New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 21
Leftist thought for at least the past 250 years has taken a particular form that is not the usual form of thinking and understanding we know and love. It’s something completely different. The Left, perhaps since Rousseau and definitely since Hegel, has been dialectical in its thinking. It is the Dialectical Left. What is the dialectic, though? What is dialectical thinking? In short, it’s the fusion of opposites in a way that understands them from a higher-level perspective, which is necessarily synthetic. In this slightly longer episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay explains the dialectic and dialectical thought in some detail with a considerable number of examples to help you understand this synthetic approach to thought and why it’s always going to be a catastrophe in the making.
Additional episodes of New Discourses Bullets may be found here.
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11 comments
The concept of “rising above” a conflict, or conflicting data, to understand it or resolve it is a useful idea.
It appears this concept can be abused to arrive at incorrect understandings.
Wealth versus poverty can be seen as the result of differences in ability to produce wealth or the result of crime against the poor. Neither understanding has to result in socialism.
A conflict of state policies with federal policies can be attributed to local difference in cultural norms or inappropriate desires for control. Neither understanding has to result in socialism.
The conflict between desiring sex for procreation and desiring sex for personal emotional satisfaction can be understood as a natural conflict or confusion that is part of the human experience. That understanding does not need to result in Queer Theory.
I suppose that a test could be that if an “understanding” intended to resolve a conflict just creates a new conflict, the that uderstanding is incorrect or has been wrongly applied.
“Are Left & Right Real?
What seems to me critical about contemporary leftism is how it serves as the spearhead of the global centralization of power. You seem to suggest that the Left is controlling the oligarchs, but it seems clear to me that the oligarchs, themselves ultimately controlled by their proximity to global power, are controlling the Left.
They control it through various devices, including the phantom of the Right, and it claps on command. The activists either don’t know why they are clapping, or they simply like clapping.
In Germany in the 1920s, the army and monopoly industry supported an aggregation of gangsters, neurotics, mercenaries, psychopaths, and the discontented, with a small number of misguided idealists to defend their interests under the rubric of the Right.
Now we have a global plutocratic corporatism, which wields a weapon called ‘the Left’. Believing anyone participating in this sub-executive formation has an ethically or intellectually coherent vision misunderstands this situation. Did the Cheka have a vision? They are remote-controlled fanatics or amoral cynics, not partisans of real ideals. Likewise, the intellectual position of the contemporary Left is terrorism – it imposes its position based on moral blackmail, violence and intimidation, it makes no effort to persuade.
This is also the position of the global biopolitical regime with regards to critics of their pseudo-scientific policies. The regime intimidates in one way or another. In response most people mumble, nod, and look the other way, others become instruments and toys. The global psychological and social sum of all their casuistry, threats and self-deception, daily pumped out on social media, today defines the real ideas of this Regime.
Meanwhile, an anonymous online Right, adopting an alternative approach, declares its deathless opposition to the Left. But is this the real name of the enemy?”
https://im1776.com/2021/12/03/zero-hp-lovecraft-vs-dc-miller-part-2/
It certainly feels like any published orientation = Left / Right can be reduced to meaningless abstractions. It seems certain a politician encrypt what they are. I’d doubt any of them bother to hear where anyone is by word of mouth anymore actually, & wonder if the default rout they use is a database to help know ignoring the public statements. When they say they are ‘There’ its like an allegory of the people in a cave issue needs to be considered.
LR = C Squared – where C represents collaboration with the opposition perhaps. If the is so much collaboration that there is zero opposition = Abstraction.
If so we all know what it feels like to stand exactly on the north pole staring at a compass that cannot indicate where we are. This is a contradiction sine you only know you’ve arrived when it can’t. And ofc politicians are trained to think its clever to take advantage of every on foot in / the other out opportunity. Its as if they are instructed on an arcane to way to consider that sincerity, &the presence of the other binary changs nothing.
“The one-dimensional leftism which today serves as the opioid of the half-literate cadres is no different. It is heavily pushed [by the TCC, Transnational Capitalist Class, Regime], to the point of hypnosis, because it supports enacting key priorities, and because it neutralizes opposition.”
ibid
You may appreciate this chillingly prophetic piece from 1970.
https://lovelycountryblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/eric-hoffer-on-intellectuals-1970/
Loved the essay. So I looked up Hoffer — an actual longshoreman become actual philosopher — and found an interview of him by Eric Severaid (? Spelling — as a much younger man than when I saw him on TV) at…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOUXSPpN_eE
He does in that 4 minute interview what Dr. Lindsay tried to do — not very well — in his 30 minute talk. And Hoffer does exactly the same thing as Lindsay, without ever once mentioning Dialectic or Hegel and does it much better. Hoffer uses the word “intellectual”, where Aristotle would use the words SOPHIST, in an academic setting or DEMAGOGUE in a political setting/context.
Incidentally both Lindsay and Hoffer rightly call out Herbert Marcuse, from the Frankfurt School of Marxism — and mostly from Heidegger’s BEING vs NON-BEING Nazi-Existentialist perspective/teaching — as a big part of the will to power of “intellectuals” who are actual sophist-demagogues.
