Peter Boghossian - Interview on Woke Ideology

[Music] whoo that is a huge question that is an unbelievably big question let's just start with what is it well we're still trying to figure out what it is but i would broadly define it by the words they use social justice uppercase s uppercase j as opposed to lowercase s and j what's the difference between those two um social justice is has a set of embodied with upper cases has a set of embodied values within it and those values are there are canonical texts that go with those values so that this is kind of getting ahead of ourselves but people mean something very specific when they use uppercase s and j as opposed to lowercase s and j and what is the latter the lowercase social justice well it could mean different things to different people what is justice that's been debated since plato's republic which was the main point of the first three books of the republic but when you talk about what social justice is um everybody wants social justice but there are no specific values that come with uppercase like uh just gay marriage would be equality for homosexuals or something cool that didn't mean far more no it's far far more complicated and anything i do risks oversimplification like i'm super conscious that someone's gonna hear that and be like well that's not what it is okay so that's a very rudimentary answer part of the new religion uh sort of rests on the capital s capital j social justice that's just that's just a placeholder name for the social political cultural and epistemological phenomenon that's emerged in the last well it's been gestating or germinating in the universities and lyle asher who wrote a piece for qualette he's a professor at lewis and clark called it like kudzu kudzu is this vine from asia that just grows over everything and just it just it's kudzu it grows up it grows down it grows everywhere but you could ask anybody what is microaggression trigger warning safe space everybody knows that those things in the piece i published in the wall street journal i expanded that and everybody's heard of patriarchy which is a much older word but there are values that are that find their nucleation point in the universities in certain departments in the universities and those invariably end in something with the word studies and then they metastasize they spread they they're institutionalized by their devotees in the university they're taught to students those students then go out into the workforce and society and they bring those values with them and i can explain the mechanism for that which is just absolutely crucial to explain how this works but the key is that those values they're totally untethered to reality i wouldn't say they're arbitrary but they're um they're not rooted in reality they're just an ideology so the way i think of the new religion is is that it's comprised of as you said social justice ideologies but also very specifically this kind of falls into that category but anti-racism anti-sexism intersectionality is that roughly in the broadest terms so james lindsey would say that that's the package that comes in but once you look in the box it's very different can we talk about what's in the box yeah before we talk about it what's in the box can we talk about how that came to be yes sure because if you don't talk about like because it's origin yeah because it's just people saying what are you talking everybody knows this stuff is true where did that come from so this is my friend brett weinstein's term it comes from ideal laundering so let's take a look at that this is an indispensable piece of the whole puzzle and then we'll come back to that so a bunch of people let's say we all have what seven people eight people in here we all have a belief about something we all feel strongly about something let's say that we feel strongly about go-karts being raced on sundays like everybody should be a go-kart racer well what do we do if we're academicians we get together and we make a journal about it go-karts why go-kart racing on sunday is so important and then we start same thing as every other journal we start cranking out why not monday why not thursday what the benefits of go-kart racing on sunday so obviously this is not about go-kart racing but it's things about you know fat studies or any other stuff so people have a moral impulse they discharge that moral impulse through writing articles that are then published in journals it goes in as an idea on one end and at the journal at the other end it comes out as knowledge so when you ask people how they know things you know uh go-karts or whatever they say well look here here it is here's an article for this here's our evidence for this but it's not evidence it's it's it's something that a group of ideologues have gotten together and laundered it's not knowledge it's just a moral impulse that people have so that's the mechanism now let's talk about how the mechanism spreads because this is a key part of this before we get to the mechanism can you give a real world example yeah fat studies okay can you talk a little bit because i think some people have no idea what the hell fat studies is well so okay so that's the thing so if i said to you what do you think fat studies is you would say well i mean they study uh macronutrients a1cs they study uh you know the prevalence of obesity among you know i don't know whatever it's none of those things it's literally none of those things it is a an ideological movement that they don't use the word obesity because that's a medicalized narrative they think it's we're getting a little ahead of ourselves but they think that it's a story that people