Podcasts about racial contract

Season 4, ep 26: Weirding Time! with: Uli, Jams, carla joy, and a Time Talks History segmentIn the season four opener, Uli, carla, and jams introduce some dreams for season 4, ruminate about other projects on the horizon, and reflect on their year off from making the Grounded Futures Show, and more! Plus, we will hear the first Time Talks History segment about the Doctrine of Discovery. Thanks for listening!

In this episode, we talk about the late, great Charles Mills and his landmark book The Racial Contract. Forcefully arguing that the modern discourse of egalitarianism and freedom is underwritten by a tacit commitment to global white supremacy, Mills develops an immanent criticism of liberalism that remains faithful to many of its core values. We discuss the limits and promises of liberal universalism, the potential reform of contractarian logic, and whether white people really mean it when they say they want to abolish whiteness. Rest in peace to a really real one.This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon: patreon.com/leftofphilosophyReferences:Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).Music:“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

This episode we are excited to welcome James Lindsay, a bestselling author who has spoken and written extensively against the woke onslaught.    His recent speech in the European Parliament looking at the Neo-Marxist Cultural Revolution that is engulfing us all has really gone viral.  In this interview James looks at the Marxist thread that runs through Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory and we end by looking at his latest book "The Marxification of Education". James Lindsay is a professional troublemaker, mathematician, author, internationally recognized speaker and the founder and president of New Discourses.  James is a leading expert on Critical Race Theory and is best known for his relentless criticism of "Woke" ideology, the now-famous Grievance Studies Affair, and his bestselling books including Race Marxism and Cynical Theories, which has been translated into over a dozen languages.  In addition to writing and speaking, he is the voice of the New Discourses Podcast and has been a guest on prominent media outlets including The Joe Rogan Experience, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and NPR. Connect with James... GETTR:                       https://gettr.com/user/conceptualjames Twitter:                       https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames Gab:                            https://gab.com/ConceptualJames Truth:                          https://truthsocial.com/@conceptualjames Facebook:                  https://www.facebook.com/ConceptualJames/ Minds:                        https://www.minds.com/conceptualjames/ Amazon:                     https://www.amazon.co.uk/James-Lindsay/e/B009BBX7BI/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk Connect with New Discourses... Website:                     https://newdiscourses.com/ Twitter:                       https://twitter.com/NewDiscourses Facebook:                  https://facebook.com/newdiscourses YouTube:                    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg Podcast:                     https://open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp Interview recorded 2.6.23 Audio Podcast version available on Podbean and all major podcast directories...  ⁣https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ Transcript available on our Substack... https://heartsofoak.substack.com/ To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more...  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with James Lindsay. Of course, the founder and president of New Discourses, and I was delighted to get him on after seeing him at a number of conferences over stateside. And it was his recent speech in the European Parliament, which really intrigued me. I know that has really gone viral. And I think the title was the Neo-Marxist Cultural Revolution Engulfing the West, now known as WOKE. What a title, what a topic to bring to the European Parliament. So he discusses the kind of response on that and how a lot of the battle lines that we are on, the Critical Race Theory and also the Queer Theory, how those fit under that socialist Marxist umbrella. He unpacks that and then we end up on education. He's just written a book, the end of last year, on the Marxification of education. We have no time to get into the topic, but I just wanted to get his thoughts on why he'd put pen to paper on a book specifically focused on education. So much packed in. I, know you'll have followed James for a long time. I know you'll enjoy listening to his thoughts on speaking in the European Parliament on such a topic and unpacking some of those other issues.  