Social Justice Explained: The Foundations Of Wokeness - James Lindsay - #124

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is James Lindsay. You might recognize him from Joe Rogan last year and the Grievance Studies dog park debacle, which he was one of the co-authors, along with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose. But today, he's sitting down in his own and we're talking about the foundations of wokeness. I, as you will have done as well, have been exposed to quite a lot of Social Justice Warrior bashing over the last few years. I was getting a bit bored of just seeing Sam Harris destroys Social Justice Warrior on YouTube. I actually want you to understand where this movement comes from. I want you to understand postmodernism and social justice and everything else to do with this particular subject area. I want to have a concrete foundational understanding of exactly what's going on because how can I have a view on it if I don't understand its origins? So fortunately, it turns out that James is not only patient zero for understanding this stuff, but he's also writing a book on it, which will be out next year. So he was the perfect man for the job. Please welcome James Lindsay.

**James Lindsay** (1:34)
I hope somebody will get upset that I've said this, but truly the whole thing is steeped in psychoanalyzing people you disagree with and paranoia, and it's all about systems of power and the way that those influence everything so that nothing can be authentic. And it's all kind of whining and complaining and very pessimistic, very cynical. It has that characteristic where, you've probably run into this, where you know it's wrong, and it's not hard to see how it's wrong. It's easy to see how it's persuasive though, and it's going to take you a lot of work to explain why it's wrong in a satisfactory way. And it's really a negative place to be. I don't think it's fun to do this at all.

**Chris Williamson** (2:23)
Are you the sort of the guy that's had to walk over hot coals to try and retrieve something of value from the other side a little bit? Sort of, it's you that's suffering this discomfort.

**James Lindsay** (2:34)
That is a good way to put it, yeah, in a sense. I feel like that's kind of what I'm doing now is I really want to understand the mindset and understand it in a way that's faithful to what it actually is, that portrays it accurately, but also in a way that I can communicate that back to other people in plain language so that they can see it for what it is without having to go read tons of it. It is like walking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the coals, knowing every single time that it's going to be hot again. It's very terrible.

**Chris Williamson** (3:11)
I get it. The listeners, you will have joined us. There's usually an intro, but me and James had too much to talk about. Welcome back. I'm joined by James Lindsay and we are talking about an awful lot of different interesting things today, principally, critical theory.

**James Lindsay** (3:28)
That's principally what I've been thinking about. Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
What is what is critical theory? I don't know what critical theory is.

**James Lindsay** (3:35)
Critical theory is a way to view the world. The long and short of it is that it's a way to view the world, that sees the world in terms of, then there are multiple critical theories. There are many critical theories. At its very bottom, it's a way to view the world where everything relevant in terms of social relations has to do with power dynamics that are in society between some group with power and other groups who don't have as much power. The object of critical theory is to say that the groups that have power carry certain assumptions and biases and the likes. And they bake that into the systems that they create without realizing that they're doing it. So the critical theorist's job is to expose those biases and uncover those assumptions so that they can be critiqued and reexamined and usually discarded, dismantled, subverted or otherwise overthrown. So you would have this in the Marxist sense, the power group would either be the capitalists or the bourgeoisie, which would be the property holding class. And they, in a very direct sense, control the working class and control how they're supposed to think and set the fashion and set the tone of what high society is supposed to look like or how the businesses are supposed to be operated. And they exploit the working class, which would be the oppressed group.