tell themselves there are different stories that people tell themselves on this world view the medical story is just one story here's another story you can be healthy at every size there's a whole movement so there's a journal called fat studies so they have these moral intuitions by charlotte cooper who lives in london and she was part of the fatty olympics and when we did the fake papers one of the fake papers the the sokol saw hoax papers that we wrote was that there should be a category of bodybuilding called fat bodybuilding where people went into professional bodybuilding competitions and showed their fat off and they thought this was a great idea so fat studies is basically a fat advocacy it's a diabetes denialism um a journal and this charlotte cooper was the main figure you know has a book fat activism and a bunch of a whole bunch of articles about this but they have a moral impulse writes about in a journal comes out as knowledge and say well how do you know it's just you can be healthy at every size or how do you know whatever the story that these people say well they point to the journal okay now we need one more piece before we get to your question so what's happening now is this is happening on a large scale with critical race theory with queer theory with all these things these are inventions they're complete fictions often it's not just that there's not enough evidence to warrant these things it's that the evidence contradicts these things and we'll come back to that but let's talk about the mechanism first so when when we figured this out this was an absolute mind blow i mean my mind was utterly blown when we figure this out so what happens so as i said a bunch of academicians get together they write in these journals they make journals they start publishing things they're cranking out articles that then point to as evidence for how they know like that's their epistemology these journals and the conclusions are particular articles that come out about as a result of these journals but it doesn't stop there that process itself is a self-credentialing mechanism so what they do is they publish and you need seven articles in seven years to get tenure so they publish in these journals and they write on their cvs which is like a resume for for people in the academy and they say look i published this i published a critical race theory or this you know that biology is a construct that there are no such gender flu whatever whatever it is they point to these things then they get tenure when you get tenure it's a job for life then along this whole road and i'm tr this is such a mind blow they're teaching people these articles they're teaching their students they're giving these students and they're testing them on the correct answers to this this whole thing is it's all made up all of it all of it concurrent with that they have systematically called voices out of the academy that they've whenever you hear the word diversity it should translate as ideological homogeneity in other words diversity means no alternative voices they've gotten rid of conservative they've got certainly they've gotten rid of people who are overtly or vocally or conspicuously conservative and they just start not hiring not promoting not giving them tenure and then alternative beliefs are much less likely to get published the perfect case of that is bruce gilly again this is a very complicated thing a lot of information let's get back to the original question so let's take a look at they make their journals they publish in the journals they put that to get promotion in tenure which is a job for life all along the way they're teaching kids students this stuff they go to colleges of education they teach pre-service teacher educators this stuff those teachers get out and teach kids so a whole generation of people are now believing things that are totally untethered to reality so that's the mechanism that's where it comes from that's why they've been so successful and they have one more piece to this they have defense mechanisms to keep their ideology in place they have offices of diversity and inclusion they have as reported by the wall street journal over 200 bias response teams anybody can file a complaint portland state university has one with a bias response team if someone has an instance of bias you can also file a bias response incident anonymously so so those are lodged not with the administration but with the police but they have mechanisms in place like title ix violations to keep dissenters from voicing their opinions so for example i was told i'm not allowed to render my opinion or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes is known and i teach ethics i don't teach accounting right so that's the mechanism that's what they do these people they tend to be almost universally atheists in in the academy at least they don't have say they have faith they don't need faith they they have their own journals uh they point to those as knowledge and they use that to systemically and that's what it is it's a system it's a system of influencing people they look at the universities as their own particular ideology mill and they indoctrinate people into intersectionality that's the mechanism by which this works now once we get to the mechanism we can look at the ideas but before i do that are we cool about the mechanism because it's very complicated before we talk about anything else i really want to make sure that that's clear because it's not just that it's just spontaneously or arbitrarily pops up there's a system in place that manufactures these ideas in which into which people are graded into which they're assessed into