How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 17 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 1 of 4 We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails. That's because it is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the right, that broken logic is centered in the no-longer-tolerant left. The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is "Repressive Tolerance." The thesis statement of this essay can be boiled down to "movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence." This asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960s, and we're living in the fruit of that catastrophe now. To help people understand this vitally important and intrinsically totalitarian essay and its relevance to our present moment, James Lindsay walks the listener through Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" in a four-part lecture series. In this series, he reads the essay in full and attempts to make clear how it is the logic underlying the present moment. The goal is to explain the essay as Marcuse would have understood it, in his own context, and to show how his own logic has become dominant and the monster that he believed he was fighting. In the first part, Lindsay begins by framing the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to give background on Marcuse. He also explains that Marcuse seems to be attempting to give a solution to Karl Popper's famous "Paradox of Tolerance," which was provided as an aside in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, which analyzed how fascism can arise and overtake liberal societies. Marcuse's answer to this conundrum is that a "discriminating tolerance," a "liberating tolerance," must be practiced that offers favoritism to the left and actively suppresses the right, as he defines them (from a perspective of Critical Theory). Join Lindsay as he contextualizes and then brings the first portion of this essay to life, and stay tuned for Parts 2, 3, and 4 to come! Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses 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 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	The All right everybody. We're going to do something a little bit different. I've not done
0:23.9	something like this before. You are listening to James Lindsay on the new
0:28.8	discourse at podcast and what I want to do I've been going on and on for weeks and weeks telling people that we live in the logic of an essay written in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse
0:47.0	titled Repressive Tolerance.
0:48.7	I've been trying to tell people the logic of the woke,
0:52.0	the ethic of the woke, as a matter of fact is repressive tolerance.
0:55.0	It makes sense of basically everything that's going on.
1:00.0	So when we see, for example, as we recently did on CNN, a Chiron reading that, what does it say,
1:08.3	Antifa seeks peace through violence.
1:12.3	There's a logic behind that. I would say seeks peace through violence.
1:15.0	There's a logic behind that. I would say that it's a parallologic in the language of my essay about pseudo- realities
1:19.0	that I published on Christmas, 2020,
1:22.0	but nevertheless, there is a logic behind this. There is in fact an
1:25.7	ethic behind it as well and I'm trying to make the point to people, trying to get
1:30.4	people to understand that what wokeness is, and kind of a very simple expression,
1:34.8	is it is the logic of this essay, Repressive Tolerance from the Neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcusa written in 1965
1:45.8	just before we saw the outbreak of violence in 67 and 68 and into 69 largely
1:52.2	based off of this essay, Herbert Mercusa was a rock star at the time when he wrote
1:58.8	this in leftist circles.
2:02.4	What I'm trying to convey to people is that this, the logic of this
2:05.4	essay is the logic of woke and that woke is this essay combined with the a
2:12.0	perversion if you will or actually maybe not a with the
	...

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