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 Boggussian and Helen Pluckrose.

But today he's sitting down in his own and we're talking about the foundations of walkeness. 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.

And I was kind of getting a bit bored of just seeing Sam Harris destroys social justice warrior on YouTube and I kind of actually wanted to understand where this movement comes from.

I wanted 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 like patient zero for understanding this stuff but he's also writing a book on it which will be out next year.

So it was a perfect man for the job. Please welcome James Lindsay.

Somebody will get upset that I said this but the truly the whole thing is steeped in like psycho analyzing people you disagree with in 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 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.

You get all.

Are you the sort of the guy that's had to walk over hot calls to try and retrieve something of value from the other side a little bit.

It's sort of it's you that's that's suffering this discomfort.

That is a good way to put it. Yeah in a sense that's 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.

And tons of it and it is like walking back and forth back and forth across the calls knowing every single time that it's it's going to be hard again.

I get it. So I mean the listeners you will have joined us. There's usually an intro but me and James had too much to talk about so welcome back and joined by James Lindsay and we are talking about an awful lot of different interesting things today principally critical theory.

That's principally what I've been thinking about. Yeah. What is what is critical theory? I don't know what critical theory is 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 some 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 at least of social relations has to do with the power dynamics that are in society between some group with power and other groups who don't have as much power.

And 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 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.

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