it now even faculty have to hire diversities to have new hires have to have diversity statements there's a lot of controversy from some from some people about this but uh that's what they do that's how they've taken over the academies yeah i think that makes sense i think that directly following that there's the question of again we were talking a little while ago about about like my parents who are fundamentalist christians right and they had good motives right they had good motives they loved me they want to take care of me but they did really bad things uh is this you know for most people is this not the same thing so where you know you have these people in the humanities who are really concerned about racism they're really concerned about people who are treated poorly because they're overweight well they're concerned about all they should be concerned about instances of injustice every sane person should be every decent person should be so so the question really is difference go ahead oh well i'm just going to say that the question is you know aren't aren't these people wanting to do good judicially yeah that's what we spoke about people don't knowingly do bad things i want to say another because again i i really want to focus on how this is the case because you can't really talk about anything until we've talked about that so here's a difference the difference is that these folks view restricting speech as a good thing they also have terms that they have institutionalized they don't have neologisms and neologism is like you know restaurant breast and restaurant i got that from one of our papers we did about fake papers about hooters but what they do is they change the meaning of words so if i say to you don't you want an inclusive space if i said that everybody in this room don't want everyone of course we want an inclusive who what only the ku klux klan wouldn't want an exclusive space some of the fringe lunatic group but what a inclusive space is a welcoming space and a space can't be welcoming if people don't feel welcomed so if some people say things that make people feel unwelcome then that is not an inclusive space so what an inclusive space means is restricted speech inclusive space is restricted speech so what they're trying to do what they've done incredibly well is restrict people's speech okay that's the i don't know 101 level but that's the basic level there's a whole nother layer that we could talk about that it's not just restricting speech it's the loss of cognitive liberty there's one way to think anything that violates that have jonathan hi and greg luke kianoff have a a wonderful book calling of the american mind in which they talk about this and one of my friends the lead researchers pamela pereski also greg lucianov has the foundation for individual rights and education where he documents these these uh pretty egregious violations of speech rights but again the thing that's really going on that we can perhaps talk about later but i want to plant the seed now in case we come to it is that those attempts those successful attempts to limit speech diversity uh equity we haven't talked about inclusion safe spaces trigger warnings microaggressions all of those things or really attempts um are um rob you of your cognitive liberty listening to distant voices forming your beliefs the way you want to form them holding your beliefs the way you want to hold them all right so that's that's what's going on now i'm happy to talk about the particulars as long as that's clear yeah and i think we can get to the particulars but if we could take a slight detour here because it relates to what you were just saying uh i see a lot of similarities and i think you've said this in the past as well but can you yeah can you lay out the similarities that um between this sort of intersectional religion and let's say christianity specifically yeah sure no no no no problem at all so there is a type of original sin um and and for the the woke even the word woke itself is you know woke you're kind of born again in the in the not the faith but in the social justice ideology you're woke you now know what you didn't know you have a new kind of awareness and consciousness before so your orientation to the world is fundamentally different so there's privilege is the the analog to that is original sin but the difference is there's no redemption narrative with privilege it's a stain you're stuck with it whereas you can get out of original sin through uh belief in jesus there is mechanisms to keep these ideologies in place so just as we have blasphemies in the in abrahamic traditions and even hinduism or what have you we also have secular blasphemies so i'll give you example you know like burning the american flag or pooping on the american flag would be a secular blasphemy but so too do we have secular blasphemies that contradict there has to be a way to keep since the sense the whole thing is under evidence anyway you have to keep the belief in play somehow so you have to have a prophylactic or a way to prevent the beliefs from from any kind of criticism and basically you have blasphemy so the you can look at the parallels i mean those are just two but you can look at the parallels but the deeper thing that's going on is that there is none of this stuff for electricity you don't need any of this stuff for electricity because you have overwhelming evidence for it so what do you need any of this stuff for nobody does this with with with gravity right there's only one thing that people do this with and it's biology any type of religious not even fundamentalists it's whether it whether because you said to keep it christianity