PODCAST

New Discourses

Pursuing the light of objective truth in subjective darkness.

education

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01:10:27

Bourgeois Overproduction and the Problem of the Fake...

New Discourses ·

2021/05/20

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 36 Elite overproduction is a concept that was forwarded by the anthropologist Peter Turchin to attempt to explain some part of why we face growing social instability in today's society. This is an insightful concept that deserves serious consideration in our present circumstances. It is characterized by a society engaging in practices, like sending too many people to college or for advanced degrees, that create conditions for potential elites

01:03:32

How to End Vaccine Hesitancy

New Discourses ·

2021/05/17

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 35 Not gonna lie, the title of this episode of the New Discourses Podcast is a bit of a bait-and-switch, so I hope it doesn't put you off. The thing is, there is a principled reason to be hesitant on the Covid-19 vaccine, and, far from positioning people as "anti-vaxxers" for holding that position, it is perfectly reasonable and needs articulation. Put simply, it's this: people should have to be convinced, not coerced or forced, into accepting

01:26:09

The Woke Rejection of the Reasonable

New Discourses ·

2021/05/07

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 34 Society depends upon the people in it being able to rely upon expectations about how it and the other people in it will function. This requires a sense of what is and isn't reasonable. Some of this is, as the Woke contend, socially constructed, perhaps even partially arbitrary and up for debate. Much of it isn't. Wokeness doesn't agree, however. By having adopted a strict adherence to Critical Theory and the social constructivism of

01:38:23

Equity and the Unmaking of UT Austin

New Discourses ·

2021/05/03

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 33 Following in the footsteps of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the University of Texas, Austin, has initiated a campus-wide plan to force diversity, equity, and inclusivity into the administrative operation of the university, particularly in hiring, promotions, recognition, and awards. This is a bold step by the university administration in making the university functionally religious and, more importantly, unmaking the

01:15:03

Authenticity and the Woke Crisis of the Real

New Discourses ·

2021/04/28

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 32 Wokeness exists in a crisis of authenticity. This is no surprise since both of its main philosophical predecessors, neo-Marxist Critical Theory and postmodernism, are both their own forms of reaction to a perceived crisis of authenticity in the world. For the postmodernists, the real is remote, inaccessible, and simulated. Meaning is infinitely deferred. Authenticity, which is to say being who you are when you're not attempting to be anyone,

01:24:54

Communism Doesn't Know How

New Discourses ·

2021/04/23

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 31 At the heart of communist and communistic thought is faith in a kind of historical trajectory toward utopia that's driven by social alchemy. There are many reasons why this fails in practice, but the simplest thing to say is that communism fails because communism doesn't know how communism will succeed. The fundamental belief driving communists is that once enough people become true believers that the communist utopia lies on the other side

00:30:35

The Woke Goal: Everything Serves Theory

New Discourses ·

2021/04/19

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 30 What is the end-game of the Woke ideology? It's a hard question to answer, mostly because it's hard to tell where it will stop, but a proximate answer to that question is easy and needs to be understood. The immediate goal of the Woke agenda is to turn everything into a Woke organ. That's it. This is more alarming than it may sound, however. You may be Catholic or Protestant, a scientist or a doctor, a rockclimber or a musician, but if the

01:22:28

A Values-Based Approach to Leaving Wokeness Behind

New Discourses ·

2021/04/13

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 29 If we are fortunate enough to leave Wokeness and Critical Theory behind us, we need a map. We need to know what a post-Woke world would look like and, more importantly, which values will get us there. In a recent essay (https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/values-post-woke-world/), James Lindsay presented four values he thinks are core to the establishment of a post-Woke world, which can repel Wokeness anywhere they are adopted. These are

01:41:22

The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism

New Discourses ·

2021/04/09

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28 The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn't be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of

01:02:05

The First Worthy Criticism of Cynical Theories

New Discourses ·

2021/04/01

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 27 There is a fair amount of criticism of my recent book Cynical Theories (https://amzn.to/3sEJF5X) (written with Helen Pluckrose) out there now, mostly from philosophers who aren't up to the task. It is both fair and correct to say that the book isn't perfect. Given their inability to criticize the book adequately, however, I decided to take matters into my own hands and am discussing the issue at length in this episode of the New Discourses

01:22:41

There Is No Good Part of Hitler's Mein Kampf

New Discourses ·

2021/03/26

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 26 As most New Discourses fans will know, back in October 2018, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose burst onto the scene with a scandalous expose of Critical Social Justice scholarship within academia. This effort to show the world what was going on in the humanities and (to lesser extent) social sciences research literature was billed the "Grievance Studies Affair"

01:47:13

The End of Civil Rights in Kimberlé Crenshaw's...

