Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay. You're listening to New Discourse's Bullets, where I give a short bullet point like summary of some topic relevant to woke so that we can understand and defeat it.

And I've been on this kind of tear lately about the friend-enemy distinction,

which is, in essence, the root of woke tribalism.

So if we want to understand woke tribalism, it all starts and ends with the friend-enemy distinction.

As I've observed in other episodes of the podcast

about the friend enemy distinction, this name comes from a Nazi jurist named Carl Schmidt,

who wrote in 1932 the year before he became a Nazi, the logic of what he calls the concept of the political,

which is that politics itself boils down to this distinction between friend and enemy,

and nothing else.

Now, you can hear that that's the criterion of war, not the criterion of politics, if you

think about it for a moment, but it's very important.

Now, in this book, the concept of the political,

which, by the way, he went on to use to justify the totalitarian arrangement of the Nazi state and its actions.

So it's not separable from the Nazism, even though he wrote it before he became a Nazi.

In this book, Carl Schmidt's pretty clear about what he

means by the enemy, but he's less clear about what he means about friend. Okay, so enemies are those

factions or groups, because this is political, that wish to end your group's way of life. So

friends are the people who are opposed to that and will work together to stop it.

So the word we usually use for that, although Carl Schmidt doesn't, is allies, not friends.

But in this episode of the podcast, what I want to do is explore this idea, who are the friends.

And so the answer to that, we can already derive from what I just said.

The friends are anybody who's willing to work together to oppose the enemy.

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