Critical Theorists as Grand Inquisitors: The Logic of "Repressive Tolerance"

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2021

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 20 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 4 of 4 In this fourth and final part of his four-part lecture series about "Repressive Tolerance," James Lindsay takes the reader from the darkest point of the essay, which was the exciting climax of Part 3, through the end of Marcuse's argument. In this part, Marcuse dedicates the rest of the original 1965 essay to explaining why it is him and people like him (that is, Critical Theorists) who get to decide what constitutes good violence and bad violence, truth and falsity, liberating tolerance from the kind that must not be tolerated and must be suppressed. In our own time, it is the Woke and the high-powered elites in government, media, education, and law who have taken up this mantle of being able to decide, in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse, what must be tolerated, no matter how bad it is, and what must be suppressed, no matter how legitimate it is. The parallels to our own time are undeniable, and, as Lindsay has claimed throughout, the unavoidable conclusion is that we live in the asymmetric and totalitarian logic of "Repressive Tolerance" today. The second half of this episode leaves the essay itself and dives into a postscript to the original essay that Marcuse added three years later, in 1968, after the logic of his essay had already caused innumerable riots and episodes of civil unrest at the end of that tumultuous and transformational decade. In exploring this postscript, we see Marcuse sticking to his guns, but we also see just how blatantly obvious it is that his repressive tolerance has become the monster it sought to slay, which sheds considerable light upon what some people are now calling "the Great Realignment" in our societies, cultures, and politics. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: 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	Hello everybody, you are listening to the new Discourses podcast, I am James Lindsay,
0:26.9	and I am presenting to you now part four of, I hope, a four-part series I might
0:32.4	cram it all in and get it done in four parts where we are reading through, I am
0:37.9	reading through Herbert Marcus' 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, and we're now
0:45.2	down near the end. We've done three parts so far, breaking down this essay, giving
0:51.5	it context. I've been telling people from weeks or months maybe now to read
0:56.1	Repressive Tolerance. This essay is the logic of what we're living in. This essay
1:01.4	explains why we have the different behaviors around, say, the BLM riots versus
1:05.7	the Capitol incident on the sixth. This essay is the explanation for everything. This
1:12.7	is why you see the tech people censoring the left and are censoring the right and not
1:18.8	the left. This is the fundamental asymmetry of our society, and what's
1:25.1	happened is that Repressive Tolerance has become the dominant logic of the left. I
1:32.2	would say that wokeness is in some sense the tools of critical theory combined
1:38.0	with the logic of Repressive Tolerance, combined with a bad reading or a narrow
1:42.6	reading of the epistemology, the relevance of truth and knowledge from post
1:48.1	modernism, and then applied to identity politics. So that's sort of what
1:53.2	woke is, and I really want to drive home that wokeness operates on Repressive
1:58.3	Tolerance, and it's not just wokeness operates on Repressive Tolerance. If you
2:03.6	want to ask the question, why is it that left wing protests like the BLM riots
2:08.2	or somehow more important or exempt from COVID restrictions, whereas right
2:12.8	wing protests were absolutely super spreader events every time the reason is
2:17.4	because Repressive Tolerance. So here we are in part four. I've read most of the
	...

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