And hello Hearts of Oak. Today it is wonderful to have a best-selling author with us of many titles. We'll refer to some of them, The Marxification of Education and Race Marxism, The Truth About Critical Race Theory, amongst many others. An internationally recognized speaker, the privilege of hearing him first at the American Freedom Alliance conference back in June last year, and the founder and president of New Discourses, and that is James Lindsay. James, thank you so much for your time today. (James Lindsay) Hey, I'm glad to be here. Thank you. It's great to have you and your handle there @ConceptualJames on Twitter, Gab, Truth, GETTR, and newdiscourses.com is the website. People can find everything there. Before we start, James, could I just ask you to take a moment and introduce yourself before we get down to the issue? That's actually a hard thing to do. I'm a very kind of peculiar character, I think, and kind of the whole thing. But the long and short of it is that my academic training was in mathematics. I received a PhD in mathematics, or completed one, I suppose. They didn't give it to me. They don't give those away. But I earned a PhD in mathematics in 2010. I immediately left academia after finishing my doctorate. I became disillusioned with the course that it seemed to be on at the time. Then I just worked for myself at a small private enterprise for a number of years. To be academically engaged, I got involved with fighting with people online basically. This led to discovering the woke movement quite early on. This led to my participation in what was called the grievance studies affair, which I'm fairly well known for, which is where we wrote a large number of at fake academic articles for feminist journals in 2017 and 18 for whatever it's worth there's a new film that just came out telling the backstory with all of that a man named Michael Nayna put that out and it's called The Reformers, so you can find that on his substack, which I think it's michaelnayna.substack.com, The Reformers is the name of the film. John Cleese apparently saw it the other day and loved it, so that's a pretty ringing endorsement. From there, I went on to write, actually, Cynical Theories next, which is a book that did extremely well at getting some of this information into people's hands. It's actually hit somewhere around a quarter million sales, so a lot of people had a chance to encounter these ideas, which is the ultimate goal. And then I built New Discourses from there and I spent all my time researching, studying. Basically the woke movement and all of its kind of intellectual, intellectual is a generous word for them, antecedents and forebears. So I created New Discourses with the goal, it says all fancy on my website, shining the light of objective truth into subjective darkness. But the fact, that was my business partner's idea, honestly, the goal was I want to study woke and understand woke and expose woke and everything that's tied to it as fast as I can create and publish materials. And so that's what it's for. So it hosts mostly three different podcasts that I have in-house as well as articles that I write, videos that I do, and you can find links to the books that I've written, which which we tend to publish in-house because publishers are so slow and this is moving so fast. So anyway, that's me. I don't know how many books I've technically written now because some of them are blurry and they're, you know, things I've done with other people and some of them have been translated into a large number of languages. Those are the things that people care about. A lot of people know me because I've been on Joe Rogan's podcast three times also, which gets you kind of in the public eye a little bit. Okay, well, it's that criticism of woke ideology that I saw two months ago. You were in the European Parliament. You delivered a short address at a conference there, Woke a Culture War Against Europe. How did that come about and kind of how was that received? Well, they just reached out to me. Apparently the group there, which is a European-wide political party called Identity and Democracy or Identity Democracy Foundation, something like this. I don't quite know the organizational structure of these things. They invited me because they put together a three conference series to be held there at the European Parliament in Brussels and asked, they thought that I would be a perfect voice for the inaugural of the three, the first of the three. And so they invited me to come to Brussels and speak at the parliament. And so I gratefully accepted and went over and somehow or rather luckily delivered what I believe is given the fact of the significance of the room that I think I delivered my best public address I've ever delivered, which worked out pretty good because I could have bombed that sucker. And it was very good and very succinct. Part of it was that I realized the night before talking to another audience that there's a language barrier that kind of cuts across my humour, so I had to be very plain spoken. Maybe I should take notes on that and deliver more plain spoken addresses in the future. But it was received extremely well. Now, of course, the room was largely composed of MEPs that are of that party, so you would expect them to be interested in these ideas. It was also, there was a group there, the other speaker was Frank Ferretti, and a fairly well-known guy. And so his organization had a contingent there. And other than that, it was actually kind of timed to correspond with a youth conference for the ID Foundation. And so it was primarily a lot of people in their twenties, political interns and people interested in political party, young people. So most of the people were in their twenties, they were younger. And of course, their energy is really good, really, really a positive reception there. It came out online and they got a little bit of attention. And then for whatever reason, I don't know why a month later it went viral and it has just blown up everywhere. And the reception online has been extraordinarily positive. I'm sure that there are people who are very unhappy that that happened, but I haven't heard much from them.  