If you want to understand what's happening in the world today, you must understand: (1) We live in Herbert Marcuse's world, and (2) Our children almost all go to Paulo Freire's schools.
These two facts take many, many hours to unpack and understand, but they can be summarized quickly in a thread. I have produced and am producing podcasts on New Discourses covering those hours and hours as well.
First, we live in Herbert Marcuse's world. This is the world of "Repressive Tolerance," at first blush. It's a world in which movements from the Left must be extended tolerance, even if violent, and movements from the Right must not, to the point of censored *thought*.
We also live in Marcuse's aims, which include sexual liberation (his 1955 book, Eros and Civilization), liberation more broadly through Identity Marxism (Essay on Liberation, 1969), and total Critical Theory and Sustainability (One Dimensional Man, 1964).
The biggest thrusts of Marcuse's work as it applies to the world today, aside from the abusive hierarchy in Repressive Tolerance, are Identity Marxism (new proletariat) and achieving liberated Sustainability (Neo-Communism) through introjecting a "New Sensibility" for Socialism.
The Great Reset is the attempt to create conditions by which total social control can introject the "New Sensibility," including Identity Marxism (Equity and Justice) through Repressive Tolerance. The goal is a "sustainable and inclusive future" under Neo-Communism.
By controlling social media, algorithms, community standards, social credit, etc., the New Sensibility will be forced upon the population until it sticks (Marcuse's introjection). Sustainability in a circular economy will resolve Marx's fundamental contradictions of capital.
The brand name and mechanism for the New Sensibility are "ESG" (Environmental, Social, and Governance standards) and "SDG" (Sustainable Development Goals"). Like Marcuse said, these will require being content with less of everything and a reduction in the world's population.
NB: Marcuse, in the name of Sustainability (Neo-Communism), explicitly calls for a reduction in the world's future population near the end of One-Dimensional Man. That book was written in 1964, when the world population with 3.9 billion, about half of what it is now. Here it is:
So, we live in Herbert Marcuse's nightmare world (which he modeled after those who reject everything, thus both Heaven and Hell, in the third canto of Dante's Inferno).
Why? Mostly ESG and SDGs, but also because our children almost all go to Paulo Freire's schools.
Paulo Freire, like Herbert Marcuse, was a neo-Marxist nutjob, but rather than giving a nightmarish totalitarian vision for the whole Great Reset future, Freire merely redefined education completely in Marxist terms. Not like Dewey and Counts, who used parts of the Soviet model.
Freire actually redesigned education completely to be Marxist. His books are among the most cited in education, humanities, and social science, and all they really do is take the product of education, being educated (or "literate") and turn it into a Marxist structure.
For Freire, being "formally educated" is like having gained access to bourgeois society, so learning what society considers knowledge (or literacy, including social literacy in the existing system) is to obtain a form of bourgeois property, which, per Marx, must be abolished.
Freire retooled education to get away from learning skills that are useful in the existing society (like being able to read, as literacy) and redefined being literate, or educated, as having obtained a critical consciousness of one's conditions and context. Knowing made Marxist.
Culturally relevant teaching (the other CRT) reproduces this Freirean frame within Marcuse-derived Identity Marxism. Thus, there, context matters and educational attainment doesn't, because that would merely reproduce the existing dominant system, which is the worst thing.
Because for Freire education (and "literacy") is sociopolitical education on Marxist terms, Freire also explicitly blends the roles of educator and social worker, paving the way for the (Transformative) Social-Emotional Learning of today, which enables Identity Maoism in schools.
So now we live in this nightmare world where our kids don't just go to Soviet-style schools or Maoist schools but go to schools where the entire program of education has been retooled into a Marxist endeavor used to program Marxist thought. Total disaster!
This is all being used to set the bottom-up stage for what ESG and SDGs achieve from the top-down and inside-out: the Marcusian "Sustainable" Neo-Communism in which technology solves the production (automation) and distribution (AI) problems inherent to central planning.
