The Atlas Society Asks James Lindsay Transcript

James Lindsay, Ph.D., is a bestselling author, mathematician, and cultural critic who has written six books on subjects including religion, the philosophy of science, and postmodern theory. He first famously teamed up with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose to submit some 20 academic hoax papers, with 7 of them getting published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. His most famous book (so far), co-authored with Helen Pluckrose is Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity -- and Why This Harms Everybody. He joined CEO Jennifer Grossman on June 22, 2022 to discuss his book Race Marxism, which explores the origins of Critical Race Theory as a reinvention of Marxism focusing on race instead of class. Watch the entire video HERE or check the transcript below. 

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman 

JL: James Lindsay

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JAG:    Dr. Lindsay, welcome again. Thank you for joining us.  

JL:       Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. It'll be hard to top how Cynical Theories did, I'm happy to be able to report. I'm glad I got it into so many hands.  

JAG:    Absolutely. I highly recommend it. And I would have to say, also, your co-author, Helen Pluckrose, if she needs to bring in some extra cash, she should start a side hustle as a narrator, because she did a really wonderful job. She has a beautiful voice.  

JL:       We all tried to tell her that, and she's so British. She has a little bit of a roughneck London accent instead of like the posh ones. So, she was so nervous about it, the British and their funny accent.  

JAG:    Oh no, it was amazing. I kind of had a hard time believing that that was her, but it was beautifully done. So, of course, you and Helen and Peter Bogosian, teamed up to submit some 20 academic papers with seven of them getting published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. The resulting uproar became known as the Grievance Studies Affairl, if I'm getting that right. So, tell us a little bit about how you came up with it, what happened, and the reaction, of course, when it was discovered. 

What we were trying to do was expose that you can actually write stuff that's either horrific or absolutely nonsense, or just silly and terribly argued, then get these papers accepted as long as they had politically fashionable conclusions.

JL:       So, this is sort of, in a sense, the origin story for how I ended up getting into this whole mess. In 2017, Peter and Helen and I embarked on a mission to expose what we thought was a huge political corruption in academia, whether they were publishing these absolutely absurd academic articles. So, we wrote, as you said, 20 of them over the course of a year, which is a lot of academic articles, usually one or two a year is a career. We did 20 in a single year and we ended up getting seven of them accepted. Seven of them were still under peer review. The Wall Street Journal caught us, so six we had given up on, to account for everybody there. And what we were trying to do was expose that you can actually write stuff that's either horrific or absolutely nonsense, or just silly and terribly argued, then get these papers accepted as long as they had politically fashionable conclusions.  

JL:       In other words, that you could just introduce, as a guy that Peter knows from Harvard put it, opinion and prejudice and pass it off as knowledge by flattering the political views of the editors and peer reviewers of the journals. I think it's actually worse than that. I think it's that they don't know what constitutes legitimate research. So, we submitted these peer-reviewed articles. Some of them focused on how we might deal with, say, the issue of rape culture as a big feminist talking point by considering the way that dogs have sex with one another in dog parks, as a lens to focus the issue through, and then to train men the way that we train dogs in order to get them to not rape. And that one actually won an award for excellence in scholarship and it is all just made up.  

JL:       In fact, the data didn't even make sense. It was impossible data claiming that we saw thousands of dogs, tens of thousands of dogs, over the course of a small amount a year. So, just absurd. We rewrote a chapter of Hitler's Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism, replacing his call for a movement, meaning the Nazi party, what became the Nazi party, with intersectional feminism. And that was accepted by a feminist social work journal. We had a number of other pretty wild and crazy papers that get less and less PG as we go.

JAG:    Right. But the conceptual penis . . . 

JL:       I think the conceptual penis was the very, very first foray into that. That the penis is a social construct, where we argued that penises are not really best thought of as anatomical organs, but rather as a social construct, that shapes how we interact with our world in a particularly nasty way, in fact, that it causes most of our problems, especially climate change by raping the natural environment, as we actually put it.  

JL:       So, yes, the purpose was to expose that these things could be accepted; it was kind of like, what do they call it?—a white hat experiment. Can we get this stuff through peer review? Will they accept it? Will they publish it? What does this tell us about the state of peer review? And a lot of people wanted to conclude that peer review itself wasn't, they weren't being rigorous. And we tried to make clear, no, no, no, they're quite rigorous. They rejected a number of our papers for the right reasons. They were accepting papers that met their minimum standards of research, but it's that their standards of research are bad and that's a much deeper and more significant problem. That was really the motivation behind that and what we exposed.  

The peer reviewers replied, you can't use compassion because that threatens to recenter the needs of the privileged. You have to focus on their discomfort if you want to overcome privilege. And I was like, holy crap, this is the seed of a genocide.

JL:       But in the process, what changed the course of my life is I didn't do this stunt and then decide, well, let's just keep going on with the grift. What happened was one of the papers was clearly an education paper, and it was clearly advocating, openly advocating for abusing especially white male students in order to get them to learn about and overcome their privilege. But, we said we had to do it compassionately, because we thought that was funny. The peer reviewers replied, you can't use compassion because that threatens to recenter the needs of the privileged. You have to focus on their discomfort if you want to overcome privilege. And I was like, holy crap, this is the seed of a genocide. And everybody thought I was literally insane when I started calling this the seed of a genocide. But that level of ignoring the humanity of a group of people for political ends is where genocides grow from. They don't necessarily sprout. They don't necessarily flourish and fruit, but that's the seed from which they grow. And so, I remember asking my wife if I could quit my job and dedicate my life full time to reading and exposing what's going on in this academic and then-historical philosophical literature. So, that's kind of how I got to where I am now.  

JAG:    How did that conversation go?  

JL:       <laugh> With my wife? She told me, she asked me kind of, you know, this very practical, wonderful woman asked me, can you make money doing it? And I said, I don't know. And she said, you have 18 months to find out. So, she was willing to take a risk on me if it was this important to me; she was willing to take the chance. Took me 16 months till I could write my first salary check. So, we got in right under the wire, and the rest is kind of history. I mean, it also gave me a giant leg up in understanding what I'm dealing with, you know, and it's an interesting leg. It's worth mentioning because a lot of people might go all the way back to Marx, they might go back before that and study Hegel or Rousseau.  

