The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 14
In a recent long-form essay on New Discourses, James Lindsay explained the origins of totalitarianism in a single word: psychopathy. There, he explained that totalitarianism arises from people who cannot cope with reality as it is, and yet who are content to manipulate others, constructing a “pseudo-reality” in service to a vision of the world that serves their needs. That pseudo-reality holds as its North Star a Utopian vision that aligns with artificial resolutions to their inability to cope with reality as it is, and it thereby attracts others who have similar issues. By constructing a false logic (a paralogic) and a false morality (a paramorality) to define and enforce the pseudo-reality, they can gather supporters in a cult-like fashion. In the end, those ensnared lose the ability to distinguish reality and pseudo-reality almost entirely and become functionally psychopathic, and if they gain enough social, cultural, economic, and political power, they can hold hostage entire societies that are, in effect, on the march to totalitarianism and, eventually, total catastrophic collapse.
The essay is an important read, but it is also a difficult one. In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James seeks to explain the essay in easier language and to flesh out its ideas one by one. He sees this process of unpacking the essay as his next major work, and in this podcast, he begins the process of linking the concept of “ideological pseudo-reality” to more familiar examples, not least Wokeness. Critical Race Theory, for example, is a pseudo-reality that positions racism as the ordinary state of affairs in society, not an immoral aberration from them. Queer Theory is a pseudo-reality in which being normal with regard to sex, gender, and sexuality is a problem while being in some way deviant (which is not the same as being gay or even trans) is elevated as normal. Communism is a pseudo-reality that deems socially engineered command economies as effective and efficient ways to maximize human flourishing. Covid-19 is a pseudo-reality built to enact control around a genuine and serious virus called SARS-CoV-2. These topics and more are presented in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to help people understand and, hopefully, able to see reality for itself again.
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12 comments
Could you say the awakening to the pseudo reality of Christianity is being born again?
To me, someone who grew up in Christianity and spent say 10 years from age 25 to 35 getting out of that pseudo reality, when people become ‘woke’ it is synonymous to being ‘born again’
They are nothing alike. Christ is real. All of this other nonsense is just that. Being born again one awakes to the truth. Being woke actually means being deep asleep and disconnected from reality. There is a huge difference between being woke and awake. The woke ones, if they were any more so, would be in a coma or dead (many are spiritually dead).
“Getting out” of Christianity is easy, just deny that Christ exists, so I don’t know why it took you 10 years. If you felt you had to get out, then I wager you were blanketed in a twisted version of Christianity. Christ is love and belief secures you. Sure a lot of churches use the Bible to manipulate and control, but Christ wasn’t religious. He was who he said he was.
There’s one way to find out. Straight up ask God to show you. If you’re sincere, he will. What do you have to lose? Be well, friend.
It’s a good question I’ve pondered myself. In my view the answer is a bit more nuanced than you put it.
I started out a Christian and became an atheist around 16 and going forward. Then a few years ago I made peace with Christianity again and have been listening a lot to Christian youtubers, and also watched Jordan B. Peterson’s Biblical series. I do consider myself an atheist, but I’m more humble than I used to be.
First off, in my view there are aspects of Christianity that – if taken literally – are pseudo-real. Such as claims that the Sun revolves around the Earth, or that it’s only 6000 years old. Or that humans were created – as opposed to being the result of evolutionary forces. Science can deal with that and creationism/intelligent design need not be taught in schools – that’s on par with teaching Critical Queer Theory in the schools: don’t do it!
In short, they do get some conclusions wrong, and being a religion has trouble updating their conclusions about reality in the face of new information.
Which leads me to the second part. Christianity in my opinion does get a lot of psychological conclusions right – cf. Peterson. I mean, they did observe humans for a very long time, and intently so, and being smart people actually figured out some pretty important stuff. There is so much that goes without saying that atheists simply follow it, so a lot of what atheists believe in does come from Christianity despite their protestations.
For example: the parable of Cain and Abel holds water to this day, and it’s applicable in a variety of situations. It truly is one of those thick, archetypal stories that lay out a sort of natural law of human interaction. To give an odd example the story of Cain and Abel can teach a young man a LOT about dating women – and avoiding resentment in the process.