so but you know even in the in the muslim world i think uh turkey is only above us for evolution denialism right so but nobody's denying any of the other hard sciences no one's designing like electrical engineering but it's that biology represents a fundamental threat to these ideologies and and eric weinstein's question is it's just fantastic i i'm not going to get the wording right but he put a wonderful tweet out and that is and i've asked scores of people this question i'll tell you what their response is if there's a contradiction between gender studies and biology on which side do you air that's that's the litmus test right there that's the question when you ask that boom that's an ideological signature and what you'll see more often than not is most people obfuscate oh there's no conflict well then you give them an example of a conflict well what about this what side do you air on e-r-r you know which side do you do you swayed toward or do you favor but um the broader idea is that this is um it's like the example i gave before is kudzu it's just it's just enveloping and taking over everything and we're so close to it we don't even see it and that this is a very recent phenomenon that it's become widespread since around jonathan height puts around 2014 i believe it's a very recent phenomenon right no i think that's great um and there's so much this is such a complicated area there's so much and in this space right now people are trying to figure out which is one of the reasons of douglas martial's wonderful book it's been so successful and jim and james lindsey and helen pluck rose have cynical theories which is a i read the manuscript it's an unbelievable book they call it applied postmodernism how did we get to the situation that we're in where people believe things that are just clearly false or people have about identity level issues people have views about reality for example women participating in or people been born the terminology is complicated sorry to be crass but people born with penises uh who are then competing in women's sports like all of this stuff is under certain ideological umbrellas which take place in the university system we know it we know exactly where it comes from it's not a secret at all in fact not only is not a secret they're screaming at it from the rooftops how do people who don't go to the universities who don't know about any of this stuff how does it how does it spread out into society oh jordan peterson's talked about that the first thing is those people who go to colleges are more likely to be have leadership positions in companies and go on to be managers and then institutionalize stuff that they themselves think is knowledge right because that's how the process of ideal laundering works they think it's knowledge so they bring these concepts to the workplace great example and you were there look at the james moore event look what happened to james damore right it's a wonderful example of privileging or raising a value up asking somebody and if you don't know the james moore thing and you're watching this i would highly recommend that you check that out he was asked his opinion about diversity he's a google engineer he wrote a memo the memo was leaked he was utterly vilified completely vilified and he got fired lost his job and and there google you know what are you gonna do they're google good luck fighting them can we talk about what the kudzu is yeah so the the analogy is this plant that just spreads and not the plant like what is intersectionality oh it's this is what it comes from of this it comes from it comes from an article from kimberly crenshaw called mapping the margins and it's this idea that we all have um identity characteristics identity markers and if for example that's the funny thing about all of this stuff is all of this stuff has some truth in it unlike you know the traditional religions of talking snakes and angels which is total all of this stuff has truth to it some a kernel of truth all of it so it's this idea that if you're black and female you have a different perception of the world than if you're white and you're male and you're treated differently in the world and if you're black female and lesbian that's another identity variable that's another oppression marker you have a different view of the world and i think i explained this on reuben before but a good way to think about this is i am a cis white hetero male like everything that's evil everything that's bad in this world view every time you add one oppression variable like say i were black then i'd be cis black hetero and male so if i'm white in all those things i see the world in grayscale you add black i see one color like you know blue you add gay i see it in you know purple you add disabled uh you know you see it in green and so your view of reality becomes more clear based upon the oppression variables you have you have more access to truth the more oppression variables you have that's the kudzu that's the idea that we we're and again this is true that we all have we're all it's it's not just we don't just have one identity we're composed of multiple identities and the idea is that we have more the the problem is that we then have more access to truth and that's where the idea of privilege comes from that's where the idea of and again there's a lot of truth to that stuff you know it's not like it's not like people it's not like angels and stuff there's they're actually black people are actually discrimination there have been horrific instances of historical discrimination um so the the difficult one my own personal opinion is one of the reasons this has taken such sway is because