JL:       And, you know, Stephen Hicks has done an excellent job with decoding that philosophy from the beginning forward. But we started at the present day, how it's being used, and worked our way backwards or I did at least all the way back to these same characters. And It colors the perspective you have of Marx or the color that you have of Hegel or that you have of Rousseau to look way back into philosophical history. If you see the end result, what fruit their ideas are bearing now, you understand what came out of those ideas that led here. It's not just, oh well, let's just look at the dialectic in an abstract sense. No, we started with this is what the dialectic has become, how did it get here, and worked our way backwards to the literature. So, it worked out to be a very interesting way to study this by starting at the wrong end and working our way back.  

JAG:    Well, I think that's right. And, of course, Stephen Hicks is a Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society, who's been with us for a very long time. We've taken his Explaining Postmodernism and we've distilled it down into a Pocket Guide to Postmodernism and our Postmodernism animated video in which we kind of give the parentage of it, but being fairly well versed with his work and the approach that he takes that was really an interesting kind of background to reading Cynical Theories. So, let's get to that first, the title. You write that postmodernism’s skepticism of science and other ways of discovering truth was “so profound as to be better understood as a type of cynicism about the entire history of human progress.” Let's get to that. In what ways does cynicism define the entire postmodernism project to dismantle enlightenment values?  

The underlying thesis of postmodernism is that every claim upon knowledge, ever discourse... is ultimately just an expression of the power system that happens to be in place.

JL:       Well, I mean with postmodernism specifically, the kind of underlying thesis is that every claim upon knowledge, every discourse, every kind of web of language that gets manifested around expressing knowledge or knowing anything or finding meaning in the world is ultimately just an expression of the power system that happens to be in place. And thus, the people who benefit from the existing power system are setting the terms of that system of knowledge or that system of discussion and discourse. So that's an extremely cynical way to think of the world, to think that basically you can't even escape the unjust application of power because the unjust application of power is this pervasive thing that defines the entire way that we communicate that we think what we claim is or isn't knowledge, that this was a cynical project set up by people who happen to want to maintain their power and then has this weird poisonous element to it, which is, oh, and it's maintained, by the way, through you, and you don't even know that you're maintaining the power system because it's been kind of inculcated into you by the way that we speak and by what's considered true and false. 

JL:       And, as you know, Foucault maintained it wasn't whether something's true or false, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, what's interesting is how power decided that somebody gets to say that it's true or false. The politics is the interesting part. So this, this profoundly cynical view of meaning, of understanding the world that we live in, that the scientific method, again it's biology, isn't a science that seeks to understand the world. It's merely a way for people who call themselves biologists to assert their power over people who want to have another opinion about what reality is a biological reality, and that this is just a regime of truth. And that regime of truth will fall as political regimes always do, getting replaced with another one that's of the same nature. So, it's a profoundly cynical way to look at the way that human societies are organized and the way that people participate in them.  

JAG:    So, as you acknowledge in, Cynical Theories, postmodernism is kind of this sprawling field. It is almost intentionally resistant to a definition, but when people ask you to explain it, I get different answers from our different scholars. I like to think of it sort of as the attempt to continue on the grievance narrative, the good versus the bad people, the oppressors versus the victims, in the wake or the shadow of the practical and observable failure of Marxism economically. So, I wonder if that sums it up or what else I might be missing, and then also just getting into this idea of postmodernism versus applied postmodernism.  

JL:       Sure, sure. So, I think that does sum it up really well. What I would add to that, in particular, is that postmodernism is a general skepticism of anybody's ability to claim to know anything, that knowledge itself is just a political contingency, which is a profoundly, again, cynical view on how the world works. And I think that this does spring from their observation of the failure of Marxism, that they had their pet theory for how the world should work. So, they already hated liberalism. They already hated religion. They already hated capitalism. They couldn't turn to those as Marxism fails. And what do they have left? Well, they were largely tied into the neo-holistic French existentialist tradition. They're like, everything's fake. Everything is just another expression of power. Why? Because the thing that they had put their hope on, which was Marxism, was just another expression of power.  

What's postmodernism? It's the belief that knowledge and even the way that we speak about ideas is a political project that benefits certain people and excludes others, which is really profoundly Marxist, that they call it a post-Marxist idea.

JL:       And so, rather than seeing the world through a lens that everything can become corrupted, so you have to remain vigilant not to allow corruption to take it over, their view is everything is intrinsically corrupt. And the corruption is, in fact, the defining characteristic of everything. And I think that comes out of what you said, but, if somebody were to say to me, you know, we’ve got an elevator ride, one floor. What's postmodernism? It's the belief that knowledge and even the way that we speak about ideas is a political project that benefits certain people and excludes others, which is really profoundly Marxist, that they call it a post-Marxist idea. It takes the Marxist conflict theory and applies it in a different domain, which is the idea of making sense of the world.  

JL:       So, it's almost like a Marxist theory of understanding things. Nobody can truly understand things, but privileged people have set the terms of understanding on their own. And it really just becomes that. So, in that sense, it becomes a project practically: breaking rules. How do you break the rules? Where do you find anywhere the rules are, they must be arbitrary and represent power. So, how do you break them? How do you smash the rules, because they benefit somebody and that somebody's probably not you. And even if it is you, you're probably harming somebody who deserves better. So, it's very destructive. I've compared it to an acid that can dissolve virtually anything. So, I think that's what I would summarize postmodernism as being. 

JAG:    As wanting to destabilize . . .  

JL:       Yes, it is a fundamental attempt to kind of, well, if we can't have our party, then we're going to destabilize everything. Because we can't have what we want, well, nobody's going to have anything, but I'm not sure that they were that petulant. I mean, you look at the people that were guiding it, Jacques Derrida, I think just got lost in his ideas. To give him a little credit, I think he was just a dorky academic lost in his ideas, which were all bad ideas. Michel Foucault had his own other motivations that don't have to be expressly stated necessarily, but people know what they are. He was tied up in various sexual proclivities, we'll leave it at that for the moment, that he was trying to find ways to justify. So, there's this weird attempt to use the word madness to exclude people that we don't want to have power.  

JL:       We're crazy. We're dangerous. Oh no, there's this whole history of sexuality that prevents people from being able to be perverts in various ways. And this is just a socially constructed disaster but, you can tell, you can, it's easy to see through, which is funny because Foucault is very Nietzschean in his approach and Nietzsche was the one who's most famous for saying that the philosophers don't really do philosophy. They rationalize their own pathologies through lots of words. And it's like, yeah, that's you, Michel, <laugh> we see you. So, anyway, I think that your summary is actually pretty adequate to be honest.   

