What Woke Really Means

[Music] Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay, you're listening to the New Discourses podcast, and here on the podcast we talk about "Woke a Lot." So what is "Woke?" That's the point of today's episode. I just want to do a casual episode where I just kind of talk about what "Woke" means. Now, I can go off in a lot of like kind of throat-clearing preamble, talk about "Woke" means critical consciousness, or "Woke" means using critical theory, or "Woke" means having a Marxist analysis, and all of that's true. But I want to talk about "Woke" as a mentality. This isn't the full story about what "Woke" is because to develop the full picture of the philosophy will require us or would require us to get into fields like ontology, which is a fancy philosophical word that means a philosophy of existence or being. What does it mean to be in the world? Of course, as I've talked about in the past, I'm not going to really develop it here. I think that "Woke" has a fundamentally socio-nostic ontology. I think that it has adopted a frame of having been flung into a societal situation that it doesn't recognize, that it didn't choose, and that it can ultimately liberate itself from. But that's beside the point. It's directly tied to what I'm going to say, but it's beside the point. And so what I want to characterize "Woke" as is kind of two things, and they're related to one another. Of course, I want to start by talking about how "Woke" is rooted in a combination of entitlement and alienation. So it is a mentality based on alienation, in a particular way, and that alienation is rooted in a sense of entitlement, which is usually generated by other "Woke" we'll call them "Wizzards" out there, to create a sense of entitlement in people, then connect it to a sense of being alienated from the world that they feel like they should be in, that they're entitled to be in, that then goes on to be attached to things that you're up otherwise familiar with, like identity politics, critical theory, and so on. The second of these things is an epistemological stance. Like I said, there's more to "Woke" than just this, you know, kind of fundamental picture, but there is this, "Woke" is so forward with its epistemology. It's so built around its understanding of knowledge and ideas, and how we decide what is true or valid in the world of truth claims, that it's almost impossible to talk about "Woke" without talking about "Woke" in terms of its relationship to knowledge, how it thinks about "knowing" and what "knowing" means. In fact, I've made arguments in the past. I'm pretty sure I would stand by them. This is complicated because there's kind of like two ways that I, and thus others, use the word "Woke", I use it kind of in this broader sense, which would include classical Marxism, maybe even a lot of esoteric mysticism and so on, and then I use it in this kind of more specific way, which is what came out of the kind of fusion of postmodern theory, neo-Marxism, and critical pedagogy, which sort of is this amalgam of bad ideas at the proximal end of all of this history of Marxist thought. And so Paul O'Fraidy created the idea of critical consciousness, so being "Woke" means having a critical consciousness, and that was expressed in terms of a critical constructivist ideology, and that means there's a critical theory component, that's the critical part, and then there was a constructivist or a postmodernist part. Okay, blah, blah, blah. But this relationship to knowledge is really, really central, at least to this more modern end of what we mean by "Woke", certainly by the time we have Paul O'Fraidy coming out, creating his Marxist theory of knowledge, certainly by then, it's a lot to do with knowledge. So when we think of "Woke", there's a strong relationship to knowledge. Now, I'm going to point out that this sense of alienation not only does it give some kind of socio-nostic ontological standing, but it also gives a relationship to power. And so, as I even wrote way back when in cynical theories with Helen Pluckrose, back, which we wrote this in like 2000, this part probably in 2018, certainly by early 2019, because we submitted the manuscript for this book on August 31st, 2019. I know the book didn't come out until August 2020, part of that had to do with COVID, and apparently we ran out of paper, but that's beside the point in delayed publication. It's usually about nine months from when you submit to manuscript to when it comes out in publication, during which time you still can't edit it, but we had written the bulk of the book by the middle of 2019. And this is from the beginning of the book. It's on pages 30 and 31. I'm just going to kind of rehash something here. Of course, in cynical theories, we laid down that postmodernism is the bug bearer. We left critical theory to the side. Helen and I don't fully agree about that. Of course, I'm right, but that's beside the point. But in a section in the first real chapter, we laid out something we called two principles and four themes, and I won't go into the themes necessarily. But what we said was postmodern, and you could just substitute in woke here, because that's what we're talking about. Postmodern thinkers approached the rejection of modernism and enlightenment thought, especially with regard to universal truths, objective knowledge and individuality in strikingly different ways. But we can spot a few consistent themes. The modern turn involves two inextricably linked core principles, one regarding knowledge and one regarding politics, which act as the foundation of four significant themes. I'm not going to get into the themes. These principles we wrote are the postmodern knowledge principle. So here's that relationship to knowledge. Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable in a commitment to cultural constructivism. I'm going to characterize it differently today. Secondly, the postmodern political principle, a belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies which decide what can be known and how. And so I'm going to tie that to the alienation thing, but it's not really the point. I'm not really here to articulate what we wrote in cynical theories and talk about it and say, look, we were right. I just want to show that there's this continuity of thinking about what woke means in at least my work that precedes 2020, and it certainly precedes 2024 in my adoption of the term woke right. And I think it's all consistent. But so the two pieces I'm going to discuss in this podcast are a sense of alienation rooted in entitlement and a relationship to knowledge that boils down to a epistemic preference for marginalized knowledges. Those are the two real ingredients that make someone woke. If they have a sense of alienation rooted in entitlement, and if they have a relationship to knowledge that epistemically prefers or preferences, I should say, that means prioritizes marginalized knowledges, then they're probably woke. Those things are derivable from what we wrote in cynical theories, but the point isn't to demonstrate that. I just want to say that there's this long standing that was written at least seven or eight years ago. There's this long standing continuity in thinking on this topic that indicates that I'm not just making this up as I go along. Now let's talk about the alienation and the entitlement first. So alienation, I think, I think that the most important sentence that I've read that clarifies what woke means. The single most important sentence comes from Karl Marx. He's writing in the economic philosophic manuscripts. He's writing that in Paris in 1844. And he's exploring in this particular part. I don't have him in front of me. I saw my laptop. I could probably find the quote. I'm not going to look for the quote exactly. I'm in a paraphrase, but he's writing at this point in the economic philosophic manuscript, which I think contains most of the essence of Marxism, by the way, more so than the communist manifesto, more so than capital, more so than a lot of his other voluminous writings. But here we have him writing about the relevance of Higgels dialectical method to the picture of economics and philosophy that he thinks outlines how the world really works. And he's saying, you know, well, Higgels got some stuff wrong. He's a spiritualist. He's a theologian. He's this. He's that. But Higgels got some stuff right. And he's talking about the dialectical method and making