it's a kernel of truth to all of it yeah and i want to touch on that real quick because i read frank shaw's 1989 paper and one of her other papers and i mean most like 99 percent of it is what she's really i mean yes she invented intersectionality but i think what it is now is very different than what she oh there's no there's no no question but that's the kudzu and so i was i was just talking about how i more or less agreed with crenshaw's analysis in her 89 paper whatever that was called i forget but how did and this sort of goes to what matt and i were just talking about how did that how did that idea spread and become something that has negative consequences you know how did it become well it it wasn't just the idea of intersectionality that spread but i'll answer your question and then i'll say what the problematic aspects are it was that it went to ed schools it was ed school so pre-service teacher education programs we were teaching our teachers this stuff uh so just as a small anecdote i went to to my daughter she goes to school at hofsford middle school and there was a pamphlet on the table about microaggressions and then i asked the woman teaching the the seminar about microaggressions about some very basic things about microaggressions um and i said is there any evidence that would con that would change your mind and she said well there is no evidence i said well this actually is there's a piece in 2017 by scott lillenfeld called microaggressions strong claims and adequate evidence and she just looked at me i said okay but just bracket that for a second could i provide you with any evidence that would change your mind that there were these things called microaggressions and she said no that's that they exist we're just talking about whether or not that's a thing that exists uh yeah that that um that that well i i framed the question multiple ways to her i gave her multiple outs she wasn't willing to change her mind and i said it's okay so so if you're not willing to change your mind about a belief then the belief isn't evidence-based because what it means to hold a belief on the basis of evidence is that there has to be a there could be a piece of evidence that could come along that would you'd change your mind and she said she wasn't willing to change your mind i said well then it's a religion to you right which is fine if it is just it's you take this as an article of faith and i'm sorry this is going very fast and i'm again like trying to catch up no i know this is very complicated when you talk about evidence in this instance like a piece of traditional psychological evidence would fit the bill well okay so i asked her so those i i asked her what she would consider to be evidence and she said there is no evidence so you're d you're already dealing with an ideologue there's no evidence that would cause you to change your mind about something really so that's the other thing that i so have have you heard of cultural appropriation yep just a quick show of hands cultural appropriation yes it's probably because we all live in portland i don't know so i had asked one of my colleagues who is the main proponent of this madness i won't mention his his name but i said to him we were at a faculty meeting and i said you know x do you and this person is a full professor in the philosophy department do you really believe it's just we're just two dudes we're just sitting here two guys table no one else is listening do you really believe that in the entire history of western intellectual thought 2 400 years of wrestling with incredibly complicated issues moral issues etc do you honestly believe that it's only within the last four that we figured out that cultural appropriation is wrong it's a timeless eternal immutable bad it's a truth he looked at me with unshakable sincerity and certainty and said yes i do okay that's the hallmark of an ideologue that's a zealot and that's a professor who goes on to indoctrinate other people any question that i could have made to him he could have reported me to the diversity board to the bias response team any one of her number of mechanisms they have a mechanism to silence dissent so why does that make him an idolog well because the same way the same reason it makes the professor the the height excuse me not the perfect the middle school teacher in ideologue remember we talked about scales from the beginning one to ten if you say 10 you're not willing to change your belief so that almost by definition you're an ideologue you have an ideology it's not it's immune to there's no evidence that someone can provide you with that would call into quest even to question the idea that cultural appropriation is wrong so it's a dogma i would say it's even worse than a dogma a dog would be a nice way to it's it's it's a kind of a dogma coupled with a world view and undergirding that is a weird form of moral certainty keeping it in place cementing it in place i'm sorry i'm just one more time no no you keep going baby so it because he wasn't willing to admit that maybe somebody had discovered that sooner like that's the no because his belief wasn't falsifiable in philosophy you'd call it defeasible uh his his there were no conditions under which that belief could be false that cultural appropriation is wrong yeah i believe i see okay yeah it couldn't it's so clear to me that it's a kind of moral or cultural myopia it's just a short-sightedness that we have or we're swept up in this wave of maybe cultural appropriation is like what we think of as the uh immigration melting pot like that would be like a piece of like another opinion that he he could yeah maybe okay but he couldn't