Authenticity and the Woke Crisis of the Real

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2021

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 32 Wokeness exists in a crisis of authenticity. This is no surprise since both of its main philosophical predecessors, neo-Marxist Critical Theory and postmodernism, are both their own forms of reaction to a perceived crisis of authenticity in the world. For the postmodernists, the real is remote, inaccessible, and simulated. Meaning is infinitely deferred. Authenticity, which is to say being who you are when you're not attempting to be anyone, is passe and embarrassing, even as we crave it so much that the world itself needs to be done away with and replaced with raw experience. In Critical Theory, nothing is authentic because a consumerist society has already commodified, marketed, and sold it to us as a good life that doesn't exist and controls us. Wokeness inherits all of this cynical legacy and generates inauthentic identities doing inauthentic scholarship to achieve inauthentic political goals. In this sense, authenticity is a form of kryptonite against Wokeness because Wokeness can't abide or manipulate the authentic. Its deconstruction has no power over the truly and comfortably real. But what is authenticity and how can you be more authentic? In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, join James Lindsay for a detailed discussion of the crisis of authenticity at the heart of the Woke project and its predecessors as well as a discussion of what it means to approach authenticity for yourself. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, you are listening to the new Discourses podcast, I'm James Lindsay.
0:24.9	And we're talking about authenticity.
0:26.6	It's been a while.
0:27.6	I've wanted to talk about authenticity for a long time.
0:29.5	It's a difficult topic to talk about.
0:31.8	I wanted to actually, I've been making the case, I should say, I've been trying to make
0:36.0	the case to get people to understand that it's something about the woke ideology or critical
0:39.4	social justice, if you like, or even it's precursors in postmodernism in particular.
0:43.8	And this is where I kind of really noticed it.
0:46.5	Postmodernism stems from a crisis of authenticity.
0:50.5	It's very difficult to read the postmodern literature and not come to the conclusion or
0:55.8	the woke literature, even in come to the, it's very difficult to read these things and
0:58.6	not come to the conclusion that these people are suffering a profound crisis of the authentic.
1:03.6	Now for me, and I've always hesitated to give advice, I've been trying to dip my toes
1:08.2	into it on my subscribers' only podcast, James Lindsay only subs, which you can get
1:12.6	on.
1:13.6	New Discourses, if you sign up to support me somehow, please and thank you.
1:18.8	I'm usually hesitant to give advice, but authenticity has been an incredibly important
1:23.6	theme for me, for most of my adult life, probably even in my teenage years, is finding
1:31.3	authenticity.
1:32.3	You might think that this is kind of funny, given that I participated in the Creven
1:36.6	Studies affair, which people would say was being very inauthentic, but in fact, it was
	...

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