i want to ask jordan if that's what he means to do when he talks about nici and a and dostoovsky. And, you know, he spends a lot of time on classical literature. Of course, we sceptics don't think there's anything actually floating out there in the ether as an archetype. But maybe that's what young was doing, not knowing any evolutionary psychology in his day,. Something like these eternal truths in human nature that it cou gout expressed through through literature. Ah, yes. And there's tesinsemontful, some stories.
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.