New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 27
Holistic thinking isn’t just a feature of the weird New Age and spiritualists; it’s also a centerpiece of Marxist thinking. For Marxists (like all Hegelians), the goal is to understand the parts in terms of the whole in which they are a part, and this is what’s meant by “holistic” thinking. What Marx and Hegel mean by this form of dialectical thought is that they understand the whole, like the whole of History itself including its purpose, and you don’t. Thus, they deserve all the power. This manifests in pushes for “whole child” education involving the “whole community” backed up by the “whole government” using “holistic methods” that transform “whole schools,” for example. If you read their documentation on almost any subject, you’ll find this peculiar “holism” all over the place. Join host James Lindsay in this episode of New Discourses Bullets where he pulls back the curtain on this seemingly strange phrasing and the diabolical concept behind it.
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12 comments
The Leo Strauss could do esoteric writing and reading, which is philosophy between the lines. Capturing two audiences, the past history of philosophy, and today’s philosophy in one body of work-the entire trend. So, if a person doesn’t study the previous great thinkers in philosophy and read what is being written today, they would not understand the context. That is why people do not understand the double speak.
Interesting analogy…however the reinforcing nature of the reward (e.g., anti-white racist vitriol) is determined by the learner. Anti-white “morsels” might actually be punishing to a great many. It would seem that DiAngelo is being rewarded by the perception that she is punishing those who do not accept her premises despite the fact that , if her punishment were effective, she (and her like-minded acolytes) wouldn’t have to keep repeating it ad nauseum. Effectiveness is clearly not her (or their) goal. Instead they are addicted to the brief feeling of reinforcement they experiences by uttering such nonsense.
Basically, the current Wokes say they know the whole and you don’t, so you must be canceled. So the pejorative term applies to them: Know-It-Alls.
If you don’t know the whole, then you might be a dumb person who might ruin the plan, so you should be killed.
Know-It-All murderers.
”Holistic.” is term used in general terms as a describer of the outer and inner workings of the world and its precise meaning should not be taken so seriously as to stake the direction of a political plan on it. David Bohm hit the limits of where he could go in Science and used the term Holistic in his thinking about that which we cant know through our human intellect. Marx could not admit his ideas were limited and shallow, he hardly considered the Whole or big picture of the many elements of the human condition.
In its more general use, “holism” signifies taking a systems approach to a problem. It’s kind of engineering oriented. I don’t see it used in the humanities that way, though. The humanities, until recently, were not engineering oriented. They have been leaning to the authoritarian side of academic approaches for a long time.
These days you have authoritarian approaches to the humanities recast in a more technocratic way. They give you things you can measure so you can determine the effectiveness of any given action or program. They call this a “results-based” activity. But they have a broken model of the central player in any human study – the human. When they try to enforce their broken model – which is basically an ideology – they come up with ideas that don’t work for the people they are intended to serve, though they may work for the people trying to enforce these activities on us.
So it becomes a con game. There is nothing wrong with looking at the entire system when trying to figure out how to fix problems. But when your model of a human system does not include spiritual beings, you’ll never get the problems fixed.
The policies coming out of Harvard, are a great example of this phenomenon-systems approach to a problem. A lot of these theorists, ideologues, are from Harvard: stupid smart people, validated by government needing their theories, as an excuse to blow cash, to demonstrate they are “doing something”and to trust their “science” and if you question the elites, they tell you to “go educate yourself.” These “sciences” and theories, have turned bureaucrats, into “technocrats,”now you have professional bureaucrats. But, the theories do not work in the real world.
One of my frustrations in trying to deal with our ultra-progressive city government here in Baltimore is the lack of desire to actually deal with the details and the unwillingness to do any real planning before rolling out policies. Fortunately, I and many others do just the opposite – dealing with on the ground issues as they occur. (Don’t kill me: I also do my best to fix recuing problems if they appear to be structural.) That actually works, but in a way that make me uneasy about this episode. It works because dealing with individual issues changes the whole.
That kind of sums up my problem with the left vs. right battle. The left is prone to sloppy top down solutions, while the right tries to atomize society at the level of the nuclear family or even the individual. In both points of view, individual actions don’t matter to the whole society, but for different reasons. On the left, structures negate any real individual agency, and on the right there is agency, but that agency doesn’t add up to anything. Personally, I believe that any agency I use affects the whole in some small way , but there really is a whole that matters to all of us.
Deism is a parent idea, the divine watchmaker that sits back as the cogs tick over. When you linked Marxism with Gnosticism it opened the whole thing up for me. Gnosticism is like a lightning bolt through time – it branches off into whatever conditions make it easier to progress. It has always been a pervasive and insidious ideology that infects any worldview it touches. I use to compare it to “the Nothing” from The Neverending Story – but I think a lightning bolt is a better analogy.
The communists who were saying “”don’t force your beliefs on me,” admonishing the Church, are now pushing their beliefs on us, which means they have exchanged one tyrant for another.
I hardly think Marxists or woke, critical theory believers have any reasoned out thought. The only whole they know is the hole in their heads and in one more location.
The personality psychology involved in this profile speaks to is a lack of appreciation for boundaries. This same flaw ties into the tendency to engage in sexual abuse and perversion. A people who might be so high in openness that they do not understand where one thing ends-and another begins. One of the other examples is the incoherence of statements like “women’s rights are trans rights are human rights are…” etc
I think it is more basic…a desire to be accepted when ones behavior and values are entirely and irredeemably unacceptable. They consistently try to blur, or erase, the boundaries so as to dupe others into believing they (and their debauched proclivities) are included within accepted norms.