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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From my Woke Encyclopedia, an explanation of the "friend-enemy distinction" of Carl Schmitt, which is the Woke political logic. Link at the end!🧵
(1/13) The friend-enemy distinction refers to the cornerstone object of the political and judicial philosophy of a German theorist named Carl Schmitt, who wrote a number of works of right-wing political philosophy and thought before becoming such an enthusiastic Nazi in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler took power, that he earned the informal title “the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.”
Though most of his significant political thinking was done both before and after he was a Nazi, during the years when he was a part of Hitler’s National Socialist movement and Party, he contributed strongly to the legal theory that justified the Nazi “total state,” including writing the 1933 piece that gets rendered in English as “The Legal Basis for the Total State,” which is significantly based upon the friend-enemy distinction.
Friend-enemy distinction:
(2/13) Schmitt’s thought is primarily of interest on the Woke Right, where he is a favored thinker and model political mind. He is vigorously forwarded for a handful of his political concepts, perhaps most visibly his “friend-enemy distinction” as the essential criterion of what makes politics political. This idea is first presented and developed in full detail in his 1927/32 book The Concept of the Political.
Friend-enemy distinction:
(3/13) For Schmitt, what makes the politics political is the distinction between (public) friend and (public) enemy, where enemies are defined as those who are interested in destroying one’s way of life and friends are defined as those who are willing to band together in its defense.
Schmitt specifically compares the essential nature of this distinction in politics to the distinction between good and evil in morality, beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, and profitable versus non-profitable in economics.
That is, politics is only political to the degree that it recognizes the possibility of factions that exist in mutual enmity underwritten by the potentially existential threat of violence. Of course, that means that Schmitt believes the essential criterion of politics is war, which he reveals also in part by making his point by completing the identity contained in von Clausewitz’s famous remark that “war is politics by other means.”
All radical movements find themselves in a pinch: they can only really advance when people don't know their true intentions, but they can only really advance by going public with what they're doing. It's an intrinsic dilemma that only rare figures in rare circumstances can win.
Mamdani is a good example of a rare figure (extremely good at presenting himself disingenuously while looking real) in rare circumstances (terrible primary opponent, then running against a terrible combination of Cuomo/Sliwa, then still not winning by huge margins).
The primary reason NYC got Mamdani isn't something to do with the electorate, the climate, or anything else. Mamdani, with tons of weird money, ran a very strong campaign (rare figure) in very weird circumstances, most of which were candidate-specific, not conditional.
Fun fact: If you had a time machine and could go back in time to this day in 2019 but couldn't take any physical evidence with you, you could not convince almost anyone to take the Woke Left threat seriously and would get mocked and yelled at for trying, even by friends.
Your left-leaning friends (if you have any) would make fun of you for not getting it. Your right-leaning friends would laugh at you for making a mountain out of a molehill. No one really understood there was a serious problem with the Woke Left until after summer 2020.
The reason I know this is because I was there and doing this full time already by that point in my life.
Introducing to you two of the "intellectual" Woke Right's favorite contemporary thinkers: Patrick Deneen (left) and R.R. Reno. Here, they demonstrate their inability to see what is plainly in front of them—a Marxist insurgency through Leftist elitist capture—because of their preference for theories of cultural rot and decay.
These kinds of theories about why we are where we are aren't just dangerous misdiagnosed; they're also self-flattering humblebrags, saying in effect, "things got bad because everyone went to shit except people like us who are better than that." Typical Woke virtue signaling except in "modest" conservative form.
Yes, they are popular with Woke Right propagandists.
It's Saturday, and the world is a mess. Perhaps it's a good time for a little humor with a point. To that end, allow me to reintroduce the "Grievance Studies Affair" to the world. This will be a longer thread (20+ posts) introducing every single paper of the Grievance Studies Affair individually in a new, never-seen-before way.
The Grievance Studies Affair (or, "Sokal Squared") was an academic hoax project done seven years ago by @peterboghossian, @HPluckrose, and I with the help of @MikeNayna, who also produced a documentary (The Reformers, 2023) about what we affectionately named "the project" as we did it.
