Peter Boghossian - Advice on how to deal with Woke ideology.

[Music] so those are two different claims the first claim is that you have white privilege and the second one is that any argument against that is proof of it so let's take the first one first i actually do believe that there's such a thing as white privilege i believe that certain people on the basis of their skin color are treated differently but my disagreement with many of the woke is how we go about dealing with that so the second part of the question was particularly unusual any denial of the fact that you have white privilege means that you're guilty of having white privilege but that argument doesn't work with anything else it doesn't work with rhinoceroses it doesn't work with witches the denial of the fact that you're a witch doesn't mean you're a witch they're totally unrelated i would ask if the same argument works for anything else does that work for witches does that work for zebras does the denial of the fact that you're a witch indicate that you're a witch or lead to the truth of the statement that you're a witch yeah that's a very very very difficult question and so how do you maintain the line between being authentic and getting your degree i think the key is to understand that i don't necessarily think it's most professors it depends on the institution it depends on the field of study certainly in the humanities it's the case most professors look at the institution as their own private indoctrination mill so the goal for these educators is to indoctrinate people into a world view or a particular ideology so you have a choice you can speak up and risk getting poor grades or you can remain silent and and toe the party line i suppose you have three choices in that case if you choose to speak up there will be consequences if you watch the social justice reverse q a at portland state university that i did last year you'll see that students talk about what those consequences are actually travis you film that so you have a choice to make certainly in your own personal life it's always better to be authentic than it is to be inauthentic and it's always better to be forthright in your speech because then you can have more genuine relationships in a classroom setting however it is different you'll have to weigh whether or not you will risk punishment but the key thing to think about is well there are two keys to think about one remember professors view the university system and their role to indoctrinate you to have you adopt a particular ideology and world view and two how bad do you want your degree it's highly unlikely that they'll fail you unless you really go against the orthodoxy but it's more than likely you'll get a bad grade and that you'll be disqualified from letters of recommendation etc there are two parts to that question one is how they should react and two is what they should do how they should react is that they should be cool as a cucumber again the idea is you don't want to show anger you don't want to show rage that just proves the narrative that you have something wrong with you you're just an angry person where in fact that's just not true it's almost like you're witnessing invasion of the body snatchers where people's minds have been taken over by a mind virus and so you being upset isn't going to do anything so what you should do is another question as opposed to how you should react so how you should react is calmly keep your composure what you should do is a more complicated question one of the things a student student should do is document document make public find other individuals who have similar experiences there's a page on instagram woke at something where people post their videos if you're doing zoom classes as long as it's legal check the law if your professor says something deranged capture that and then post that to those pages again within the confines of the law so making as much of this stuff public as possible is one of the best ways to help the other thing you can do is find organizations either within the school or outside the school who are fighting and organizing against this madness because at the base you are not alone there are other people it might feel like you're alone but you're not alone so find those people and see if you can contribute your particular skill set the best way is to remember that they're your kids and you should always love them and treat them with kindness and decency and compassion and the more you stray from that the more difficult it will be to help them people change their views from the position of psychological safety we know this the research literature is absolutely overwhelming that's why the whole quote unquote punching nazis thing a few years ago achieved the opposite effect in terms of whether or not someone would actually change their beliefs people hunker down in adversarial relationships so the first order of business is to create a a loving sensitive listening environment once you have that environment set up it's easier to help people navigate difficult conversations and difficult life issues but the most important thing is not how to react but how not to react don't react with anger don't react with rage don't shout at somebody model the behavior that you want to see in others they can ask them how they know it how they know what they they they think they know they could ask them how confident they are in the belief that it's true they could ask them where it came from where the belief came from in all of those cases focusing on the epistemology or how they know what they claim to know is the root out of a belief system it's not focusing on the claims it's not attacking the claims it's questioning the claims so they can come to doubt the beliefs themselves it's not you telling them that the beliefs are false or bad or wrong or evil but it's them doubting whether or not the beliefs are true and the only way that comes is through psychologically safe environments and questions that target epistemology or how people know what they claim to know that is a very difficult question the the most important thing is that you work that out with your spouse and you don't take that out on your children and so if there's a disagreement it should be talked about with your spouse it's extraordinarily difficult to raise children period given the demands of modern life if two people have different religious backgrounds that makes it even more difficult and muddies the water but with religion usually people can talk about it ahead of time and more often than not people aren't sudden converts to a religion like wokism so if somebody is woke and somebody is not woke that's springing something on the partner that wasn't there beforehand and people couldn't agree so that makes raising children difficult the most important thing is you want to buttress the children from the disagreement and you want to attempt to figure out with your spouse beforehand how you would navigate issues now there will be some issues that are simply incommensurable your spouse wants to teach them about anti-racism what have you and the other individual in the partnership doesn't want to that again has to be worked out in the confines of the relationship possibly to be blunt if it cannot be worked out maybe separation is best my feeling however though is that we will sort most of this stuff out in a few years and the people who have been brain damaged by the woke virus they will shed those beliefs the first thing they need to do is show up you have to show up to meetings you have to show up to