OnlySubs Episode 106: They’re Not Idiots is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
Facebook
Locals
Odysee
Patreon
Subscribestar
Substack
YouTube Members
I hear people say “Idiots!” all the time when discussing the actions of the ruling class. That’s a mistake. They’re not idiots. They’re malicious. Recognizing that stupidity alone cannot explain their behavior is extremely important to understanding what’s going on in the world around us today. In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I explain how Hanlon’s Razor (never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity) is an escape hatch for a dangerous movement that does not have our best interests in mind.
Additional episodes of the OnlySubs Podcast can be found here.
3 comments
Along with mistaking wokes for “idiots” and pretending that malice is only stupidity (it’s not!), there are four other huge mistakes/underestimations “conservatives” make about woke/left people. (This comment is really long – thank you for allowing me my say.)
One: Blue haired gender studies grads are so useless they can’t even get jobs at McDonalds. WRONG. These grads are the indoctrinated foot soldiers of the woke/left ruling class and get hired immediately at tens of thousands of government-funded NGOs, community programs, schools, media, the arts, and so on. They are a woke army who is being created for their functionary roles.
ALL are fully employed at huge salaries because they are rigidly-trained lackeys who are rewarded with status and money for their fanatical obedience to their paymasters’ (ruling class) dogmas and dictates.
Scan this random list from a progressive social services employment web site (I randomly selected NYC as search locale). All of these jobs hire blue haired woke gender studies grads only (and no white men ever unless they pretend to be a “woman”!)
https://charityvillage.com/search/#results/63234b9e170f72ffa38dc761?kw=&loc=New+York+City%2C+New+York%2C+United+States&place_id=5128581&city=New+York+City&page_num=1
Two: Sensible and ordinary middle class people will not continue to vote for or agree with left policies and woke insanity indefinitely. WRONG. The majority of the new middle class in the Western world work for the government and obey ruling class leftist directives to retain their status and money. Joel Kotkin: “…much of LA’s remaining middle class [in 2022] is made up of teachers and other public employees.”
The former merchant, business and blue-collar urban middle class in USA/Canada is now made up almost entirely of government-paid public servants (bureaucrats, consultants, education, arts, etc.) The new urban bourgeoisie no longer work for themselves or for blue-collar industry or for small/large businesses, but solely as apparatchiks for the ruling class (and woke is their dogma of the moment).
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/10/the-fall-of-los-angeles/
Three: Hivemind Minority versus Individualist Majority. Woke-left people comprise a minority Swarm. Anti-woke people comprise a majority of dissenting Singletons who are individually separated, disconnected, leaderless, and rendered impotent by their lack of conceptual cohesion, infighting, failure to have each others’ backs, and the betrayal of their interests by their own vindictive and traitorous womenfolk.
For example, how can .01% of the human population, i.e. Trans, control the entire society with online bullying and death threats? Because Trans are part of a woke-left Swarm. Solitary Trans are defenseless and unable to defeat anti-wokes one on one (except by psychopathic murder). So they use social media as their “Swarm pheromones” to signal to one another an alert to mob attack (take down) the anti-woke individual who didn’t bow down to one of their members.
My conservative 29-year-old nephew told me he plans to wear an anti-woke t-shirt in public then confront any wokes who hassle him. I said, bad move. You will lose. Because after the event, you will be alone with no one to back you up even if all your pals online say they’re gonna kick woke ass, they won’t because the cops will turn on them every single time and ruling class conformity enforcers such as “Human Rights” tribunals and mainstream and social media will separate you from the flock and crucify you on the cross of woke.
Woke/lefts are like wasps. A single wasp keeps bugging you until you get exasperated and kill it. As it dies, it seems to send a signal of “Swarm pheromones” that alerts other wasps who swarm and attack the person who killed the solitary wasp. Wokes are wasps. Individual anti-wokes cannot ever defeat the Swarm because it is programmed to isolate, pile on and mob the defenseless and isolated anti-woke individual.