It involved writing 20+ academic hoax articles and sending them to peer-reviewed journals in the "theoretical humanities," things like gender studies and sexuality studies, to reveal a kind of ideological academic rabies we now refer to as "Woke (Leftism)". In the end 7 of these papers were accepted, 4 were actually published, 1 received recognition for excellence in scholarship in the field of "feminist geography," and 7 more were still under peer review on October 2, 2018, when the Wall Street Journal blew our cover.
What we learned from the project is ultimately that peer review is only as good as the peers. If the peers are corrupted in some way, that corruption will be validated as "knowledge" and passed into the intellectual foundations of society through the existing system. The implications are vast. Of course, while we revealed a form of ideological corruption in academia, there are other forms as well: political, economic, corporate, etc., all of which matter in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons.
While the Grievance Studies Affair itself is now over six and a half years old and thus an article of history, I don't think it has ever been more relevant. To this day, it still has not been reckoned with in the slightest. Our knowledge-producing institutions have ideological rabies and corporatist cancers that will be our undoing. Until we see complete reform or replacement of much of our research, higher-education, and primary and secondary education institutions and apparatuses, we are at risk of complete societal collapse. It really is that serious, and absolutely none of it has been stopped yet.
This thread isn't just a reminder of the Grievance Studies Affair, however. It's also an introduction to a Grievance Studies Portal I have published on @NewDiscourses through much effort of my team. In this thread, each of the 20+ papers will be introduced individually with direct links to their new home on New Discourses so that you can read them and laugh (or cry, or be horrified) and share them with ease. I hope you appreciate them and all the hard work that went into them and their publication here.
For my part, it has been a great opportunity to take a day to reflect and reminisce about one of the most challenging and most fun times of my entire life. I don't think I will ever be blessed with the opportunity to work so hard while laughing my head off ever again, nor will I ever regain the innocence I had going into this project. I thought it was funny when I started. By the middle, I realized it wasn't just serious but a legitimate threat to civilization. I changed my entire life as a result, and not a lot of that has been so funny.
I hope you enjoy this thread. Below, you will find the release video Mike Nayna produced that we put out on October 2, 2018, minutes after the Wall Street Journal outed us. It has been seen millions upon millions of times now and legitimately has changed the world, just not enough. It will serve as your reminder and introduction to the absolute insanity you'll find in the posts below.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Like I said from the start, mostly I hope you'll find this at least as hilarious as it is terrifying, and maybe you'll share it with your friends.
The Grievance Studies Affair has never been more relevant.
The New Discourses Grievance Studies Affair portal is located at the link below. In it, you'll find information about each of us, our motivations, our original write-ups and analysis about the project, as well as every single paper and its peer-reviewed commentary, as available (not all papers made it to peer review).
I hope you will find it a useful and sharable resource about the plague of ideological rabies that has taken over our institutions. newdiscourses.com/grievance-stud…
What became the Grievance Studies Affair began with a trial-balloon paper that @peterboghossian and I wrote in late 2016, hilariously titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." It's one of the funniest things I've ever written, rivaled only by a couple of the later Grievance Studies Papers (YMMV).
It is not housed on the Grievance Studies Affair @NewDiscourses portal, but perhaps it should be, because it wasn't part of the Grievance Studies Affair properly. It might be its second most-famous contribution, however.
In the paper, Peter and I took inspiration from a real paper that had been published in the highest-ranking gender studies journal, Gender & Society, characterizing menstrual blood as a social construct. We argued that penises are not best thought of as male reproductive organs, in part because "pre-operative trans women" also have them (which was effectively repeated in the Supreme Court argumentation this week in the Skrmetti case). Instead, they should be thought of as social constructs that create toxic masculinity and rape culture and cause all the problems in the world, especially climate change.
This paper was ultimately accepted by means of a related but passed-over academic publishing scandal in a (likely) predatory journal called Cogent Social Sciences after a clear sham peer review process after being rejected and transferred from a masculinities journal called NORMA.
Because of the low quality of the journal and the one-off nature of the stunt, it was left ambiguous if Peter and I had proved any point about gender studies and related fields ("Grievance Studies" fields) at all. We were admonished to write more papers, target serious journals, and be more accurate in our claims, and we accepted this challenge happily.
"The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" was published in Cogent Social Sciences on May 19, 2017, and by June 7 Peter and I had resolved to start the Grievance Studies Affair to do the job right. skeptic.com/content/files/…