JAG:    Yes. But, I thought that the addition of this perspective of cynicism also even helped me better understand some of the more benign aspects of postmodernism. Let's just say, aesthetically, some of the surrealism there was almost a kind of playfulness, but there was still a cynicism. It was like, we're abandoning the prospect of creating great art that's original and that has the prospect of ennobling or elevating or providing a window onto the transcendent and we're just going to kind of doodle and squiggle and be funny and just take something that is, and reinvent it in a different way. But, you have this interesting perspective and what's been very fascinating to me watching you on social media, watching your work over these past few years is it's almost like the people who are just consumed with this postmodern perspective, they call themselves woke, but you almost have a different kind of wokeness in being able to see where it's going next and how it's manifesting.  

JAG:    And also, I thought it was interesting that a lot of times libertarians and objectivists will say, “Oh, well, those are just the culture wars. Those are cultural issues.” But, the framework that you present shows how actually there is this continuing project of trying to advance an egalitarian worldview, and it's applying it to various aspects of life, smashing the rules, wherever they may be, sexual or otherwise. So, I wanted to ask, given our experience of the past two-and-a-half years, I think one of the biggest shocks to Western civilization that we've experienced in my lifetime, has been the way that government authorities took advantage of the crisis, the real crisis of this pandemic, to try to remake society, reinvent or reset capitalism. So, again, your perspective on what we've been through over the past couple of years.  

JL:       Yes. And this kind of ties into the question that you asked before. The part that I didn't answer about the evolution of applied postmodernism. What we called applied postmodernism was essentially a bunch of radical activists who had various threads back into critical theories of different types. Some of them were post-colonial, some of them were race theorists. Some of them were post-structural feminists. They could have picked up these tools, these postmodern tools, and started to apply them to their own activist projects.

JAG:    Yes. I have to just say we are doubly thankful for Dr. Lindsay, he's getting over a cold and he's been traveling and he still showed up. Hydrate. <laugh>  

JL:       Excuse me. I'm sorry about that. Yes, I got a little bit of a bug in Phoenix, so we're dealing with it, and I don't feel as bad as I sound, so don't worry about that too much. I just got the watery eyes from the coughing. But no, these activists took this up and they very diligently started to put it into practice in order to transform the institutions that they had gone into. And this follows the instructions of a Marxist or neo-Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, from the middle of the 1960s going into the early 1970s. And he said that what you have to do is you have to infiltrate the institutions. It's not enough to be a Marxist that sits outside and criticizes. You actually have to go in and become the thing. So he said, you launch a counter revolution revolt, which he did in 1972.  

JL:       He said, you know, if you're a computer programmer, you're going to be a person who brings your ideology into computer programming, but you're going to do the thing. If you're a biologist, you're going to bring your ideology into biology, but you're going to do the thing. And that's what we have to change. We have to take up what Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions,” largely through education, because everybody goes to college or to school to be whatever it is they're going to be. And so that, of course, is the project of Antonio Gramsci that was written about in the 1920s, and then he was in prison. So, nobody saw it until much later, except the Soviets because it was smuggled to Moscow, maybe; Mao, maybe. So, the whole project took on this new element, which was, “let's turn the schools into places where this ideology can be deposited in the heads of people who are going to go out into the world and become the thing.”  

Marcuse divorced Marxism from its traditional reliance on the working class. The working class, in his opinion, had...betrayed the Marxist agenda....You need to look to the racial minorities, to the feminists, to the outsiders, to the sexual minorities...because they have the energy to be our revolutionary cadre, but, they don't have the ideas.

JL:   And that's a very important piece to understand. The other thing that Marcuse did is also very important to understand. He divorced Marxism from its traditional reliance on the working class. The working class, in his opinion, had become stabilized and thus betrayed the Marxist agenda. So, now you need a new working class, is what he said. You need to look to the racial minorities, to the feminists, to the outsiders, to the sexual minorities, you’ve got to find these people and motivate them because they have the energy to be our revolutionary cadre, but, they don't have the ideas. So, what are you going to do? You're going to get those ideas to them by bringing them into the universities and by radicalizing the youth to go bring them into their areas. So, he teams up with Angela Davis, a very radical black feminist.  

JL:       And all of a sudden this German white guy has tons of street cred with a bunch of hip black radicals. How do you think he would've been treated otherwise? Right? So he finds his way in to start giving The Black Panthers, the black nationalists, the black liberation of various stripes, the Marxist tools and neo-Marxist tools to understand their context and to redefine it. All of a sudden they're freed up from the shackles of having to pretend they care about the working class because Marxists have never cared about workers in reality. They see them as a political opportunity and they move this into domains where they can do it with identity politics instead. And since they're not shackled to the working class anymore, these bourgeois professors can become the people who direct it. And then eventually professionals can be the ones who direct it.  

JL:       So, this evolves over time. It's impossible to tell the whole story without bringing Paulo Freire’s ideas about knowledge and knowing into the equation. But, I don't want to divert into that. It's a whole extra hour right there. But in essence, these things combined within the educational domain, particularly colleges of education, to create what we call woke, now. And this is actually, I think, if I had the chance to go back and do a second edition of Cynical Theories, if Helen was interested in doing it, the part in chapter eight, where we talk about so-called social justice scholarship, I think I would want to call it woke-Marxism, or we call it, also, reified postmodernism, which is where these postmodern tools, these critical theory tools had kind of been combined. And they got mixed in with the Freirean idea that knowledge itself, not in the way that the postmoderns did it, but through the educational-certification process is also its own Marxist structure.  

JL:       People who are educated, you get to decide what it means to be educated. And, therefore, they set it up as a country club for themselves to exclude other ways of knowing—blah, blah, blah, yada, yada—Marxism all over again in the domain of knowledge. And what you get now is this new woke-Marxism where you are, if you read Freire, he's not ambiguous. He actually says that the process of becoming aware or consciente, he calls it, to oppression in this, say, pedagogy of the oppressed is a process of literal death and rebirth. He compares it to . . . 

JAG:    Wow, was it like “born again”? 