The parable of the sower is also fantastic and useful. I’ve heard it used in sales even. Powerful archetypal stuff!
Another less obvious feature of Christianity is that in practical terms, when combined with Aristotle and the Enlightenment, it does in fact appear that they largely got the metaphysics right. It may seem subtle, but the fact that God IS – as opposed to Becoming – has huge ramifications for whatever thoughts, ideas and conclusions that are formed down the road.
Wokeism – including everything preceding it going back to Hegel – has the wrong, alchemical and Hegelian metaphysics. And it obviously doesn’t work, because they ruin everything whenever they implement their conclusions as formulated on the basis of their belief in the nature of dialectical reality.
I’d say in fact that this year of 2022 has warmed me a lot to the idea of avoiding heresy as the plague. Not the least because Wokeism is a heresy.
When nothing the Woke do ever leads to any good, but in fact its opposite, doesn’t it imply that the Woke do not walk with God?
To me, a sort of levelled up atheist(?), I think that those who act in accordance with reality are those who are able to make a long, sustained push towards desirable outcomes. While those not acting in accordance with reality will – in a way – reap the wages of sin. Sin, here, is error, specifically to err on the side of warped reality.
If you do alchemy or some other sort of magic you can indeed weave your spells and sometimes make out like a bandit. But all magic comes at a cost. And sometimes the spells can be broken, upon which your entire magic castle comes crumbling down. Saddam, Ghadaffi, the lot of them … with few exceptions they’ve had violent deaths and only provided temporary stability.
For example Venezuela. They went full Socialist, Marx t-shirt and all, and at the beginning it looked like it was successful … then it was as if it rotted away from the inside, poverty, starvation, ate all the pets and animals in the zoo to get by, couldn’t get anough gas despite having some of the largest deposits in the world.
It’s the opposite when someone has the basic facts – such as the metaphysics and epistemoloy – right. They can get off to a rocky start, because all beginnings are difficult, but things tend to improve over time and get really good.
For example: The US Constitution claims that all people are born with equal worth, not that they’re the same or identical, or has the same size bank account, but that they have an intrinsic worth as human beings that needs to be respected on a moral level.
Yet were all slaves immediately released? No, not at first. But ALL Christians nations were among the first to abolish slavery nonetheless, and largely in a peaceful way (I’m not ignorant of the American Civil War, but it seems to be the exception).
I know that it’s a fundamentally Christian claim or sorts, but look at what different groups of believers do and ask yourself if they’re walking with God or not? You know … know the tree from its fruits!
I think we can easily see that the heretics suffer much more on this mortal coil than do those who are aligned more closely with reality. Reality (God?) IS and you can align yourself with it.
The current Woke heresy says that reality is what most people imagine it to be, and that if enough people just believe in something for long enough … it will transform reality to conform with the idealistic world of thought. It will make the divine/God conscious of himself as the final, perfected idea – or managed State – arises. (Again subtle: Christians recognize Paradise when spoken of, but they also know that only God can create Paradise, so as a result Christians don’t foul up everything here on Earth.)
So it’s a bit of both. Some in my estimation can’t be right, but largely Christianity has done a banging job of getting base reality defined correctly, and it’s visible because Christianity-based nations perform the best on the planet.
Of course lots of Christians take the theology too literally, but Christianity has a long tradition of looking beyond that and taking things symbolically. Like Cain and Abel’s parable. There need not be an actual Cain or Abel, because you can just open your eyes and cast the Chads and Incels into the respective roles.
I think what confuses is that *structurally* a correct theology looks a lot like the fake theology. It’s because they have many of the same features, just populated by different facts, logic and morality. (I think this connects to Lyotard.)
So it’s not so much the fundamentalism that’s the issue, it’s rather what those fundamentals are.
And here my claim is that beliefs that correspond with reality are king. And you’ll see such ideas turn into great, stable “kingdoms” where those who are the most real and corresponding also produce the best outcomes.
