it's like there's not nobody shows up
00:47:55.640with fire hoses or anything like this and so they're looking for a big fight but no one wants
00:48:00.640to fight them back nobody needs to fight yeah so it's like and that genuinely does create a crisis
00:48:05.480of meaning and then if you couple that with what with what you said francis where um if you couple
00:48:11.740that with the fact that the world genuinely, especially like post 2009 recession and financial
00:48:20.760crisis, and then whatever the universities have been doing to these poor kids, and I don't mean
00:48:25.360mentally, I mean, financially, like they're properly screwed. And so you tie into that
00:48:30.640level of like resentment that the society has cheated them and stolen from them. And so you
00:48:35.620have this kind of very, I have a bunch of friends actually, who are like Bernie people, and they
00:48:39.040don't like the woke at all and they think that the woke is like totally excessive and insane
00:48:44.420but they're like 100 occupy wall street and they're just mad as hell that occupy wall street
00:48:49.080didn't work and the republicans are stealing our future from us and these big business interests
00:48:52.960and the corrupt corrupt politicians are stealing our future from us and there's like a lot of kind
00:48:57.220of truth to that and then now after this is all blown up they don't know what to do because it's
00:49:02.600like they kind of they're like well the woke are busting everything up so we're on their side now
00:49:06.700even though we don't like them. And so there's this weird fight, but they don't know where the
00:49:12.740real fight is. And then there's an issue that's gaining traction. So they latch onto it and get
00:49:17.340all worked up. And it's a very confusing time, I think, to be under 35, not least because the
00:49:22.560schools have literally been mindfucking them pretty much the entire time so that they think
00:49:26.140in weird poisonous ways to find where oppression and bad things are happening and to not trust the
00:49:32.480system or understand how the system works and so on so really like so when you ask the question
00:49:37.260you 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
00:49:44.480hit this catalyst which is covid we have now seen the black lives matter movement we've now seen
00:49:50.900you know writing you know destruction of property and it's very very it's a tricky question to ask
00:49:58.020hold on before you say rioting we learned yesterday that the proper term is in intensified
00:50:04.920peacefulness okay that means rioting and arson yeah courthouse burned down as literally the
00:50:14.320the news report said um a courthouse got burned down and something else was badly damaged and
00:50:21.140police officers were injured when a peaceful demonstration intensified yeah so the peacefulness
00:50:27.960intensified as a result of which property got destroyed and people got injured so we've seen
00:50:32.840a lot of peacefulness francis is what you were saying yeah mate i yeah i i i burnt uh uh the
00:50:39.320dinner last night so i saw some intense for intensified peacefulness at last night's dinner
00:50:44.540but anyway the point is james is where do you think this is going to end up do you think what
00:50:50.560do you think is a natural progression for this that's hard and scary every people keep asking
00:50:56.960me this and it's like it's so non-linear i wish you would just ask me the easy question like what's
00:51:01.360their end goal and it's like i don't think they have one but somebody that's behind them probably
00:51:05.800does so we'll see who tries to scoop up like i'm starting to get the impression that the woke are
00:51:10.660the useful idiots for somebody who's not as not as uh politically lost and internally contradictory
00:51:16.720and they are basically the bulldozers leveling the ground so that some somebody who actually
00:51:22.480wants to build something scary in the world can come in and fill that space. But I don't know for
00:51:29.480sure what will happen now. I think a lot of people have been awakened to wokeness and many of them
00:51:36.140are the liberal type who need to fight back against it with reason and trying to claim
00:51:43.840the mantle of moral and epistemological authority and high ground that comes with that and to fight
00:51:52.440for putting our society back on the track of genuine you know proper progress but at the same
00:52:00.080time there is what people kind of refer to as the sleeping giant and last time we spoke we you asked
00:52:06.780about this and we actually talked about it we talked about whether or not there was going to
00:52:09.220be a rise of genuine racism a rise of genuine sexism and that's the sleeping giant which is
00:52:14.760are majority groups going to be awakened to full bear um zero-sum identity politics and
00:52:24.840i genuinely think at this point that the giant is stirring and has one eye open and that's a
00:52:30.700bad place to be so no reasonable person wants this the woke's game is to claim that there's
00:52:37.640no such thing as a reasonable person and so everybody who is against them does want that
00:52:42.080and that's ridiculous which is why the three of us are all all right and blah blah blah because
00:52:48.500you can't oppose them without being smeared and tarnished so that no reasonable person can oppose
00:52:54.420them because therefore own all reasonable people would agree with them right that's because of the
00:53:00.920mythology which the first tenant of which if it's a critical race mythology says that racism is the
00:53:06.660ordinary state of affairs in our society not aberrational and so that translated into robin
00:53:11.520d'angelo condescending speak is the question is no longer did racism take place but how did racism
00:53:16.340manifest in that situation because the racism is to be assumed so um that's part of the mythology
00:53:21.780that racism is in every possible interaction if you look at just that aspect so if that infects
00:53:29.520the sleeping giant and the sleeping giant wakes up and you start to see these like
00:53:34.440militia groups going crazy or white identity politics rising, I don't see any solution other
00:53:43.460than civil war, which will be a very nasty one, because that's a thing that's very hard to stop
00:53:50.780once it starts happening. It's very hard to get that resentment and anger back under control.