JL:        It is, it is “born again.” He actually, in his ’85 book, The Politics of Education, has a three-paragraph span in the 10th chapter where he openly says—not only does he say it is the Easter and that you have to go through it and be reborn on the side of the oppressed—you must die to your  bourgeois values and be reborn on the side of the oppressed.  

JL:       But he also says that the Easter that Christians celebrate is just a date on the calendar because they don't die and be reborn on the side of the oppressed, which is the only real Easter—the only real Easter is to be reborn into Marxist Praxis. He actually says that. And so, this becomes this really different thing. And that's what I now conceptualize as woke. And that's this idea that every single domain can be pulled into a Marxist theory by saying that the knowledge system that operates within that domain—and you see how postmodernism feeds into that—is itself a construct of the people who want to maintain their dominance and power over others and keep other ways of knowing out. Now, Marxism is—let's give them the credit of being true religionists that actually believe what they say, as opposed to power-hungry monsters—what Marxism operates as in every single instance, is if we have the true believer who's just, we will give them all the credit.  

JL:       They really do want the best. They think this is going to work, it's the sales department for fascists. This is this great, ideal, utopian world. That's going to come along. And then somebody who knows how to do things in the world, because Marxists don't, somebody who knows how to do things in the world is going to come along and graft onto that and create a totalitarian system out of it. And that's what seems to happen every time I see that as having risen in the financial sector, in the corporate sector, primarily 2008, 9, 10, 11 in the wake of the financial crash. When they realize that they could bust up Occupy Wall Street, by sending in these identity politicians who make everything so complicated and poisonous and postmodern that nobody can do anything with it. And then he said, oh my gosh, we look progressive.  

JL:       Let's make our corporate emblem, you know, a rainbow flag this month and we look great and we're just here for the equity and for diversity, we’re behind all these great words. And meanwhile, we're crushing our competition. We understand “go woke, go broke.” And so smaller corporations will go broke faster than us. So let's force all these policies in place where the only way you can do business is to have this very expensive stuff. And they pulled a kind of corporatist...Well, frankly, they created a conspiracy and a cartel that set up the policies. Well, these are the correct environmental policies. And these are the only way that these are the correct social policies. And they're all rooted in all this identity-politics, Marxist nonsense.  

And all of a sudden, we're not dealing in a place where corporate leaders can make decisions in the best interest of their own corporation...they're now making decisions according to, well, 'Larry Fink is going to kick me out of the club, if I don't do what he says.'

JL:       These are the correct ways to run a company. These are the so-called ESG scores. And you know, if you don't play ball, we're going to make it impossible to do business. We're going to restrict your access to investment capital. We're going to buy 20- to 30% of your stock using other people's money to do it. And then we'll threaten to sell it all. If you don't participate with us. So, maybe we will crash your company's value overnight. And so they have a gun, a financial gun, to your head. And all of a sudden, we're not dealing in a place where corporate leaders can make decisions in the best interest of their own corporation, themselves, their clients, their customers, they're now making decisions according to, well, Larry Fink is going to kick me out of the club, if I don't do what Larry Fink said, is what it kind of boils down to.  

JL:       And of course, we see that with the World Economic Forum, having been pushing exactly these designs with lots of other weird designs, by the way, oddly tied to Paulo Freire all the way back to the 1970s, through Freire's mentor, Dom Helder Camara, who Klaus Schwab called his spiritual mentor, who Klaus Schwab risked his entire organization to bring Dom Helder Camara to Davos, Switzerland, in 1973 at their annual meeting, which was the third one they ever had. He brought him in and it was illegal to bring him in. He had to get special permission from the government of Switzerland to bring him in because Dom Helder Camara was not allowed to speak in Switzerland because he was a communist and Switzerland wasn't taking a side being neutral in the great political debate of the middle of the last half of the 20th century.  

JL:   So, what you see is this huge movement that's used all of these tools and kind of created this witch’s brew of “oh, wow.” For example, you talked about COVID. Michel Foucault talked about bio power. This is a way that Michel Foucault warned that governments can control people. If we're talking about the Postmodernist, they warned about the idea that you can create a false legitimation scheme, legitimation by Pureology. Let's do that, too. Let's just take over the media and make sure that that's how it works. Jean Baudrillard warned that we lived in a hyper-real world of images where we can no longer access reality. We can't tell what reality is because we live in this constant world of images and we've lost the ability to discern it. So, let's flood the zone with not just propaganda, but propaganda that comes from every single angle, propaganda that looks like education, propaganda that looks like just the ads, entertainment, or organically.  

JL:       Your algorithm on social media feeds you certain tweets or certain Facebook posts or whatever. So, it looks like that's just what people think. Relentless propaganda to create a hyper-real experience of reality around you and they see all. I'm not giving Foucault and Derrida and Baudrillard and Lyotard all this credit. But these lunatics saw these tools and picked them up and were like, this is how we win. And they were able to accomplish all of the Marxist agendas that the critical and cultural Marxists had laid out. Once they were able to use the postmodern and post-structural tools of divorcing people from being able to understand the world on its own terms, they removed all objectivity from the world and replaced it with literally pure subjective, first, or if we get fully Marxist, subjective leading the objective through a dialectical relationship between the two that puts primacy on the subjective, rather than the objective. I don't know how technical you want to get, but this is what they were able to accomplish.  

JL:       And this is what they're doing to us at this point. Now, historically, Marxists did the same thing. This was Lenin getting frustrated that the stupid workers wouldn't do what they were supposed to do spontaneously, like Marx said, so he said, “Oh, we need a vanguard. The Bolshevik party's ready to go.” Stalin saying “Marx was wrong, but man, it's me.” Not I know what to do, but it's me, you know that. And then Mao picking this up and saying, “Oh, well, we need Marxist-Leninism with Chinese characteristics to fit it into this context—it's me, you know.” This same mentality, though, that you need this elite vanguard to usher the thing through and define the terms because the stupid people can't figure it out for themselves. That's your cost, Schwab. You know, they have this now-universal acid in woke-Marxism and they're like, “Well, we'll put it in the S score of ESG.”  

JL:       Now we're going to tell all the plebs what they're supposed to do. And they've created the new vanguard model. And it's funny that their one bank is actually called <laugh> Vanguard that they're ushering us through their intended change of history, their intended reset of history, their intended year zero, or whichever one you want to attach it to, they're going to take us through this great revolution out of shareholder capitalism where the goal is each company has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns and into a stakeholder capitalism where a council of stakeholders is going to decide what the right policies are and which companies are better to prop up through crony investments and which are best held down or knocked down like  an electric car company that’s got the cleanest record, period.  

