James Lindsay: The monkey is out of the box and it HATES liberalism
Chris and Matt discuss James Lindsay's talk at the Speaking Truth to Social Justice conference held at the ostentatious National Liberal Club, in an episode that will disappoint Lindsay fanboys and haters alike. Blindingly hot takes include, "He's a bit hyperbolic" and "Critical Theory is complicated".
They discuss some pretty strong metaphors (or are they analogies?) of Critical Social Justice involving monkeys, viruses, and boxes.
Most importantly, the duo establish definitively that, despite James' assertions, Jeff Goldblum did NOT die on a toilet in Jurassic Park (which, let's face it, would have ruined the entire movie).
It is the podcast where two academics listen to content from the greatest minds the online world has to offer and we will try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown from Australia and with me is Chris Kavanagh.
He's from Northern Ireland and presently in Japan.
And today we are looking at a talk that was given quite recently.
And before getting into that, I just want to give a bit of a...
Reminder about our podcast.
So we're looking at the way that people structure their arguments, the way that people present themselves and frame their speech to be convincing, and the way that they build a community around themselves.
So we're as interested, I think, in the form that their arguments take as much as the content.
So hopefully we'll become a bit more aware of the rhetorical techniques and so on that get applied.
So, Chris.
Welcome.
Hello, Matt.
Yes, you were doing a good job there, so I don't want to interrupt.
Please continue with eloquent speech before I destroy my garbled ramble.
I'm afraid it was turning into a speech, so I thought I'd better stop.
No, I was enjoying that.
So yeah, I feel bad to pop in and interrupt.
But yeah, just to echo one point that you were heading towards.
In looking at the way that people use rhetoric or persuasive techniques, we aren't only arguing it.
The people using these techniques are necessarily nefarious characters who just want to steal your money and convince you to cut off contact with your family or that kind of thing.
It isn't so black and white.
Actually, you could use the same techniques to argue for something which is morally good or which is, I don't know, a worthy cause.
So it is something to note that a lot of the things that we're talking about, even though it...
I think that's basically right.
I mean, you know, we think it's interesting the way that people present themselves and the way that they make their arguments.
And, you know, it's just good to be aware of, you know, because there's the substance there, the substantive analysis and argumentation going on.
And then there's also rhetorical techniques being used as well.
And usually when you're When you're an academic writer, a good academic writer, or you're trying to help someone be a better academic writer, you're usually in there with the red pen, deleting a lot of that sort of rhetorical stuff, because ideally we wouldn't be doing it, but we live in the real world and let's face it,
we'll do it.
But, you know, it's just something that it's smart to pay attention to when we're forming our opinions about things.
So, you know, in this podcast, look, we have opinions, just like everyone else.
We're going to comment on the material and talk about what we...
But we're not necessarily authorities or experts on any of the things that we talk about.
So we may well be wrong, but we're not going to pretend that we have no opinions.
Yeah, and I think if I'm not able to be sarcastic and cynical, then that will eliminate about 80% of what I say.
Okay.
I know.
We hear you, Chris.
You being obnoxious is a line in the sand and that's...
It is my nature.
I will also say that this is a point I consistently bump into online.
When I offer an opinion on something or a response to an argument, it doesn't require that...
Everybody has to accept my interpretation.
I'm just telling you what my response or opinion is.
And this seems to be a point that is often hard for people to accept because I'll make some opinion on something and then someone will respond by saying, oh yeah, well I think this.
And it's like, yeah, that's okay.
I genuinely don't mind if you don't agree with me.
These are the reasons that I think that.
It's fine that someone else has another opinion, but it's kind of like some people anticipate that you should want to convince them to join you and completely abandon their opinion.
And this includes complete strangers who you've had no interaction with.
They're like, well, I don't think that.
I'm almost just like...
Yeah, that's okay.
I don't actually have a strong willingness to spend five hours convincing you to agree with me.
It's okay for you to disagree.
And that's very much the way I feel on this podcast, that it would be impossible for me to talk about some of these content and characters without issuing opinions or my response to things.
But it doesn't require that.
To enjoy the podcast, you have to agree with me.
It's probably more enjoyable, at least it is for me, with a lot of content that you don't agree with everything.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, and look, I think the other thing that feeds into this is that the way the Twitter discourse is that really people are in these camps, you know?
So if you criticize X, then you're in the anti-X camp and you hate everything about X and X is entirely illegitimate and should be.
Scourged from the face of the earth, right?
But, you know, I think this comes up in this episode because I, for one, have very ambiguous feelings about the topic.
You know, I've got a mixture of opinions about it.
I could spend hours criticizing points of view on both sides of this topic.
So maybe with that, it's worth mentioning who it is that we are going to be discussing.
Yes, let's not keep people in suspense.
Yeah.
I think we've built it up enough.
So the person that we're discussing is James Lindsay, who is a well-known, somewhat controversial online figure who rules the prominence through a series of high-profile hoaxes.
The first being the conceptual penis hoax where he wrote an article, a parody of...
Feminist writing about toxic masculinity and submitted it to a journal to illustrate low standards that are accepted for arguments in these kind of fields.
The significant flaw in that enterprise was that the journal was a pay-to-play journal where you just pay a fee and they will publish you.
So on those grounds, it didn't do that well.
But James had various defenses for that.
But in the wake of that, James, Peter Borgossian, another academic, and Helen Pluckrose, who I think was an academic but has left academia.
In any case, that trio then engaged in a larger scale hoax effort, which I think took the better part of a year, involving submitting a whole bunch of articles to various...
Gender studies or postcolonial studies or the critical theory-heavy disciplines to again highlight the lack of standards in the field.
And this time they did submit to actual journals in the field and they got a bunch of papers rejected, a bunch of papers accepted and a bunch of papers under review whenever the hoax was revealed.
And this created a significant uproar, either from people cheering that they were able to call out the vapidness of the social justice disciplines, or from people who saw them as bad faith hucksters issuing a critique that had all these problems with the methodology and didn't target.
Science journals or this kind of thing.
So yeah, that's how James rules the theme.
Do you think that's an accurate account or am I missing anything?
Yeah, no, that's a good account.
Yeah, there's a few other things, I guess.
So I guess it's important to mention they've followed up the hoax, became known as the so-called square hoax with a book called Cynical Theories, which I think you're reading at the moment, Chris, which they sort of delineate their point of view.
Yeah, so I am halfway through that book, and it's fair to say that they were not, at least James was not super positive when he heard that I would be reviewing the book.
So yeah, I think actually before we get on to some other things, it probably is worth mentioning as well that...
I wouldn't be James' most popular person.
I think he has tweeted about how he genuinely hates me.
I think you've said a few things too, Chris.
Are you on record for calling him an obnoxious arse or is that just my imagination?
Maybe I have said that.
I would happily go on public record saying that.
I think James' Twitter persona Maybe by his own admittance is like an obnoxious troll.
And he's justified that in various ways.
So I don't pretend that we have no history of positive or negative interactions.
But I will say he seemed much more convinced that I have this multi-year campaign against him.
And actually, I had paid relatively little attention to his content until very recently.
So I can honestly say I have not been running a multi-year vendetta against him.
And also, I think I can separate to some extent the argument he is making from his personality and person.
But I do think the two are somewhat interconnected.
But yeah, this isn't an attempt at a hit piece take down on James.
It is the case if we ignore all the people that I've had various Twitter feuds with or negative interactions, there'll be very few people that we can address on the podcast.
Yes, well, some of the feedback we were getting on the first episode from people was that, oh, Chris is much less annoying when I listen to him than when I see him on Twitter.
He's maybe not such an asshole after all.
I did notice that was a consistent response, was, oh, he's actually not that bad.
And did you notice, Chris, that nobody was saying that about me?
Yeah, but that's because they know you're an outright sympathizer, Matt.
That's the issue.
No, no.
It's because they liked me before.
That's why.
You could learn from me, young man.
Anyway, yeah, look, so I think your and James' history there is balanced somewhat by the fact that I'm pretty friendly with the so-called squared crowd.
I'm a mutual of Helen Pluckroses.
We have friendly interactions now and again.
I'm very friendly with Iona Italia, who is so-called squared adjacent.
She's also friendly with me.
I'm friendly with her, just to...
It's not a one-way street.
In fact, I think our friendliness has reached such a pitch of flirtation that I'm assuming at this point we're going to run away together.
That's kind of what I'm assuming.
Okay, so a couple of other things to mention about the backstory.
The current Circle Squared episode didn't happen in a vacuum, of course.
It's called Circle Squared because it's almost like a reboot.
Of the Alain Sokal affair, it was known as, in which this physicist, I think he is or was or is, did a hoax article many years ago.
And I'm so old that I actually remember this.
This has been done before, essentially, where he submitted a very amusing article, really.
I recommend everyone read the original Sokal hoax article because it is quite funny.
It's called a quantum hermeneutics of, oh, something.
Anyway, it's...
Just nonsense from beginning to end.
And it was accepted by a journal called Social Text and did generate with exactly the same intent.
It was actually followed up by what I've not read this, unfortunately, but what I'm told is a pretty good book called Higher Superstition, The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.
And so this is back from 1994.
So, you know, it's fair to say the kinds of issues that James' speech that we'll be covering today deals with.
Have been doing the rounds for some time and, yeah, show no sign of getting resolved anytime soon.
Yeah, actually, Alan Sokal's book, which he made this all along, a book which annotates the article.
It has the article and then on each page a breakdown of why he included the things that he did.
And then, like, philosophical discussions about what it means and authority and peer review and all these kind of things.
That was a book I really liked back in the day.
So I don't have any philosophical objection to hoaxes to illustrate points.
And I also share the feeling that the SoCal Squared hoax did illustrate valid points to do with willingness to accept articles that are congruent with certain ideological positions and issues that are common in peer review.
