New Discourses

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 they espouse and preach intolerance but when they also cease to be amenable to reason and rational debate, forbid their followers from listening to reason and rational debate, cannot be held in check by public opinion, and encourage their followers to respond to arguments with "fists or pistols," i.e., violence of some form or another. I contend that the Woke, uniquely, have crossed this line in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast. They are absolutely intolerant, will not debate or listen to alternative perspectives, and, unlike all other hate movements that fail those two criteria, have grown to be completely unchecked and uncheckable by public opinion. This places them outside of the range to which tolerance should be extended in free, open societies, and it identifies them uniquely as a threat to their continuance. Join me to hear my argument for how Karl Popper warned us in 1945 so that we might see this situation when it arose. Infographic: http://bit.ly/ParadoxToleranceInfographic For more on the idea of tolerance, check out the entry on "tolerance" (https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-tolerance/) in my Critical Social Justice Encyclopedia and check out the four-part series on Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" on the New Discourses podcast, part 1 here: https://newdiscourses.com/2021/01/how-not-to-resolve-the-paradox-of-tolerance/ -James 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.

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 what constitutes good violence and bad violence, truth and falsity, liberating tolerance from the kind that must not be tolerated and must be suppressed. In our own time, it is the Woke and the high-powered elites in government, media, education, and law who have taken up this mantle of being able to decide, in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse, what must be tolerated, no matter how bad it is, and what must be suppressed, no matter how legitimate it is. The parallels to our own time are undeniable, and, as Lindsay has claimed throughout, the unavoidable conclusion is that we live in the asymmetric and totalitarian logic of "Repressive Tolerance" today. The second half of this episode leaves the essay itself and dives into a postscript to the original essay that Marcuse added three years later, in 1968, after the logic of his essay had already caused innumerable riots and episodes of civil unrest at the end of that tumultuous and transformational decade. In exploring this postscript, we see Marcuse sticking to his guns, but we also see just how blatantly obvious it is that his repressive tolerance has become the monster it sought to slay, which sheds considerable light upon what some people are now calling "the Great Realignment" in our societies, cultures, and politics. 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.

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 suppress and what it must tolerate, including the sorts of violence and extralegal behaviors it must tolerate. The statement, which we arrive at near the end of this part, is simple, in Marcuse's own words: "Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left." In this part of the lecture series, Lindsay walks the listener through the darker part of Marcuse's argument to show how he arrives at this blatantly biased and ridiculous conclusion that has set the stage for the totalitarianism we see today in Wokeness and from Big Tech. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 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.

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 in the 1960s when he wrote the essay, but paradoxically, or ironically, because it adopts the logic of this very essay as justification for its administration! This part of the series, then, raises particularly interesting questions about whether or not Marcuse would support the fruits of his own work and thus sheds interesting light on the problem we currently find ourselves in. It sets the stage for answering at the end of the series how we might go about solving this problem while avoiding the mistake Marcuse plainly made. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 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.