Let's just knock that out of the scores because he decided to buy Twitter this weekend. Elon Musk, Tesla’s owner, did something we didn't like politically. So no, no, no, no, no. Tesla's bad: bad score.

JL:       Let's just knock that out of the scores because he decided to buy Twitter this weekend. Elon Musk, Tesla’s owner, did something we didn't like politically. So no, no, no, no, no. Tesla's bad: bad score. But, we have this crisis going on with energy. So ExxonMobil’s environmental score, let's bring it right up. Let's, in other words, let's have this council of stakeholders that gets to make the real decisions about how the world needs to operate at the biggest, global, political levels and we’ll tie all of the economic strings up through that. And, of course, you know it's good to pause and say, council of stakeholders, stakeholder capitalism, well, what is the Russian word for council? Oh, yeah—it's Soviet. We have a Soviet establishing itself in terms of, literally, global corporate governance.  

JL:       And that's largely because of the Western context—they have to get around our Constitution. They have to find a way. And so as my friend, Vivek Ramaswamy, says, “They use the corporate back door to come in through the front door that the government's not allowed to go through.” Joe Biden can't decree that we're not going to do this or that such and such is going to be censored on social media because it violates the first amendment, but Twitter can have its terms of service however it wants. So, they have a back door—same thing. Joe Biden can't say you can't buy or sell in the United States, but MasterCard can decide your reliability and cut off your ability to have payment processing or PayPal can cut off your ability to have payment processing or any of these private corporations under the neoliberal guys of, well, they're corporations.  

JL:       They can do whatever they want. It's their business. And this denial of service becomes actually a powerful weapon. When you end up having a, what do you call it, a public-private partnership where the governments and the foundations and the corporations start colluding. If you think of the government as one giant corporation and then, say, Disney is another giant corporation. And if they start colluding in what we used to call a trust, organizing a trust arrangement, then you can actually accomplish what neither of the two individually can do. If you have the shareholder or, sorry, stakeholder agreements that they're all signed onto, say through the World Economic Forum where they've all made a commitment to support these agendas or else they risk the ire of this financial sort of Damocles, that's been hung over them. You can get thousands of corporations to march together even if they don't want to because they know it's not in their best corporate interest to do otherwise because you've got a small number—a council—of people who are able to pull all of those strings. It's really amazing that they've been able to pull this off. You can also read the seeds of it throughout Marcuse. He wrote it all down in the sixties. They've just made it come true.  

JAG:  And you bring that up to date with Race Marxism. We're going to get to that, but we have been deluged by a bunch of questions across all of these social media platforms. So, I do not want to deny our great peeps an opportunity to ask you a question directly. We've got one from Instagram, Aaron Malair says, socialists, like Vaush, like to lecture people about praxis, but what does praxis actually mean?  

JL:   Okay. So, praxis is theory-informed practice, which is kind of complicated. How deep do you want this to go? Do you want me to go back to Hegel and talk about the theoretical idea and the practical idea and the need to unify them into the absolute? The idea is that Marxists believe that their theory is the first and last word on reality. Marx even said that the wissenschaftlich sozialismus -- the scientific socialism -- is the first true scientific study of history and its conditions. It's the only scientific study of history, its conditions and therefore sociology, and the unfolding of society. And so, they call what they're studying in the world the real or the concrete or the actual or the objective conditions that people live in and the real or concrete or actual or objective causes that cause them.  

Praxis is putting into application that which their theory says they should do. So, they should maybe disrupt and dismantle. They should have a protest, they should have a riot. They should try to get onto a corporate board or they should make sure that certain people are able to get hired and other people fired, whatever. And then it only counts as praxis if it is informed by the theory.

JL:       So, the theory is what comes first. Praxis is putting into application that which their theory says they should do. So, they should maybe disrupt and dismantle. They should have a protest, they should have a riot. They should try to get onto a corporate board or they should make sure that certain people are able to get hired and other people fired, whatever. And then it only counts as praxis if it is informed by the theory. So, whatever you decide to do, your activity is not informed by your own thoughts. It's informed by your understanding of the theory. And then, if, secondly, afterwards you reflect upon how what happened compared against what was going on in theory, what contradictions were revealed. So, you remember Lenin saying it accelerates the contradictions. You wanted people to see the contradictions and this made what he was doing practice because they would see the contradictions in their environment.  

JL:      And when they saw the contradictions in their environment, he could then direct the disgruntled dissatisfaction that arose from those onto a scapegoat or whatever, but this made it praxis. So, praxis is activity that moves the objectives of Marxism forward. It is the attempted mixture of theory and practice. Or you could say it's theory-driven practice that constantly figures out how to inject more theory into whatever happens; so, practice that's kind of very abstract, practically speaking. What praxis looks like and means is that they're going to implement some idiotic policy like equity policies at schools and then scores are going to go down and then they're going to say that the reason that scores went down is actually because the school has a massive racism problem and it's not ready for an anti-racist grading system that they simply installed or whatever, or an anti-racist education system.  

JL:       And so, now you have to add in a second anti-racist component or anti-racist training or anti-racist classes. In other words, the people aren't aware, the people involved in that situation or system are not aware of the true nature of reality. So, you have to bring them closer to the true nature of reality and then they'll start to succeed is what it actually means. Praxis is when you take a prisoner in a Chinese thought-reform prison under Mao, and you tell them “You're accused of these crimes.” And then, “Your perspective, you're very individualistic, you're capitalistic.” You’re ‘imperialistic’ was a frequent word. They used, “Your perspective on the world prevents you from being able to see that you actually committed crimes against the Chinese people. So, now we're going to interrogate you and then we're going to send you back to your cell and your cellmates are going to struggle to help you recognize; that's the actual term in Chinese.

The true praxis is putting Marxist theory into action and then staring at what happened until you can figure out the Marxist reason for why it didn't work. And this demands more Marxism as a result. That's the bottom line of what praxis is.  

