New Discourses

New Discourses
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May 28, 2021 • 3h 50min

Hegel, Wokeness, and the Dialectical Faith of Leftism

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 37 Is Critical Race Theory Marxist, as many insist, or is it not? What is the relationship between Marxism, neo-Marxism (Critical Theory), and Wokeness? All three criticize one another, and yet all three have a great deal obviously in common. Is there some common underlying thread between these clearly similar yet obviously different worldviews? The answer is yes, and by tracing back to one of the most influential speculative idealist philosophers of the early 19th century, namely George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we can gain a great deal of insight into how these decidedly leftist movements—the Marxist Old Left, the neo-Marxist New Left, and the intersectional Woke Left—share at least one deeper philosophical architecture in common. From Hegel, the Left since his time has, wittingly and not, adopted several of the pillars of Hegelian philosophy, these including his statism, historicism, and, much more importantly, his dialectical approach and metaphysical worldview. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay takes a long, deep dive into the ways that Hegel's philosophy is at the root of the entire "Dialectical Left" since, naming the dialectic the "operating system" of all activist Leftism since the early 1800s. In this episode, Lindsay takes considerable time explaining Hegel's view of dialectical thought and then reveals in many examples, reaching up to the present day, how consistently the dialectic appears as the functional underpinning of Leftism ever since, at the latest, the 1830s. He makes the case that Leftism since Hegel thinks dialectically, moves dialectically, and applies dialectical thought not just to its targets but to everything, including itself and even its own dialectic. He then switches gears and explains how the dialectic is central to Hegel's underlying Hermetic (or alchemical) worldview and explains his mystical metaphysics so that this long arc of Leftist activism can be understood as evolving denominations within a single religious faith. With this theoretical groundwork laid, he then tackles how Hegel's historicism and statism arise as key features of his philosophy, with both of these characterizing activist Leftism up to the present day. Join him for his longest and most in-depth discussion yet, taking on how Hegel is a key progenitor of communism, liberationism, and ultimately Wokeness, how this philosophy must be understood so that it can be countered, and why it should be thought of in the same way that Hegel thought of it: as a religion in its own right, with its own notion of deity, metaphysical commitments, soteriology, and eschatology. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses https://newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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10 snips
May 20, 2021 • 1h 10min

Bourgeois Overproduction and the Problem of the Fake Elite

Dive into the concept of elite overproduction, exploring how sending too many to higher education creates underemployment and social instability. Discover insights on the harsh realities faced by graduates and the clash of bourgeois values with societal needs. The podcast critiques Marxist interpretations of class, revealing tensions within today's media landscape where talent often collides with sensationalism. Join a thought-provoking discussion on the implications of a 'false elite' and the cultural challenges that arise from these dynamics.
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May 17, 2021 • 1h 4min

How to End Vaccine Hesitancy

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 a vaccine into their bodies, especially under the conditions presented by Covid-19 and its vaccine. That is, the argument for getting vaccinated needs to be made, not merely assumed, and neither coercion nor force makes that argument. On the contrary, in fact, they diminish the ability to make the argument and thus increase vaccine hesitancy. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, in which he tries to articulate that principled argument for vaccine hesitancy and thus also the path away from it, should our institutional authorities want to achieve it. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses https://newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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May 7, 2021 • 1h 26min

The Woke Rejection of the Reasonable

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 postmodernism, Wokeness rejects the entire idea that there is any such thing as a reasonable person or standard. In place of a sense of what is and isn't reasonable, the Woke ideology sees only one thing, its sole obsession: power. This is a catastrophe for society and the laws upon which a functioning society depends. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to learn about the long history of unreason in Wokeness and even its all-out rejection of the notion that anyone or any position at all can be reasonable in any meaningful sense. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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May 3, 2021 • 1h 38min

Equity and the Unmaking of UT Austin

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 university as an educational institution. Of course, this isn't to pick on UT Austin. Most universities are doing the same thing to themselves now, much to our detriment as a society. So are most companies, schools, churches, and everything else. The ideas are shallow and functionally identical, so even if UT Austin isn't interesting to you, these kinds of plans are likely to be infecting something closer to your life. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay takes this jargon-heavy plan (http://bit.ly/UTAustinDEI) and reads through it, breaking it down so that people outside of the inner circle of UT Austin's diversicracy can make sense of what these plans entail. The short answer is an ideological reworking of the institution to make it into something it never should have been: a seminary to a new totalizing ideology that is taking over our society and poisoning our minds. Join Dr. Lindsay as he reads through this document and breaks down exactly why the requirements it entails amount to creating de facto discrimination, quotas in employment and advancement, and wholesale corruption that is to be enabled by a raft of expensive new equity commissars who add nothing of value to the institution. If UT Austin is something close to your life, this might be especially alarming and informative to you, as it is setting itself on the same path that destroyed The Evergreen State College in 2017. If not, you'll still find much value in the discussion of this document because something approaching a facsimile is likely to be in place or in the works wherever you learn, work, or worship. James's goal in this episode of the podcast is to inform you about what these documents really entail wherever they arise. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Apr 28, 2021 • 1h 15min

