The Essence of Critical Theory

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 134 At the center of Woke thinking is critical theory. So, what is it? In short, critical theory is a tool for delegitimizing a real thing for not being some kind of sociopolitical ideal thing that cannot even exist. The way it works is by holding the real thing up to the standards of an imaginary ideal rather than against the contingencies of reality and criticizing it with the aim of breaking people's faith in it, simply for existing in reality. It's a wicked tool almost always used to undermine something legitimate so that something illegitimate can replace it (dialectics). Join host James Lindsay for this episode of New Discourses Bullets, where he breaks it down and makes it clear. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #criticaltheory

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to New Discourse's Bullets, where I give a single
0:15.1	bullet point-like summary of a topic from Woke that we all need to understand in order to defeat it I hope
0:22.6	these in these short podcasts are informational and helpful I hear all the time that
0:26.4	they are please share them like them subscribe whatever your subscriptions keep
0:31.3	the lights on and keep this going and it's very helpful and so if you get
0:36.4	something out of this like let, let's make that happen.
0:40.0	I want to talk to you about kind of the heart of critical theory today, which is to say the
0:44.2	heart of woke. Since this podcast is dedicated to talking about woke, let's get to the heart of woke.
0:49.2	And the heart of woke, I mean, there's different things we could actually say are there.
0:52.7	I like to talk about Marx's concept of supersession of the individual by the retraction of alienation into the self.
0:59.6	In other words, that you come to identify yourself with an aggrieved identity group that views itself as alienated.
1:06.7	And you come to understand yourself in terms of that being woke.
1:09.7	You woke up to the fact that you're part of an alienated class. So that's woke. But critical theory is the essence of woke as well.
1:18.6	The shortest answer when people say, well, what do you mean by woke, James? They ask me this a lot.
1:24.1	It's people who use critical theory. Being woke means believing in critical
1:27.5	theory. So what's the essence of critical theory? It's hard to actually explain this because
1:30.9	critical theory is inherently negative. It is a critical theory. It was developed by a guy named
1:37.1	Max Horkheimer who described it in fact as a kind of second dimension of thought. It's like in
1:43.6	comparison to what he calls traditional
1:45.4	theory. And what it actually boils down to that second dimension is idealism. It is believing
1:52.2	in an ideal world that you're going to use as the benchmark for the real world. And you might not
1:59.8	even be able to and typically are not able to describe that ideal world. And you might not even be able to, and typically are not able to describe
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