generate that sure he wasn't even he wasn't even open to it i mean look the very fact that we are in this room now speaking english we have culturally appropriate there are so many things that we have culturally appropriated i'm eating at chipotle that's culturally appropriated the whole thing is culturally appropriated so but the idea that a full professor of philosophy was so hoodwinked by this and couldn't come up with a disconfirmation condition it should be terrifying that this individual has a job for life and indoctrinates people into this and you guys were sure you were talking about the same thing uh i i assume so because i did the rappaport's rules and such right from the beginning we're gonna have to go back and talk about what that is restating their position yeah restating their position there are four rules the first one is the most important in my opinion restating before any criticism is offered restating their position so clearly that they say that's right i wish i had thought of that i wish i had expressed it that clearly so there's an important question i think so complaining of some of the excesses of social justice ideology and and you know certain anti-racist anti-sexist movements may seem to some to be essentially a waste of time the complaining about those things in that these movements point to real problems right so in other words people may feel justified and assuming that you care more about these what some people would think are abstract problems that don't affect too many people um then about you know bigotry and sexism and so how do you address that concern that is the hardest question to answer okay let's say that that they're correct and i actually share most of those values first of all that doesn't give you license to make stuff up because you have strong moral impulses it doesn't mean you can fabricate lines of literature right and that's what the grievance studies thing that's what we try to point to second thing is the problem that most people have and this is so difficult to explain to people is they'll they'll say something well those are just kooks in the academy are those are just a bunch of fringe crackpots well actually no these are people who are teaching very dangerous ideas what makes those ideas dangerous is that they're divisive we start looking at each other in terms of race one of the things the consequences of intersectionality is making ever finer distinctions when you look at someone about their race and gender and nancy rummelman had a case right here in portland where and that's a fascinating case if you haven't heard of it where one of her employees was caught up in this insanity and demanded that white patrons stand at the door and buy black customers cups of coffee as they walked in the door but in this ideology that's totally fine but the point of the point the larger point is that this doesn't does not advance civil rights causes it's exactly the opposite so instead of going up like superordinate identities things that bind us we're americans we're humans we have problems we have money problems the plastic in the oceans whatever whatever problems we want to say you divide people into ever finer divisions based upon their identity markers so how can we uh for those of us who are concerned about these problems how can we sort of push back against that but also worry about sexism and bigotry and the things that that that they're pointing to does that make sense yeah it does i don't know if worries the right word but we already have the answers to this we have the answers in humanism we have the answers in the enlightenment we have the answers in liberalism let people if it's totally irrelevant to anything what sexual preference one has or what identity markers one has we we have to start treating people as individuals and not on the basis of i mean that was mlk was not an intersectional feminist so the the idea would be to still push for equality as much as that is possible ah but you see what you just did yeah you use the word equality tell us they are not pushing for equality that's right if you say to people oh do we want an equitable every time i get an email i get all these emails because both my kids went to portland public schools oh you know equity equity if equity offers equity do you know what equity means i can i take a stab you can please do um so equality and i saw this in a cartoon so all the boxes the boxes and the facts okay let's talk about that that's that's my definition okay so we'll go with that so equality means treating people equally right we all agree that's not that everybody agrees that equity well equity has a very specific definition in finance but equity the way they use it from their canon from their lines of literature means remediating past injustices making up for past injustices so if certain groups like for example the ruth bader ginsburg's the famous quip that she made in jest but the idea behind it was how many supreme court justices should there be if equality is your value it should be four or five since there are nine supreme court justices but if equity is your value all nine should be female it's equity that's what an equity-based system does it makes up for historical injustices and it pushes for equal outcome not equal opportunity that's is it always time-based like that's another thing that the equality of outcome versus opportunity that's a whole nother conversation but someone said something else making up for past injustice that's correct i've never i've never thought of it that way like it like as a time based yeah do you know why you've never thought of it that way no because the word equity doesn't