If you want to understand the crazy world we live in, then, it's applied Herbert Marcuse. If you want to understand why our kids are being programmed instead of educated, it's Marcusian-adapted Freirean schools. All of this is neo-Marxism, which is really just Marxism warmed over
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In light of recent developments, it's worthwhile to revisit George Soros and his methodologies for social change. He calls the method "reflexivity," and you cannot understand today's psychological manipulation and mass-formation psychosis without it. newdiscourses.com/2024/04/the-re…
Reflexive pushes take advantage of the gap between perception and reality to drive rapid social change. In practice, the first step is to create a widely believed misperception. This is accomplished through a "reflexive push" in which a desired fallacy is pushed hard all at once.
The goal of a reflexive campaign is to make sure everyone relevant to a subject is suddenly talking about it in almost the same ways all at once, and anyone who isn't participating either doesn't get it or is a problem. This builds consensus on the "fertile fallacy" being pushed.
Many people misunderstand me about what I think the threat of the Red Conservatives ("Woke Right") really is. It's not to seize and claim power, although they'd gladly take it. It's to spark conflict and ultimately scatter the loose coalition that elected Trump and split MAGA.🧵
Understanding my perspective on the Woke Right's purpose requires understanding first that I don't think it's a fully organic movement but instead one that probably mostly started organically and has been co-opted by savvier enemies of America (or was their creation).
What that means is that I think most of the Woke Right (Red Conservatives) are fully earnest people who fully believe they have the post-liberal sociopolitical philosophy necessary to save the West through claiming power at multiple levels, including the political.
Despite the evidences of the last few years, many people remain skeptical of conspiracy theory-sounding explanations for social movements. Like, are they really centrally controlled, or are they organic? Well, let me ask you this: do you believe in venture capitalism?🧵
The venture capitalist model pretty neatly explains how you can have quasi-coordinated social engineering that isn't centrally manufactured. Think of large NGOs and such as operating like venture capitalists for cultural activism and you pretty much have the model.
The NGOs themselves do have agendas and, in some cases, large-scale orchestrated plans, but they aren't manufacturing most of the social movements that advance their goals. They're finding them, marketing them, and pouring gasoline (lots of money) on them.
I'm going to attempt to explain how Woke people (Left and Right) can say Marx got some things right and is still useful even though his specific conclusions were wrong and sound credible. I'm also going to explain why they're dangerously wrong. 🧵
This little sketch is the key to my argument, so let me explain what it is. It's a position together with a heading (think airplanes or sea navigation), or, alternatively, a depiction of position and momentum, not position alone. Understanding that both matter is key here.
In the sketch, the dot is position. That's some analysis of where we are. Marx or the Critical Theorists or whatever might have said some true things about where we are/were, which is like getting the dot right, but the heading matters a lot. The arrows are the headings.
Wtf is this? Some pompous post-liberal manifesto for the future that fails to understand how we actually got where we are through manipulation and acts of political warfare, is based on "belonging," and looks back to the golden era of the New Deal (and FDR) for its inspiration?!
What amounts to "Conservatives for the New Deal" (big state power) immediately after a bunch of Tech Lords, ESG dudes, and Democrats get invited into the White House after a strong reelection win by Trump? What's going on here?
The problem isn't rampant individualism at all. It's that our governments are violating our inalienable rights by forcing 21st Century Communism on us, spying on us, stealing our data, building a social credit system, and propagandizing us 24/7. Who are these people?
According to the All-Knowing Internet, I still haven't defined "Woke Right" and don't know what "Woke" means. So, let's do this AGAIN. 🧵
Woke means "woke up." It means "woke up from false consciousness." That means "woke up from reality as it is to belief in structural power."
What is structural power? It is not institutional power. It is not individual power. It is not even government power. It's a far vaster conspiracy than any of those. Structural power is the power rooted in the way we have been programmed to interpret the world.
Believing in structural power means you believe that we have limited access to reality and can only come to know what we think is reality through our perceptions, but our perceptions themselves have been structured so they reproduce familiar patterns coded there by power.