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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Like it or not, this is correct. It's not a matter of being tolerant or not. Islam, or at least Islamism if there's any daylight between them, is fundamentally a militant ideology. Free societies cannot tolerate militant ideologies except in small fringes.
Karl Popper laid out the so-called Paradox of Tolerance in 1945 in his not-so-great book The Open Society and Its Enemies, and free societies will live or die based on the practical solution they come up with to this paradox. This paradox is the rub of liberty and freedom.
The Paradox of Tolerance is simply enough stated: must a tolerant society tolerate intolerance that will eventually end its tolerance?
The answer is that there has to be a line drawn somewhere, and the problem is that it's hard to draw a clear line anywhere.
No, Fascism is a progressive ideology, which is inherently idealist (Hitler makes this argument himself about National Socialism in MK vol 2 ch 2). Conservatism is a realist ideology. They're not remotely the same, though both claim to favor the nation and tradition.
Hitler, as indicated: "This is why it is necessary to establish a faith in an idealistic Reich to battle against the reckoning imposed by the present materialistic Republic."
This is not a conservative statement, and it's an anti-realist statement, like Marxism would make.
I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what the relationship between Fascism and conservatism is, and it's this: Fascism is what you get when a conservative abandons realism for romanticism and idealism, which are progressive and anti-realist.
Yesterday, I read the very last chapter of Mein Kampf, Volume 2, Chapter 15: "Self-defense as a Right." It's not a particularly enlightening or powerful chapter, but it made me think of Europe today. It makes me think Europe is being forced with immigration back to that place. 🧵
"The enemy's reaction is your real action" is a backbone of Leftist activism, and that sentiment was heavy on me while I read the very last chapter of Mein Kampf. Why? Because the architects of the immigration crisis in Europe would have been familiar with Hitler's motivations.
In fact, the architects of the immigration crisis in Europe would have been fully aware of not just what Hitler was talking about but the effect his arguments had in Germany in the 1920s through 1940s. "Self-defense as a right" is a theme we're hearing everywhere from Reaction.
Authoritarianism is frequently (but not always) explained and measured using a three-factor scale that measures "conventionalism," "authoritarian aggression," and "authoritarian submission." These are worth knowing about, particularly in this day and age. 🧵
Conventionalism is the first of the three typically recognized authoritarian traits. What it refers to is a tendency to follow conventions and to expect (or force) other people to follow the same conventions. These conventions can be defined in a wide variety of ways.
Often, and I think wrongly (following Altemeyer, mostly), the conventions are usually defined in terms of adhering (strictly) to traditional norms and expectations, but this misses a key, crucial generalization that any ideological community can define any conventions it wants.
A huge lure that hooks people into the Woke Right is what we might call "the hope you're not allowed to have." Someone can sell a hope that force or authoritarianism or fascism can stop the apparently unstoppable march of Marxism and radicalize by saying it's unfairly withheld.
Frankly, all totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies use this mechanism. Marcuse talked about it with "liberating tolerance," for example, and the "utopian possibility" of a liberated socialist state. The mechanism (sales pitch) is pretty devious and radicalizes people hard.
In short, the ideologue pitches the idea of a vastly better society freed up from the repressions of the current age but places it just out of reach, thus seeming to damn its targets to living in unnecessary misery if only we were allowed to pursue liberation, but we're not.
Something everyone needs to understand about identity politics and "collective identities" (aka, "collective justice," aka "social justice") is that they are intrinsically scams and will intrinsically end up led by people who screw over the people "of identity" who support them.
Identity politics is not what happened in the Civil Rights Movement. What happened in the Civil Rights Movement was a bid by groups to not have to be treated as groups. The slogan black men carried on signs in Memphis was "I am a man."
The term and concept of identity politics as we understand it now was coined in the late 1970s in the Black Feminist Marxist group called the Combahee River Collective, which laid out the neo-Maoist program of intersectionality from Woke (Left) Identity Marxist perspectives.