00:53:56.060And the woke have the narrative on their own side that that resistance is to be expected.
00:54:02.220Resistance 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.
00:54:21.600Their 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.
00:54:30.420Their 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.
00:54:37.500And if it's the feds, they'll say Trump is now seizing power.
00:54:40.880He's the dictator that we've been telling you he is for four years.
00:54:43.600And it's this weird thing where there's enough people who believe that narrative.
00:54:47.620And again, this is that relevance of that Trump derangement that I was talking about.
00:54:51.220that when they say it, a huge proportion of left-leaning under 35s are all going to believe
00:54:57.240it. Yep. That's it. Um, my friend, for example, recently got very upset with me on my Bernie,
00:55:02.580one of my Bernie friends. And he said, you know, what do you think's going on? And I told him,
00:55:06.240and he just got really mad at me and then said, you've shot your arrow and painted the target
00:55:09.500around it. And I was like, okay, conversation over. Um, if that's how you're going to think
00:55:15.320about this uh fine but that's kind of what's going on it's like you literally have people who are so
00:55:22.420convinced that trump is a dictator and waiting and i will admit there are concerning signs there
00:55:27.400are concerning possibilities around that claim um and it's clear uh the the so with his the most
00:55:36.200concerning one for me is nothing to do with his policy it's the kind of like a loyalty based
00:55:43.520attempt to fill his government only with people who are loyalists to his cause right so there's
00:55:48.260like these purges happening within different government departments to try to get them on
00:55:53.140side that stuff makes me concerned his policies not so much he's not even really like gone nuts
00:56:00.160too much with the executive orders or any of these kind of things he's not doing anything
00:56:04.280overtly like that but when you start trying to make a purity campaign within your own government
00:56:08.260rather than an ideological diversity campaign, that's a different thing.
00:56:12.620Well, isn't that just a businessman's way of doing things?
00:56:15.880And if you run a business, you don't want people who fundamentally disagree with the mission statement of your business.
00:56:22.380Right. So something being concerning isn't the same as something being proved.
00:56:26.220Right. So there are signs that it's possible.
00:56:29.640I genuinely think it's unlikely that Trump is actually dictatorial in his ambition.