I think my objection is not to the effort, but rather the inferences and how broadly they're drawn from that.
Yeah, if I could put words in your mouth, I think you're probably fine with such an endeavour as, I don't want to call it a stunt because that's a pejorative, but as a demonstration or an attention-getting exercise, as a jumping-off point to have a conversation as opposed to being incontrovertible proof.
A hundred percent.
So my issue in large part stems from the framing of it as a study and the way it was represented on Aereo and laid out in quasi-study format.
And I think they referred to it in various times as a study.
And it much more seems to me like a journalistic expose.
And I actually think, ironically, if they had framed it like that, they would have avoided.
Some of the issues that eventually came up with research ethics and the need to get your work approved by institutional review boards.
So, yeah.
But anyway, this podcast is not about the so-called squad hoax, but it's definitely relevant to the background, I think.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, because this relates to what we talked about at the beginning, which is when we take one of these figures and take some of their material and look at it in depth, we're kind of focusing at it in isolation and just treating it as something in itself.
But with something like this, I think it's easy for people to assume that we've got some agenda to either...
Yeah, well, because we're a critical kind of podcast to assume that we're in a camp that is ideologically opposed to whatever the person is saying.
So, yeah, so for myself, you know, I...
Where I'm coming from with this whole issue is, you know, I'm a quantitative social scientist and it's probably the one thing I actually do get passionate about, like good and bad social science, you know, and the good stuff is really good and the bad stuff can be really, really bad.
So my opinion on this is that just from a methodological or epistemic point of view, I have serious concerns about the various critical.
X studies stream of research.
I'm concerned that it forms a bit of a bubble.
It doesn't really talk to or interact much, as far as I can tell, with the broader social science.
And it's kind of its own thing, and it does tend to rely on a lot of theory and not a lot of evidence.
So, you know, my heuristic when I think about research in the social sciences is almost like a pyramid where you go for a large amount of raw data of one kind or another.
It could be quantitative or qualitative.
And then you make careful inferences and analysis of that.
And you very cautiously adopt some sort of theoretical perspective that's driven by
So my gut feeling is that this discipline has that pyramid around the wrong way, essentially with very elaborate theory with some pretty strong priors applied to it that is...
Not always supported by a great deal of evidence at the bottom.
But that's not what we're talking about.
We're not debating about this.
We could be completely wrong about that.
Hopefully we've got listeners who love critical studies and hopefully we have listeners who hate it and hopefully everyone can enjoy this episode.
Yeah, that's a nice equinami...
Oh God, I don't even know the word to say.
A good message, Matt, to finish our overly long introduction on...
So there is a couple of very final housekeeping points to note before we forget.
One is that we do now have the Twitter account, which is at GurusPod, already blocked by Eric Weinstein.
So there's that endorsement.
It was all those abusive DMs you were sending him, Chris.
You've got to stop doing that.
Yeah, well, to be fair, the amount of dick pics he got, it's too much for anyone.
Maybe I'll cut that.
I'll see.
So on that account, we'll be giving advance warning or notification.
Of the material that we'll cover in the following week.
So we're aiming to release on a kind of bi-weekly schedule.
And for us, that means like one week of researching and recording and then one week to prepare and release.
And for the listeners, hopefully it means like one week or one and a half weeks to get around to looking at the material.
And then you can see how far you agree or disagree with our analysis.
And like we mentioned, disagreeing.
It's fine.
We're actually interested to hear feedback.
So we do have an email account, which I think is decodingthegurus@gmail.com.
All one word, just decodingthegurus?
Sure.
So that is probably our email account.
So if you send feedback there.
Assuming that account exists.
So yeah, and if you send back things, we'll read it and we might end up discussing it on the next podcast.
There you go.
That's all the housekeeping expertly and professionally done, right, Matt?
Well done.
Yeah, that was good.
Yeah, you did it.
You did it.
We are professionals.
That's right.
Perfect.
Professional podcasters.
Joe Rogan, watch out.
Okay.
All right.
So enough faffing about.
Let's get into this topic.
Okay, so I think we'll probably start with some clips there, Chris.
So you can have a little look in your folder.
Before that, Matt, before you jump the gun into your obsession with hearing clips, I think it might be worth mentioning the actual name of the talk.
So this is The Truth About Critical Methods, which was one of the most popular videos that popped up when I typed James Lindsay into YouTube.
It might have been the process involved in discovering it.
It's a talk from a conference given earlier in this year.
Yes, it was.
It's called Speaking Truth to Social Justice Conference.
So the titles of the conference and the talk already, I think, flag up the perspective that you're being given here.
And to try and summarize in one or two sentences, this is James revealing to the audience what Critical theory is actually about not what it sells itself as being and issuing a warning about the danger that it poses to liberal societies.
Is that fair?
Yeah, that's very fair.
And look, I hate to give more preamble, but I feel like the one final thing we should mention is...
In kind of talking about what this podcast isn't about, this conference was hosted by an organization whose name I've forgotten.
Could you remind me there, Chris?
Sovereign Nations.
Sovereign Nations, yes.
So it's fair to say some questions have been raised about that relationship and another podcast, Embracing the Void, has covered Sovereign Nations in some detail, raising some...
So, one of the people that was raising questions about this conference was me.
And to summarize my point, and like you say, this issue is covered in depth on the Embrace the Void podcast in a standalone episode.
So Sovereign Nations is an evangelical Christian group that has partnered With Lindsay to create the website New Discourses where James posts most of his material now.
Or at least the founder of Sovereign Nations, Michael O 'Fallon, has some business relationship with the New Discourses website and company.
And that group, Sovereign Nations, if you go to the website you will basically see a smorgasbord of fairly standard Reactionary right or conspiracy-prone right-wing content about George Soros and the coronavirus not actually being a serious concern,
that kind of thing.
So it does seem an odd organization for a self-professed atheist and secular humanist to partner with.
But I know that James and the other SoCal Squared figures'response is that they're not endorsing that worldview, they're just speaking across the internet.
I do take some issue with that argument because while it is good to engage with people with different opinions and you don't have to agree inherently with everyone that you share a platform with.
I think it's fair to say that Christian dominionism, which seems to be the ideology that sovereign nations is ascribed to, is almost in polar opposition to secular humanism.
So it just feels a little disingenuous to paper over that, if your whole ideology is about the need for liberalism and secular humanist values.
So yeah, that's all.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
We don't want to cover that here, but I think that's an important point to make.
Because this organisation is obviously a political, partisan organisation.
Their main concern is political, and it's a right-wing, traditional Christian kind of perspective.
And I think it sort of points to a problem in which is that the discourse goes from being one that's about essentially academic methodology and epistemology, really, really kind of an ivory tower type.
Like issue to being a very much a popular political and polarizing issue.
And I think my final comment on this is that I think it's a shame that essentially everyone on the left thinks that the circle squared people are terrible and it's just nothing that we should be talking about.
And it's all just a maneuver by the right wing people.
Everyone who is, you know, centrist or classical liberal law.
Or right-leaning, or on the side of this, on the side of Cycle Squared, saying, look how terrible the universities have become, and academia is broken, and we just need to burn it all down.
That's a really...
My final point on this is that I lament the direction the discourse has taken.
Well, it will come up in the discussion of the episode anyway, so maybe we'll crack on with that clip that you were so eager to get to.
Yes, I need a break from talking.
I'll tee it up by saying this is James starting out by referencing that he is a 90s kid and he has something he wants to warn people about.
So here we go.
In every one of those movies, you had this one particular character, not the hero, Jeff Goldblum or something.
He was always some kind of scientist, kind of a weirdo.
And that person saw the problem.
Kind of before everybody else, and more or less freaked out.
They tried to tell public officials, the public, anyone who would listen, something catastrophic is on the way.
So 20-something years later, out of the 90s, that's me.
I'm not Jeff Goldblum.
He got eaten by a dinosaur on a toilet.
Okay, so this is GM's
Presenting themselves like the common character in 90s disaster movies, the scientists trying to warn society about the impending disaster and being ignored.
So if it was a different time, it might be comparing yourself to a prophet, right?
Who isn't eating.
A Cassandra, Chris.
Cassandra.
Yes, the mythical archetype.
So before we get into...
Some of the other content, and just to illustrate my complete neutrality, I want to note a very important substantive criticism here, which is that James said that Jeff Goldblum was eaten on a toilet by a dinosaur in Jurassic Park.
Now, man, as a scholar of Jurassic Park and a 90s kid myself, I think that...
Many of our listeners who share those characteristics will also note that Jeff Goldblum was not eaten on a toilet at Jurassic Park.
He in fact survived, not in the novelization, I think, but he did survive in the movie, which was fairly obvious because he was in the sequels.
So I think this is important because I think it speaks to the level of scholarship that we can expect.
This is an entirely fair point.
This is not a gotcha at all.
I think you've really nailed him on this, Chris.
Yes, I think it was important to get that up front out there because it is the main issue with this talk.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm just glad to know that he wasn't eaten on a toilet because the idea of...
Jeff Goldblum getting eaten on the toilet.
That's just not right.
You know, Jeff Goldblum is great.
Everybody loves Jeff Goldblum.
It was a bad lawyer.
Someone who deserved it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, not Jeff Goldblum.
And one other point to note, still on the Jurassic Park theme, is that the Jeff Goldblum character, who's the kind of cynic, you know, warning people about an impending disaster, he was actually kind of a precursor to a critical...
He was a mathematician, sceptical of science's arrogance and hubris.
So it's kind of ironic to be compared to that kind of character.
So again, not a petty point, just flagging that up.
Not petty at all.
Yes, absolutely.
But look, I mean, okay, so being more serious about this now, because somebody has to be Chris.