Thanks for Hoffer’s Essay. Enjoy Hoffer — an actual Working Man’s Socratic Philosopher — in conversation with an actually legitimate old school newsman at the above mentioned YouTube address.
Kevin James Byrne
Nonsense set to some kind pseudo argument about irrelevant details. Word salad BS that dwarfs in the light of the true knowers. Again they are circling the rotting corpses in the dead fields. No way they end up at the end with any value.
Adam Winfield: “Is it worth becoming red pilled?
A friend and I rib each other… about the latest events in clown world news. He’s a pretty smart guy… and like many at that borderline level of intellectualism still has faith in the corporate mainline media to inform and educate him. At one point we got onto the discussion of information sources, since the elephant in the room these days is: if our worldviews and interpretations of current events are so different, how exactly are they being shaped?
One key difference is that whereas I always have a cursory knowledge of what the mainstream media is saying and how they are spinning things (hell, most of the time I can predict how they are going to twist something), he has no or very little knowledge of the alternative media. In fact, he has something worse than no knowledge: he has a caricatured, demonized version of it given to him by a corporate media that will attack anything and everything that threatens its dominance of the masses.
This puts us in a situation where it’s assumed I’m batshit crazy because I’m suggesting that things may be unfolding somewhat differently to how the unquestionable ‘experts’ in corporate media are presenting it. This is by design –- when the media uses terms like ‘conspiracy theorist’ to demonize anyone who deviates even slightly from their opinions presented as facts, they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s a very smart way of promoting near-total intolerance of thought, ideas, and debate among the public –- anyone who doesn’t believe this story is a whacked-out nutjob.
So, even though it can be fun debating with someone you like who happens to be thoroughly blue pilled [woke], it’s a futile endeavor that can only end with them thinking you’ve been brainwashed by some cult, that you’re morally deranged, or that you’re incapable of synthesizing information and evidence. No matter how well you present yourself and try to show how you’ve arrived at your viewpoint through research and reflection, you are never really viewed as more than ‘is he losing it?’ or is ‘he must be joking’. You’re not doing yourself any good on a social level getting into these debates.”
https://palimpsestaw.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/is-it-worth-becoming-red-pilled/
Adam Winfield: “One important thing to bear in mind is that if you start on the path to becoming red pilled, you need to go all the way. You can’t get stuck at the stage of [popular anti-woke youtube commenters], you need to finish the job. You also need to read actual, quality books, hundreds of them. Getting red pilled off YouTube videos is a fast track to a hollow intellectualism and you really will be as dumb as the corporate media rube thinks you are.”
the money quote: “READ ACTUAL QUALITY BOOKS HUNDREDS OF THEM”
This is why New Discourses is so successful in moving beyond mere “red-pilling” and into substantive intellectual understanding of human nature and its role in totalitarianism across history — not merely consuming and reacting to online opinion-mania but engaging in a genuine discourse about the written word which is the history of human intelligence — building deeper understanding in the time-honoured way of taking the duration, concentration, endurance and effort of reading, reflecting, thinking, processing, analysing, pondering and discussing critical BOOKS. Reading critical books is the means and the process necessary to understand human nature; as opposed to either mainstream/social media blue-pill/wokes’ deliberate Refusal of human nature or online angry-impotent red-pill rabble-rousing that’s nothing more than rhetorical masturbation using easy anger as arousal locus.
My young nephew always asks me how can he learn more to counter woke and I say he can’t learn any more because he does not indeed he can not learn anything critical because of his digitally-crippled nonexistent concentration-attention span. His millennial generation’s mal-education and formative years’ online saturations (games, youtubes, porn, etc,) have destroyed his cognitive ability to read critical books and so he will only ever micro-react to what’s in front of him and never be able to meta-comprehend what is happening all around him.
Books, critical books, and critical writers like those being parsed on New Discourses and linked to by commenters are the key to moving red-pilling beyond black-pill despair and back into deeper contextual awareness of the millennia-long history of critical written reflection on human nature and its essential role in the struggle against a constant, insidious and exhausting perpetual human default to totalitarianism.
Your despairing comments about your young nephew’s method of cognition are false because, since he has a faculty of reason, since thinking and action are volitional, and, presumably, he has a healthy brain and sensory organs, he is capable of choosing to learn a better, i.e., a sound, i.e. reality-based cognitive method. Introduce him to logic (the art of non-contradictory identification), demonstrate how it is applied to facts, and show him the facts that refute wokism. If, in spite of your attempts, he is unreachable, incorrigible, he is so because he chooses to be. Depending upon your level of regard for him, either keep trying to reach him (but set a limit for the sake of your own mental health), or write him off.
Good advice – closing partial illustrating stark choices possibly leading to just letting the social engineers have them – this is how debilitating the contagions are. Agreed there is a limit to the length of support one can facilitate. Introduce to logic vs write him off is another one with an almost alien like plane of tumbleweed between the two, but the gulf is being created. These remarks (me) are not intended to challenge your advice. Its the sense of cognitive distances i’m interested in elucidating. The tragic consequences of this parasitic social engineering critter living off an innocent a mind as a tick beds in on a horse would.