events public events if you watch benjamin voices videos about equity in the state of washington one of the things you see is how few people attend those meetings you have to show up you have to film film is always better than than paper documents if they have paper documents take photos of those and then try to post those online that's one thing you can do the second thing you can do is you can join particular organizations to fight back like the foundation against intolerance and racism and there are constantly organizations springing up astronomy does some wonderful work many people do some wonderful work the third thing you can do is you can educate yourselves you can read about the subject matter you can go to james lindsay's new discourses page you can read cynical theories with helen pluckrose and helen has two new books coming out this year about how to fight back against woke ideology and very important one of the things you can do is you can find whatever your skill set is are you a lawyer are you an artist are you a writer and you can offer to make contributions they don't have to be financial contributions you can dedicate your time and your skill set to certain groups for example i'm constantly looking for attorneys for the work i do i'm constantly looking for people to help me project managers and retired physicians by lending your time to those of us who are involved in this full-time that's one of the ways that we can move the needle so if your church or an organization has gone woke remember you're not alone follow the steps document publicize educate yourselves understand what's going on find organizations volunteer your time i would ask them the following question under what condition would you be willing to revise your belief what could somebody show you and they would say ah wow you're right it's not just that so that's the first thing i would do and then i would listen to really genuinely listen to what they had to say and see if you could provide that and see if that's reasonable i recommend documenting i recommend filming and i recommend not challenging but asking questions specifically asking questions about how they know that how do you know for example white fragility how do we know that is that does that apply in other spaces or in other arenas when when people tell you about equity or diversity and inclusion always make sure you ask for a definition of those words and what people mean by those words are they trafficking in ordinary language are they trafficking in other language the word part is extremely important and i have videos one minute videos coming out explaining how woke people use words the word component of this is extremely important because people are using words in different ways and they're talking past each other so if you go to a diversity training your first order of business is to really understand what's being said document if possible often they won't let you record or document but if you can document document and two focus on asking questions and those questions should revolve around what words mean and then c do the words actually mean that one common confusion for example is the difference between equity and equality these are opposites these are not the same words here's a simple thing you can ask can you think of a single sentence in which the word equity can be swapped for the word equality and the meaning of the sentence will remain the same i don't think it's possible and i don't think it's possible because those words mean different things who cares about whether or not a belief is espoused by people on the right or the left the only thing that matters is whether or not it's true yeah there are a lot of tactics i mentioned some in this series one asking a disconfirmation question under what conditions could that belief be false two when you look at the literature on occult exiting why people leave cults it's not that their belief systems are necessarily disrupted it's their interpersonal milieu is disrupted the individuals within that either there's some form of treachery or there's some form of betrayal or people make new friends and have new friendships and those friendships guide them out of those relationships even in that case again as a theme that's emerged in this video is you want to treat people with kindness and decency the other thing you can do in addition to just focusing on broad-based epistemology which is how people know what they claim to know and we wrote about this in how to have impossible conversations there are 36 techniques what to do if if somebody offers a belief and you don't think that that person actually believes that belief so here's one thing you can do you can ask them to put the belief on a scale on a scale from 1 to 10 how confident are you in this the more ideologically captured one is the higher number one will give so they'll say 10. so the response if someone says 10 is so that's interesting so that belief isn't formed on the basis of evidence they'll usually say well what do you mean by that or what are you talking about and the response to that is well if a belief is formed on the basis of evidence then there must be some evidence that could come along that would cause someone to doubt that belief and if you're telling me your belief is 10 and 1 to 10 in other words you're 100 positive and there's no evidence that would change it it's basically a religiously held belief right notice how i ended that in the question so you're always ending and asking questions so questions give you hooks they give you things to hook onto so you can ask more questions to probe their epistemology and further instill doubt but in each of these cases there's a sequence it's establishing a safe environment a psychologically safe environment that includes building rapport asking disconfirmation questions asking questions about how they know things asking if their beliefs are based on evidence asking a version of what's called the outsider test for faith john w loftus does a wonderful job for this it's basically looking at your faith in this case considering woke-ism a kind of faith looking at your faith in the same way that outsiders look at it so for example if you're born into a system of christianity it's just normal and natural to believe that jesus walked on water if you're born into buddhism it's just normal and natural everybody believes that the dalai lama reincarnated throughout bodies and time but if you're looking at that from an outsider perspective it's bizarre it's probably a delusion and it's almost definitely false so for example the pentecostal believes they can speak in tongues but if you've been raised in an environment where you've seen people speak in tongues and you've quote unquote witness that over time it's totally normal to you so one of the things you can do with the woke is help them look at and view things from an outsider perspective it's not that difficult to do and it basically deals with asking them targeted sequenced questions like put your belief on a scale does everybody believe that in what way could that belief be wrong simple very basic questions that can help people to question and doubt their own belief system again we write about this all in how to have impossible conversations and there's a specific chapter in chapter six in the book that deals with woke ideology a disconfirmation question is basically asking under what conditions could a belief be false the important thing here is that you are not telling someone a belief is false if you tell someone a belief is false you create an