Yeah, look, I think this is a good...
I mean, this sort of sets the tone because a lot of the...
A lot of the talk does rely heavily on metaphors and evocative imagery.
And that self-presentation as the person who is giving the warnings to a complacent public and who aren't getting listened to is, I think, the self-presentation here, which is fair enough.
The other imagery or metaphor that James returns to a lot in this talk is this looking inside the box.
So before we say any more about that, maybe we should go straight to a clip to illustrate that.
Yes, there's quite a lot of choices in this regard, so let me just pick one.
Okay, how about this one?
Let's have a look.
The problem is that the contents of social justice don't match the pretty diversity picture on the box.
Social justice activists say it's just about respecting people.
It's about making the world more fair and just.
That's the picture on the box.
That's not what's inside the box.
I want you to look inside the box with me today.
So I'm not going to tell you what social justice and critical theory are about today.
We're going to look inside the box together.
I'm going to read what they say, what they teach, straight out of one of their books.
So there's two things here that are recurrent.
And I will say James is someone that certainly seems very fond of his metaphors.
I was tempted to make a supercut of all the times we get this mention of what's in the box.
I may do so and stick it at the end of the podcast, but it's fair to say he returns to this imagery fairly often.
And alongside that is the notion that it's not him misinterpreting.
He is going to present what the critical theorists say themselves, and in particular in this case by reading extracts from a book called Is Everyone Really Equal?
An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education by Oslam Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo.
So Robin DiAngelo being a prominent critical theorist who has become a kind of previously celebrated figure for a book introducing the concept of white fragility.
But more recently, a punching bag, I would say, for people who are critical of the social justice critical theorist worldview.
But I will say that James was ahead of the curve on that.
He's an OG criticiser of her.
So it isn't really fair to blame him for just following that trend because he's one of the people that started it.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's some credit to his self-presentation here because I think criticism of Robin DiAngelo is pretty widespread, including a lot of people who are...
Very sympathetic of social justice because I think she does represent a point along the popularized spectrum of critical theory thought or social justice thought, that sort of edgy spectrum as well.
And I think it's often brought up the amount of money that she earns for giving talks where essentially she tells predominantly an audience of white liberals that they are racist and she herself is a white liberal.
So this is part of the reason that I think she tends to be reviled.
Yeah, yeah.
There are some grifter-type characteristics there.
Accusations.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so look, I'm getting back to the metaphor.
Yeah, look, as you said, this looking-inside-the-box metaphor is used throughout the talk.
And in rhetorical terms, the idea is to present critical theory and social justice as a kind of Trojan horse.
With destructive and corrosive stuff being smuggled into the city of liberalism under the guise of friendship.
So, you know, I think it's a pretty effective metaphor, but we should remember it's just a metaphor.
Yeah, and one of the points that he's making is that there's a distinction between social justice, which he would say is kind of lower-case social justice, and upper-case critical.
social justice, that this is a distinction.
And there's an important distinction between these two worldviews.
And it's one that the practitioners themselves make.
So let me, I'm going to play another clip, which is him reading from the D'Angelo book directly where they make this point.
Let's start with the concept social justice.
While some scholars and activists prefer to use the term social justice, In order to reclaim its true commitments, in this book we use the term critical social justice.
So here's a first truth to speak to social justice.
The authors of this book tell us exactly what they mean by social justice and that it isn't what you might expect.
It isn't just treating people with more respect, caring about issues of race, sex, sexuality, and so on.
Or trying to make society more fair.
That's the picture on the box.
Or as they put it, it's true commitments.
And they tell us, they, not me, they tell us, that it's not what's inside.
Okay, so yeah, that was a nice encapsulation of the two points.
And a kind of contradiction I want to flag up here is, so this point about the description not matching the content, and that there's this important distinction between critical social justice and what people would normally understand as being for equality and against racism.
So on the one hand, James is presenting this as he has uncovered this important information which he needs to share with people.
But the people he's quoting are very, very directly making this distinction themselves, openly.
Like, there's no subterfuge, right?
They are saying, let us make clear that this is our stance and this is not the same as the mainstream opinion.
So, to some extent, both James and the D 'Angelo group agree.
Yeah, I have to agree.
I don't think anything's being smuggled in.
People like D 'Angelo, or indeed any academic critical theorist, is not shy about talking about these things.
So I don't think it's really secret.
I mean, the thing he seems to be alluding to is really that spectrum of popular perspective and people who are more either in the academic world or terminally online.
Like you and me.
Obviously, if you're highly involved with it or further out on the spectrum, you're going to be really attuned to all of these fine theoretical points, which are indeed more extreme, if you want to use that word, than the popular conception of social justice.
If you put away Twitter and just talk to somebody in the real world and ask them about social justice, they would list off a bunch of things that are just general liberal humanist type.
And then if you were to go to Robert D 'Angelo or to the academic literature, you'll get a very different picture.
So that much is true.
But I don't think there's anything nefarious about that.
It's just a natural consequence of how the world works.
So academic theories can be more Byzantine than is standard.
It just feels like if D 'Angelo is talking in public, that she will be making the same kind of points.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, a couple of other issues here is that Robin DiAngelo doesn't speak for every critical theorist or social justice person out there.
Yeah, obviously.
There's that.
I'm sure a lot of them disagree with her.
I mean, this is a point that probably we wanted to get to a bit later, but I think now is as good a time as any to bring it up, which is that there is throughout this talk...
And this is a kind of common tactic amongst people who want to argue for a particular worldview.
They present the opponents or enemies as this unified group, and they can take examples from individuals and use that to speak for the entire category.
So like you pointed out, critical theory is like this massive field or approach.
I think it spans across multiple academic.
Disciplines and has various sub-disciplines or sub-versions of the approach.
As my summary probably illustrates, I'm not an expert in this area.
But I would be hugely surprised if there isn't significant differences between different theorists that they might share core beliefs about, say, that society is organized unequal and that there are power structures at play that...
Go unacknowledged.
But where you go from there can be hugely different and like what social implications it has.
But James in this talk tends to treat D 'Angelo and a bunch of other scholars who he references as if one of them says something, then all of them basically agree with it.
And a really good illustration of this is When he compares critical theory, social justice, to a virus, which is another metaphor that he uses fairly often.
And he justifies this at several points by saying, okay, you might think I'm being unfair by constantly invoking this viral imagery and talking about critical theory as an infection and so on, because that sounds like dehumanizing language.
He kind of flags his audience.
Well, you might think that's a rhetorical technique, but actually.
And then he points to this article, which he notes was published in an obscure journal by two feminist scholars, which talks about social justice ideology or something as a virus.
And it compares it to an infectious disease that can go in and needs to break down the defenses.
Students of this approach can infect different departments, which to me doesn't sound like a good thing to be arguing for, right?
Like when you're comparing yourself to a virus.
I share James's sense about that.
But the thing that I don't share is two academics making a controversial comparison in a random article does not mean that everyone in the field endorses that view.
Or their arguments, right?
And the last thing before I forget, when James mentions that they say this about themselves, he uses it to legitimize or to move the source of the criticism from him.
But in this talk, and probably if you do a search online, the person that's most associated with comparing critical theory to a social virus and a contagion is not these obscure...
It's James.
So he is the person making that comparison.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's funny, actually.
When I looked at that article about the critical theory article that compared it to a virus, it didn't actually ring too many alarm bells for me because partly, one, I know how...
The field, just like, this is true of many academic fields to one degree or another, but particularly that one, psychology too is rife with this, is that using the most sexy language to dress up a relatively anodyne point.
So I think the fundamental point they're trying to make there is that, yes, we're hoping to enact social change through education, getting those ideas out there, and these ideas will spread, and word of mouth, and there'll be a grassroots kind of change.
And they rely heavily on this evocative analogy to make their article sound more exciting than it is, right?
Which is something that academics tend to do.
And, you know, the first thing I thought of was Richard Dawkins' idea of memes, which basically proposes that all ideas are like this.
All ideas are like viruses.
So those are the two connections that I made.
And I didn't, you know, I find a lot of that literature objectionable, but I didn't find that one objectionable.
Yeah, but as you say, look, I think the key point is just because you found one academic writing one article in which they make that analogy, it's a weak point.
It's nothing more than a metaphor, I think, is probably the correct view to take.
Yeah, so this is James using that metaphor in the talk to talk about the spread of social justice infection.
This isn't just in our universities, law societies, many corporations, even some cities now have diversity officers.
And the diversity training industry in the United States alone is above a $10 billion a year industry.
This is an industry that produces no tangible product whatsoever.
And almost none of what it does is supported by evidence in its favor.
Some of what it does has evidence against it.
So, yeah, I just played that clip to highlight that, like I say, this metaphor is extremely useful to James in his argument, and it does have rhetorical force.
So, yeah, I just think he should own that it is him using it, right?
And like you said, you know, an idea being catchy or effective, it could be used to discuss ideas which are actually good, right?
That you want You want to spread ideas of democracy or that kind of thing.
But even still, I think using the viral comparison is rarely presented as a good thing.
Sure, sure.
So, look, I think this metaphors that we're talking about, which is firstly talking about the guy from Jurassic Park or Cassandra warning about this secret or somewhat secret thing that is destructive about the metaphor of looking inside the box to see what's concealed in there.
And I think he also uses the phrase, the monkey with the virus is loose in the city.
So what's that science fiction movie with the monkeys?
Contagion.
Oh, Planet of the Ebs.
No, no, no, 12 monkeys.
No, both wrong.
12 monkeys.
Is it 12 monkeys?
I feel this was a trap map because there are many sad fiction movies with monkeys really embarrassing.
Yeah, okay.
So very, very evocative imagery and very much designed to press those emotive buttons.
