How to Make a Critical Theory Out of Anything

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 45 Critical Theories are almost embarrassingly simple. There's almost nothing to them. A Critical Theory of anything can easily be made by one of two routes. One: Take an existing Critical Theory of something, substitute the domain-specific jargon of some other thing, and then publish. You're a genius revolutionizing (pun intended) your field! Two: Just understand the basic anatomy of a Critical Theory and do the same thing. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks you through the idea of a "Critical Car Theory" that challenges "carnormativity" to show you exactly how. It's simple. Choose something imperfect in the world that you'd like to complain about. Identify a politically actionable outcome you hope to achieve, probably a Leftist one. Blame everyone for incidences of the problem by thinking "systemically" and assign them moral complicity and responsibility for the problem you started with. Demand systemic change. Then close off all disagreement or questioning as an attempt to maintain the "status quo" of "the system," which only an evil person who wants those problems to continue would do. That's it. That's the anatomy of a Critical Theory. Join James in this episode to hear how ridiculously simple and absurd it is so you can protect yourself from Critical Theories in other lines of thought. 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	Hey everyone, this is James Lindsay, you're listening to another exciting episode of the
0:23.7	new Discourses podcast.
0:25.3	I think this will be a shorter episode.
0:27.1	I just want to do something kind of simple.
0:29.5	I want to talk about the anatomy of a critical theory.
0:33.7	So a couple of years ago, it turns out at the very beginning of 2019, so I guess two and
0:38.4	a half years ago, I got invited to review a book that was about critical diatetics and
0:46.0	critical nutrition studies.
0:47.6	Now, diatetics is the study of diet, kind of like nutrition.
0:53.8	So it's not the other thing, dionetics, which is Scientology.
0:58.9	It is a study of diet, so it's related to nutrition.
1:03.0	And so I got to ask to read this book and to review it and I thought, I don't know anything
1:07.9	really.
1:08.9	I mean, I try to eat right or whatever, but I don't know anything about dietician work
1:13.6	or diatetics.
1:14.6	I don't know anything about nutrition studies.
1:17.4	I'm definitely not a nutritionist or an expert in any of this.
1:20.9	Why on earth am I being asked to review this?
1:23.0	And of course, what I pointed out in my eventual review that I wrote, which by the way,
1:28.4	I think has been taken off the internet.
1:30.1	I tried to find it earlier and I couldn't find it except in my email where I had actually
1:34.9	exchanged it.
	...

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