the dialectical method practical for kind of the first time being an abstract methodology before that. He's kind of claiming. So now what he says is, and this is where I think you have the most, and I've said this in another couple episodes, but I think this is the most distilled explanation of what it means to be woke, what you woke up to, what you're awake to, not just a critical consciousness without explaining what that means or a class consciousness as it was for Marx. He says that Higgels dialectic outlines and gets right the idea of super session by retraction of alienation into the self. That to me is the woke disposition in a single sentence. Woke means that you have superseded yourself. You have gone beyond yourself. You have transcended yourself. You have gone higher than yourself by the retraction of alienation into yourself. What does that mean? How does that work? Well, you're taking a sense of being alienated and bringing it into yourself, retracting it into yourself, defining yourself in terms of that alienation. So the woke mindset is one that defines itself in terms of alienation, but it doesn't just feel alienated. Woe is me. It is woe is us because you are superseding yourself for what a group identity. The sense of alienation that woke teaches is that some identity group to which you belong is alienated from full participation in society. That's the intrinsic idea of class conflict at the basis of all of Marx's thinking. For my socionomistic hypothesis, it is the basis of socionomism that there is a powerful ruling class that alienates and exploits a lower class that doesn't get to experience itself as it really is. It doesn't get to experience itself as truly human in the literal sense or in the social sense because it is being exploited by a higher class, an upper class, a bourgeois class for the Marxists that is operating like kind of like the false society or world-constructing god called the Demiurge, the demon of the Nostek faith. Now, I don't want to get off into those weeds. This is beside the point. The point is that there is this sense of being alienated. The Nostek thing is really important because what's alienating you is the alien who alienates and the alien who alienates you is this upper class, but you are going to leave yourself as an individual behind and supersede yourself to see yourself as a member of a class, a dialectical transformation of yourself as a result of retracting a sense of alienation into yourself. Now, where do you get that sense of alienation? That's where the entitlement comes in. So you can talk about Marxism in terms of that fancy French concept or Saint-Aumont which is resentment that's gone bad, curdled envy is the way I've described it in the past. It's like when you just come to resent kind of everything about the situation you find yourself in, is all pervasive, envious resentment of your situation. We can characterize it that way, but the deal is that there's ultimately some sort of entitlement. You are a certain kind of person or being, a human being, a social being, Marx tells us over and over again in there. You are a human being who is a social being and you've been alienated from that by this power structure by the alien who alienates. You've been alienated from that. You not as an individual, but the entire class of people to which you belong, because the fundamental organizing principle of society is class conflict. In critical race theory, I've said that the basic point of critical race theory is to believe that the fundamental organizing principle of society is a system of racism that is not easily overcome. That the fundamental organizing principle of society to queer theory is normativity whether cis normativity or heteronormativity or normativity in general or thin normativity for the fat studies dimension or whatever. That there's these norms that have been imposed upon society that have alienated the queer, the marginal, the outsiders, to that normative structure. But it's still based on this kind of class identity. So you are alienated because there is some class and you are entitled to experience the world in a certain way, but because you're a member of that alienated class, you don't get to. You are being alienated, so you supersede yourself, identify as part of the class, and then you retract that sense of alienation into yourself and learn to identify with it and thus supersede yourself. Thus the identity politics that you probably associate with woke, if I were to say to the average man on the street, all right, you've probably heard the term woke. What does it mean? They would probably say it means identity politics. They might add on the left, but they would say it means identity politics. And the reason that it means identity politics is that the fundamental basis for what we mean by woke is that you woke up to a new view of yourself rooted in identity politics, rooted in a sense of class oriented or group oriented alienation that you've retracted into yourself to supersede yourself, to see yourself as a member of that class. Okay, so first thing that we can say here is that the alienation at the heart of the woke mindset creates the identity politics. The identity politics is not a primary understanding of what woke is. It is a phenomenon of woke. It is secondary. It is derivative to the sense of alienation and the interpretation of that alienation that is class-based and then the pulling in of the alienation into yourself to identify with it, to identify by it, to identify as the alienated member of a class. Really, as the member, the valued member of an alienated class is a better way to say that. And the whole reason you can feel alienated as a class is because it starts by creating an entitlement complex. So you convince people that they're entitled to live a certain way and that they don't get to because they're the member of a class that's being alienated by another class from their full experience or inheritance in life. And you get them to wake up to an identity view of themselves and identity politics based view of themselves by getting them to retract that sense of alienation into themselves, which is associated with the group that's said to be being alienated by the alienating force, which is operated from the alienating group, the alien who alienates. Okay. So you get a lot of what we can we associate with woke downstream from this. Like I said, the identity politics fall right out in your lap. So once you get to the identity politics, you get to all of that class conflict based stuff that's out there. In other words, what you get to is the friend enemy distinction in politics as it got called by Carl Schmidt. You now have groups or tribes of individuals who see themselves in terms of their group or tribe, who see their situation as alienated, robbed of their full potential, therefore existential. As Mark says, you are not truly human. You're not allowed to be human. You aren't allowed to exist as you were supposed to exist because you're alienated from your true social, which is to say, your true human nature by this process of socio-nostic alienation. Now, Marks doesn't call it socio-nostic, I do, but that's beside the point. So this is an existential situation of your group in conflict with the other group that's alienating you or the alienates in general. Or maybe there's a melange of groups or several groups that are all kind of competing with one another. But because of this intrinsic class conflict, so we start with the sense of alienation, which is rooted in an entitlement complex. You get the entitlement complex. You get people to feel an alienated by it. You get them to identify as a member of a group that is alienated by this power dynamic that's generated by the class conflict. And you have them believing in class conflict and identity politics now. And identity politics doesn't mean civil rights by the way. It means it doesn't mean advocating on behalf of a genuinely oppressed minority. It means this. It means this this activity where you see yourself existentially alienated and separated from the rest of the political situation. And therefore, operating as a collective in class conflict. So the class conflict is intrinsic to the idea of identity politics. So you get to the identity politics. You get to the class conflict. And this gives us the friend enemy distinction in politics. And once you get to the friend enemy, what does the friend enemy