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." The thesis statement of this essay can be boiled down to "movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence." This asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960s, and we're living in the fruit of that catastrophe now. To help people understand this vitally important and intrinsically totalitarian essay and its relevance to our present moment, James Lindsay walks the listener through Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" in a four-part lecture series. In this series, he reads the essay in full and attempts to make clear how it is the logic underlying the present moment. The goal is to explain the essay as Marcuse would have understood it, in his own context, and to show how his own logic has become dominant and the monster that he believed he was fighting. In the first part, Lindsay begins by framing the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to give background on Marcuse. He also explains that Marcuse seems to be attempting to give a solution to Karl Popper's famous "Paradox of Tolerance," which was provided as an aside in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, which analyzed how fascism can arise and overtake liberal societies. Marcuse's answer to this conundrum is that a "discriminating tolerance," a "liberating tolerance," must be practiced that offers favoritism to the left and actively suppresses the right, as he defines them (from a perspective of Critical Theory). Join Lindsay as he contextualizes and then brings the first portion of this essay to life, and stay tuned for Parts 2, 3, and 4 to come! Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 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.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 16 If you want to understand the present moment, especially how similar Wokeness seems to Mao's Cultural Revolution, you have to understand the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci wrote a series of essays and books while imprisoned by the Italian fascists in the 1920s and 1930s that are referred to as his Prison Notebooks. These are the birthplace of Cultural Marxism, which James Lindsay argues has evolved into "Identity Marxism" since. Once you understand Gramsci, you can easily understand what is going on with our society at present and understand more clearly than ever why it must be resisted. Though he didn't coin the term, the idea fellow communist Rudi Dutschke would name "the long march through the institutions" in 1967 is ultimately Gramsci's roadmap to getting communism to take hold in the West. Gramsci identifies that the "cultural hegemony" of Western cultures prevented communism from having any chance of taking root, so he recommended a strategy that seeks to tear apart and capture major cultural institutions, including religion, family, education, media, and law. Mao understood this clearly and used it to devastating effect. The same thing is happening throughout the West today. Join James Lindsay as he explains the thought and relevance of Antonio Gramsci in today's Woke movement, which he aptly brands "Leninism 4.0." Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 http://bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 15 We are witnessing the birth of a new national mythology in America, and it is not good news. Imperfect as it was, the old one was better, warts and all, and it needs to be fought for. This new mythology turns the story of America on its head, positioning it not as having been born in the pursuit of freedom and liberty in 1776 but in slavery and evil in 1619. It has mainstreamed itself since the 1960s but especially over the last five years as it used Trump's presidency as a foil to legitimize its pseudo-real description of America for millions, and now it has gained the beginnings of cultural hegemony (which it is already abusing). This magic narrative has been and remains the key to their power. This new mythology is using its own narrative about Trump's presidency and, especially, the events that took place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a pivotal moment in its story arc, where it finally gained the upper hand on more than 400 years of evil and could usher in a new world order based on equity, guaranteed by the "perfected" state apparatus and its corporate partners (especially in tech). The thing is, while the real American story genuinely is the story of freedom, this new alternative, of "liberation," is based not in truth but in alchemy, and like all such regimes, it will therefore end in catastrophe. Lead, as it sees our history, cannot be changed into gold, as it views our future through its manic utopian lenses, and drinking potions of cinnabar will not make people live forever but will slowly poison them into madness. Join James Lindsay as he tries to make sense of the events we have been watching unfold over the last few days and years, relying in an unexpected way, if you'll believe it, on the postmodern philosophers who in some ways saw this danger first. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay - Episode 14 In a recent long-form essay on New Discourses (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/), James Lindsay explained the origins of totalitarianism in a single word: psychopathy. There, he explained that totalitarianism arises from people who cannot cope with reality as it is, and yet who are content to manipulate others, constructing a "pseudo-reality" in service to a vision of the world that serves their needs. That pseudo-reality holds as its North Star a Utopian vision that aligns with artificial resolutions to their inability to cope with reality as it is, and it thereby attracts others who have similar issues. By constructing a false logic (a paralogic) and a false morality (a paramorality) to define and enforce the pseudo-reality, they can gather supporters in a cult-like fashion. In the end, those ensnared lose the ability to distinguish reality and pseudo-reality almost entirely and become functionally psychopathic, and if they gain enough social, cultural, economic, and political power, they can hold hostage entire societies that are, in effect, on the march to totalitarianism and, eventually, total catastrophic collapse. The essay is an important read, but it is also a difficult one. In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James seeks to explain the essay in easier language and to flesh out its ideas one by one. He sees this process of unpacking the essay as his next major work, and in this podcast, he begins the process of linking the concept of "ideological pseudo-reality" to more familiar examples, not least Wokeness. Critical Race Theory, for example, is a pseudo-reality that positions racism as the ordinary state of affairs in society, not an immoral aberration from them. Queer Theory is a pseudo-reality in which being normal with regard to sex, gender, and sexuality is a problem while being in some way deviant (which is not the same as being gay or even trans) is elevated as normal. Communism is a pseudo-reality that deems socially engineered command economies as effective and efficient ways to maximize human flourishing. Covid-19 is a pseudo-reality built to enact control around a genuine and serious virus called SARS-CoV-2. These topics and more are presented in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to help people understand and, hopefully, able to see reality for itself again. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Human beings think in stories. We understand ourselves and the world, societies, social groups, and contexts we live in that way. One type of story is a national story, and in this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James Lindsay makes the case that Americans have, by and large, forgotten the totality of their own story. This has happened by placing too much focus and too much emphasis on one valuable and important part of the American story, which is equality. All men are, in fact, created equal, at least so far as liberal ethics should understand men, but this part of the American story exists in some tension with the other parts, especially the liberty part of the story, which is threatened by an overemphasis on equality in the same way that equality is threatened by an overemphasis on liberty. The truth is, even on a perfectly equal playing field, liberty will produce unequal outcomes because people will behave in unequal ways, and this form of inequality of outcome is just, even if inequality of opportunity isn't. In this podcast, Lindsay argues that Americans have mistaken the equality part of their story for the whole story, and in that the equality part of their story has been largely but not perfectly fulfilled, Americans now find themselves retelling the story in ever more tendentious ways, including Critical Social Justice. That is, Americans, in seeking to understand themselves against their own story, which they have misunderstood, are telling a kind of genre fiction on the equality story, trying to resurrect its themes in new ways to give themselves meaning and personal and social context. The Critical Social Justice, or Woke, story is comprehensible as a certain type of genre fiction on the equality portion of the American story, one that inverts the very values it claims to espouse in the pursuit not of further equality but of equity, which is a type of enforced equality of outcomes, regardless of behavior, talent, and merit. In the end Lindsay urges Americans to remember the totality of their story: liberty and equality in balance with one another, government with the consent of the governed, and a place, at least one place in the world, where these values can be kept alive. The American story has not been fulfilled, although it is not necessarily clear what its next chapters are. This podcast hopes to start finding the next parts of the American story. In that, Lindsay urges that Americans today are called to be keepers of the flame of liberty in a society that values and has, in largest part, achieved equality. They are also encouraged to offer their balanced model of federalism and anti-federalism, individual and national sovereign liberty, in this case, to the world as globalism increases with technology. Should the world refuse, Americans should not turn their backs on their story but should, instead, keep the flame of Americanism burning bright for any who should want it. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

James Lindsay recently said on Twitter that he will vote "unhappily" for Republicans including Trump in these troubled times after seeing an argument that the left should work to abolish the Constitution. Join him on this episode of the New Discourses Podcast for an explanation of his thought process on this issue as it has unfolded over this tumultuous summer of 2020. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.