John Burnham in ‘The Machiavellians’ described the mechanisms of minority control of majorities very clearly in 1943. (I can’t find exact passages on the fly.)
https://archive.org/details/BurnhamJamesTheMachiavellians/page/n3/mode/2up
Four: Failure to recognize that woke versus anti-woke is an Assymetical Battle: Pluralism and Leave Me Alone (anti-wokes) versus Borg Assimilation and Extermination (wokes). Anti-wokes (especially “conservatives” and “Christians”) refuse to accept that wokes are not playing the same fair-play game as anti-wokes. Anti-wokes assume the culture wars are like a football game with opposing players playing the same game abiding by the same rules but just on opposing “sides”. WRONG. This is the biggest mistake “conservatives” make. Wokes are not playing your game from the past: They are playing their own game while knowing that you’re not even aware that the old game (fair play) has been changed to the new game (by all means necessary). “Nice” is suicide.
Lack of understanding of woke Swarm reality (foolishly calling them idiots or unemployable, etc) as well as ignorance or refusal to accept that the prime directive of all wokes is total war: This is why anti-wokes are losing the battle. This reality is bleak and black-pill and ugly and overwhelming, but pretending otherwise is a one way ticket to the extinction of generations of Western personal freedoms.
A Total War reconceptualization of this historical moment is desperately needed across many fronts, especially the recognition that anti-woke dissidents are a complex and diverse collection of disparate groups and individuals and not merely “conservatives” or “Christians”. There must be a shared intention to align the collective wills of all who want to remain free, no matter how different they are from one another.
There’s no other way because this time there’s not going to be any Custer’s Cavalry or returned Jesus or restored “Democracy” to save our anti-woke asses.
“The Lumpenbourgeoisie: The Price We Pay For Elite Overproduction
by Leighton Woodhouse
But probably no industry has scooped up more of this labor market overflow than the non-profit sector. Unlike in tech and media, in the world of progressive NGOs, there is an actual organic demand for the moral capital that these job applicants have spent four years of college accumulating. There, one’s finely calibrated sensitivity to microaggressions, one’s native fluency in the obscure grammar and lexicon of social justice speak, and one’s acute ability to discern the structures of racism in literally anything are assets rather than liabilities.
And from there, one can literally create the consumer market for those talents out of thin air, simply by inventing new social problems to solve.
From the perch of one’s non-profit post, one can diagnose the rest of the world’s afflictions, perceiving the white supremacy at work in corporation X’s failure to achieve racial parity in its recruitment practices, and recognizing the misogyny and transphobia in the gender lopsidedness of industry Y’s consumer base. One can divine the contours of new marginalized communities, from “voice-hearers” to “MAPs,” each desperate for new 501(c)(3)s to protect them from their oppressors.
Defense against social exclusion, it turns out, is an infinitely elastic commodity, as it takes nothing more than a college-educated imagination to discover new threats, name new villains, and then sell your remedial services to the wrongdoers in the form of audits, trainings and consultations.
The business model is simple: extortion. The non-profit world’s moral technicians scan the landscape for organizations, whether public or private, that can afford their services, diagnose them as acutely infected by some form of structural oppression or another, and then offer up their suite of services to set them on their public path to healing and redemption. As Malcom Kyeyune has noted, the ideology of wokeness operates like a political protection racket, insinuating its practitioners into every industry and enterprise as intermediaries between creators and their creations.
You can run your company, you can write your screenplay, you can draft your bill, you can bring your product to market — but not without bringing in an outside team of minders to ensure that it conforms to the ideological standards of the moral intelligentsia, for a hefty fee. For a class devoid of any discernible skills of actual economic value, this parasitical function is an enviable source of political and social power.”
https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-lumpenbourgeoisie?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
“Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system…”
“…[A]ll values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing… The elements will shift and move together just like the changing pattern in a turning kaleidoscope.”
“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”
‘Rules For Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals’
Saul D. Alinsky, 1971