Basically I think that for all its faults Christianity isn’t pushing some weird pseudo-reality that is bound to send us all to hell in a handbasket. Wokeism: well we’ve just been through 10 years of them gaining critical mass … and now our seven year olds need to attend Drag shows and stuff dollar bills into the thong of a man dressed as a highly sexual woman.
Which means I’m willing to bet who has the best grip on reality.
Atheists, just to round that off, doesn’t impress me like they used to. They do not sufficiently know the religion they so zealously fight, and most of the time they’re deeply biased by being predominantly Left-leaning in their policies.
I quit that crowd to go my own way when ten years ago they kept beating up Christians just because they historically burned a bunch of witches (I’ll grant you that was a pseudo-reality), yet atheists would call me a RACIST for criticizing islam for doing worse things in the present (slavery, their view of women, supporting apartheid in their trifecta of Muslims, dhimmis and, well, dead or enslaved people … and calling themselves the religion of peace, only we have to go through this “dictatorship of the proletariat/Imams”, including terror, for Islam to become victorious and usher in the Utopia of a planet enveloped in Sharia where ultimate peace will reign forever and ever in the perfected State).
I agree with 90% of what you say here. But there are issues you do not deal with , which I suspect stems from the declaration that you are a liberal and an atheist. Much of the discourse here deals with the woke agenda of the left of all stripes and it’s creation of a false reality and I think for any thinking person that’s self evident. There are two fundamental issues here.
The first is that equality is a myth. Equality exists only in the abstract. Human society is hierarchical It’s basic building block is the family and by extension the extended family, community , nation. And we are not defined by what we are . We are defined by the other. I n a homogenous society those definitions are by status and class , by merit and ability. An open egalitarian society in practical terms is simply not realistic.
I do not subscribe to any political ideology. Because at some point inevitably it will collide with reality. And the ideologue will conclude that reality is at fault not his ideology with obvious consequences! The obvious example being Soviet Russia. To be successful in that it benefits the ordinary people a social order/ Gov’t needs to be pragmatic . ‘What works’ being the guiding principle and unafraid to change policy when it doesn’t work! Policies based on empirical fact and not bound by the dictates of some theoretical political framework. We are seeing this here in the UK with Johnson’s ‘ Levelling Up’ agenda which is really ‘Levelling Down’
The second issue is morality and inevitably that is linked with religion and the concept of ‘absolute values’ . Jordan Peterson said in one of his lectures that ” Nietztsche took a hammer to christianity” This is a superficial reading of what Nietzsche had to say. The much quoted “Good is dead” from the parable of the madman in the market place neglects the following statement “We killed him and what are we to do now? ” . Dostoevsky’s statement “Without God everything is permitted” expresses the same idea. Any framework of imperatives cannot stand alone. It requires some authority to underpin it . And without that authority it has no force . This is especially true of absolute values, absolute morality. Moreover the authority from which absolute values derive must of itself be absolute and transcendent. For the religious this is clearly ‘God’ .
What Nietzsche saw was that with the elevation of materialism and reason during the enlightenment there would be a turning away from religion and a subsequent erosion and eventual loss of a moral compass. He also realizes that reason will eventually be turned upon itself. And so he attempts to define a new morality as expressed in his concept of the ‘Ubermensch’ ( Overman, not Superman) . There’s a clear thread through Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil culminating in Also Sprach Zarathustra.
This last is obscure and difficult to read because Nietzsche knows reason alone is inadequate to construct this new morality and so he lapses into parables and poetic and at times seemingly mystical language. His condemnation of ‘Master /Slave ‘ morality within religion is an expression of his elitism and his attempt to construct a new morality in accordance with his concept of the ‘will to power’.
These ideas then come to fruition in the post modern world. The loss of absolute values leads to moral relativism and the realization of Crowley’s dictum “”Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. In a
materialistic world the drive towards egalitarianism leads to attempts to create a utopian society, heaven on earth. And in Foucault , Derrida and then Marcuse we see reason turned upon itself, albeit with ulterior and self serving motives .
I have read Abuse of language , abuse of Power and Josef Pieper’s examination on communication is well worth reading. As for Banality of evil by Hannah Arendt I would simply reiterate what another commenter here has said “Ask yourself are you reading the work of a classical liberal or a critical theorist ?