Yeah, although just to run with this point that you want to see, I'm pretty sure his reference about monkeys in the city refers to Contagion because he's talking about Dustin Hoffman earlier.
In the talk.
No!
No, you're wrong, Chris.
It's got to be that movie 12 Monkeys.
The Gilead movie.
We're not going to agree on this.
I think we might just need to hang this up now because this, for me, is a red line.
James was referring to Contagion is an article I will not fudge on.
All right.
In the interest of maintaining our friendship, we will let that drop.
But it's good that we're talking across the aisle like this, Chris.
I think, really, if more people did this kind of thing, then the world would be a better place.
Did you want to continue?
I did, but I won't.
Okay, please go on.
So, related to that, all of that, all the monkey stuff, all the other things that we talk about, as well as this talk...
And James presenting himself as a prophetic figure who is trying to warn society.
The issue about what he's warning society about is like an obvious question, right?
And we've already seen that he wanted to highlight that social justice isn't what it pretends to be.
So a question might be, you know, what is it about?
And thankfully, we have James to tell us that.
And this might be him quoting from the book.
Let's see.
The very fabric of society is what needs to be changed.
There's a term for that.
We call it social revolution.
This is a real glimpse inside the box of social justice.
Not fairness, not respect, not equal pay.
Social revolution.
To unmake our current system and replace it with one, they are socially engineering for us.
That's what you are signing up for when you sign up for your lifelong commitment to social justice.
So there you have it.
It's about social revolution.
And the comment about lifelong commitment was because in a quote he had previously read from D 'Angelo, she mentioned that committing to a critical theoretical approach requires a lifelong commitment.
And he took the issue with this.
So yeah, what do you think?
Yeah, okay.
Well, I'll take the last thing first, which is that, yeah, there's a few quotes from Robin DiAngelo there.
And I feel like he chose his quotes badly because I feel sad that she must have said more contentious stuff than is quoted.
Like, he quotes some pretty anodyne statements there from Robin, like, you know, that people are individuals, but also members of groups, that the groups aren't equally valued and people that are more highly valued receive more benefits.
When you actually think about what she's saying in those quotes, it's not very controversial.
And if you take that one that you mentioned, which is something along the lines of ongoing reflection on their socialization within these groups and requires a commitment to an ongoing lifelong process.
Now, I think that kind of talk is pretty, I don't know, hand-wavy and saccharine, frankly.
But it doesn't sound like it's stuff that sounds good.
So that's my first comment.
I guess the other thing is that these many...
Allusions to social revolution and communist revolution, actually.
he evokes the archetypal enemies of the free society and
this current social justice movement with historically previous opponents of liberalism and you know you have to assume he means fascism and communism there and also refers to that location which i think we'll get to as kind of like a bastion of bastion of freedom and talks
about bias response teams amounting to being the red guard
Peter this morning talked about bias response teams at over 200 universities.
He didn't say so, but they amount to the Red Guard.
Now, to sort of steel man his point of view, I agree with him that absolutely critical theory and social justice has a social agenda.
They do want to do a kind of social engineering.
They want to have an effect on the broader society, and that's something they're quite explicit about.
So where I think he's going too far, or I disagree with him, is that I don't think that they're inciting revolution in my point of view.
He does set up...
The social justice as a kind of Manichaean enemy, an irreconcilable enemy of liberalism.
And while I definitely think that there are some big differences there, I think he's really stretching to project it as a Manichaean struggle.
Yeah, so let's hear that Manichaean struggle from James, what social justice wants to do with liberal humanism.
And then I'll offer some comments as well.
The critical theory movements initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism, individualism, freedom, and peace, but quickly to enter a rejection of liberal humanism.
The ideal of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism, the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate, was viewed as a mechanism for keeping them marginalized in their place.
by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.
In other words, it, liberalism, fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow.
So this lets us take a look, reveals the truth of what social justice and its critical methods want.
They want a social revolution that dismantles...
So that was James reading from D 'Angelo at the start and then riffing on what it illustrates.
So I think that might be the kind of section, Matt, where you might have more sympathy for James's view, right?
Because D 'Angelo is setting up herself the opposition between...
A kind of naive liberalism and what social justice will bring, right?
Yeah, I think so.
I think there are people like Robin DiAngelo who set themselves up as provocateurs and edgelords.
I don't think she would agree with that.
That's excellent.
I'm sure she wouldn't.
I'm sure she wouldn't.
That's just my opinion.
But I also think that there are other people that are taking them Very, very literally.
And yelling from the rooftops that there's a revolution going on.
I think the truth is somewhere in between because D 'Angelo seems very comfortable cooperating with the neoliberal system, I think.
And I think running anti-bias training in corporations isn't quite revolutionary.
Yeah, it's not.
Tearing down the system.
But I think James' argument is that it is tearing down the system from the inside.
But before I get back to James bashing, let me just continue to give him a little bit more credit because this is a clip where it's another reading of an extract from D 'Angelo's book.
And I want to note here that while we'll get into the way he builds up a mannequin binary struggle between the forces of good and evil, his partner in this, D'Angelo's wing of the critical theorists, are doing
the same thing themselves.
And this extract that he's reading from
Each of us has a choice about whether we are going to work to interrupt these systems or support their existence by ignoring them.
There is no neutral ground.
To choose not to act against injustice is to choose to allow it.
Although it does take ongoing study and practice before a social justice framework will fundamentally shape your work, and this part's all in italics, to decide not to take on this commitment does not mean you are being neutral.
Indeed, to decide not to take on this commitment is to actively support and reproduce the inequitable
So, in the wise words of...
Some figure from Star Wars who I forget.
Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
And this rhetoric that there is no middle ground.
Either you agree with critical theorists and are actively supporting their anti-racist position.
And I don't mean just being against racism.
I mean the specific anti-racism approach that they endorse.
Then you are, in effect, aiding societal systems of oppression and indirectly propping up racist structures.
So it is true to say that the worldview, at least outlined by D 'Angelo, brokers no middle ground between assent or complicity.
Yeah, I mean, I think perhaps you've said it better than I could...
That I was saying it before.
I mean, my issue is with both sides here because both of them really play into this polarizing worldview in which unless you're with us, then you're against us.
So choose your side and join the fight.
I have to interrupt with this because what you have teed up is a clip that comes at the very end of the talk.
And just to illustrate this point that you're making about it being a battle between the forces of good and dark.
Here's how James ends this talk.
I thought this was perfect.
This is the truth about critical theory, and we cannot let this happen.
So I'm here today to warn you, we are late to this fight.
This is already well underway.
Thank you.
I mean, Matt, can you see any, you know...
Any theme there about heroes standing up to the plate?
The swelling music in the background have added to that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and, you know, look, I don't necessarily condemn James for that at all because it's a political speech.
And I think that's just the thing to just be aware of, that this is...
A speech of political rhetoric.
And to make those kinds of speeches, then you do this kind of thing.
You meet calls to action.
Calls to action, calls to emotion, all that stuff.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
And in fact, if I have an instinctive kind of reaction to it, because I'm an annoying both sides, that's one reason.
But the other reason is that, I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing I don't like in the social justice framing of things as well.
That you're either an anti-racist, for instance, or you're complicit or an anti-fascist and you sign up to every single article or you're against us.
And I understand that it's effective and I understand that's how politics works, but I don't have to like it.
No, and I think my issue is that when you make a talk reeling against people creating binaries and...
Forcing the world into this stark contrast of evil, oppressive forces and good revolutionary forces.
It's just a little bit lacking of self-awareness when you then do the exact same thing throughout the talk for the people that agree with you.
And this is something in general I notice with the way James presents what he calls liberalism.
In his description of liberalism, liberalism is just everything that's good.
It's what ended slavery.
It's what gives women rights.
It's what allows universal human rights to exist and people to be respected as individuals.
Liberalism, although you probably haven't heard it put this way before, is a system of conflict management that allows advanced society to exist.
It works by guaranteeing freedoms to speak or not, to worship or not, to make use of one's property as one will, to disagree or not, to
for oneself as one will.
So,
Liberalism, as a set of systems, built the modern world over the last five centuries.
And with it came the lowest infant mortality rates, the lowest poverty rates, the greatest access to health, travel, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And while liberalism is a complex political philosophy, right, and there's all different types of liberalism, and it's certainly true that liberal philosophies play a large role in the development of modern societies and human rights and all these kind of things,
it still feels that his viewpoint is fairly unsophisticated in that he just picks all of the parts.
That are positive and calls that liberalism.
And then the aspects which are, you know, the liberal justifications were used to rationalize colonialism and spreading civilization to the uncivilized and destroying superstitious worldviews.
And that's presented as like, yes, yes, of course, we all know that that's there.
We all recognize that.
But that's not really liberalism.
But it isn't entirely clear.
Why James is able to completely cauterize and remove the negative aspects associated with capitalist exploitation or this kind of thing as these are nothing to do with liberalism.
And that's a really common thing.
It doesn't matter if you're a tanky communist, a liberal booster, or a social justice person.
Just adopting everything that is good is bound up in my ideology.
And those other guys, you pull out the worst stuff, you put everything bad in that box.
Look, I think it's mirroring the catastrophization and demonization that goes on in these social justice circles, at least on Twitter anyway.
I don't think...
I don't think more everyday people who are into this necessarily do this, but this tendency to paint your enemies as entirely nefarious and entirely immoral, really, or illegitimate is probably a better word, is the tactic you see on all sides these days,
like a complete refusal to acknowledge that.
Let's say you're a traditional Catholic, like a social conservative Catholic.
Now, from the point of view of a left-wing person, that is, you know, at least a Twitter-type online person, that is illegitimate.
Like, it's not just that I just, you know, I don't agree with your Catholic traditional opinions.
