I Feel Like I'm X, Therefore I Am X

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Abigail Adams has been criticised for not acknowledging lived experience as a form of reliable knowledge. This post modern push against objective knowledge kind of led us to that position, she says. We read stories almost everything we do, whether it's video games,. movies, books, we like stories about people. So feelings really are very important. But the idea that you can leto one or the other, i am tis is a fals trifle to me.

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.