New Discourses ·

2021/03/15

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 25 In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay continues his abridged reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw's famous (or infamous) paper, "Mapping the Margins," which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. While not the birthplace of intersectionality, this paper is the first full-throated appeal for its application, not just in the world but also in the movements from which it was born: radical feminism and black liberationism

01:11:58

Forging the Woke One Ring: Kimberlé Crenshaw's...

New Discourses ·

2021/03/10

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 24 "Mapping the Margins," by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an academic law paper that changed the world (abridged pdf here). It was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991 and makes the case for putting intersectionality into all cultural analysis. It is also more or less unambiguously the birthplace of Wokeness, as in this paper, Crenshaw indicates explicitly that, to her, intersectionality is "a provisional concept linking contemporary politics

01:42:24

Aufheben der Dr. Seuss

New Discourses ·

2021/03/03

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 23 Aufheben is a German word that, in Critical Theory, means to "abolish" or to "negate" in the way that Critical Theorists do. It's a somewhat complicated term in that it means both to abolish and to keep or to keep safe, and the Critical Theory use taps into the so-called dialectical process to attempt to use aufheben to tear apart and, as the Marxists translated it, "sublate" whatever cultural artifact they are targeting onto a "higher"

00:29:22

NO! Critical Race Theory Does NOT Continue the Civil...

New Discourses ·

2021/02/15

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 22 Critical Race Theorists like to claim that they have inherited and continue the noble legacy and justice work of the Civil Rights Movement, but this is an abject lie. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I take about half an hour to make the case definitively that, while they are content to portray this illusion, it is a grotesque distortion of reality, using their own words. By exploring the book Critical

00:34:43

How the Woke Fail the Paradox of Tolerance

New Discourses ·

2021/02/11

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 21 In 1945, even as the Nazis fell from power, Karl Popper told us how to find the line where free, liberal societies are in imminent danger in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, most simply summarizing a crucial part of the argument in a short footnote about "The Paradox of Tolerance." There, Popper lays out a short summary of when a free society should and must not tolerate intolerant movements if it is to survive. It is not only when

01:04:28

Critical Theorists as Grand Inquisitors: The Logic of...

New Discourses ·

2021/02/08

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 20 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 4 of 4 In this fourth and final part of his four-part lecture series about "Repressive Tolerance," James Lindsay takes the reader from the darkest point of the essay, which was the exciting climax of Part 3, through the end of Marcuse's argument. In this part, Marcuse dedicates the rest of the original 1965 essay to explaining why it is him and people like him (that is, Critical Theorists) who get to decide

01:09:28

Repressive Tolerance: Left Good, Right Bad, What...

New Discourses ·

2021/02/03

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 19 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 3 of 4 In this third part of James Lindsay's lecture series on Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance," we see how the essay takes a particularly dark turn. Having set up the framing of the essay in the first part and explaining the condition of the "administered society" in the second, Marcuse now turns to answering the question of what a Repressive Tolerance should look like, including what it must

01:08:41

One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Herbert...

New Discourses ·

2021/01/29

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 18 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 2 of 4 In this second part of his annotated reading of Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance," James Lindsay reads and explains the portion of the essay where Marcuse defines the "administered society" that he claims we live in. The listener will find striking parallels to today's world, which certainly qualifies as the type of "administered society" far more accurately than the world that Marcuse inhabited

01:04:54

How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance

New Discourses ·

2021/01/26

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 17 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 1 of 4 We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails. That's because it is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the right, that broken logic is centered in the no-longer-tolerant left. The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is "Repressive Tolerance."

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