JL:       We're going to help you recognize your crimes from the people's standpoint. So, the idea of praxis is that you're going to basically start drilling theory into people's heads until they learn to see the world through theory. And when it's time for you to do your own praxis, it's for you to take the Marxist theory, go put it into practice, and figure out a way to make yourself more Marxist as a result, and to do it again and again and again. So it's a kind of a self-reinforcing feedback loop of Marxist theory. If you go to the marxist.org website and read their definition of truth, they actually kind of explain this. They say that the truth is a matter of a social formation for Marxists, and it's always relative, but then they get down and they say, “Well, you know, this is what rationalist truth means: something about reason and whatever. This is what empiricist truth means: something about corresponding to the world. This is what pragmatist truth means: it means getting a result in the world.” And it says that the Marxist view of truth is closest to the pragmatist view, but that it must always follow from the combination of theory and practice, in other words, the true praxis. And so, the true praxis is putting Marxist theory into action and then staring at what happened until you can figure out the Marxist reason for why it didn't work. And this demands more Marxism as a result. That's the bottom line of what praxis is. And the goal is, like I said, from Hegel, to reunite the theoretical and the practical idea at which point the absolute idea realizes itself is deity. And we enter into the perfect world order at the end of history.  

JAG:    Okay. I'm going to take this question from Gloriana on Instagram, because I think it actually goes directly to one of the quotes that I had excerpted from one of your books. She says that she agrees that there seems to be a religion among progressives, but, is it only one belief or multiple sects? And I think you've spoken to that in terms of talking about CRT as just one denomination among a broader religion.  

JL:   Yes, it's multiple sects. But there's kind of, what do you call it in a religion when you have a bunch of sects that kind of come together under a single ecclesiastic? I can't think of the word, there's a word for this, when they all kind of come together and talk about how their sort of manifestations are the same thing. And that's intersectionality for these people. Intersectionality is the idea that all of the forms of oppression are reflected on all the other forms of oppression, but that they're all still distinct. So, there's kind of one overarching sect, but you know, the critical race theorists, they're the people who focus primarily on it, are going to get most aggrieved about race, and they're going to sometimes attack the other groups. The queer theorists are going to get most aggrieved about sex or sexuality, but they're sometimes going to attack the other groups, and so on.  

JL:       So, I would definitely say, especially when you get outside of the identity-politics thing though, that it starts being multiple religions that are coming together in this way. The COVID thing is another example of the exact same religious mindset. And, you know, people go back and forth. Should we call this woke? Or should we not call it woke, but we should call it woke because it's still derived from the idea that we have to look at certain ways of knowing and other ways of knowing it. It's just complicated because it's a vanguard model. So, it seems to be self-contradictory. Bear with me a second. The Marxist theory of knowledge is in medical knowledge as well. Certain people have established themselves as medical authorities and they've excluded other people from their ways of knowing, et cetera.  

JL:       And they do this to maintain their power. And you're already thinking, “Oh my God, that's what they're doing.” But that's always what the vanguard does because they’re the ones with the correct theory. So, you see this problem is the stupid plebs can't be trusted to do this. And this is where the vanguard of Lenin or Stalin or Mao comes in. You have to have an elite that comes in and understands the 

right answer to these questions and moves things along. And so the COVID thing follows this whole thing exactly the same. It's just that the vanguard's much more obvious. It's more of a top-down process than a bottom-up identity-politics thing. Same thing. If we move into the realm of environmental justice or climate justice or climate change, again, you have the exact same thing. There's a council of experts and nobody else is allowed to have an opinion about it at all.  

JL:       Nobody else is allowed to ask questions, et cetera. You've got a Soviet that's just determining what the right answers to those are. But, those are, in a sense, the climate change kind of a Malthusian death cult that's clearly working hand in glove with the weird COVID-whatever in the world. Maybe also Mathuslian—let's hope not—but a death cult. And then the identity-politics death cult are all somehow working hand in glove together, but they're actually, in a sense, kind of different denominations. You could have people who are very invested in the environmental or the medical one and not necessarily the identity politics one, but there it's really kind of one. It's like they're all, in a sense, Baptists; but some Baptists believe you have to baptize at birth, some people think you can't do it till they're seven, and for some people, it can only be a confessioning adult. 

JL:       You have all these different rules on when you can baptize each other. And they all hate each other and have intense disagreements and some can drink and some can't drink and all of this other complicated crap, but they're all Baptists. In a sense, this is all kind of woke. Knowledge is understood in a Marxist and/or Leninist way. And in different domains, it comes up in different ways. So yes, different denominations, different sects, but they're all in one kind of a—and I still can't believe I can't think of the religious word for this because I’ve got ecclesiastical in my head and that's not it. 

JAG:    Concordance?  

JL:       We can go with that. That's not it. Well, I figure it'll pop into my head at an awkward moment later.  

JAG:   All right. Well, Nina Mrose, who is a supporter of The Atlas Society,  is weighing in. She stated she’s excited to hear this discussion, but she was also helpful in recommending not just Dr. Lindsay's books, but his New Discourses podcast for anyone who wants to understand this philosophy, its origins, and its current tactics. She's giving you a testimonial. She's learned a great deal from them. So, go ahead to a commercial and tell us a little bit about the podcast.  

JL:    Okay. The word is ecumenical, by the way. I told you it would come into my head; it's an ecumenical council of various sects of religions and somebody, Scott Schiff, has commented that oppression is the underlying theology. That's correct. Because it's gnosticism. It's all gnosticism. They're all sects of gnosticism. So gnostics are people who believe that they've been flung into the world against their wishes and they suffer in the world. But there's an absolute truth that if you access it, you can break free of the prison of the world, and for Marxists, because its collective system only works if everybody breaks free together all at the same time. So it's different people who suffer in different ways. Maybe they suffer with, “Oh my God, I could get a disease. I don't want, oh my God, climate change might ruin the whole planet. Oh my God.”

JL:       You know, racism imposed upon us. “Oh my God, I'm a boy that feels like I belong in a girl's body” or something like that. And it's all the exact same, it's all variations on the same thing. “Oh my God, I'm a rich asshole named Karl Marx who wishes everybody to pay my bills for me. So, I'm going to write a bunch of fake economic theory.” Okay. So, what's going on at New Discourses? Well, you kind of just heard, this is the nature of what I do. I spend all my time reading Marxist literature and then comparing against other Marxist literature and trying to figure out what in the heck it says and where it fits. Like how does it work? And in particular, as you kind of just picked up, I'm very interested in tracing it back as a religious movement that I think is actually a combination of a number of mystery religions that were kind of popular in Europe in the late-18th century, mid-18th century, going into the 19th century that cobbled themselves into a kind of scientism, not scientific, framework.  