distinction? It means that there are people who are with you allies. The word friend, it turns out that Schmidt in the original German uses the word for friend in German. He does not specifically use the word for ally. But he means something that is the opposite of what he means by enemy. And he's very very clear when he describes what he means by enemy. He never describes what he means by friend by the way. This is in his book The Concept of the Political. What he explains is what he means by the word enemy. And the enemy he is very, very clear is not the individual or the private enemy, okay, which is inimicus in Latin. He's very clear about that. It is instead the public enemy, which is hostess in Latin. Okay, so the friend is the opposite in some sense of the public enemy, which means it's a public friend or you could say a political friend. There's no such thing as a political friend, though. And I really want you to pause and let that soak in for a second. By the way, there is no such thing as a political friend. Re-adjust your life accordingly. You're probably making some big mistakes. There's no such thing as a political friend. There are political allies. So when we hear the word ally, like black ally or queer ally or trans ally or gay ally, that's the friend enemy distinction and politics. Class ally ally to women under the feminist doctrines. This concept of ally ship as it gets defined in the woke doctrine. So now we're getting to ally ship is the friend in the friend enemy distinction. And the friend enemy distinction says that the society is broken into or any political environment. He says is broken into groups that are friend that are opposed with full mutual enmity with the risk of existential annihilation. It is an existential condition against enemies who are or would be willing to end their way of life. So you have this existential conflict theory at the heart. Now we don't have to get into Carl Schmidt to believe that this is what Carl Marx meant by the conflict between classes. It's the same idea. Carl Schmidt just gave it a different name and a different time later. In the 1930s, just before he became a Nazi and applied it to develop the Nazi program for Hitler. So you end up with this friend enemy distinction, but the friend enemy distinction because it's a group based, which is to say a belonging based, there's a group based, existential group conflict or class conflict justifies Machiavellianism. So all of a sudden you get to this kind of dark tetrad space as a result, all this derivative stuff, cancel culture, double standards, reward our friends and punish our enemies, lying, the ends justify the means lying in order to gain political power, hiding your power level. So to speak, not showing your true face, all this Machiavellian politics is also downstream from what? This intrinsic sense of alienation, Nietzsche and others describe this in terms of something called slave morality. When you believe that the society, I think Hegel described it that way too, is split fundamentally into masters and slaves. The slaves create kind of an antinomian morality of their own, which isn't just among themselves, it justifies their retaliation against their masters, it justifies the logic of the slave revolt. And it is a very utilitarian ends justifies the means logic, because why? Because you are deprived of your essential humanity. Therefore, you cannot operate within the boundaries of humanity. You have to operate within a more existential framework. So you have a different set of rules, which is called slave morality, and you get to act in a different way. And so the Machiavellianism, the cancel culture, the double standards, and so on, the ends justify the means logic are all derivative to this sense of alienation. So like I said, what's primary here, if we just walk it all the way back, is you have a largely manufactured entitlement complex that's turned into a narrative about alienation, until it becomes a sense of alienation, and that alienation is then identified with a group in that identity is retracted into yourself. So you no longer see yourself as an individual, with individual rights, you see yourself as a member of a group that is alienated from full participation in society by some alien force that is alienating you, that is illegitimate, justifying the conflict theory, the identity politics, Machiavellianism, the friend enemy distinction, and so on. So all of that stuff we think of as woke, all the bad behavior is all derivative to fundamentally seeing yourself as alienated. That sense of alienation is fundamentally derived from a manufactured entitlement complex. People like you, that's your group, deserve to be a certain way. So we talk about the concept of social justice, that's what you're talking about, group based entitlements are at the bottom of social justice, at least in the way that woke people use it, whether that woke person is a communist, whether it's Pol Pot, for example, who said everything in his communist regime, including killing a quarter of his population, three million Cambodians, was done for social justice, or whether you're dealing with your typical so-called social justice warrior, which is a term we haven't really used that much in the last little while, that we now call wokies, or wokes, or woke laughter, or whatever, or insufferable leftists, whatever you want to call them, okay, so step one alienation. Now, sidebar, we can all tell like, it was all very clear how it applies to the left, Marxism, critical race theory, and so on. You know, white supremacy is the force that alienates, whiteness is its kind of embodiment, the people who get to benefit from whiteness become the demi-erge, the alien that's alienating, racial minorities are alienated by it. Same story with the queer thing, it's very easy to understand, there are people who've designated themselves as normal, that was an illegitimate move, everybody else's deviant or queer, and they arrange society for their benefit and marginalize the queer, and so derivative to this sense of you get to be your own freak and fire, freak flag, whenever, however you, and wherever you want, and you're being oppressed if you don't get to, is this sense of alienation about who you really are. You see, you should really be able to be whatever kind of sexual being you want to be. You have a sexual bill of rights, you have all kinds of stuff like that, I forgot what all they call these things, at the moment, and you've been alienated from who you really are, which is your weird gender, your weird sexuality. By the way, what do you, James, what do you mean by a weird sexuality? Aren't you just playing their game? Look, sexuality's not complicated, I'm just going to be flattened real with you. Here's a real simple rule of thumb for you. If you were trying to talk to your parents or your grand parents or an older aunt or uncle about your so-called gender or sexuality, and it requires an explanation, you're weird. Okay, none of this requires an explanation. I'm, there's nothing complicated. If you have to say, oh well, you know, it means that I'm attracted to this kind of part, nope. If it requires an explanation as to what it means, it's weird. Okay, male attracted to female, male attracted to male, female attracted to female, not that complicated. Everybody gets it. If you can say it in that much space, probably not weird. If it requires you to say, well, I'm attracted to certain kinds of people on Tuesdays and different kinds of people on Wednesdays, that's an explanation. Weird, queer. Okay, so there is normal, and then there's weird, right? And you're weird. You're just weird. And like, I'm not totally opposed to you being weird. I don't think it's necessarily going to be the healthiest thing for you in the whole world to be weird, but you're probably going to get aggrieved about it. If you think you're entitled to be able to be weird, and I don't want you being weird in public, like nobody wants to deal with you being weird like that. And so you're, you should keep it private, but if you can't, you're going to get really aggrieved about it, and then you're going to be pissed off. And then queer theory is waiting to tell you that you are a member of an alienated class, and you can retract this since the alienation into yourself and have queer allyship will build you a cool acronym, LGBTQ+ will give you one of any number of 3,500 flags that nobody knows what they mean. And