New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 91
Woke Marxism is a cult. It’s not like a cult. It’s not kind of a cult. It’s a cult. Because it’s a cult, and like the word “Woke” implies, becoming Woke means experiencing a rebirth into the social, emotional, and intellectual worldview of the cult’s doctrine. In fact, fathers of Woke Marxist theory, like Paulo Freire, are explicit about this aspect of Woke Marxism in the starkest possible terms. For Freire, awakening to critical consciousness (becoming Woke) is a personal Easter, a spiritual death and resurrection on the side of the oppressed. How do we know? He says it himself, explicitly and more than once, in his now-famous 1984 book The Politics of Education. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay pulls back the curtain on this cult belief and makes it plainly visible. Join him so you can understand that we’re dealing with the largest cult startup in human history.
Hear more about this in a fuller reading of the relevant chapter of Freire’s book here.
Additional episodes of New Discourses Bullets can be found here.
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14 comments
Honneth. Axel. German egghead. Teaches at current Frankfurt School (and NYC’s Columbia – that figures).
New to me. Same old bullshit:
[Honneth’s] “Reification reformulates this key ‘Western Marxist’ concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power. For Honneth, all forms of reification are due to intersubjectively based pathologies rather than the structural character of social systems such as capitalism as argued by Karl Marx and Gyorgy Lukacs.”
Elvis Costello in 1978 sussed the type. Mutton dressed as lamb:
“They call her Natasha when she looks like Elsie
I don’t want to go to Chelsea”
Call a plumber. The toilet’s clogged with “philosophers” again.
(ps. Thanks for your kind words. Read Erasmus’ 1509 “Praise of Folly”. I am the person Erasmus warned is doomed to discontent by refusing to play the fool’s game. High price but worth every penny.)
For me, ‘Easter in the Woke Cult’ was one of the best and most useful ‘bullets’ so far. Finally I’m beginning to understand the psychology behind the woke mind virus. Thank you.
The quoted passage from Wickedpedia says that this Grayling creature believes in: “a debate about the basis of ethics… based on our best understanding of human nature and the human condition”; and that Grayling also believes: “that the philosopher should engage in public debate”.
These two statements by or about Grayling are contradictory.
If “the philosophers” should “engage in public debate” (Why?!? why not the plumbers or the morticians?) and if such public debate must be based on “best understanding of human nature”, then it is impossible for “the philosophers” to fulfill their own self-stated requirements for public debate because none of “the philosophers” have ever understood anything about actual human nature other than their own egomaniacal self-nature: their puffed-up abstractional status-preening, masturbatory conceited verbiage-vomiting and predilection for licking their powerbroker masters’ assholes. Thus nothing “the philosopher” says has any connection to human nature or the human condition or any ethics dependent upon knowledge of human nature, but only to their own self-aggrandizing, profitable and narcissistic theatrical performances “on radio and television”, just like any other ratbag celebrity grifter con artist.
The quotidian opinions of any plumber speak more truth about ethics, human nature and the human condition than any of “the philosophers” and that’s why “the philosophers” hate the common man so much and want him exterminated. The common man makes “the philosophers” look like the nasty mean phoney petty haughty and unethical fools that they are.
You wrote: “None of these consensus boosting followers realised they were only helping to remove a soft abrahamic religion // only to install a abrahamic faith that is hard caliphate based.”
Yes. And their pea-brained followers may not have realized this cultural colonization and ideological replacement of Thideologies was happening in front of their eyes because their Puppet-Masters (P-Ms) spun the post-truth so brazenly by telling the p-brains that the sudden appearance of Islam, veils, mosques, “praying” in the streets, Taharrush Gamea (the gang rape game), open terrorism and all the accoutrements of the “religion of peace” (Oh, such tasty hummus! Oh, such pretty scarves!) were nothing more than “right wing conspiracy theory”. “Did the Islamic bombings in your city make the wine you drank with your dinner last night taste any less sweet? asked the mayor of a Dutch city after a mass terror event, “No? Then what are you worried about?”
The P-Ms understand the bovine idiocy/cowardice/selfishness (human nature) of their digital cattle so well and know that p-brains always default back to their comfort-zone propaganda/security blanket/SOMA/opium-of-the-massholes and knee-jerk blame any cognitive dissonance on “right wing conspiracy theory” — the way a Pavlovian dog can be trained to return to eat its own vomit and like it.