have that meaning in it well okay that's what they do they smuggle in the meat they change the word like if i say to you what does diversity mean what does diversity mean matt uh the way they use it oh uh the way they use it they being intersectionalists they meaning virtually every single person who holds an academic position in the continental united states today i don't know okay i'll tell you what they mean most people would think what do you mean by diversity oh we have you know skin color sexual orientation all the stuff they're right there with you you can just as you can translate equity as making up for past injustices just as you can translate um in inclusive space as a res as a space that restricts speech you can translate diversity as a intellectual homogeneity people having a singular ideological view that's what they mean by diversity and it's all the better if they happen to be from a marginalized group if they're gay and black if they're native american missing a limb with some learning disorder who was born in some horrific condition gold star gold standard what's the point of view that they all share that that's which is why we called our project grievances that there's systemic oppression that they're that they're just looking for grievances everywhere that there's a patriarchy that women are oppressed that minorities are systematically oppressed that um that there's an entire system geared against these for this privilege that white people have privilege and that that's why we need equity so we we need to reverse that system we need to some some method of remediating that injustice but this is the world we see these folks moving to and teaching our kids in the academy this is it it's a shift towards people's subjective experiences your subjective experiences substitute for objective knowledge so it's no longer that you're being taught on objective knowledge it's that you're being taught that you're the views you articulate accord with the dominant moral orthodoxy and i would argue to you that our kids education now is actually teaching them faulty epistemologies it's giving them pieces of knowledge that couldn't possibly lead them it's like an ant it is it's an anti-road map but what's the reason that you assume people go to school well if you look at the word education it comes from latin educare and plato's republic book seven talks about this where it's the allegory of the cave have you heard about that people are basically changing the cave and they other folks walk by and there's a fire and they see shadows on the wall and they mistake the shadows on the wall for reality and there's one man who manages to loosen his shackles his chains he walks out he sees the sun and he decides to go back in to the cave and tell other people and plato's is very specific if they could kill him they would so that whole process it's super dark and then you walk to the light when you educate someone you're not putting something in somebody you're leading them out of something you're leading them out of a state of ignorance you're not indoctrinating them with values right so i would it seems pretty obvious to me that the the purpose of an education is to lead someone out of a state of ignorance and i don't see that happening now i see a very specific it's based on one book an educator from brazil named paolo ferrari it's to put things into people it's to put values into people it's to talk about oppression is to talk about race it's to talk about gender it's to talk about you know whatever whatever that is not only morally fashionable today but comes from this very specific suite of ideological propositions that we teach teachers in pre-service education in in because you can't just nobody you can't just walk in and teach a college class you have to get certified to do that you're certified through the universities through the ed departments and ed departments are a root of this problem so that's what i would argue it's to take someone out of a state of ignorance as opposed to putting beliefs in them about grievances everywhere and oppression everywhere and et cetera so what is it what is it like to lead somebody out of ignorance like what is that process like what happens well i wrote about that um i could i could i could do it i could do it in five minutes if you want me to do it so the first question you have to ask somebody is is it possible that certain people harbor views about reality that are not correct is it possible and then someone will say nobody's going to say no but let's just run with it and say they say yes they say yes okay the second question is is it actual in other words are there some people who actually harbor views about reality that are not true they will say yes you say okay what's an example of that someone will say you know my aunt betty believes you put a bar or soap in your head and your rheumatoid arthritis would be good okay good are there certain ways of knowing right you don't use the word epistemology are there certain ways of knowing that are better than other ways of knowing this is where the problem will come people who have been indoctrinated especially by social justice ideology cultural relativism into really giving subjectivity primacy or thinking in subjective ways will say well no all ways of knowing are just as good as another and so then i'll say something like okay let's say i want to figure out how to solve a math problem is sacrificing a goat on the hood of my car a good way to to do that people were no okay so the moment you say that there are some methods of arriving at knowledge that are worse than others by definition you cannot have a worse unless you