you'll have a new identity based on that. You can see how it works. My point is you can see how it works. That was a huge stupid digression. Okay, so obviously ownership and private property are the alienating force under marks. The bourgeoisie or the alien that alienates and the proletariat are the workers who are expressing themselves through their work or producing the value by which society operates. This is a very sociological materialist theory, and they're having that ripped away from them. So they're not able to understand their full humanity. So the workers themselves are alienated from being full participants in society. You get the picture. Okay, so it's all downstream from that sense of alienation. The alienation is built on an entitlement complex, which is people who are like you deserve to live a certain way, but there are powerful people out there who keep you from doing that. Okay, so we see how it fits in the left. What about the right? Well, there's different ways. The easy, easy one to see is this whole conspiracy theory of the woke, by the way, it's just the same conspiracy theory as anti-semitism that the Jews are these powerful characters to do shadowy things and control the world is the same as saying the whites are these shadowy characters who do these powerful things and control the world or that the straights are these shadowy characters who do certain things and control the world. It's the same conspiracy theory guys. It's literally the same model. So you got this kind of one species of kind of woke right that blames everything on the Jews. That one wasn't complicated at all. Okay, the Jews are like the mastermind or whatever. They're the alien who alienates you as a Gentile or as anybody else is somehow, you know, alienated from your true ability to live in society. There are more complicated expressions of this like the ones that the Nazis took up that the Jews are contaminating your society and your race. They didn't a woke racial ideology at the heart of their thing. We can talk about that, I guess. I don't want to get in all these details. What the point is, that's an easy one to understand. Now, the way that this does tie to the Nazis, the way that this usually works on the right is different than the way that it works on the left. That doesn't mean that it's not still woke. That sense of alienation is still there. You see, what the right is concerned about is this kind of societal extension of the family, which is called a nation. And the nation is the rightful object that's attached to a nation state or a political object that we think of as a state. Okay, so there are rightful people who built the nation, who characterized the nation, who are the rightful inheritors of the nation. And because there are these other things that we've tolerated, bad ideology, wrong kinds of people, Jews, in particular, they've watered down the nation or they've spoiled the nation. And so the people who are supposed to inherit the nation, as it says in the constitution, our posterity, the posterity feel aggrieved. They are alienated from the society they think they're supposed to inherit. They have an entitlement because I'm a heritage American. I deserve to inherit the wealth and abundance and prosperity of the American experiment. But there's these damn Jews and immigrants who've come in and spoiled it all for me. See how it works. So they feel alienated. I can't even sing God bless America. So some guy called Dale Partridge said this. Fucking idiot. Sorry, I'm not supposed to swear on this one. Dale Partridge said because all this Jewish stuff, we can't even sing God bless America because something something. I don't know. It's Christians because he's a poor alienated Christian right by the Jews. But it turns out of course that as they are Berlin, who is Jewish, wrote God bless America because he loved America so much. Okay, sidebar. The sense of alienation is like that they are a group of people who identify with a class, but it's not like black people or racial minority, some universal class where all of humanity, no matter what country they're in or whatever, can be split into it. It is rightful inheritors of the nation and foreigners or outsiders. The other are the people who aren't supposed to be part of the nation. And by tolerating them too much, they've created a situation where there's an entitlement complex. It makes those people feel alienated from the inheritance they're supposed to receive, which they feel entitled to. Very simple logic. This is why these people are woke, by the way, at the heart of their basic ontology is a sense of alienation rooted in a sense of class identity, where that class is called the nation. And the nation is defined in some way or another that they think designates a legitimate member of the nation. People ask me sometimes, James are going to write a book about the woke right. And I always say no, that right there is the only interesting part. In my opinion, that what I just said is the only interesting part of the whole freaking woke right architecture of thought is that they locate their sense of legitimacy as human beings in the extended sociological family called a nation that has rightful members and interlopers. And they feel alienated from their own nation as a result of tolerating the interlopers, which again could be people or ideology. So how does that work? Well, it's a little complicated because different people define nations differently. It could be a people or people in a place where it could be a people in a place with a common language, a common history and a common destiny, a sense of historicity running through them, a common culture, a common religion. There are lots of ways to define what actually makes a nation. And it's actually in say the US context very complicated because we have been a nation that has allowed an awful lot of immigrants to come in and to partially assimilate. And we don't doubt their Americanness. For example, nobody doubts the Americanness at this point of what might be called Irish Americans. People whose ancestors are from Ireland who primarily came over in the 19th century, maybe some of the early 20th century, we don't doubt their Americanness. We don't do it for German Americans whose families came over again mid 19th century to early 20th century primarily. We don't even do it for more recent immigrants. As much we don't do it for Chinese Americans. Whose families maybe came over again in the mid 19th century and built a lot of the West, particularly the railroads. Just making a point here. But what we do is we have this quasi assimilation. Irish Americans, we don't doubt that they're American, but they still have a blowout on St. Patrick's Day and they make big fusses about their Irish heritage. And they dress and say certain things sometimes, but not all the time. And it's like important, but it's not important. Same with German Americans whose families go way back. Same with Chinese Americans whose families go way back. And it's not a big deal. The whole American thing is it's literally not a big deal. America's like, no, we can do the melting pot thing. And it's cool. And yeah, you can still be as Irish as you want and do your Irish things. And as, you know, Jewish as you want, do your Jewish things and Chinese as you want, do your Chinese things, Indian as you want, do your Indian things, German as you want, do your German things. Whatever Persian, Armenian, we could just go down the list. And it's cool. But they only quasi or pseudo integrate. They don't fully assimilate like a hundred percent. Well, eventually this tolerance thing, things start not working and people flip out and they don't think that they're getting their fair share. And it's probably some interlopers. And now the deep heritage American deserves everything. It's just weird in America because unlike, say, England or Japan or even Israel, we have less firmly rooted ethnic heritage of any particular kind. We have a kind of philosophical heritage, which is deeply rooted in Scottish common sense realism and somewhat English liberalism and a little bit of this and a little bit of that that the founders pulled in from Greece and from Rome and from Jerusalem and from like I said, Edinburgh and London to mix together to make this American experiment. So we have this kind of philosophical continuity and a traditional continuity that's heavily English and Scottish, which was kind of a regional thing