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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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.
Marxism isn’t holistic at all. Very often Hegel genuinely wanted to be lead by a conscience, and come up with things that were ecological. Thus sometimes the issue with Hegel is that there is a mixed message, & then ofc his work could be downright evil. ‘Earth’ is holistic if such archetypal reference helps, and the philosophy underpinning is wide. To make my point i might draw analogy to rats in mazes and place cell research. A fairly well defined neuroscience where place cells are confirmed to be the nerve assemblies involved in transporting conditioned learning acquisition neural waves to the rats episodic memory. And lets bring in Robin DiAngelo. So there isn’t a marxism segment that uses holistic algorithms, theres an exploit of algorithms that are analogous to holism. For instance DiAngelo ( or whoever design it for this front woman from the shady depths of hades ) – sets up one grid of reference for the target sycophants to run around with, and another for the counter woke to deal with. Here ‘deal with’ should mean decode as its not difficult so long as we do not be pointless by blaming mere words and phrases. Anyway – DiAngelo uses a system of linguistics that always provides her racist following self guiding principles over both grids. Thus they find it easy to accuse white people in the ‘accuse grid of reference’ and are guided by DiAngelo to the reward like rats. Naturally the reward isn’t a food morsel, its always a piece of anti white racist vitriol. The rats also familiarise themselves with the ‘no way out’ grid of reference, so that they can feel theres a 2nd line of politically polite vitriol open to them. As someone trained in cognitive neuroscience, i’d wager that it is during participation with this lock in grid, that the most most hormones are are released. It is a psychotic racist attack & hence there will be a certain amount of psychopathic mesoscopic issues will be going on. DiAngelo isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, and its her type that are selected to transport these designs because of that. So she won’t be aware that the affect is hazardous to mental heath & neither will the contagion carriers. But you see the idea is that one grid gives all degrees of freedom & the other none. The designers will know how it can also be gated = open / close at points. Di Angelo won’t have a clue about that given she’s just the oily rag who spreads the misanthropy.
Thats why Marxism isn’t holistic – its just another Algorithm.
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.
”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.
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.
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.