The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 52
Surely you’ve noticed that the Woke movement doesn’t build anything or accomplish anything productive. There’s a reason for that. The only thing they bring to the table is protest, which is to say destruction. Disrupt, dismantle, deconstruct, subvert, and then “reimagine”; that’s their whole program. This has been summarized here on the New Discourses Podcast under the slogan “Communism doesn’t know how,” but in this episode, James Lindsay walks you through their literature again, showing you that protest is the only method they intend to bring to the table. That protest is rooted in a profound paranoia that pervades all of Critical Theory, and thus the entire Woke movement can be summarized as being one of little more than protest and paranoia. Join James for another in-depth discussion of the Woke literature and what it tells us about the movement we’re all dealing with.
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4 comments
I could not agree more with your previous discourse, describing the academic source of this “movement” as psychopathological.Those people have zero effective means of interacting with wider society,on that society’s terms; therefore the have spent 2/3 generations inculcating their distorted mindset into students via the mechanisms established in previous regime’s.The academic overlords of Critical Social Justice now think they are on the point of achieving a “critical mass” in which their programmed minions can impose this astigmatic Weltschmerz on society, with all the attendant horrors associated with such regimes.Thank you for your dedication to this endeavour.
We need a new movement to free the People from the State: ANTI-LEVIATHANISM! Some prophetic warnings about the State as enemy of the People:
“It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.” Henry L. Mencken, 1926
“[T]he aim of the collectivists… [is] the complete extinction of social power through absorption by the State. [The collectivists’] fundamental doctrine was formulated and invested with a quasi-religious sanction by the idealist philosophers of the [19th] century; and among peoples who have accepted it in terms as well as in fact, it is expressed in formulas almost identical with theirs. Thus, for example, when Hitler says that ‘the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it,’ he is only putting into loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that ‘the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but accidents.’ Or, again, when Mussolini says, ‘Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State,’ he is merely vulgarizing the doctrine of Fichte, that ‘the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent.’
It may be in place to remark here the essential identity of the various extant forms of collectivism. The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only the one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. When Hitler and Mussolini invoke a kind of debased and hoodwinking mysticism to aid their acceleration of this process, the student at once recognizes his old friend, the formula of Hegel, that ‘the State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth’, and he is not hoodwinked. The journalist[*] and the impressionable traveler may make what they will of ‘the new religion of Bolshevism’; the student contents himself with remarking clearly the exact nature of the process which this inculcation is designed to sanction.” Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock, 1935
[*]”There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” attributed to Herbert Spencer
Dr. Lindsay – With respect to your point about Derrick Bell and Brown vs. Board of Education, you might want to check out the work “A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States Volume II (2nd Edition)” which I believe, is still available at Amazon. In the recounting of B vs. BoEd, the argument Bell is probably referring to, has to do with amicus briefs from the State Department with respect to the national security aspect of B vs. BoEd, namely, the postwar spread of communism in Africa and how segregation in the US, put the country at a persuasive disadvantage. Bell isn’t e-x-a-c-t-l-y wrong here. The problem, of course, is that he made it a “white” thing because of his Neo-Marxist leanings. At the time of B vs. BoEd, there was much ink spilled about the national security aspects of segregation in the the press, etc., so “A March of Liberty: . . . ” isn’t the only source. You might could even get a copy of the case itself and review the briefs. Popular history makes Brown a moral cause almost exclusively, good enough for most of us, but it decidedly was not. In fact, it’s possible that without the national security argument, the case might have been decided differently since much of the plaintiff’s case was built on evidence from sociology “experts” concerning the benefits of integration, rather than a question of constitutional law, the usual domain of the SCOTUS (the wording of the 14th amendment is somewhat flawed with respect to the case) and was controversial at the time. Now, we’re told, by sociologists, BLM, et. al., that segregation is a good thing. Not an exact science, I guess.
Over the last year I have followed James engage with woke thought, and here he really hits a home run.
During this podcast, it occurred to me that Marcuse was a sociopath conman whose goal was to seduce people with a promise of a better future that, of course, would be always undefined. His sales pitch was to refuse to recognize anything good in existing society, or any value to human experience that had created it. Only his ideas matter. He was a (wannabe) cult leader, whose simply wanted to watch other people seduced by his words destroy hemselves and their society.
We have to see him for what he is. I for one, can’t unsee it.