adversarial relationship that's also the problem with asking someone why it seems like a basic question in many regards it's a good question well why do you believe that if you ask someone well why do you believe that why do you believe the systemic racism and sexism here's what will happen they'll talk to you and tell you why they believe it which is exactly what you ask them to do so they will increase their confidence in a belief when they hear the reasons they have for a belief but the exact opposite happens the mechanism is diametrically opposed when you say to them under what conditions could that belief be false instead of talking themselves into a belief in increasing their confidence they talk themselves out of belief and decrease their confidence many people have never even been asked that question so if somebody says to you free speech is just an excuse for you to be racist that doesn't come out of nowhere the person who espouses that buys into a radical ideology the first thing i would ask them is why why do they believe that what's important to understand embedded within that answer is from the literature there's something called privilege preserving epistemic pushback that's just a fancy way of saying that privilege will do everything and anything it can to preserve itself and we can't have freedom of speech because if we have freedom of speech that's just a way that the privilege can maintain their privileged status and their privileged position and so what we need to do is we need to undermine the ability for people to say nasty hurtful things so it's really important to understand the moral infrastructure for the questions and and once you understand that you can understand how to respond to those questions so here's here's one thing you can do is you just ask why and you can really listen to what the person with whom you're speaking has to say here's a way to think about it again if someone is more intelligent this is the question i would ask them someone who's less educated and less intelligent you'd have to go to a different suite of questions but here's a kind of bundle or basket of questions i'd ask someone do you believe that your moral beliefs are rationally derivable in other words do you believe they're true because you can know them through reason or do you think they're just accidents of culture most people will say well it's just true there should be universal ascent for example to the fact that we shouldn't throw gay people off a building should we should do we know that through reason or how do we know that once you figure out what someone says to that again this is a complex problem so the answer to that the answer to your question is a little bit longer so once we know that if someone says well it's all arbitrary it's just an artifact of culture well then you can might as well believe anything right so if that's what cultural relativism is that's what moral relativism is you literally might as well believe anything but most people will believe that the beliefs that they hold in this particular case about free speech and not saying things those are universal values because the only universal constant is power and that seeks to preserve itself so a subsequent question is so if your beliefs are rationally derivable then you should want to subject them to reason and scrutiny and have a conversation about those beliefs no and then you see what someone says there are other things you can do along we'll call this the the high road or the the intellectual road you can ask people for example if they can think of times in history where that's not been the case so for example for the civil rights movement free speech was the very thing that allowed the emancipation of slaves it allowed the emancipation of lgbt people and so in each of those cases the only way we were able to challenge or question the status quo was precisely because we were allowed to have open conversation and honest dialogue i just read andrew doyle's from the uk his book titled simply free speech and it is an incredibly good book and an easy read to understand basic arguments for free speech telling them not alone encourage them to leave if it's possible i've stayed at portland state university a long long time for for many reasons related to that and sometimes when you're in an environment you think it's the right thing to do for example if you have a position of authority if you're teaching you think it's the right thing to do because if you leave that environment those students they'll have nothing they'll have nobody they'll have nowhere to go they'll have nobody to speak with the other thing that i think keeps people understanding the motivations for why people stay in those positions for a long period of time is that they think once they leave the organizational structure will just become a juggernaut and rule over anybody and anything that disagrees with them and so one way of support is to let people know they're not alone the second area of support is to talk to and reach out to organizations that are actively involved in this it used to be years ago that there were free thinkers and atheist movements all along campuses in society but almost all of those like almost everything else in society has become woke remember wokeness is a universal solvent that destroys everything it touches and the consequence of that is we don't have vibrant institutions anymore where people can have open and honest conversations certainly doesn't happen in the classrooms that's just by the way one of the reasons i think podcasts have become so popular in alternative venues like this media so what you can do is you can let people know that they're not alone and they can find organizations and groups and then they can go to you to have honest open conversations undergirding all of that i would say is the simple principle let friends be wrong let friends be wrong means it's okay if you don't agree with absolutely everything your friend believes i know that's a weird idea in 2021 but that's the way it was throughout certainly throughout much of my life you don't have to believe every single thing someone else believes in order to be friends with them in fact some of my richest friendships come from people who don't hold beliefs that i happen to hold so you can support those people through friendship you can support those people to encouraging them to leave their current position you can support them by not just telling them to find an organization but actually helping them go out and find other non-local organizations [Music] hi everyone thanks for watching i hope you're enjoying my channel don't forget to subscribe and if you'd like to see more of my work you can head on over to locals which is an awesome free speech platform that won't take down or flag any videos which youtube is known to do it's a great platform because people want to be there and they'll engage in meaningful dialogue with you and it's awesome plus if you sign up for a paid account you can get access to content that is exclusive to locals you'll find a link for that in the description below also if you ever see me lying down in interviews or in any of the videos it's because i lived with debilitating back pain for years so i just wanted to explain that so you understand what's going on and uh sometimes my little dog nora might make an appearance come here don't be shy don't be shy all right thanks everybody

Channel: The Signal Productions

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Id: E533GrNR89g

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022