The reason for the P-Ms switch from Christianity to Islam is because Islam is inherently authoritarian and mass obedient. All Islamic societies are totalitarian because Moslems don’t care about politics but only about tribalism and “religious” mania. Thus they are a ready-made compliant “masses” for totalitarians that needs no control because it polices itself like a seething swarm of fanatical fundamendalist hivemind Inquisitors (Hitler also knew this and was best buds with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in WW2 who asked Adolph if the Germans won to build gas chambers for the Muslims to use to kill their own Jews).
As well, the P-Ms saw that Christianity was self-imploding anyway into just another preposterous New Age cult. A UK “clergyperson” (clergyfolk?) recently claimed in a church sermon that since he believed the wound of Christ in a medieval painting resembled a vagina that this was proof that Jesus is transgender and intersex. Another US “non-binary pastorix” created the new “Sparkle Creed” (look it up and laugh or cry or puke). The P-Ms don’t have to lift a finger to get rid of Christians because Christianity’s own new trans Satan, Lucy Fur, is having a field day trashing the last 2000 years at the request of Christians themselves. It’s a Suicide of the Simpletons.
ps your comments are not “eurocentric” since the entire Western world is now united in its common demise — we finally achieved the 1960s “one world” fantasy — too bad it was at the mouth of our own graves
Sociologist wrote: “Part of the the LBGT thing links directly to Transhumanism (which links to Humanism).” [I can’t reply to your reply so this comment may go to top of thread or appear above your comment]
Transgender has never been about “transgender”:
See my comment D13 says: July 16, 2023 “Who are the ‘they’?” on New Discourses July 10, 2023 post “An Open Letter to Woke Youth”
“Check out Jennifer Bilek’s substack where she clearly defines who ‘They’ are. Bilek’s ‘Who Is Behind The Transgender Agenda’ names the billionaires who are using transgender, woke, ESG, etc. as psycho-social, cultural and political steps towards total population control at a biological level with them in control. Bilek names the Big Pharma, bankers, funders, etc. who are recreating human beings for their own profit and power aggrandizement.
A sampling of some ‘They’ include:
Billionaire [man pretending to be a woman] Martin ‘Martine’ Rothblatt and his Terasem Movement Foundation and United Therapeutics Corporation, creator of ‘Bemes’ and ‘Lifenauts’: ‘Our mission is to promote the… use of nanotechnology for human life extension. We conduct educational programs and support scientific research and development in the areas of cryogenics, biotechnology, and cyber consciousness.’ They create post-human ‘bemes’, the new people.
Billionaire [man pretending to be a woman] James ‘Jennifer’ Pritzker: Bilek describes Pritzker as ‘The billionaire family pushing synthetic sex identities (SSI)… have set their sights on a new God-like goal: using gender ideology to remake human biology.’
You mentioned the New Age “indigo/rainbow children” con game. I’ve known so many New Age people throughout my adult life (New Age is mother’s milk to so many mixed up homos and whacky artists) and I despise it even more than its poisonous progeny Woke. My nephew’s drughead New Age artist girlfriend at the time told him they were both “indigo rainbow children of alien superior birth” so they needed more drugs to feed their godheads, i.e. themselves. He has serious mental illness (bipolar) and their heavy drug use induced his first psychotic breakdown (first of four over the last eight years) and he dumped her after becoming an evangelical Christian (to his Woke atheist sisters’ horror) in the mental hospital during his first court-mandated psychosis treatment stay for six months (he’s had two more six-month court-mandated psychosis hospitalizations since then because his current girlfriend is also a mentally ill drug addict).
So all this magical thinking, be it New Age, Woke or whatever, may be manufactured by insane Elites and may have complex metaphysical dimensions, but its real world outcomes wreak havoc on actual normal people’s all too human lives. Meanwhile, I abhor and reject all forms of magical thinking and continue walking like Dante through the wreckage of this historical moment, observing and noting every horror, every calumny. I am a rock, I am an island. A Sane amidst the Insane. I am Robinson Crusoe stranded in Bedlam. It is what it is.
@ D THIRTEEN,
You aver, ” ‘the philosophers’ hate the common man so much and want him exterminated. The common man makes “the philosophers” look like the nasty mean phoney {sic} petty haughty and unethical fools that they are.”
Clearly you have never become acquainted with Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. For starters, read her essay “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” Her philosophy is an antidote and an indictment against philosophers throughout the centuries who disdained reason and loved the collective floating abstraction of “Humanity” while expressing contempt for living individual human beings.