00:56:35.780it's more likely that he's dynastic and Trump wants to try to rig the system so that say his
00:56:41.000kids become president next and you know there's this kind of that wouldn't be all that unusual
00:56:45.900for the United States let's be honest no kidding no kidding do we need another Bush or Clinton to
00:56:51.380come in and save the day right maybe a couple Roosevelt's or something all right James look
00:56:56.020just to wrap up it's an interesting it's a fascinating not just interesting fascinating
00:56:59.700talking to you about this but I want to make for the last five ten minutes of the interview just
00:57:04.140turn this right into the real world which is people are now starting to see we've had it in
00:57:11.320this country people being fired for criticizing the this movement people being ostracized what's
00:57:18.700called cancel culture uh people a lot you know 62 percent of americans now say in the latest cato
00:57:25.300poll that they are scared to express their political opinion publicly 46 percent of people
00:57:31.580in britain but say that they we we have less free speech uh than we did a few years ago versus 20
00:57:38.960that say we have more so the direction of travel is this movement has taken hold of all the
00:57:46.020cultural institutions the education system television news media etc people are feeling it
00:57:52.380and if someone is watching the show and and they've they've sat through 40 minutes of us
00:57:58.800talking about critical race theory and Foucault and they're going okay well I feel all this is
00:58:04.400happening around me what the hell do I do right so unfortunately there's not like oh you know go
00:58:13.460register with this and you're done you know and it's hopefully not so grim as learn Chinese
00:58:18.600but I mean but the the long and short of what you you actually do have to put in some legwork
00:58:26.860if you want to do something. There are two options. Do you want to take it on or do you
00:58:30.860want to do something different? And both of those things are success vectors. If you want to take
00:58:37.480it on, you have to learn some of it. You have to. The stuff that we just talked about, you have to
00:58:42.320become at least basically conversant in it. You have to learn to see the word games, the setups,
00:58:50.820because that's what these are. It's built out of setups. I've said it over and over and over again,
00:58:54.640just as a very quick idea, but this will come into every context in your life with, say,
00:58:59.980critical race theory. It assumes racism is in everything. Therefore, say you run a shop and
00:59:04.820a white person and a black person enter at the same time, you have to pick one customer to help
00:59:08.500first. If you pick the white person, the racism must be present. And so the reason you pick the
00:59:15.500white person is because you think white people are first-class citizens and black people are
00:59:18.620second-class citizens and you're a racist. If you pick the black person first, it's because you
00:59:22.140don't trust black people to be unattended in your store while you help the other customer.
00:59:25.860Then you want to get them out of your store as quickly as possible. And you're racist because
00:59:28.980racism must be present in every situation. So when you start to see that the thing is playing
00:59:33.980a game with you to set you up, to keep you on your heels, to make you feel stupid, to make you feel
00:59:38.100immoral, to make you feel like you're on the wrong side of history, to make you feel like you're not
00:59:41.200part of where the crowd is going. Once you see that, then you can find your own feet. But you
00:59:46.800do have to learn a little bit about how the ideology thinks, how it uses language, what it
00:59:51.200means by its words there's a little bit of legwork put it to put into that i made new discourses to
00:59:56.000provide resources for that you can use it you can use other ones i'm not like i'm the only correct
01:00:01.940voice on this or people speaking up it's good so um you have to learn something and then you have
01:00:08.160to start talking with other people find people who agree with you start to organize and actually
01:00:12.260start showing up if you're going to be an activist you have to show up activists show up that's why
01:00:16.420these people are in so many bureaucracies. They're on so many committees. They're installing
01:00:21.460policies. And that's where it's happening is they're changing the world at the level of
01:00:25.720administrative policy so that people are stuck having to behave or they'll get fired or something
01:00:30.860like that. So you have to show up and push back the other way. Get on the committee. Volunteer
01:00:35.020with your boss to help lead the diversity leadership initiative that everybody has to
01:00:40.700take up now and try to steer it away from this nonsense and toward more productive venues so
01:00:45.400that you can tackle the real problems. On the other hand, if you're like, I can't learn, like
01:00:50.200a lot of my even very smart friends, very academic friends, like, I just can't think like that. I
01:00:57.120can't think wrong stuff. Okay, great. Maybe you should learn a little bit of it just to have
01:01:03.680some background, do what you can, don't stress. What you actually need to do, you do need to
01:01:09.260understand the way that it does shakedowns on people. But other than that, you need to go build
01:01:12.800the thing go build the thing if it's in our schools people need alternatives they need other
01:01:17.920ways to get educated to educate their kids in the united states is going to be a godly number of
01:01:23.300people doing homeschooling those people are going to need resources they're craving the reason
01:01:28.060they're doing the homeschooling is they want not woke resources educational resources so go build
01:01:32.460a thing that offers that if you're going to work you know in law you know leave your current law
01:01:37.540society if it's going woke and go create one that isn't and you know don't put like proudly racist
01:01:42.780since 2020 on the side but you know proudly not woke is actually a thing right now you know you
01:01:48.960know you'd have to find the right wording obviously but totally i know what you mean i said this the
01:01:53.080other day like if you if your small business comes under attack from these woke people now the best
01:01:57.900thing you can do the best thing you can do right now is just double down and go my mars bars are
01:02:04.160for non-woke people, and you're going to get way more money than you would have done otherwise.