in its beginnings, digressing again. The point is that there are lots of ways to define a nation. It's messy in America. As the Natcon people are discovering, they thought they could introduce some kind of American nationalism. And they didn't realize that it was going to get the religious nationalists, that's your Christian nationalists and your intergrillists and the Catholic sense. And it was going to get the racial nationalists, the white nationalists, they're going to come out of the woodwork, you're going to have all kinds of stuff going on. And there's different ways to do it. If you look at the fascist experiments, we're all nationalist experiments of the 1930s. You kind of, I don't know the fascist is right word, but you kind of have four big things. Five, if you count the Chinese experiment going on in the 1920s and 30s, you got the Guamming dong in China, you've got the fascists in Italy, you've got the Nazis in Germany, you've got whatever the hell Franco was doing in Spain, it's called pseudo-fascism, semi-fascism. And then you've got the imperialists in Japan, there's kind of some big picture stories that you can look at there in terms of what was going on. You could also kind of loop in Stalin's ideas about a Russian nationalism to drive the Soviet Union supposedly international communism. So you have this kind of nationalist fervor going on. And the Italians basically defined there's, I left out Salazar and Portugal too. But the Italians basically defined there's politically the Nazis racially, you had to be a blood German to count as a real German. So what it meant to be a part of their German Reich, German nation was to really be ethnically German, and you had a religious identification in both Spain and Portugal, under Franco and Salazar. Stalin had his own classification thing that's complicated because it was communist. The Guamming dong was mostly a political and cultural heritage that wasn't really working to try to unify the 56 races of China. The communists were very effective at undermining that by saying that the 55 minority races were being forced to be like Han Chinese. You had the Japanese imperialists and I won't elaborate on that because I don't know much about it. But at any rate, what you had going on was a lot of different ways to define a nation. I'm sure that the Japanese one was very ethnic and very religious since their belief that their emperor was a god was a Shinto belief. Okay, so a thing is, as you can define a nation a lot of different ways, but the point is that people cook up different ways to define who's legitimately part of the nation. And then there's outsiders, both ideological and like for the Nazis racially, for the Italians politically, for the Spanish and Portuguese, sorry, the Italians were politically that, yeah, I said that right. Okay, so it's religious for the Spaniards and the Portuguese and so on and so forth. Once you start getting the body of the population, when things aren't going great to feel alienated from their rightful inheritance under whatever definition of the nation that they have, you have woke right. That's my whole point. So they're still alienated. They still have a sense of entitlement. I deserve to inherit my own country. I'm not, therefore, the people who are valid members of my nation need to band together as a collective. They are intrinsically in class conflict with the out groups that are that we've mistakenly tolerated blah, blah, blah, Machiavellianism, friend enemy distinction, the whole thing, the collectivist machine rolls into play based off of a collective sense of alienation that has been retracted into the self and expressed as a group identity and intrinsic class conflict under the rules of the friend enemy distinction with the outsiders. Okay, so there's the legitimate people and the others and they're intrinsically in conflict and the legitimate people feel like they've been alienated rather than the others feeling like they're alienated so it's like an inversion of the same woke program from the left. So yes, this still applies to the woke right. All right, so now also derivative to this sense of alienation, by the way, part of this is their epistemological sense. The centerpiece of being woke is this sense of alienation. The next part is that they, this is kind of what makes it really woke is that they believe that the world has arranged so that everything reaffirms the power of the alienating group against the alienated group, the power structure that defines the class conflict. In other words, it's all pervasive and systemic. Marx had a doctrine or the Marxists during Marx's time. In fact, had a doctrine under what was called dialectical materialism called material determinism. Okay, the later people that we would call woke under kind of postmodern conditions have something they call structural determinism. But the idea is that one's conditions in the world, the world that you find yourself in literally socializes you in a deterministic way to have a very limited perspective of how the world works. So you have established ways of knowing and knowledges as a result of that. This is just what everybody believes. This is the hegemony of the society. This is how we all think. This is what is true. This is what is valuable. This is what is valued and valid. And then you have the marginalized stuff that they don't want you to think. And so what you end up with is as a belief that you are in the alienated class, you think, man, the alien, the way this alienation actually works is so pervasive is that it limits how much I can actually see how much I can think. Sidebar, Kamala Harris, we are able to see what can be unburdened by what has been. The Marxist belief is that what has been has burdened you and limited your ability to see alternative futures. So if you were born a peasant, you will be a peasant and your children will be peasants and their children will be peasants because they're not able to know anything except peasantry and the powerful lords and ladies off wherever they are, the royal tea or whatever it is, are going to make sure that they stay in that condition so that they can never rise up. If you were born into a working family, you're a worker and you were uneducated, you're just going to learn enough to be able to do your job and you're going to know that you're a worker and it's your place to be a worker and you're going to continue being a worker and your children are going to be workers and their children are going to be workers and they're going to work and the man is going to get rich and you never will but that's working life. This is the idea that the system itself has structured such that you don't have the ability to think out of the situation that you're in and then the conspiratorial element comes in. They don't want you to think otherwise. They don't want you to think differently. They in fact, this is kind of Pollo Freides, Marxist theory of knowledge that I spent like an entire year elaborating on for you guys. The Pollo Freides idea was, in fact, they decide who is allowed to know and what is able to be considered knowledge and protect their own interests by limiting the knowing field and the knowledge is to themselves. His example that he gives is that in the, you have all these peasants and they have peasanty jobs of general farmer and like, you know, very low class things, a lot of them are in slums, the favelas and Brazil and they are kept out of the education needed. So what they, if you go to school for Friday as an education theorist, they teach you to do things like read and they teach you to do things like math and they teach you to do things like know the right answers to history questions so you can regurgitate the right answers so that you can prove that you deserve to have one of their fake bourgeois jobs and that they only admit people into those jobs who can who know those things whether those things are relevant or not. And so that's why Freides spent so much time talking about the world being split into those who know and those who are not allowed to know those who are knowers or who have knowledge and those who are not allowed to be knowers who are considered completely ignorant and therefore unqualified to participate fully in society. So woke means as a result of the same alienation by the way, woke means having a particular relationship to knowledge and that relationship to knowledge is an epistemic preference for