Ayn Rand’s 1937 novel “Anthem” is a classic anti-dystopian work. And I enjoyed her views in her many old video interviews. I am not anti-reason — I am pro-reason and anti-phoney (the British spelling which I learned in grammar school that Americans spell “phony”) “philosophers” who appear to use reason but are as deranged and dangerous as any “religious” fanatic whose mumbo-jumbo the philosophers are purported to oppose with their own “reason”. The reason versus religion clash died long ago because a) religion lost the battle because of hypocrisy and b) “reason” became unreasonable, hence Leftism (read Aron’s “Opium of the Intellectuals”), Woke and everything presented on New Discourses. I respect people like James Lindsay (and others who do similar analytical socio-cultural parsing) because they are NOT “philosophers” but rather are intelligent people applying their intelligence to gain insight into the real world madness happening all around us for the purpose of helping people survive and resist the madness — nothing to do with “the philosophers” who are the new priest caste parasites and just as stuck up and obnoxious — name one living “philosopher” who is not priest caste show biz fake — Chomsky? Zizek? Grayling? Bigger media whores than Zsa-Zsa Gabore on the 1970s Merv Griffen Show.
Good session, as always James.
Cults are a version of totalitarianism (which is not a specifically political term, but a term denoting aberrant group psychology of a particular type). There are various categories of groups which fit the totalitarian definition. Cults are one of them.
We are talking about a tremendously distorted kind of group psychology in cults. The onus is on “group”. The individual has disappeared into a warped hive-mind.
All these cults and strange clubs which this fool is in head deep are squarely operating in the Astral plane. In others words the dream state where in sleep one can have a view of a fantasy looking like reality. This is operating in the mind in a vast black hole of self deception. Yes it possible to be this delusional without ever in life waking up and seeing the error of ones mental picture of the world. In the ASTRAL plane there fast spaces of random folly and sheer madness.
We must point out the Astral world is not real and can only be felt in deep sleep. It can operate in daydreaming and fantasy land. We will do well to know that these ideas are metal pictures depicted with language Having no reality in existence. Existence being the prime force and shaker and mover of all manifest is beyond human control. The wise will defer to the quite state and accept the conditions of life with humility and humor. Being free of vanity the wise will endure through good and bad times. This guys book smacks of absurdity .
I suggest you are making a fundamental mistake, James.
By quoting from historical Marxists you are making the assumption that the current state of Woke culture is the product of an intellectual process. You claim as evidence for this that you can identify and document books, articles etc which lead to the current situation.
I assert that, while you can do this, it is not valid. The causal relationship is too weak.
I assert that both the current state of Woke AND the Marxist writing you cite derive from the same source/cause.
You need to provide evidence that, for example, schools of education did actually succeed in teaching teachers to understand and then later apply the critical epistemology you state.
There is a much simpler explanation (Occam’s Razor etc):
Seeing the world as oppressor/oppressed groups does not require Marxist theory. We could even claim that it is the ‘normal’ approach taken by humans, based on an instinctive tribalism and an instinctive sense of care for the downtrodden. This is why so many students hold this view: it’s the view all ‘decent’ people hold.
Your assertion in this piece is far-fetched: you are saying that the works of Paulo Freire have directly influenced so many teachers in the West that they have turned Woke. You would need good evidence to support this claim. You would need to show that the works are actually studied in teacher-training colleges and that practicing teachers can see the origins of their thinkng in the Freire material they studied in Teacher Training College.
My explanation is far more likely: that the ideology is self-publicising. That it is enticing. People like to feel they are on the side of the ‘good’ people. They want to feel they are part of a wider movement.
This is exactly what happened in NAZI Germany. people did not study Mein Kampf and follow the logic, they heard that they were members of a super-race and they were being downtrodden by the JEws etc., they voluntarily joined this movement. It was not primarily an intellectual process.
Commenter wrote: “You would need to show that the works are actually studied in teacher-training colleges and that practicing teachers can see the origins of their thinking in the Freire material they studied in Teacher Training College.”