01:02:09.060It's absolutely true. So people who are looking at this world do need to understand that giving
01:02:16.980into this will not satisfy the problem. It is an unsatisfiable black hole of a problem.
01:02:24.080Giving in to something that's shaking you down or extorting you is an invitation for them to
01:02:28.620shake you down or extort you again later. And that's really what this is. It's using
01:02:32.680fancy terminology, a claim on the current of history, and agitations about people's moral
01:02:42.040standing rather than, say, physical intimidation to bully them. It's using administrative policies
01:02:47.280to try to get people fired. So yeah, build the thing. Go build the thing. We're going to be a
01:02:52.960company that's not going to be woke. We're going to get harassed, and we're going to endure the
01:02:56.860harassment to give people a place they can work and if you're going to build a company you will
01:03:01.940out compete your competitors because they're going to have to divert an increasing amount
01:03:07.360of resources to wokeness if they let it into their company because it's not satisfiable it just keeps
01:03:12.020coming for another shakedown another as you know it's very mafia logic it's like kicking the
01:03:17.340kicking it up to the to the to the mob boss and so do the thing we need like if we if you say oh
01:03:25.700my gosh everything's fallen there's two ways to look at that that's you know chicken little the
01:03:29.980sky has fallen or whatever and there's this is an opportunity and i'm about to about to blow this
01:03:35.860thing up so just if you don't want to learn this and take it on head-on you don't want to be an
01:03:40.660activist just go do the thing and like you said stand strong double down you this is what so i
01:03:47.000know your last question is coming it was the thing that nobody's talking about i'm gonna steal your
01:03:51.740thunder and just jump right to it go for it take that francis take that i got my banana for you
01:03:59.240right here i thought you'd never ask mate yeah no but no that's the thing is nobody's talking
01:04:05.740about the fact that the liberal perspective the one that we've built our modern world out of
01:04:10.380has the moral high ground it is it is the right way to think about these issues it's not to say
01:04:16.680that it's perfect it's not to say that we can't do better at listening or whatever else but it
01:04:21.200holds the moral high ground it has the also epistemological high ground because it actually
01:04:25.540gives a shit what's true which is a different i mean you read this paper allison bailey 2017
01:04:31.340something about i can't remember the title tracking privilege preserving epistemic pushback
01:04:35.560something shadow texts and philosophy classrooms or some shit like this and in there she literally
01:04:41.680writes that epistemic adequacy is a master's tool epistemic adequacy is academic speak for
01:04:50.680knowing what you're talking about that's all like literally knowing what you're talking about is
01:04:55.440racist sounds pretty racist sounds racist so you have the high ground to say no and nobody's talking
01:05:02.800about that everybody's kind of like how do we make them happy you don't you don't you say no
01:05:08.640i'm actually in the right here i talked to a guy the other day and he's you know we had a
01:05:12.500conversation like two hours on a podcast and he's like at the end he's just kind of sitting there
01:05:16.580and he gets this look on his face he's like i think i've just come to the point where somebody's
01:05:19.600going 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
01:05:27.820that's it like you do so if you want to ask me the question i'll make up another one by the way
01:05:33.240though yeah i'm gonna do it purely out of spite james i knew you would with your smile that hides
01:05:40.420all your spite your mask is slipping yeah i'm nothing if not work so uh what is the one thing
01:05:47.300that we're not talking about that we really should be do you mean like everybody because i could just
01:05:52.240say like that the lays dill pickle potato chips are like next level good nobody talks about that
01:05:57.080i never hear anybody say that at all yeah they're good well okay now two people are saying it and
01:06:03.880then we have a skeptic no um so what i don't hear people talking about that i think people
01:06:16.160do need to talk about is regular stuff like not being political for once regular stuff
01:06:24.340like i know that they're trying to cram it i saw that the opening of the baseball season it's like
01:06:29.880everybody's on their knees and crying in the field or something and they got black lives matter on
01:06:33.880the on the home run fence and all this crap and it's like but nobody's just talking about the
01:06:39.680baseball game nobody's talking about nobody's going to work and just talking about how to do
01:06:44.060the job. What are we not talking about that we should be? Normal stuff, everyday stuff,
01:06:51.060like getting together with your family and not having a political argument and just talking to
01:06:55.640each other as human beings without the politics injected. So I know that some people are doing
01:07:00.580this, but what we really all need to be doing is ratcheting down how much we're obsessing about
01:07:06.000what's on the news, how much we're obsessing about what's on social media, how much we're
01:07:09.520obsessing about the political valence of this, the political valence of that, and remembering that
01:07:14.020we can just be normal people with each other also and that that's really where life is right that's
01:07:21.520the heart that's the beating heart of social life these i might swear fucking woke idiots piss me off
01:07:29.260because they're like we need to have authentic cross-racial relationships by focusing on the
01:07:34.100most divisive possible thing in the relationship constantly and bringing it up and calling each
01:07:38.300other out. That's the least authentic way to have a relationship ever. The most authentic way to have
01:07:44.240a relationship is for me to look you in the eye and say, you're a person that I can relate to.