marginalized knowledges. Now there's a bit that goes into this. Knowledge is here. Don't actually mean things that are knowledge. It means claims about the world and very general. But then marginalized means that this conflict oriented division in society is purposefully pushing certain people who would be knowers certain ways of knowing which are epistemologies and certain claims about the world which are quote unquote knowledges to the margins so that they can keep their power. So marginalized knowledge is knowledge or knowers or ways of knowing that are excluded on purpose because if people had thought that way or we listened to people who think that way or if they had those ideas, it would break the stranglehold that the conspiratorial power structure has over society. And so you have an epistemic preference for marginalized knowledges. In other words, they believe that knowledge is what the established knowledge of the world is hegemonic. That's what you're allowed to know. That's what you're allowed to believe. That's how you're allowed to come to conclusions. And so anything that is counter hegemonic is epistemically preferenced or prioritized that is more likely to be true or more likely to be a good methodology. So the essence of a preference for marginalized knowledges means it has to be outside of what is considered the established knowing field and it has to be critical of it. So here you get your critical theory. The use of critical theory, which stems from having which becomes like an instinct when you have critical consciousness where you learn to see through this alleged trade and then in the system and the knowing field and the knowledge-based society or in the structure of how everything works when you start to have Marxist interpretations for everything or this I shouldn't say Marxist. I should say this alienation, the systemic alienation based analysis for why everything is the way that it is. This grand conspiracy theory about how society works rooted in entitlement-driven alienation. Once you have this, all you can do, once you learn to see through this, you have critical consciousness and then all you can do with that critical consciousness is criticize. That's how you are counter-hegemonic. You don't care whether your knowledges are a BLM counter story or a revisionist history like 1619 project. You don't care if it's indigenous knowledges. You don't care if it's so-called queer knowledges, which I imagine are very experientially gained. Let's just put it that way. It doesn't really matter as long as what it is is that you say this is a different way of thinking and it challenges the existing power structure which might involve you just saying I'm marginalized because you don't admit the way that I think which is probably going to be or you don't want to admit the analysis that I gave or the belief that I have which is probably going to be the result of one of these alienated or woke theories of how things are supposed to work in the world. For example, being able to interpret like literally everything as racism is the critical race theory way of seeing different knowledges or having a critical consciousness or engaging in a critical theory. What do I mean? Here's how this counter-hegemonic picture works in critical race theory thinking everything's racist. So let's say that you go out and you go hiking. You're probably a white college graduate if you come to this conclusion although it's possible that you're a grifter of some racial minority status who's trying to do some race hustling. Let's say you go hiking and you notice on the trail that there's like you know you see about 30 people on your hike of the 30 people you see 29 of them are white. There's like one guy who's not and you come home and you say man that's a lot of white people most of the people who go hiking are white. That's probably because so many people who aren't white don't feel comfortable hiking because all they're going to see is white people that means hiking is racist. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. That's the kind of marginalized knowledge that you then preference. Your observation is a claim to knowledge. Your observation might be true 29 out of 30 people were in fact white but that doesn't mean that there is some actual intentional force that's like racism that's keeping black people off of the hiking trail. However, if I were to say that from a critical racer perspective I am marginalizing that "knowledge" which is a claim to it's a claim on an explanation for an observation and if I say look that's not true there's no racism and hiking. Anybody can go out hiking. The person can even appeal to like their feelings and they can say I feel like there is. I feel like it's racism. I feel uncomfortable personally as a racial minority to go hiking because it's such a white thing to do blah blah blah. I feel I feel and you can't really argue with somebody's you know paranoid personality disorder. Therefore you are stuck in the situation of accepting their marginalized knowledge or that's what they're trying to get you to do anyway. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. This is a critical theory. So critical theory dates back. I've said this a lot of times to Max Horkheimer who was part of the Frankfurt school and the Frankfurt school was originally called the Institute for Marxism and what Horkheimer was trying to do was figure out why Marx was wrong because Marx believed that capitalism would have misery at the worker. So Horkheimer says but actually it allowed him to build a better life. So we had to have a different model than make the worker miserable till he suffers so much that his entitlement complex comes in then he feels alienated then you tell him it's a result of being class so that he retracts his sense of alienation to himself and awakens to a class consciousness that you then teach him to use to do a critical analysis of class that you call classical Marxism with all of the nasty identity politics a class based politics at this point class conflict for an enemy distinction blah blah blah. He's like that that doesn't work. Capitalism doesn't demiserate the worker so you don't ever get to the point where you can dredge up or manufacture an entitlement complex because people are going to work and they're making some money and maybe they're not making as much money as they would love to but they feel like they're making a fair amount of money for the amount that they're putting in. In other words they feel like they're achieving equity for their efforts and they are able to climb the ladder a little bit by some things comforts some stuff they think is cooler that they like and live a comfortable good life not work any harder or take bigger risks than they really want to and you end up with this middle class situation where people are happy not being rich because they have fulfilling good lives and it turns out you can't manufacture an entitlement complex in those people very easily so you can't get them to feel alienated you can't blame it on their class situation and you can't get them to retract that sense of alienation into the self and become woke at a class conscious and go be your revolutionary so horror cameras trying to figure this out this is in the mid 1930s and this is the develops this thing called the critical theory in the critical theory he was like aha here's the deal the whole system the whole capitalist system it's not just capitalism and work and the work environment it's the whole culture everything in the whole culture everything in the system how we learn what we think how how we live our lives what we what our ambitions are these guys have the wrong ambitions they want to be able to have a nice comfortable home for the family buy some comforts have some cool stuff to do on the weekends maybe get a nice car that they're proud of and show it off a little bit whatever it is and be happy and the whole culture around this is what the problem is and he says he develops a critical theory this is what he says specifically in dealing with this question because he realized he says that the system itself is so we could say material determinist you know material determinism so materially deterministic or structurally deterministic or some of both at that point it's so deterministic on how people experience life he says that the ideal world cannot be thought of or even articulated on the terms that we have in the existing