Like, they, for various reasons,
For example, for thinking that gay people are sinful.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and I do not think gay people are not sinful.
I think they're totally wrong about that, right?
But I also don't think that someone who has that point of view is wanting to destroy the world.
I don't think they're necessarily evil.
Yeah, I would agree that it is possible for people to hold religious...
I mean, I think people do get this because left-leaning people tend to be tolerant of conservative Muslims.
To a certain extent, in a way that they aren't as tolerant of conservative Christians.
Now, I think the right goes too far in painting the left as loving conservative Islam.
But I definitely think there is a greater willingness to criticize aspects of conservative Christian worldviews than any non-Western religion.
Yeah, so look, that's a complex issue about sort of squaring the circle there in terms of what sort of ideas do you tolerate, or at least talk about in a kind of pluralistic kind of way, in which ones that you don't.
We'd be getting on a huge sidetrack if we went down that road, so we should return to James.
Okay, let me write the ship.
Following on from this presentation of liberalism as like a pure source of good, right?
James starts to talk about the building and the room that they are holding the talk in, which is in the National Liberal Club.
Now, for audio listeners who haven't seen the talk, it would be hard to overestimate the amount of mahogany and gilded trussets that are strewn around this room.
Imagine as much mahogany as you can and then double it.
Yeah, that's about it.
So it's ostentatious might be the word that I would use to describe it.
And I think someone on Twitter who started watching it said, I didn't know it was possible for a room to feel pretentious.
I really like that.
But the thing is, as somebody from an Irish Catholic background with complex feelings about elite English culture, My reaction to that room is not to see it as an illustration of the beauty of liberalism,
but rather to see it potentially as an illustration of a capitalist excess and elite English men's club culture.
And I completely get that you can have different reactions to that or that it can be both things, right?
That it can be...
A room which has historically done many things to aid liberal causes and been a room that excluded women from joining as members until the, I think, the 70s or the 80s, right?
Both things are possible.
But I'm just going to play you two clips about the way James talks about the room because I think it reflects a kind of a lack of critical reflection on that kind of thing.
And I think those kind of reflections are what the critical theorists are often talking about.
So here we go.
Now, if you will take a moment and take in our surroundings.
We're in the National Liberal Club, in the Gladstone Library, among the greatest bastions for liberalism in the world, where a flag for liberalism was planted.
Okay, that's tip number one.
And this is tip number two, also about the room.
He really liked the room.
Rooms like this one, the one we are in now, were built to promote and defend this system.
So welcome.
That's why we're here.
That's why this conference was held here.
Yeah.
And to make a slightly more substantive follow-up point, I was interested in, like, where the hell is that gilded National Liberal Club and looked into the history a bit.
It's a very interesting storied history, as a lot of these old political buildings are.
But one point I wanted to note was when I was reading about it, that at various times in the history, the club had been denounced for housing revolutionary radicals.
And the kind of positions that were associated with members of the club or the divisions between it, right?
Like Winston Churchill's portrait notably kept being moved up and down from the basement, depending on his status and which political group was in control of the club.
And it speaks to me to two important points.
One, that liberalism is a broad church.
And yes, it often does involve revolutionaries because the people who established the social welfare state in the UK were once considered radicals, right?
So there's always this tension in liberalism between moderates and liberals.
And the second is that it's too simplistic to present ideologies as being simply static throughout all of time.
Like, things change and there's many divisions within groups and so on.
So, like, I think this binary manichae in...
It's much easier to get people to join your cause if you present the world as being like that.
But it usually does an injustice to the way the world actually is.
Yeah, like the complexity of the world is not good for rhetoric and politics, so it gets ignored.
I mean, this is an aside, but I remember noticing the use of a guillotine by social justice oriented.
Activists in the streets for sort of symbolic purposes, which was an interesting choice of symbolism.
And of course, this was leaped on by the critics of those protests as more evidence that this was a kind of communist type socialist extremism and revolutionary destructive thinking.
So the irony to all of this, of course, this goes to your point, Chris, is that the guillotine...
It was used in revolutionary France and which sprung out of the Enlightenment liberal ideas that were terribly corrosive to the monarchies of the time.
And at the time, the social conservatives saw the guillotine as an evil symbol of the excesses of liberalism.
So I think it's just fun to think about these little inconsistencies between the sort of simplistic Meta-narratives that people impose on symbols and the complex reality of history.
So you're saying that really science and progressive liberal worldviews should be represented instead of by compasses or mathematical formula or whatever.
Their icons should be the guillotine.
That's what you're looking for, right, Matt?
I'm saying that liberalism is a dangerous revolutionary idea.
We need to get back to monarchism.
Quickly, before the world falls apart, yeah.
Yeah, well, I'm with you there.
I'm with you there.
Yeah, as an Irish person, you love the monarchy, I know.
Yeah, we're big fans.
So, okay, I think this might lead us to another topic.
So, we've established in James' worldview that the critical theorists want to dismantle liberal.
And there's plenty of clips I can play showing that.
But another issue is how, right?
How are they going to do that?
Destroy our good liberal societies?
So this next clip is James outlining the techniques that the critical social justice theorists are using to undermine liberal society.
So what their nefarious plan is.
James, as a good guru, is decoding for his audience, looks unfamiliar, what their plan is.
So let's hear what it is, because it might be a little bit surprising.
What the theorists, ranging from the Frankfurt School, to the radical New Left in the 50s and 60s, to the postmodern deconstructionists, to today's social justice warriors, all understand and count on everyone else not understanding as one simple truth.
can dissolve liberal societies.
Okay, and?
Critical theorists like Horkheimer, ranging through D'Angelo, therefore understood that to tear down a liberal society you just need one thing.
You just have to get a large enough group of people to complain constantly
how society can be understood as unfair or unjust, as cheating them or somebody they care about, whether that's based in genuine understanding of the circumstances or not.
They don't have to offer solutions.
They don't have to understand.
They don't need clear perspective of what they're talking about.
They just have to air their grievances.
Yes, so there we have it, Matt.
The secret weapon, as decoded by James, of the critical social justice theorists, is their ability to incessantly moan about everything.
And this is a corrosive acid so powerful that it can dissolve the very fabric of liberal society.
Do you think he might be giving a little too much credit to the power?
Yeah, I think he might be.
I think if we look at the history of revolutions, they don't usually come about by moaning.
It is fair to say that moaning It's a fairly inherent part of social revolutions, right?
They do tend to include moaning, or as they might put it, legitimately critiquing the existing power structures.
Yeah, but look, Chris, if you achieve your revolution by criticizing things and then getting people to agree with your criticisms of things, then what you've achieved is social change, not a revolution, right?
Yes, true.
Unless you've dissolved all of the structures of society.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So look, I mean, we're being a bit snarky here, but I think the fair thing to say is that, yeah, the characterisation that James is making of this technique of achieving a revolution and destroying liberal society, it just doesn't sound very plausible.
I think it also speaks to a myopic aspect of James, which is basically, This is how he experiences critical theorists.
He doesn't like their content.
And in a large part, you know, they are, like the name suggests, critiquing aspects of society or culture, right?
Like approaching things from a critical perspective.
And obviously he doesn't like it.
But it's the fact that this is perceived as the kryptonite of liberal society.
And he actually argues that it's exploiting...
It's kind of like the exhaust part of the Death Star, right?
Like there's this one weakness in liberal society, which is they let people criticize them and they heed to the criticism.
That means that if you just incessantly criticize them, they'll collapse.
I don't think that's giving credit to liberalism enough because the history of liberalism involves criticism from a whole range of competing ideologies, as well as like, you know, Marxists and communists and fascists and other brands of liberalism.
It is in the nature of liberalism to accept criticism and have diverging opinions.
But I just don't find that that is the thing that allows society to be vulnerable.
It always seems like a feature.
Yeah, look, and I don't think it's a fair characterization of what Helen Pluckrose and the team generally are doing themselves.
I mean, they...
They are responding to these political ideas that are out there having an influence in society, and I definitely agree with them on that.
And they're criticizing those ideas, and I agree with them on some of their criticisms.
And, you know, that's all good.
The system is working, I think.
Yeah, this is a...
Because, like, it is hard to take James, somebody who spends a significant portion of every day complaining about what...
Critical theorists are up to in a cynical fashion as saying that this is the secret weapon.
Because again, it just speaks to a lack of self-awareness, I think.
And I don't mean to make it just avoid him personally and whatever he lacks.
But rather, this speaks to when you have a hyper-focus on a specific issue that...
You're often blinded to the broader implications of your argument or parallels, except the ones you want to make.
So James can make parallels very easily between critical theorists and the Red Guard and communists, but he doesn't make parallels between himself and them.
But there are obvious parallels there.
I mean, look, I said this to Helen.
And she agreed with me as it was a fair point, which is what their team is doing is researchers' activism.
They are doing some kind of academic investigations and making academic critiques, but they're mixing that with political activism, which is basically against critical theory and social justice ideology.
So they're doing what the social justice people are doing.
And I don't think that there's...
Anything wrong with that.
But what I do have a problem with is that of either side making out that the other people are completely illegitimate and sort of catastrophizing and saying that you just you can't do that.
So this is true on the social justice side as well.
I mean, I think it's fair.
Like, you know, we talked about James's online persona, which isn't great.
I think he'd even admit that.
But, you know, it's also fair to say that the response they got.
Was pretty over the top as well.
Essentially, the people that were criticizing were not allowing for any kind of legitimate criticism, essentially, I would say.
So I got flack, actually, whenever this whole 2 plus 2 equals 4 perfuffle was going on, where there was a debate on Twitter, God forbid me for discussing this, about the...
Mathematics and whether two plus two equals four or there are more complex mathematics that means that statement can be more complex and so on and so forth.
The specifics about the mathematics, I have no desire to get into, but...