Authenticity and the Woke Crisis of the Real

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, is passe and embarrassing, even as we crave it so much that the world itself needs to be done away with and replaced with raw experience. In Critical Theory, nothing is authentic because a consumerist society has already commodified, marketed, and sold it to us as a good life that doesn't exist and controls us. Wokeness inherits all of this cynical legacy and generates inauthentic identities doing inauthentic scholarship to achieve inauthentic political goals. In this sense, authenticity is a form of kryptonite against Wokeness because Wokeness can't abide or manipulate the authentic. Its deconstruction has no power over the truly and comfortably real. But what is authenticity and how can you be more authentic? In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, join James Lindsay for a detailed discussion of the crisis of authenticity at the heart of the Woke project and its predecessors as well as a discussion of what it means to approach authenticity for yourself. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Apr 23, 2021 • 1h 25min

Communism Doesn't Know How

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 of certain social changes, a perfect society will manifest. How? Because they will. The details aren't meant to be known or told; they're meant to be figured out. This is in exact alignment with the historicism in Marx's dialectical materialism: once we get capitalism out of the way, we'll enter a worker-managed system (socialism) that can start figuring out how to make the state redundant to its purposes, at which point a stateless improvement of the same will emerge and the communist utopia (and end of History) will emerge. On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay gives an example of how a contemporary police abolitionist activist has made almost exactly this same argument perfectly explicitly and walks you through how you can spot it for what it is. Join Lindsay for one of his more important discussions. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Apr 19, 2021 • 31min

The Woke Goal: Everything Serves Theory

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 Woke agenda proceeds far enough, you will in time find yourself being a Woke person professing Wokeness in Catholic or Protestant language, or through science and medicine, or in rockclimbing and music. That is, the Woke agenda is to flatten all the variety out of life and make every aspect of life do one thing and one thing only: serve Theory. This means that Wokeness is a totalizing ideology and will lead to totalitarian outcomes unless we reject it and put a stop to its relentless takeover of our society and every aspect of our lives. Join James Lindsay on this latest episode of the New Discourses Podcast to dive more deeply into this alarming truth about Wokeness. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Apr 13, 2021 • 1h 22min

A Values-Based Approach to Leaving Wokeness Behind

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 truth, beauty, liberty (thus responsibility), and merit. Join James in this episode of the New Discourses podcast, wherein he discusses why these are the right values as well as why we should hold the narrow way against other competitors in the space that will not produce results as good, including both the Very Smart "respectability" (blue pill) approach and the relatively hopeless "post-liberal" or "neoreactionary" approach (black pill, mostly). Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Apr 9, 2021 • 1h 41min

The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism

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 millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing Lysenkoism, despite its catastrophe, meant a trip to the gulag or a bullet in your head. We should be aware of Lysenko because it is crucially important to understand how the ideological perversion of science, especially the biological sciences, can lead to catastrophes. In fact, if we were more aware of Trofim Lysenko and his legacy of death, we might be more cognizant of the threat we're currently stumbling our way into under the banners of "antiracist medicine" and "health equity." These are the dawn of Medical Lysenkoism, which is a tragedy in the making, potentially on a grand scale, and this is already well underway. The threat of Medical Lysenkoism is rapidly growing around us already, and we have to take it seriously and demand it be put to a halt. In this case, Critical Race Theory and its perverse doctrines of "antiracism" and "equity" are being leveraged to transform healthcare away from a science- and patient-oriented endeavor to an activist opportunity to "level the playing field." Further, under the banner of "health equity" and Covid-19, our society's concerning lurch toward medical dictatorship (governed by this new "equitable" Medical Lysenkoism) is becoming the standard throughout our medical schools, hospitals, and research universities. This is a preventable catastrophe in the making. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he reads through a recent essay (https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/bram-wispelwey-michelle-morse-antiracist-agenda-medicine) published in Boston Review outlining an advance in the "health equity" agenda wherein even racially preferential care is described as already being implemented and reparations are demanded at a major Boston-area teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

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