I did an MSW (focus on adult literacy) at University of Toronto in the late 1980s and did my Masters’ Thesis on Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” while taking relevant courses at the adjacent Ontario Institute for Studies in Education OISE), the main teacher training institute in Canada (then and now) because they were “experts” in these topics, adult and children’s education. Freire’s ideas plus those of all radical Marxian theoreticians (Lukacs, Marcuse, etc.) were the basis of OISE’s entire teacher-training curricula and since the 2000s now include Crenshaw and all the current CRT theorists. The first quote below from the USA in 2009 addresses your question, as do the final quotes from Toronto District School Board (2024) that show the extent to which Freirean, Marxian and Critical Theories (CRT etc.) have become the not just the norm for teacher training but the locus of the entire educational endeavour where the focus of all K-12 now is “decolonization of whiteness” (“decolonization” is the key Freirean oppressor/oppressed concept).
“Since the publication of the English edition in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country… and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their [mandatory] philosophy of education courses.”
“Pedagogy Of The Oppressor Another Reason Why U.S. Ed Schools Are So Awful: The Ongoing Influence Of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire”
by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2009
“The Canadian education system exists exclusively to perpetuate ‘white supremacy’ and schools must prioritize the race of their students above any other factor, reads an official guidebook distributed to all 20,000 Toronto public school teachers. Authored by the TDSB’s Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Department, the guide is one of several new policy documents telling teachers to become agents of ‘decolonization’.
“Education Is White Supremacy, Toronto Teachers Told In Official Guidebook” by Tristin Hopper Feb 22 2024 nationalpost.com
[This article contrasts the 2003 pre-CRT (Critical Race Theory) TDSB teachers’ guidebook that contained no CRT concepts and provides evidence of full CRT organizational capture in 20 years.]
“Facilitating Critical Conversations: A Teaching Resource for Challenging Oppression in Toronto District School Board Classrooms
Toronto District School Board 2024
Core Beliefs (page 7)
• Schooling in North America is inherently designed for the benefit of
the dominant culture (i.e., white, middle-upper class, male, Christian,
cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc.).The interests
and needs of the dominant culture determine established behaviours,
values, and traditions that are considered acceptable and the ‘norm’ in
education, other institutions, and the broader society.
• Education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and
Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized.
• Race matters – it is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining
peoples’ social, political, economic, and cultural experiences.
• White Supremacy is a structural reality that impacts all students
and must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms, schools, and
communities.”
commenter wrote: “This is why so many students hold this view: it’s the view all ‘decent’ people hold.”
But why? Why do “decent” people hold one particular view over another? Where are people getting the content of their “view” from? Everything you say about human nature is absolutely true: “People like to feel they are on the side of the ‘good’ people.” It’s the specifics of the “decent” and the “good” that are the issue and not the generic human nature tendency to perform “decent” and “good” for people around them to fit in and feel nice about themselves, a human survival trait.
Even if German people did not read Hitler, their support of his values so they could feel socially “decent” and “good” amongst their peers perpetuated the consequences that resulted from holding these particular values (mass murder, killing, atrocities, etc.). Similarly today, the Western young people (once again 80 years after Nazism) screaming “Kill the Jews” think such views are “decent” and “good” (“right side of history”). Such views originate in radical Islam as well as radical Marxian oppressor/oppressed theory, but whether these students read or even know the origins of their views (and most don’t), their “decent” and “good” values have consequences in the real world of flesh and blood and politics that requires any of their fellow citizens who find these young people’s choice of values and their method of enacting them disturbing, dangerous and insane to identify and analyse the sources of these values with the purpose of better challenging and fighting them.
That’s the purpose of what James Lindsay is doing with this Marxian analysis. Whether each single school teacher can name and recite Freirean theory is not the point. It’s the self-described “decent” and “good” values the teachers have absorbed and regurgitate to their students that is the problem needing examination and not the degree of their individual awareness of the processes by which the values are inculcated into them or even of the deeper content of the values. Just like the WW2 German citizens, these teachers and Woke student “radicals” will claim “but we knew nothing about all that bad stuff”. This was no excuse then, it is no excuse now and it never will be an excuse. All humans are responsible for the consequences of their individual value choices, no matter who oblivious they pretend to be regarding those choices.
I understand your (and the previous commenter’s) concern: Can dead Marxian writers/theorist be held responsible and accountable for the “appropriation and revision” of their ideas by their readers, followers, disciples, etc.? Did any of these Marxian theorists actually say or write “go out and brutally slaughter the bourgeoisie?” Probably not, although I would bet that deep research into the archives of all of their letters, speeches and lesser works could possibly reveal such literal statements (this would make for an excellent book).