society so the whole the the whole way we think about life and everything else the terms of society does not admit us a vocabulary to articulate what a socialist utopia really looks like that's his conclusion so he develops a critical theory he says because we can critique those aspects of the existing society that we wish to change so what does that look like well for example you don't know what utopia looks like you don't know what the perfect socialist society looks like but you know there's no racism in it so anywhere you find something that's a racial inequity or an actual racism or anything you can gin up in your feelings to believe as racist and accuse their like going hiking and seeing a lot of white people and accuse their racism that's something you can imagine wouldn't be in the utopia even though you don't know what the socials utopia looks like so you can criticize the thing that you actually see for not being that ideal that you can't even picture so this is something that I've called negative idealism so downstream from this critical theory view is negative idealism it's this idea that there is an ideal like at the pletonic neoplatonic form sense of the ideal of how things are supposed to work how society is supposed to run out the institution should look like and you don't know what it is you just know it doesn't have sexism it doesn't have racism it doesn't have class division it doesn't have relative privation it doesn't have disparate impact or inequity it doesn't have any of these things and so you can criticize those aspects of the thing that you wish to change even if you don't know what you want you can criticize what there is for not being perfect so the old saying don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good is sort of the operational definition of critical theory it is intentionally making the perfect the enemy of the good on purpose even though you don't know what the perfect is you just know what the perfect doesn't contain and you complain about it okay there's more we could say about the critical theory but that's beside the point so what you end up with from this sense of alienation is the critical theory but what this is is a preference for counter hegemonic or outside knowledges there's your relationship to knowing why because they have arranged the whole system so that everything reaffirms their power even the way we think even the way we express so that we can't even think of or articulate or imagine a better thing we just might know what it doesn't contain and we get the critical theory as a result the critical theory is a preference for marginalized knowledges or for counter hegemonic knowledges so when we say that having a critical consciousness is what it means to be woke what that means is having woke up to thinking about the world this way it means having woke up to thinking about the world in terms of the entitlement complex that generated the sense of alienation that was located in a class that you retracted into yourself to identify with that class as alienated so that you could do a power and knowledge politic game in order to try to take power and change the world in line with satisfying your entitlement complex so this is what woke really is this is what I wanted to talk about today this is the message that I wanted to give this is what woke is actually about this is why woke is an entitlement complex turned into an airsatz religion that airsatz religion is socionomistic and that it's rooted in a sense of alienation that is retracted into yourself in order to get you to operate as a avatar of a class identity thus the identity politics thus the friend enemy distinction thus the Machiavellianism and then in the epistemic domain thus the preference for marginalized knowledges which requires believing that there's marginalized or marginalized certain knowledges and keeping people from knowing believing thinking saying and acting in line with their underlying entitlement complex at the end of the day okay so what does that look like in critical race theory already mentioned some things you have counter stories so people tell stories about the way the world works and they tell a counter story about how the world is actually hidden racism the hiking example is one such example um Derek Bell who is considered by a lot of people to be the the founder of critical race theory although major secondary props to his student Kimberly Crenshaw this Derek Bell at Harvard Law author in 1970 of race racism in American law which is considered the first real critical race theory text was so into telling counter stories that he just made him up he made up these critical pericapies about racism that's what he calls them where he would pretend he was having a letter exchange or a conversation with a administrator and just make this thing up and then submit that as an example of what racism at Harvard looks like where he's you know imagining a discussion his most famous of these pericapies is called space traders where he just decides that you know given the opportunity of a bunch of aliens came down and said we'll solve all your energy problems give you a bunch of gold and not destroy the world or whatever but all you have to do is trade off all your black people for for slaves they he's like yep everybody would just say yep no problem and get rid of the black people it just made up a story um one of his stories was about a young woman whose name whose last name was Crenshaw of all things uh and maybe it was even Kimberly Crenshaw I don't know but uh I don't remember but somebody Crenshaw so he makes up a story about some woman who allegedly experiences all this micro aggression sized racism at Harvard just makes up stories these things didn't happen the person doesn't exist just made up stories these are counter stories or you know somebody says you know we have this really great situation in society now blah blah blah and then somebody's like yeah well when I went to the store somebody called me the n-word and that's a counter story in some sense um we could go on and on so they have counter stories they do revisionist history like the 1619 project which they also disgustingly called honest history uh that kind of thing queer knowledge is or of course those that are literally by definition in opposition to the legitimate and the uh normal um and so anything that queers a situation that makes it out of its normal context anything that deconstructs or that engages in what Judith Butler called the politics of parody where you kind of like step outside of a thing and kind of make fun of it to try to highlight how it doesn't work drag being sort of an extreme example actually based on the ones that I've seen out there in the world a good example like a well-performed example of the politics of parody you have men parodying the certain type of loudmouth you know often prostituteish woman uh as as an act to in theory draw out issues of gender and sexuality and things and supposed to be adult settings and kind of burlesque settings or whatever we all know how that went sideways but at any rate those kinds of things are like the queer counter stories of some sense queer knowledge of course indigenous knowledge is are big because they did actually have systems of ways of generating beliefs with you know some degree of fidelity to reality um maybe not the highest degree of fidelity to reality often interwoven with intrinsic sacred and spiritual things that you can't insult because then you're insulting somebody on their sacred stuff and you have have quite a weapon there in the so-called indigenous knowledge is but why are they so preferenced because they're outside of the existing system nowhere in the world do we see the Soviet Corrine Zazia program more explicit that's where um Stalin and Lenin went around and looked at the different nationalities and said you know we're going to put you under self-determination but you're more socialist than anybody else so we're going to elevate your socialist we're going to give you power in the system to kind of oversimplify then with the indigenous knowledge is indigenous languages indigenous blah blah blah you know land acknowledgments whole universe this is straight up a Soviet program to exploit the indigenous situation because it's so hard first of all it's outside second of all they can claim that they're being oppressed or marginalized or insulted by virtually anything lots of these are