OnlySubs Episode 23: How Wokeness Makes Conversations Impossible is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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Surely you’ll have noticed that it’s not just difficult but legitimately impossible to have a productive conversation with someone once they get into Woke ideological territory. You’re not misperceiving the situation, and it’s not you who is the problem. It is nearly impossible to talk productively about Woke topics with the Woke. There are a number of reasons for this, and among them is a little-known truth about the psychology of conversation. If you’ve ever heard a Woke person saying that disagreeing with them causes “harm,” “trauma,” or “literally erases their identity,” you’ll know what I’m getting at.
When I was doing the research to write How to Have Impossible Conversations with Peter Boghossian back in 2018, I was lucky enough to read a wonderful book that was produced from within the Harvard Negotiations Project, a book called Difficult Conversations (Stone, Patton, and Heen, 2010). In that book, we learn that conversations take place on (at least) three psychological levels at once while we tend to believe they’re completely logical and operating just on the most superficial of those levels, which is the factual level. In reality, there are emotional and, importantly, identity-based levels to our conversations as well, and the deeper into that stack you go, the less likely you are to be able to have productive dialogue. This is where Wokeness is particularly insidious because it places all conversations deeply into the emotional and especially identity levels, guaranteeing that they cannot go productively across disagreement or connect with facts. Join me in this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, to understand more about this psychological reality to conversations, especially with the Woke, and what you might be able to do about it.
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
3 comments
That ANY sane ‘academic’ failed to resist this hateful brain-sewage, never mind fell for it and infected innocent students with it, is shameful beyond comprehension.
However, when James refers to folks moving to the emotional level, e.g. “you always do this to me!”, you *may* tolerate such encroachment from your spouse, but I’ll tolerate none of it from strangers.
The minute the latter tries to treat me, as if they had the “family” right to so argue with me, I demand that this presumption of familiarity be withdrawn, or I exit the interaction.
Whenever anyone, esp. a stranger, tries to shift the original subject matter to a different (more contentious) level, I suspect manipulative intent.
When a stranger does this, I *assume* manipulative intent.
Not bad, esp. at the end, when mentioning family.
I say, that those not eligible to become family aren’t worth the huge “babysitting” effort this identity stuff requires, esp. insofar as this identity stuff usually involves the Wokester’s identity, in the context of his/ her *status* with their (usually Upper-Middle class) peers.
Wokesters build/ keep their status in the Upper-Middle class, mostly by tormenting Deplorables, with whatever means come to hand.
The factual level is quite irrelevant, and the emotional is also a mere means to the status-climbing end.