Yeah, please don't.
Please don't, or I will stop this recording immediately.
Yeah, and I can't as well.
I also simply can't, but the...
The online war or whatever, you know, the online kerfuffle that came about because of that involved James targeting this statistician, Kareem, online, and then attack lines being drawn along those.
And in those attack lines, there was one point where somebody called James a far-right extremist who was motivated by his desire to keep black people out of science.
And some evidence was marshaled about disparaging comments he'd made.
Anyway, I defended James by saying, like, I don't think he is a far right person.
It's just that he has a very singular issue focus.
And it means that's all he cares about, right?
He doesn't really, he's not motivated by a desire to push far right wing ideology.
And people criticize me for the naivety of this comment.
But so that definitely happens, right?
They get labeled these things and associated with like far right or reactionary worldviews.
However, because of that, or in reaction to that, I don't know where the lines of causality exactly go, but it is the case that James doesn't do himself any favours because, like, this talk was given with cooperation or in collaboration with sovereign nations,
and then recently he's been cheering Trump on for, you know, making statements critical or negative about critical theory.
And I think it's fair to say James leans in to the polarization, while at the same time decrying it.
And as a result, it makes people skeptical.
And I've described James as being on a Rubin trajectory.
And I don't think that's entirely unfair, because he seems to have started out from a relatively moderate liberal position, but that has this singular focus about the issues of social justice.
But that's gradually come to encompass everything that matters in his worldview.
And anybody that opposes it, whatever their other views are, is fine.
And other people don't see it like that.
They say reactionary conservatives who oppose social justice are not necessarily the groups that liberal humanists should be allying with.
Yeah.
And I can understand the dynamics.
And sort of stepping away from James a little bit here and just talking about that general dynamic, I think everyone...
Who's engaged with this can feel that.
I mean, you can feel the pull towards polarisation.
I mean, if you haven't been accused of being a racist on Twitter yet, then you're not using it right, I think.
Basically, or on the alternative, you'll probably be accused of being a socialist who hates America or whatever.
So there's this intrinsic sort of push towards polarisation because the people you're arguing with or any discussion will very quickly be completely over the top.
And it will seem to you as if those people are worse and worse and you will drift towards the people who are agreeing with you, essentially.
So I think James is following a path which I think pretty much everyone is in danger of following, which is you drift towards the people who are nice to you and you get a more and more jaded opinion of anyone who disagrees with you and you end up...
Contributing to this terrible polarized discourse that we've got going on right now.
Yeah, except for us, Matt.
We're the only ones that don't fall under that.
Yeah, we're so mature and it's such emotional maturity.
Again, I want to just make a point here, just a very brief aside, which is these kind of dynamics that we're talking about, we are not claiming to be immune from them.
Rather, we're indeed saying that they affect everyone.
And I'm not also saying that everyone is affected to the same degree.
But it's naive to think that these don't play into it.
And they relate to this topic and the presentation of a binary of the good liberals and the bad critical theorists.
And I think you and I might know some critical theorists, not tons of them, but at least people that are sympathetic to it on Twitter.
And even though we might not share their social revolutionary goals, it isn't the case that they're all secretly No, no.
I mean, I completely agree.
It actually really helps on a personal level to just know people, you know, and genuinely like people.
That are on the other side of the fence.
I think it always helped for me that my mum is like super work, right?
Really super duper work.
And she's a nice lady.
She doesn't want to destroy society.
I promise.
That's just a cover map.
Yeah, so look, that's really helpful.
And yeah, look, we're really not immune to this.
I'm definitely no better than the next person.
I went some way along that route as James Lindsay, I think, when I first started using Twitter.
Completely naive.
And people don't know, Matt, that your original username was KimmergetLicker65.
Stormtrooper69.
Yeah, that was me.
Yeah, it was my life for a few years there.
No, this is a joke.
Do not cancel me for that.
That's not true.
That's a joke.
That's a joke.
Just a joke.
Anyway, yeah, so look, I mean, that's the dynamic.
Look, it's not some shattering revelation.
It's politics, isn't it?
It's political thinking.
It's polarisation, yeah.
But I think in terms of the scope of this podcast, it's just that that polarisation is useful for people that want to present themselves as authorities on any side.
You set up a cardboard villain and rally your side, the side of righteousness, to stand up against the threat.
That's what this talk is.
Yep, yep.
Don't do that, people.
That's our advice.
Don't do it.
Maybe close to final point that speaks to this.
Both the skew and the polarization cycle comes when James starts to talk about people like you and Mima have the mistaken idea that maybe this isn't a big deal and it hasn't.
impacted society.
And he wants to point out that it has through cancel culture, through how things have spread across different aspects.
So let me play him talking about that in general.
And then I want to talk about his view about how this ideology has infected social media in particular.
So here's the first thing.
This isn't just in our universities, law societies, many corporations, even some cities now have diversity officers.
And the diversity training industry in the United States alone is above a $10 billion a year industry.
This is an industry that produces no tangible product whatsoever.
And almost none of what it does is supported by evidence in its favor.
Some of what it does is has evidence
So just one point here is that I don't think it's strictly true to say that they don't produce any tangible...
Because I might not agree with the diversity training lecture series, some of them.
I don't know the content of all of them.
But they definitely are producing lectures and trainings and stuff like that.
So they are not producing a physical product, but there's plenty of services or corporate things.
That is a product.
That's why they get paid $10 billion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, every academic is guilty of not producing tangible products.
Guilty.
That's probably my reaction just to that accusation.
People who make no tangible products are okay.
But the more important point is the extent of the spread of this critical theory perspective and how it's seeping in to all areas of society.
And we get a discussion about cancel culture, which is topical.
So let me just play this brief.
Social justice.
Activists are very visible on social media, and they're particularly keen to punish people who are influential within the arts and within media.
Calls for the punishment of artists who have spoken against or stepped out of line with social justice are often referred to, as you've heard now, as cancel culture.
Okay, so that's James's summary about cancel culture.
And what I wanted to note here was that, so I'm not a cancel culture skeptic.
First of all, I think it is a kind of modern phenomenon that happens that people have their careers attacked for things that they said a long time ago or things that they say online.
In some cases justified, in some cases not.
But this is not a thing which is unique to critical theorists and social justice people.
There are plenty of right-wing campaigns to get people cancelled.
Indeed, Mike Cernovich has made something of a career out of it.
For example, the Guardians of the Galaxy director was fired because he made some off-color joke related to kids or pedophilia or something.
And Mike Cernovich drummed up a campaign and he was fired by Disney.
Now, you can say that's them weaponizing the response of corporations to online campaigns and their sensitivity to these issues.
But I think it's wrong to lay this solely at the feet of the critical theorists and social justice people, because it seems that this is a pattern that a lot of groups follow, and a substantial portion of
them are right-wing artery campaigns dropped out by Fox.
Yeah, I think I agree with you there.
I guess it's true that one could say social justice tends to place a higher priority on protecting people from harm than on free speech.
Ideologically, anyway.
But though right-wingers purportedly free speech, or the sort of libertarian type right-wingers are free speech boosters, they don't necessarily walk the talk, yeah?
There's a fair bit of moral condemnation basically exerting some kind of force over people on moral grounds happening across the board, yeah.
So that's a much bigger thing than just...
Critical theorists.
And, you know, you have to acknowledge also that it's got a lot to do with technology.
It's just a different technological age we're in at the moment.
So a lot of it is simply driven by the fact that so much is so public and that that just allows mobs of any kind, of any persuasion, to gather and make their force felt regardless of where they're coming from.
Yes, yes.
And so let me play a clip where James is talking about how far this ideology has infected social media.
He wants to make the point here about the platforms, but also the giant corporations that are endorsing this ideology.
Online platforms themselves increasingly ban and block and otherwise punish users who produce content that can be deemed offensive, as Peter pointed out, even by proxy.
YouTube regularly demonetizes videos.
It seems to have transgressed some standard.
These are sometimes seemingly arbitrary.
Facebook has become so vigorous in its censorship that years old posts that are being read out of context by its algorithms
result in account suspensions and bans.
and Twitter has updated its rules to ban all kinds of speech, in particular that which they call dehumanizing language for religious groups as well as gender-critical feminism.
This reads as a fairly familiar set of complaints, right, that are particularly prevalent amongst Fox News and that kind of focus.
But it is fair to say that the IDW is big on this issue as well.
And so I want to say here that it's not that these trends that James is lamenting are real.
Again, with cancel culture, I think there's legitimacy to some of the points that he's making.
But on the other hand, if you look at the top-performing Facebook, It's completely dominated by Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart, stories, so on, day in and day out.
And this notion that the only ideology that is allowed on these platforms and which is being enabled to spread is woke social justice activism, it really doesn't accurately capture the environment.
There's plenty of other ideologies that...
Are rampant on these platforms.
And like James himself has a massive platform because of Twitter.
And what does he do all day real against these ideologies?
And he's still there.
So I know there's lots of cases that people like to point to.
But it's not to say that Twitter or Facebook always gets things right.
But just the extent to which these institutions are controlled by social justice people seems slightly exaggerated.
Sure, you have James Damore, but why don't you have many more cases?
And I guess the argument would be that people are too afraid to speak out, but it becomes an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think we won't be able to dive into all of the issues around censorship or deplatforming because it's just too big a topic.
There's obviously legitimate concerns one could have about delegating the authority Platforms, which are corporations, and essentially leaving it up to them to decide what goes too far.
On the other hand, it's a genuinely difficult issue.
Like, I don't envy YouTube or whoever who are sort of forced by necessity to have to make some decisions here.
I mean, sure, Alex Jones was deplatformed and that was arguably suppressing free speech, but, you know, really?
That was probably for the best, most people would say, yeah?