I feel like the academic establishment has failed us, how they couldn't see this tyranny coming is something of a mystery, but it's largely because it was their tyranny that was coming.  

JL:       The science was arising. Nobody knew what science was in, say, 1807. If you know why that date's important, good for you. Nobody quite knew what science was then; people were making stabs at it. And maybe, I don't know, GWF Hegel made a stab at it in 1807 and called something a system of science and tried to explain what science is and how it works. And they kind of cobbled narcissism into a scientific or, I should say, scientism, being their kind of new framework, a way of thinking about things. And so, what I do with New Discourses is, the name should tell you, I try to give new ways to talk about these issues. I feel like the academic establishment has failed us, how they couldn't see this tyranny coming is something of a mystery, but it's largely because it was their tyranny that was coming.  

JL:       And so they were perhaps motivated not to see it or just busy doing their own academic things. But, certainly I don't accept the mainstream interpretations of Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory or Postmodernism or even Marxism itself. I’m trying to break that down right now. I'm in a huge stretch of doing critical education theory and or critical pedagogy as it's also called. And I'm actually breaking down Freire, which has forced me to go back and read a lot of Hegel and a lot of Marx and to really get into a lot of Gyorgy Lukacs, the Hungarian Marxist, to try to understand how this actually operates as a system of faith or theology. And so, I do these long form podcasts where I read through primarily, it's not to just talk, but mostly what I do is read through their documents and explain what they say is what the authors are saying.  

Race Marxism tries to explain, how, if we think of Marxism as an engine of a car and it was in the economic car, somebody lifted the engine out, did a few tweaks and stuck it in a new car—that's race.  

JL:       This is where this comes from. This is a little reference you might not have caught. It's almost like a college class where I go through academic papers, books, chapters, et cetera, and try to bring you to the ability to see and read Marxist literature, whether it's the woke kind of today, whether it's the sustainable kind of Klaus Schwab, whether it's the old school like Karl Marx’ 1844 manuscripts, I want you to be able to see what's there as I see it. If I'm right, cool. If I'm wrong, well, at least it's out there and people can criticize it; that's also cool. So, that's what I try to do. The books are just kind of extensions of that. I just try to explain, Race Marxism tries to explain, how, if we think of Marxism as an engine of a car and it was in the economic car, somebody lifted the engine out, did a few tweaks and stuck it in a new car—that's race.  

JL:       And then they did the same thing to make queer theory. I don't have a book for that, but they stuck it in, we'll say, a queer body to make it go in another direction where the bourgeois property is being normal or being considered normal, and so on and so forth. So, I try to make these things as clear as possible. That is largely all I do. Actually, I'm going to spend the rest of my night reading another piece of Paulo Freire’s education theory that I've read 11 times already, because I'm trying to finally organize the podcast that will get me out of this book and into something different. 

JAG:    All right. Well, we have eight more minutes. There is a question here that I'd love to get to, but if there are any others that you see in the thread that really speak out to you, then go ahead. But again, on Instagram, Bing999 asks, what do you think is a bigger threat to America today: woke-Marxism or the alt-right that the woke-Marxist and even some libertarian types seem to be terrified of? And I thought that was interesting because I do think that in Cynical Theories, you talk at the end about liberalism and the fact that the kind of applied postmodernism is energizing. The nationalist-right, which could present, in itself, a threat, but right. With the time that's gone by since you've written the book and now we're also seeing some policies, which some might describe, I would say, as liberal coming out of the Supreme Court, so yes, what's the bigger threat?  

Think of what China is doing as stage one out of five progressive stages of worst tyranny. With all the surveillance, all of being able to turn off your money whenever they want, et cetera. And that's like step one of five. The last steps are literally getting inside of your head with implantable devices to control your thoughts.  

JL:       Okay. So this actually turns out to be a complicated and timely question. The immediate threat, the far larger threat is woke-Marxism. Woke-Marxism is a tool for this huge corporatist, fascist, communist, weird, Klaus Schwab new-world-order thing. And if we end up in that, we're all screwed. There'll be no freedom for anybody anywhere ever again. Like never; we'll never get out of the digital prison that they're going to build in all likelihood. Think of what China is doing as stage one out of five progressive stages of worst tyranny. With all the surveillance, all of being able to turn off your money whenever they want, et cetera. And that's like step one of five. The last steps are literally getting inside of your head with implantable devices to control your thoughts.  

JL:       No kidding. That's the program of the World Economic Forum tyranny that woke is enabling. So, that's by far the biggest threat to freedom in the world. Now, if we step back from that, then woke is probably the larger of the dangers in terms of its ability to create dysfunction. The alt-right is an imprecise term. What it seems to refer to doesn't exist in any significant capacity. But, what it covers up by using this incorrect term is something that's called the post-liberal right. And I'm actually very afraid of the post-liberal right, which is rapidly gaining context and support. And I don't mean like on the internet with 25-year-olds, which is kind of its primary basis of support. I mean, with influential people with lots of money and people who are in government and running for positions in the government who believe that the liberal order has failed, has come to its end, and has to be replaced with something else.  

People are becoming increasingly desperate realizing that we're increasingly close to the possible success of this tyrannical Great Reset. They're becoming increasingly warm to the idea of...reactionary solutions to the problem that will not favor individual freedom and liberty either.

JL:       Basically, the idea is,”Well, we couldn't keep society free. So, if we're going to live in an unfree society, better ours than theirs.” So, they want to go ahead and grab the club and start whacking people with it. And this has very ascendant energy because the procedural liberal order where the law rules, not any individual, seems not to be able to contain the woke problem. So people are becoming increasingly desperate realizing that we're increasingly close to the possible success of this tyrannical Great Reset. They're becoming increasingly warm to the idea of—fascist isn't the right word, but reactionary is—reactionary solutions to the problem that will not favor individual freedom and liberty either. And that idea will, at some point, because woke is rapidly now on the decline, not necessarily institutionally, but its popularity is through the floor; that's on the decline, whereas this post-liberal right is on the ascent.  