So who constructed the Woke pseudo-reality? Who is going to be he leader of the Woke Party? Seems like those should be the primary target of any and all push-back against this dangerous cult. Who is this cultural revolution’s Chairman Mao? Where is its little red book?
They haven’t found their dear leader yet. Best they are stopped before they do.
It’s what New Discourses is all about laying out 😉 I do the Lord of the Rings edition:
It started with Hegel, who was the first magician. His pupil Marx then dethroned his master and his spell gave us Communism. The other branch, the old Hegelians, bloomed into Fascism and National Socialism (Nazis), then largely died out.
But Marx’s spell survived!
Then there was a lull as the pseudo-realities of time bygone collapsed, and then came the Grand Wizard of the 20th century: Herbert Marcuse. He’s why James always says that we’re living inside his Repressive Tolerance. His magic still covers the land.
Muddle in some post modernism at this stage. It’s tranformed Marxism with not the dialectic but “deconstruction” as the method. It’s a slightly different school of magic, but magic nonetheless.
Then in the 1980’s another wizard was brought out of his tower and became the Messiah of the movement, and Henry Giroux became Grand Wizard Paulo Frieri’s disciple, placed hundreds of followers in key positions in academia, thus transforming our schools into Hogwarts.
Then arose the generalized Intersectionality with the sorceress Kimberlé Crenshaw, and she is the current Eye of Sauron that sweeps across all of known creation in order to find and cancel people who threaten to dispel her magic.
That’s where we are today. Some of what you ask for is yet to materialize.
Pair this with C.J. Hopkin’s “The Covidian Cult” for a better understanding of what we saw unfold in 2020 and what we continue to see unfold into 2021.
https://consentfactory.org/2020/10/13/the-covidian-cult/
Psychopaths are good at controlling their emotions, most woke followers aren’t. I’ve heard it said that psychopaths are born, sociopaths are made. I’m no expert on the topic, except I believe that while the leaders of the movement may be psychopathic, most followers of the Woke religion may be more sociopathic. They often have difficulty regulating their emotions and lack impulse control. This seems to be in contrast to the cold, calculating psychopaths orchestrating the movement in a slow, methodical fashion.
Miguel-
You may be interested in reading what Adorno himself wrote on fascism, authoritarian personalities, and psychology. The writing of members of the Frankfurt school are readily available to anyone who wants to read them. Here is a link to Adorno some of his ideas: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4421-the-authoritarian-personality. By the way, Adorno developed the “F scale”. That is a personality test.
You may be surprised by what you read. Some of the ideas (re: fascism and psychology) sound like some of the notions James presents. To be clear, I only said “some”.
By the way, fascists traditionally have authoritarian or totalitarian governments. It’s interesting to read Adorno condemn the very thing today’s critical theory supports.
Also, suggest reading the original works of other CT members. Eric Fromm is widely published. He, of course, subscribed to psychoanalytic theory. His writing on the “alienated person” are relevant today. Ask yourself, who do you see there? A critical theorists or classic liberal?
Finally, also suggest you read Hannah Arendt on the topic of evil. She discussed how it becomes normalized and people don’t question it. Her explanation is concise and compelling. Arendt spent much of her career studying the Nazis; and she wrote a book, The Banality of Evil, about Eichmann.
I’ve been reading these all day today! Thank you for the suggestions.
This is spot on. The part about shepherding people into revolution gave me chills. I was watching the Jordan Peterson / Slavoj Zizek debate and Zizek said the white liberal left “denigrates own culture and blames white eurocentrism (racism/capitalism in our case) for our evils. Self denigration brings a profit of its own: renouncing their roots, multicultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal position, graciously soliciting others to assert their particular identity.”
The white liberals are (mentally) stepping out of society and are racially engineering a pseudo reality fundamentally based on race. What do you think the “woke” are really awake to this fourth time around? You mentioned it was wokeness, so political correctness but I wonder what comes next. Quick note: the worst disconnect of paramorality and morality I could think of was during the holocaust: ratting on families who helped Jews vs hiding them from the government. Thanks for the great content!