Well, yeah, definitely.
I think a lot of people don't spend much time with his content that venture opinions on him.
And, like, I do because of knowledge, right?
And his content is a lot more extreme, I think, than a lot of people realize.
It isn't just, like, waffling about interventional aliens.
It's fairly consistent, frequent exhortations for his audience for the need to do something potentially violent, generally against Democrats.
I mean, I'm not saying the political point, but it's more the call for violence and targeting specific people and so on.
So it's like there's validity, but there's also like this blind spot to that side of the content.
And I kind of wish that if people were going to complain about that, that they would do it with an acknowledgement of some of the reasons that there are needs to remove people from platforms.
Yeah, I mean, I think the modern situation is an interesting one because you have these different institutions which I think are dominated to one degree or another by groups with different political persuasion.
Like, from all the surveys, it does seem, for instance, that academia has a very strong skew towards the left.
And I guess the same would be true of many, but critically not all, of the mainstream media outlets as well.
You know, the very existence of Fox News, and we have similar news organisations in Australia.
In fact, our most popular newspaper, The Australian, is definitely centre-right.
So, yeah, I mean, I agree it's kind of not healthy that they're, you know, obviously the...
The White House is a Trump government.
I guess that's the fundamental point for me.
You often hear, you know, nobody is able to speak these truths, and yet every day on Fox News and from the White House, these messages are blasted out.
So it's kind of like, yes, as long as you just ignore...
That there is right-wing media and that there are a large amount of popular right-wing cultural commentators.
And maybe the argument as well, people on the left should be saying this too.
But even there, it feels like, at least from me, there are a fair amount of people talking about this daily as their main output.
So yeah.
I just want to make the point that the social media issue always feels a bit like a political football and that people are always looking for it from one lens.
They find examples of people being banned or of bad decisions and they never go and look for disconfirming examples, you know, like tankies being banned.
That's not the concern.
Yeah.
It wasn't such a long time ago that Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent.
Which basically made the opposite case that all of the media institutions were basically pushing a right-wing capitalist kind of agenda.
This is a point because it's still the case that leftists think, and maybe they have some validity, that the mainstream media is biased against socialism or anything which is out of neoliberal centricism is presented as extreme.
Now, I don't think the case that they present is that strong.
But Jeremy Corbyn and the way he was treated in the media and stuff, they take that as very indicative of a hostility towards far-left ideas.
So both sides are kind of claiming that the mainstream media doesn't represent their views.
I mean, I'm not going to argue that there isn't a greater prevalence for sympathy for far left or woke arguments among Vox and The Guardian and these kind of outlets.
But James Lindsay at some point starts randomly listing off a bunch of articles he doesn't like from mainstream sources.
I mean, in some sense, that's what they're there for, to generate responses.
Yep, fair point.
So he's arguing, you know, it's indicative of a cultural shift, but it still feels that there's like a selective attention problem.
Okay, I have a clip that speaks to this related to how James knows the extent of this problem.
Examples aren't limited to these.
I get emails literally every single day.
It's quite depressing talking about yet another walk of life that's been infected by social justice and critical methods.
Rock climbing.
Hiking, knitting, craft ceramics, Catholicism, Lutheranism, American Zen Buddhism, the Southern Baptist Convention.
Okay, and the list continues, but you get the idea.
And the only point here I want to make just quickly, which basically follows up on this, is if your sole attention is on a topic, the messages that you get...
Or the people that contact you will tend to contact you about that topic.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that he gets examples daily from people complaining about this ideology.
It would be as surprising to hear that I often get DMs from people complaining about the intellectual dark web.
Yeah, I guess it has that characteristic of being too online, which affects all of us, really, because you have this bubble and it feeds you a constant stream.
Of bad stuff that makes you upset, you know?
So he mentioned people getting banned from these various platforms for making religious statements that were considered derogatory and gender-critical feminists being silenced and so on.
So I think I definitely could see that there are lots of edge cases because, you know, I was someone who was a bit upset when many people on the left...
Essentially shrugged their shoulders when Salman Rushdie got his fatwa and it was kind of trendy to say that the people at Charlie Hebdo had it coming.
So, you know, I'm definitely on the side of...
Defend free speech?
Yeah, and defend pluralism, basically, and just be able to live with the idea that there are going to be people out there who say things that you won't like and just suck it up.
Offence is not a reason to kill someone.
I think we can agree on that.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm sure these platforms are basically...
I don't think they actually ever really wanted to get in the business of censorship.
They were getting pressure from all directions.
They had to do something about hate speech that was really off-the-charts type stuff.
And I don't think anyone would have a problem with them not...
You're letting their platforms get used for that.
And so it's not a simple free speech or not black-white issue, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, as with last time, lest we end up with a three-hour podcast, which half of the people like and half of them hit, I guess we should move on to anything that we missed and then maybe some final sum-up points.
One point we have glided over is the extent to which the views of the critical theorists are linked to previous historical movements.
And typically you highlighted communism is a specter which haunts these conversations.
And there are various occasions where it's stated critical theory is not communism.
But even with that disclaimer, there are plenty of parallels.
Drawn to, as you mentioned, the Red Guards or struggle sessions and so on.
And one point that crops up in this talk and a bunch of others is the connection to the so-called Frankfurt School.
You and I, Matt, as we disclaimer at the start, are not critical theorist scholars and do not know that much about the history.
And the connections that are presented here...
Between the Frankfurt School and modern critical theorists is very much that they were inspired by this approach, and they acknowledge that themselves.
So, well, let me play a clip where James is discussing the Frankfurt School and what they're about from his point of view.
The critical theorists in the Frankfurt School and since didn't and don't trust liberalism.
They were faltering Marxists who were already disillusioned with capitalism and who were becoming increasingly disillusioned with a society that seems to like it.
For them, the problem was that liberalism lets people make their own choices.
And, of course, people can't be trusted to choose the right things.
At the time, they were concerned with people choosing fascism, so maybe that's fair enough.
And it goes on from there.
I just like, by the way, that ending where there is the consolatory point that like, well, they were opposed to fascism, so maybe they had a point there.
In the 1930s and 40s and 50s, that might have been a reasonable concern.
Yeah, and the fact that they had to flee Nazi Germany seems like it might have been on their mind.
But it's clear they're not seen as, like, very good people, right?
And I think his description as, you know, kind of following Marxists is, from all that I can see, fairly accurate, that, you know, they were people who were interested in ultimately encouraging a social revolution leading to communism.
But the other point, whenever I started doing a bit of research about this group, and I think you experienced this as well, Matt, is that, like, looking at the history of liberalism, It's a massive school with a bunch of different thinkers that stretches over,
I think, 50 or 60 years, or maybe it's still going in some form or another.
And it has divisions within the school.
And they actually end up in the 60s and 70s being denounced for not being radical enough.
And you have, like, people...
Coming into the lectures series and doing a Brett Weinstein on them, chastising them for not being appropriately revolutionary-minded.
So the point I want to make is I think simplifying these large or long-term projects and groups into single ideas that are entirely negative, it feels...
It feels too simplistic.
And I don't like the opposite extreme where you deny everything that you say.
You can't say anything about the school.
So I think it's fair enough to draw out themes that they had or how the modern critical theorists are interpreting them.
But I think acknowledgement that this group of people are diverse and that their ideas cannot be boiled down to just like a hatred of liberalism.
Considering that they existed in liberal societies for multiple decades and were part of governments to some extent, like serving on committees and whatnot.
It just seems if cynical criticism is this thing which dissolves society, how come they didn't dissolve the societies then?
Like, how come we're still here?
Yeah, I mean, like you've got to emphasize that I'm just a complete amateur.
Trying to understand the kind of philosophy that went on in things like the Frankfurt School.
But I have read bits of it from time to time.
And this talk got me reading a couple of articles on Max Horkheimer.
And I probably only comprehended like 5% of the stuff this guy has produced.
But, you know, as you say, it is heavy going.
And it's actually pretty interesting.
There's a bunch of quotes from him essentially talking about a scientific worldview being the only reasonable way to kind of approach reality.
And I'm sure he's said stuff that could be interpreted the other way.
So, yeah, look, there's a lot of stuff I could say, but I think the main thing I'll say is that I think my hot take here is that the Circle Square Group has made a little bit of a mistake, in my humble opinion, in attempting to So the stuff that they don't like is the stuff that's very much applied philosophy to the social sciences or to social studies.
So the stuff that you and I are familiar with, that actually the critical X studies journals, for instance, that exist in psychology and sociology and anthropology, these are like four steps removed from the philosophy that was happening in places like the Frankfurt School.
And yes, you can trace back ideas through this winding path, but I'm more familiar with the actual literature that actually appears now in these applied settings.
And yeah, if you don't like that stuff, that's one thing.
But I don't think you can trace a direct line back and lay it at the feet of these philosophical groups.
Yeah, and there's a lot of emphasis placed on that they're seeking to Actually apply these theories to society, the critical theorists this is.
But in academia, almost everyone, especially within the social sciences, is encouraged by funding bodies and by their academic institutions to claim that their research can be applied to society.
You know, whether or not it actually can is a different issue, but it's a fairly universal thing that there's a push.
For you to be able to frame your research as being applied or having applications.
And I'm not saying I think that's a good thing.
I actually think there should be plenty of space for just doing research which doesn't have these specific social applications just to find things out.
But I do want to note that there isn't something that's just unique to the critical X field.
It's in mainstream psychology and so on as well.
Yeah.
And look, I think another thing I'll point out is because a colleague of mine actually prescribed a critical social psychology textbook in our faculty, I did end up getting familiar with the contents of those.
And in the first chapters of those textbooks, they outline the, I guess, philosophical and conceptual antecedents, like the different lenses or whatever that they apply.