literally spiritual practices of various tribes and so they can claim that you're pissing on something sacred when you say look we're not going to determine you know where we're gonna have a tree in the courtyard based off of some you know rain dance or something like that well that's a very important thing to us and you know we can't figure out how we're going to build Walmart based on you know some moon cycle it's a very important thing to us so you get to weaponize that sense of offense and of course you get to weaponize the claims that there were um intentional displacements and genocides and so on throughout history so it's a very powerful weapon that's why the preference toward indigenous knowledge is but the whole point is that there's preference toward counterhegemonic knowledge is and basically claims that you're doing a racism or a sexism or a normativity or something that they can leverage against the existing system that's the preference for marginalized knowledge is and the purpose isn't because they actually like the marginalized knowledge is because they can weaponize those claims to unseat the existing system they can take a guy doing a rain dance and say his rain dance is just as valid as science so if you don't give him an endowed chair at the university in the science department you're a racist and then they can get that guy who they probably trained to be a agitator who did the rain dance as an agitation a prestigious job that he can use to make more people into radicals that's kind of the whole point that's how Korenets Atsia and Soviet Union worked as well okay but it also looks like just asking questions it looks like conspiracy theories it looks like believing that you know there are certain things that we just they just don't want us to know that we just can't talk about you are not allowed to talk about the way that Israel did this you are not allowed to talk about racial differences and IQ you are not allowed meanwhile they're running podcasts doing numbers talking about them on the air you are allowed there are certain like decency rules you're not really supposed to swear you're not really if this was like the FCC on television you're not supposed to swear you're not supposed to show you know graphics sexual stuff you're not supposed to do a lot of things that are you know considered out of bounds for general decency or audiences um but you are actually allowed to say these things nobody is going to stop you from saying these things as we can all see but they can make you believe that there's some powerful shadowy force out there where they don't want you talking about it and therefore the thing that they don't want talked about is more likely to be true that is there is a preference for marginalized knowledge right so they don't want you to know that on this many boards there were Jews therefore it's the Jews control things is a possible conclusion of that that's a marginalized knowledge that you're now going to have an epistemic preference for that is you're going to think it's more likely to be true and the correct explanation so when you start to believe that a particular explanation is more likely to be true because they don't want you to know it that's conspiratorial thinking of the woke variety why because woke is all a gigantic conspiracy theory and the gigantic conspiracy theory boils down to in a sense of entitlement that you should be an important commentator in this in this situation that you with your sleuthing on the internet should be considered equal to somebody who's done serious research into something that's the general idea we've all become very susceptible to conspiracy theories because it turns out a lot of conspiracies were happening we've become very susceptible to suppressed ideas that are actually true and that it was a reasonable but not good heuristic to guess that something might be true because it was suppressed because of the lies the damaging lies around the COVID-19 situation where they suppressed truths about drugs and supplements and treatments and all kinds of things so they could favor a particular one and that was also a giant conspiracy so we're primed to want to believe this stuff but when you believe that something is more true because there's a conspiracy that doesn't want you to know it that's woke thinking that's woke epistemology that is a preference for marginalized knowledges the book that I call the book of woke which is critical constructivism of a jokinchalo the entire last chapter of the book is dedicated to that I would read it to you and prove it to you but he frames it out in terms of something called blue knowledge that he claims comes from African American culture so it's a super weird chapter because nobody ended up talking about that he picked some you know weird characterization for it that didn't stick it didn't go anywhere it didn't get used anywhere else so it's super weird but he spends like a large portion of the book as does what I call woke for dummies which is is everyone really equal by robin d'Angelo and uslem sensoi which I mentioned earlier they spend a large part of the book trying to unseat the scientific method as a legitimate way of knowing that it's just one way of knowing among many that it suffers all of these intrinsic biases and blah blah blah that's woke that's woke thinking it is a way for them to position counter hegemonic outsider knowledges as though they are equal to or in fact better than thus preference them over established knowledges so if you believe if you want to know what woke epistemology is it means thinking suppressed knowledge stuff they don't want us to know is more likely to be true than establish knowledge and now you know what woke is this is woke it is a sense of alienation retracted into the self connected to a group based identity that's all rooted on an entitlement complex that's been manufactured around that group identity along with a epistemological framework a way of know approach to knowing I should say an approach to knowledge and belief that boils down to preferring knowledge that you believe is suppressed by the evil power structure so there's an evil power structure that's suppressing knowledge and if it's something they're suppressing it's more likely to be true that's woke that's woke thinking being woke means that and like I said I spent a lot of time talking about how that's a critical theory based way of thinking so woke could also mean using critical theory or having woke up to naturally using critical theory in various situations with due encounter in life which is having a critical consciousness or if your critical consciousness is Marxist class analysis you might have a class consciousness or if it is a female male conflict theory that's explained by the feminist theory of patriarchy and misogyny you might have a feminist consciousness or if it's something that's outlined in critical race theory you might have a critical race consciousness or if it's something that's reacting to that you might just have a regular racial consciousness or you might have a racial belt and shong consciousness if you are uh Deutschland are mocked if you are Germany awake Germany woke under the Nazis if you believe that that's located in your nation's legitimate traditions and culture you might be woke right because they preference the nation as the favored group if you believe that practices and beliefs and activities that are outside of the norm and of legitimacy have greater likelihood to be true that's queer knowledge is in all cases a preference for suppressed knowledge is an epistemic preference for suppressed knowledge is a woke epistemology and at the end of the day it's all an entitlement complex that is manufactured and attached to some kind of a group identity that's driven into a sense of alienation or connected to a sense of alienation that's then attached to that group so that you retract your group identity into yourself that sense of alienation into yourself to supersede yourself and become an avatar of a group identity rather than an individual that's woke that's why it's collectivist that's why it's critical theory that's why it's Machiavellian that's why it's identity politics that's why it's cancel culture that's why it's ends justify the means that's why it's double standards that's why it's front enemy distinction and that's why it's conspiracy theories and they don't want you to know so i'm just asking questions you