01:07:48.980You can look me in the eye and say, you're a person. You wouldn't really say that because
01:07:51.600it's weird. But we're people that can relate to each other. And let's just be friends on terms
01:07:57.000that have something to do with our lives. And let's not turn this into like a political argument.
01:08:01.760So the thing that people aren't talking about, but should be, is everything else. Everything
01:08:07.160that's not what they're yelling about on Twitter that day. That's a really good point, James. And
01:08:11.980I've been trying to say this to people for some time now is like, racism doesn't diminish because
01:08:17.220you got admonished on TV by somebody. It diminishes when people meet in the same space and
01:08:24.780connect and find out about each other's background and culture and just connect as people and talk
01:08:31.000about family and movies and play sports together and do stuff together when they actually take a
01:08:37.140moment to not think about race to not think about any of that stuff and just connect as human beings
01:08:43.520um and it's a really important point you make very bad for trigonometry yeah but but a good
01:08:49.600don't listen to what james said basically guys yeah listen everybody watch trigonometry and
01:08:56.520send them money that's that's what you really that's nobody's talking about your patreon right
01:09:01.120right well fortunately some people are fans are helping us find a new studio after we lost
01:09:07.760our previous one not to be due to not being quite woke enough but james listen it's been an absolute
01:09:12.280pleasure uh people should definitely definitely check out cynical theories the the book that
01:09:17.160you've just written with heather uh helen pluckers not i do it all the time my wife's name is heather
01:09:22.420and it's just a nightmare i'm mixing them up in my head all the time well that that there's an
01:09:26.800extra dimension to that that we're not not as people just the names very clear on who's who
01:09:32.020yeah uh so with helen pluck rose who's a former guest of ours as well also people should check
01:09:37.520out new discourses they should follow you on twitter if they do want to to hear more about
01:09:42.220all this crazy race stuff um and uh is there anything else that you you want people to know
01:09:47.380about that you do um no that's pretty much all i do now uh but i did if people are are listening
01:09:53.660and you know whatever i actually got i bought a domain name cynical theories.com so you don't
01:10:00.420have to remember like go look up cynical theory you can go cynical theories.com just redirects
01:10:05.280to the amazon link now so now you can just go buy it no problem i don't think it works in the uk
01:10:09.620though i think it's the us one you can only put one all right okay perfect and before we finish
01:10:14.800i've got a very one last important question what was the name of those potato chips again
01:10:18.260Lay's dill pickle. Lay's is the brand. Dill pickle flavor. They are the perfect amount of
01:10:24.800dill pickle flavor and vinegar and salt. It's like salt and vinegar, but better with the dill.
01:10:29.160It's great stuff. But Francis, you're not getting anywhere near crisp for the rest of your life,
01:10:32.920mate. You're on a diet. Yeah. Get in shape, man. He actually did during the lockdown. This is the
01:10:39.040thing. I used to make fun of him for being fat and now he's not fat. Oh, very good. It's kind
01:10:43.520of disappointing. Disappointing. But anyway, James, thanks so much for coming on the show.
01:10:47.660it's been an absolute pleasure make sure you check out cynical theories and uh the news
01:10:52.760discourses website as well and it's been a pleasure speaking with you uh enjoy the rest
01:10:57.800of your day if you are in the middle of a day enjoy your evening if you're in the evening and
01:11:01.860we'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream absolutely and our
01:11:07.040episodes and live streams go out on tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday
01:11:11.740always at 7 p.m uk time at 7 p.m uk time see you soon guys