And yes, they mention schools like this, they mention postmodernism, but they also mention Freudianism, Chris.
It gets a whole section as big as the postmodernism.
Psychoanalytic approaches are huge and are a huge influence, I think, in a lot of critical theorists or at least postmodern scholarship, as far as I saw in anthropology in the 90s.
That absolutely astonishes me.
Within psychology, or orthodox psychology, Freudianism is completely discredited.
It's probably neo-Freudianism, to be fair, or like Jordan Peterson's Jungianism.
But in any case...
I don't like that much either, Chris.
That doesn't help.
I know.
Look, I'm not advocating for them.
I just acknowledge that I had to read stuff where people were interpreting things through that lens.
So yeah.
So I think what we're saying in summary, this is going to be a consistent message, is things are complicated.
People that give you simplistic accounts which have good and evil forces are often doing an injustice to the complexity of the world.
Even if there is some legitimacy to the way that they paint things.
That's all I think I want to say about that.
That's good.
That's a very anodyne summary and I can sign up to it 100%.
That's right.
That's all I'm good for.
So ultimately what I want to say is nothing at all.
Things are complicated.
Wow, you took a brave stand there, Chris.
You would be surprised how often that is a brave stand in the online world, at least.
Okay, so there was one other point which actually feels a bit random, but I did want to get to it because I think it also speaks to the tendency to extrapolate too far from the available evidence.
And where we might be accused by James of, you know, sticking our head in the sand and ignoring the very real danger signs, I'm just going to play this clip which is related to diversity statements.
Not only are these requirements political litmus tests, at least potentially, for hiring, the compelled confessions they sometimes contain can be potentially useful for firing too should somebody later step out of line.
Even he said he's a racist.
Okay, so a hot-button topic in heterodox quarters, for a while at least, was these diversity and inclusion statements that people were required to include in job applications.
And so here, James is saying, because people need to write these and they sometimes make statements about where they've fallen short or whatever, that this information could be kept on file and used to fire them.
But like, first of all, has that ever happened?
Because that seems like it would be a huge issue in regards to privacy and employment laws.
So that's one.
And two is, I see people making like a big deal about these signing statements and stuff.
But way back before I'd even heard the word woke and I had not even flown my nest in Belfast, when I was trying to get a place in like an electronic goods store.
As a part-time job, I remember having to write things on the application that were pretty nonsense.
Just like job applications and applying for university places often have these hoops that you have to jump through, where people produce statements that are relatively...
But I think part of the thing is just to simply show that you can write something that sounds good, that shows a commitment to fairness or equality or diversity or whatever it means.
And there might be political implications for that.
But it just seems to me a little bit of a chicken little scenario that this, you know, it's going to lead to people being fired and that this is something we need to hold the line against.
Yeah, actually, I was just this morning listening to another podcast, Two Psychologists, Four Beers, and we might put a link to that episode in the notes because they talk about this issue of...
Also, they give us a positive shout-out from the first episode, so there's a double reason to do so.
Oh, really?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so we can reciprocate.
And so I really liked their take on the thing, by the way.
So it's worth a listen if you're interested in that.
And they said something similar, which is, okay, it's basically silly.
Yes, it's an exercise in writing something that sounds good and people copy and paste it into each of their applications and really...
What does it mean?
It doesn't mean very much at all.
I've never heard of any one of them being used to fire you later on.
No, no.
I mean, I don't like them.
I think they're silly.
It's not kind of...
No, I don't think they do anything.
I don't think they actually achieve anything.
I just see it as like a meaningless bureaucratic requirement.
Again, I'm defending the status quo.
Oh, God.
That's my lot in life.
But anyway, so...
All right, look, I think we have gone through this content in some detail, and we're returning to a bunch of themes over and over, but let's try and keep things below the two-hour mark this time.
So, Matt, unless there's anything else you want to hit, do you have your big takeaways from this content?
Yeah, yeah.
No, look, I definitely agree.
We made a promise that we'd try to be shorter, so let's do this.
And we've definitely kept to that.
That's right.
It'll probably come in at 10 minutes shorter.
Anyway, okay, so my conclusions.
Yeah, look, I mean, I don't have such strong feelings about this as I did on our last episode when we talked about the Dark Horse.
Oh, by the way, we pronounced their names wrong just to correct.
I should have known this given the amount that I've engaged with their contact, but they are not Weinstein, they're Weinstein.
Yes.
That was an error that many people pointed out.
Just my and your, by extension, mistake.
My apologies.
Yeah, so look, this is a political speech.
It's in a rhetorical mode.
So it's got, I mean, and you have to keep in mind, he's speaking to an audience of people from sovereign nations, I assume.
They're not from sovereign nations.
They just set up the conference.
I think this isn't a room of, like, evangelical Christians.
It's a room of, you know, British people that are sympathetic.
Yeah, sorry.
So, you know, it's not intense.
So I'm trying to evaluate on it because it's on its own terms because it's not meant to be like an academic article or anything like that.
It's done as a political speech, but as such, it's pretty light.
It's light on the content.
As we talked about it, the examples and quotations that are given to support the argument.
Yeah, that's right.
The box, the monkey with the virus loose in the city, you know, the social justice people versus liberalism theme.
Yeah, you know, it's a bit of a reach.
So even though I could enumerate a bunch of details that he mentions that I would nod my head to and say, yeah, that's a fair point.
Yes, there are Kafka traps that are out there and there is this conflation and switching forward back and forth between, say, systematic racism and what a nod.
So I could enumerate a bunch of those specific things where I would nod my head on.
But I think in terms of the big picture...
Yeah, I think it's a political speech.
A lot of rhetorical flourishes and evocative imagery.
So yeah, it is what it is.
All right.
Yeah, I don't find much that I disagree with what a shocker.
But the thing that I would emphasize maybe that is slightly different is that like last time we were dealing with...
People whose expertise flits around between a whole bunch of different subjects.
And yes, the Weinstein brothers were talking about the problems with academia and whatnot.
But with James, it feels like if we're treating him as a guru, he is a guru in the sense of he's detailing this one specific topic which he claims expertise and deep expertise in,
which is critical theory and social justice.
And that he can break it down to other people.
And maybe, I mean, he clearly has spent significant time thinking about the topic and reading some selected material.
But what that also leads to is this monomaniacal focus on a single issue to exclude all others and seeing the world and everyone in it to an extent through what their position is on that one.
And I think, you know, when you go back and you read history for your one pet focus, you can find all these connections, but you're maybe ignoring lots of other connections which you could just as readily emphasize.
So I'm not someone who thinks that people can't have their focus.
But I think we should be willing to call out when they are presenting it as the only thing that matters for society, when there's clearly many other things which matter.
Yeah.
Well, look, I mean, so yeah, in terms of the guru thing, I think he does cast himself as a bit of a guru because he's like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, right?
Well, he's not like him because he was eaten on the toilet.
Neither of them were eaten on a toilet, Chris.
You're right.
In that sense, he is very much like Jeff Goldblum.
Yeah.
But yeah, in terms of that focus, I mean, here's an interesting thing.
I don't know about you, but I've found that when people like a researcher of some kind really focuses on a topic and makes it their job, then in general, what I find, and I certainly found this in myself, I'm curious what you think, Chris.
Generally, people become more dispassionate about the topic because you tend to treat it more as a technical thing to be understood and sort of solved.
You might have been attracted to it.
For instance, I know people that have been attracted to studying addiction because they had some strong feelings about wanting to help people and so on.
And then as they get more into it and into it, They develop a more detached, kind of dispassionate view, which is, I think, generally a good thing.
Well, Matt, I have an excellent example of this.
I'll keep it very short so as not to interrupt your flow.
But I was, as a teenager, maybe in a Sam Harris way, interested in Buddhism and meditation quite significantly.
I had meditation practice, was attending groups, was reading a lot about Buddhism.
And I decided...
As my undergraduate, instead of going to do law and, you know, have a successful career as a lawyer, I would take a course that would allow me to study about Buddhist history and Buddhist philosophy.
And that's part of the reason I ended up at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
But actually studying Buddhism completely changed my perspective on it because I learned about, you know, the traditions and the history and the divisions and that my image was this completely idealized, uncritical.
It actually deepened my interest in Buddhism and the history and the traditions, but it somewhat destroyed the marvelous image and passion that I had for Buddhist practice, which some people would see as a shame.
That's a perfect example.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Something different has happened, I think, with James.
It's ironic, really, because I see the same thing in terms of some of the academic research on You know, these issues like racism and so on.
Like, rather than adopting that kind of view, rather it kind of leads to a monomaniacal kind of focus where you see the thing that you're studying absolutely everywhere.
You know, it just becomes this all-consuming, where nothing else, the importance of everything else in the world just doesn't compare to this one thing.
And it sort of goes the other way, I think.
And that's unhealthy.
So my observation here is I think I think the thing that is potentially happening with the people that James is criticizing is happening a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, maybe just in case you're listening, James, I will again say that I think you're an obnoxious ass, but I don't hate you.
And yeah, maybe it's useful to have someone like him out there in the ecosystem.
I'd be interested to hear pushback from, maybe not from James himself, but I doubt he'll want to respond.
But if he or anyone else that thinks we're not representing things correctly or we're kind of missing the point, I'd be interested to hear the arguments.
And you can do so by sending us the email to decodingthegurus at gmail.com, probably.
By reaching us on Twitter, which I think is also decoding the gurus.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, I think so.
Oh no, a gurus pod.
Okay, there you go.
Good thing you're here.
So yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks, Chris.
I think that's a pretty good place to leave it.
So goodbye from both of us.
We had a good time.
Hopefully it doesn't end up being too long.
In a couple of weeks, we hope to be doing Jordan Peterson.
So we will post a link to the content we're covering a week beforehand.