have a better right so that must mean that there are some better ways of knowing so let's try to figure out what those better ways of knowing are okay so that's a rough road map for how you do it i've published stuff about that that's not the method none of that stuff that i just said that is almost an anathema to the way that we're teaching our teachers to teach our kids i feel like there's a lot more we could cover about about the the religion but i'll ask i'll ask the specific question which i talk to you on the phone about a little bit which is uh you know in your book you have a lot of methods to talk to various people various beliefs do you have any specific methods that people can use to talk to people who are more or less indoctrinated into this kind of political religion yeah i wrote an article an op-ed in the wall street journal james lindsay about that a couple months ago and that is when you're talking to a social justice warrior and they say something that seems to you to be utterly insane listen and believe listen and believe don't believe that the content of what they're saying is true but believe they actually believe it and that is something that is extraordinarily difficult for people to do because they keep saying well they don't actually believe that like if you're talking to a western secular liberal you say oh you know these people believe there's a talking snake well no they don't actually believe that no actually they do they believe in an actual talking snake when you talk to them and they tell you that they want to overthrow the entire system and they want to that's one of our papers that we wrote about putting white men white college men heterosexuals in chains on the floor as a form of experiential reparations in their classroom just as a quick parenthetical on that what was interesting about that paper is i said jim this is so insane nobody is they're not going to accept it so we need to we need to tone it down we're saying we need to be compassionate to these people and the journal reviewer said no we don't need to be compassionate you need to take this out they don't need compassion if even saying that you're compassionate is centering the needs on those people instead of the minority students in the classroom um so so following up the question of how you talk to these people you should listen and believe that they believe what they what they claim and and then what's the next step that's pretty much it so so well it is it because if someone won't doesn't want to have a conversation with you there's no conversation to be had they're just going to be delivering messages to you they're just going to be saying stating their beliefs to you and you could ask why or what have you but then at some point the so so if you're not trained if not only if you're not trained but if you are told that you ought not it's called platforming you ought not to give people a platform you ought not to have these people and nazis don't have a conversation with them it's not going to go well for you there's no there's no conversation to be had okay my last question which is um i know you've you've said that that uh these people aren't relying on faith because they're pointing to specific literature do you think there's some kind of similar mechanism that exists so i would assume that a lot of people who are out there sort of fighting the social justice battle haven't read that literature they don't even know where it comes from they've just been sort of indoctrinated into the belief so just like islam my bet is most people i mean read the quran right so but and but they're taking that on faith that's the mechanism by which they uh embed that belief in themselves and continue it is there something similar in in this other realm in this other religion i'm not sure i understand the question so that so so faith acts as sort of a linchpin in in christian and and muslim ideology is there another linchpin like that they're canon they're canons of scholarship but i'm saying that there are many people who don't know that canon who still hold the belief they they do know the canon because either they they were taught the canon in school they either taught it in college or they got it from teachers who learned the canon when they were in college and if they if they never went to college then they got it from the workforce from people who went to college we know the source of it it's the nucleation point is gender studies so for those people who haven't gone to college that's what i'm interested in uh you know who who don't know the candidates it's in the cul okay so then for those people they get it through like look what happened again to james damore they get it because those people go into tech they go into media i mean look at the crazy stuff the new york times has been putting out lately look at this and you know that's another story it's complicated but all of these people go into the job market and they influence tech media i just watched um um man in the high castle right great first few seasons and then the last season was a lot of social justice stuff i see social justice stuff in movies i see it in tv i see it in films et cetera i see it we see it in tech we know that there are these biases in tech reuben is complaining about all the time i see what they do to me i see what they do to people we know that this is there so we get this is the cultural pond in which we're swimming and this is the dominant moral orthodoxy we're just so close to it we don't see it [Music] you

Channel: The Signal Productions

Views: 94,917

Keywords:

Id: S-OhqLydeCM

Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022