JL:       At some point in the near future, which I would guess would probably be the next six-to-ten months, probably just six before the end of the year, we will see a switch of which one of the two presents the largest, immediate danger. But, because it depends if they've got another big trick up their sleeve at the World Economic Forum or whatever, then that may not be the case. But, right now woke is the access point to that. Now, the thing is the post-liberal right are producing the conditions that the weirdo globalists can take advantage of in exactly the same way. So, it's going to blow up in their faces, too. They want to do crazy things like split apart the United States, which is a vehicle. This part of the program is to get rid of countries like the United States, because they're big and unified and control lots of assets and resources, and so on.  

JL:       So, this post-liberal right actually freaks me out and I'm sort of looking down the road. I'm like, okay, we have a giant attacking us right here and then a hundred miles down the road, there's going to be a dragon. And it's crap. So, that's a complicated answer. But the thing that gets called the alt-right isn't real, not real. I mean, there are people that do that. For example, everybody trots out Charlottesville, but they don't know that, for example, the people with the Tiki torches were paid by the same people that paid the people on the other side of that whole fake conflict, that were all paid by the same weird globalist interest to create a conflict that they could use to do a reflexive media push. That was a question, by the way, here in the Q and A: could I explain reflexivity?  

JL:       Yes. It's creating a story and flooding it from every direction so that you think it becomes true by people thinking it's true. An example of a classic reflexive statement is “this is a revolutionary moment.” It's false until enough people believe it to make it real. Or “the economy is going to collapse.” Well, that's false unless a lot of people believe it and rip all their money out of the market and it collapses all at once. So, reflexivity is a means of projecting into the world that which you want to create in the world, and then creating a media environment where everything somebody encounters, or a cognitive environment where everything they encounter, reinforces it. So, they just believe it's inevitable and happening. So they go along with it: a self-fulfilling prophecy on purpose, in a sense. And that's the kind of environment that I see happening around this post-liberal right.  

JL:       Rising up is, “Oh, well, we have no other option than to go fully forceful.” Somebody says, who are the intellectual leaders of the post-liberal right? Well, Alexander Dugin in Russia, Putin's guy, you might look into him. He's probably the most intellectual of them. Curtis Yarvin, who used to write under the code name, Mencius Moldbug, neoreaction is his philosophy, or dark enlightenment, he's a Postliberal guy. Politically, JD Vance is running for office as a postliberal, I've heard, but I don't know that. Blake Masters is postliberal. You kind of run into these guys. If they doubt that the constitutional order can continue in the United States, then they're probably postliberal. And I really worry about that. But, the kind of big philosopher types are going to be kind of fringe characters like Curtis Yarvin, and then whatever in the world Alexander Dugin represents behind Putin, and whatever that's all about.  

JAG:    Fascinating. Well,  

JL:       And I see JD Vance and Masters are post-liberal guys, and I prefer them over Romney types and nobody should prefer Romney types. That's a disaster, Romney's a disaster.  

JAG:    We agree on that. Kind of a choice between lesser of two evils, but, yes. All right. Well, that is taking us to the end of the interview. This has been absolutely spectacular. Thank you very much. I'm going to release you to go and spend the rest of your evening, as you said, reading Neo-Marxist education philosophy. Wouldn't be fun. I guess I just would close with, what can we do to support your work or what would you say the priorities are for the people that are concerned about this threat, and what would you recommend that they do to help protect the freedoms that we all cherish?  

JL:       Sure. The first and most important thing to do, if you want to protect freedoms, and it has nothing to do with me, is to take the issue seriously and to start learning about it. I believe I read a Polish proverb a number of years ago that I firmly believe, which is, “do not attempt to cure that which you don't understand.” Imagine what kind of things you might inject into your body if you tried to cure something you didn't understand; imagine what could happen; never attempt to cure something you don't understand. So start studying this; you need to. Read Race Marxism, if you want. And if you think it's wrong, great, write thoughtful criticism of it; if you think it's right or you think parts of it are right, advance the thought. This is something that needs to be happening.  

JL:       I think that if you want to support what I'm doing, the most valuable thing to do is actually to share the materials. If you go check out the New Discourses podcast or the New Discourses website and you find something on there useful, share it with somebody. I'm not about to ask anybody for money. I don't care. I want the materials to get out there. It's like I said, Cynical Theories did very well, and I'm just happy that it got into as many hands as it did. And that means the most valuable thing you can do is to help other people realize this is a moment where sitting on the bench is not going to be acceptable. Freedom really is, for real, at serious risk. We can disagree about little details here or there about a lot of things, but freedom is something that we must all stand up to preserve.  

JL:       And the way that you're going to do that is by understanding the problem and then being willing to take action in accordance with your best understanding of the problem. So, getting materials out that are talking about the issue, because certainly, you know, they're not going to put me on CNN to make sure lots of people hear what I have to say,  sharing those ideas. If you thought what I have to say is interesting or valuable is kind of up to you and you kind of have to make it grassroots and flowing outward  from your little whatever. Maybe your reach is big. Maybe your reach is small, but whatever it is is kind of within that range. But the most important thing is you have to do something and it starts with, I've been telling people for three or four years, they're, “what do you have to do?” And I'm, “you're going to hate me for what I'm about to tell you. You have to actually learn some of this before. I know you don't want to, but, you actually have to learn some of this before you can possibly take it on.” It's not hard once you break through the surface, but the surface is complex and it's confusing. And it seems like it's nonsense. And then you finally break through and like somebody said in the comments, it's just the theory of oppression, correct. That's right. That's all it is. 

JAG:    Right. Well, so everyone who's been watching, you can start right now by sharing this interview on your social media. And, of course, tag Dr. Lindsay, he is  @conceptualjames on Twitter, and I believe on Instagram as well,  

JL:       I think, on all of them.  

JAG: Oh, okay. Great. And while he's not going to make a pitch for money, I would say, for those of you who are enjoying this kind of content and want us to do more of it, perhaps even do a pocket guide on Critical Race Theory, please consider supporting The Atlas Society with a tax-deductible donation. Tune in next week, I'm going to be interviewing Chris Stewart of Brightbeam. And then the following week I'm going to be interviewing Jack Carr. I've been talking to one of my favorite nonfiction authors today. And we're going to turn to one of my favorite, living, fiction authors with Jack Carr in a couple of weeks. So, thank you very much. And again, thank you so much, Dr. Lindsay, for this interview and for all of the work that you do.  

JL:       Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.