The reason why I don’t share your concern about James Lindsay (and others) ascribing blame to dead Marxian writers (and earlier philosophers) for the actions of their readers is because I believe that these Marxian theorists, as a highly specific and unique cohort of particular writers, are accountable. For the reason I outlined in my previous comment about the origin and germination of people’s “decent” and “good” views and values derived and interpreted (appropriated and revised) from specific writers/theorists’ written (and spoken) words. The dead writers of the bible are not responsible for Charles Manson’s deranged interpretation of “Revelation” as a blueprint for exterminating the “pigs”. But the relation between Marxian writers and those who utilize their writings is not the same kind, category or degree of influence – it is serious and more insidious.
One example of a (then) living Marxian theorist who was held accountable in a negative context – meaning he was championed against his wishes for a meaning he claimed he did not intend – was Marcuse. Jillian Becker’s 1977 “Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhoff Terrorist Gang” presents a detailed story of the 1960s/70s left-wing radicalism in Europe which mirrors exactly what has unfolded with Woke today because the same theorists informed both movements. Becker discusses Marcuse and his work and also the effect of that work on the new left Euro radical youth which incited hatred towards their own bourgeois middleclass white society and rage against purported US/British/European “imperialism” and “colonialism”.
The 1960s/70s radical left Euro youth (including the Baader-M gang) reified indeed deified Marcuse as one of the oracles of their revolution. Becker describes a speech by Marcuse at a German university where he was reduced almost to tears because the radical left youth audience screamed abuse at him when Marcuse tried to distance himself from their recent radical actions which included murder. Marcuse impotently pleaded that his many written and spoken calls for revolution did not mean actual violence but was “metaphorical” and “reformist” which made his disciples turn on him in frenzy until Marcuse fled the stage terrified of the very constituency that he himself had so painstakingly hatched and nurtured “in theory” for so long.
Did Marcuse literally tell these radicals to kill people. No. Was he horrified when they did so in his name? He appeared to be (an act perhaps?). But what on earth did Marcuse expect would happen when his written and spoken words called for overthrowing and removing the decadent evil Western society? “To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs.” Freire is the same as Marcuse in his (fake?) surprise when his works incited actions he claimed were not intended such as Africans using Freire’s oppressed/oppressor ideas to overthrow their own “imperialist stooge” governments only to install themselves as violent leftist war lords.
I often wonder if people who criticise anti-Woke dissidents for their seeming indictment of (dead or living) Marxian theorists as accountable for current insane real world developments done in the name of these theorists have spent a lot of time up close and in person with openly far left radical self-proclaimed Marxists? I have and they are horrible people. Disturbed, fanatical, repellent, revenge-drunk and emotionally seething. But mostly they are, like their forebears described in Becker’s book, dogma-blinded acolytes of their Marxian masters who they endlessly quote and literally worship as saviours showing the way to bring about the Rapture of Revolution.
I do blame Freire and Marcuse and Marx and the rest. The hordes of their followers are not benign and misguided and are not merely appropriating and revising their masters’ words: they are “religiously” bringing them to their logical fruition. They see these theorists as their personal and collective Allah whose radical words are sacred blueprints for bringing about their revolutionary Utopia. All criticisms of Marxian theorists are more than justified by the consequences these theorists’ words have had and continue to have on real people in the real world.
“Teachers just assumed the inclusion of Freire was a healthy learning curve that could help some unfortunate souls.”
I was one of them. But after 20 years working as an NGO adult educator, I finally admitted to myself that I’d been wrong in my assumption.
The only souls being helped by the inclusion of Freire were middle class university students seeking permanent secure well paid and high status employment in NGOs and government systems such as education, community programs, etc. I was, to my shame, one of them and no amount of Mea Culpas can absolve my guilt at that choice I made despite my original “good intentions”: the epitaph for my “helping career” is “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
“helping adult educators realise how to teach the disadvantaged how they can escape poverty by learning”
The disadvantaged didn’t escape poverty by learning because the adult educators were too busy solidifying their positions in NGOs by constructing the “Disadvantaged/Poverty/Homeless Industrial Complex” which taught the educators (and all social service workers) not how to help the “disadvantaged” (whoever they are) but how to help themselves maintain perpetual employment by inventing “social problems” that require perpetual professional interventions to “help the disadvantaged”. Ca-ching ca-ching all that money just goes round and round and round.
But what do I know. Perhaps it was all a dream.