Well that group, the ID group, is a fantastic group, probably the best bulwark against what is happening in Europe, and I've watched them closely through all my involvement of politics over the many years. But could I ask you, what was it like going into the, I guess, the ruling chamber in Europe and helping them understand the danger of socialism, which many of them call themselves socialists. They really do believe the state knows better than the individual. What was like kind of going into that? Obviously the ID group are on side, but as a chamber, as a parliament, they're very much against anything that will shine the light on the evils of socialism. So what was that like, kind of explain to them the dangers of socialism?  Well I mean it was surprisingly, again surprisingly positive, I thought it might be quite hostile. I thought there might be at least some people who would come by, you know, interested to see what people against their view might say. But I don't get the impression, or at least anybody who did stayed very professional and very polite. It was a very I mean, I don't want to say it's a very bureaucratic building because I don't know that I got that impression. But it's a very, very professional environment. So that wasn't, it wasn't like where I spoke at North-western University a month ago and got heckled and yelled at and protested the whole time or anything like that. The building itself was more interesting than my experience inside of it, I don't know if you visited Brussels and seen this but so walking around there's a... Brussels is, I'm sorry any Belgians watching is not the most beautiful city Down in the older part of the city the older the where the castles and things are that part is quite nice but over by the Parliament is, it's just kind of plain European city. It's not particularly beautiful. So but there's a little park there that's okay. And I found it striking that right outside the backside of the European Parliament building, there's a small grassy area with a number, maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen, somewhere in between statues in the grass. And what they are, when you look at them at first, you think, what are these? Are these aliens or something very peculiar? And you look closer, but no, they're ostriches with their heads buried in the ground, all of them. So it looks like a three-legged thing, but it's not. It's an ostrich with its head buried in the sand and there are you know dozens of these and I thought that's a weird installation to have, you know, on on site then you come around to the front to go into the to the actual Parliament building which you can't do without passes and a guide and all these things you can't just go in, but there's this statue right by the door that I found very striking and it's of this kind of very angry almost Soviet looking woman holding up a very sharp, angular, I'm trying to dig into the semiotics here like aggressive European and, you know, Euro-e. And she's standing triumphantly over a man that she seems to have conquered, who looks quite dejected and broken and so, you know, there's there's this weird vibe about the place, plus it's this weird building of steel and glass and an otherwise kind of fairly quaint European city, that just this kind of this glass. It's not the scary circular one that's in Spain or wherever that is. It's but this is, you know, intimidating steel and glass structure, that is just so out of character for the rest of the city. But as far as being inside the building, we went afterwards, after it was all people that were on site. And then after the talk, there was a little reception out in the hallway. And that was all, nobody bothered us. And then we went upstairs to do some interviews. And there was at the interview area with all the cameras, the media area, with the good lighting and all of that, There was another group, and I don't know who exactly they were, Renew Europe or something like this, I think is what it said, and they had a European Union flag with the stars. But instead of it being solid blue, that kind of deep blue that they use, it was rainbow. I think the stars might have not been in a circle, but might have been in a heart or something silly. So I asked them, and so obviously these people are not my people, so I asked them, I said, I love your flag, can I borrow it for a picture? And they were quite accommodating and they had a friendly chat with me and they don't know my views, but they were polite and professional as one would expect in a building of that sort. So I didn't find it's, I find more hostility going into American government buildings from Democrats here in the US than I experienced in the EU. But that might've just been stroke of luck or something like that. Just before I move to the issues, how do you see it? Because as an American, there is a culture where there is a battle happening, and it is one side against the other. When you look at Europe, it's much more one-sided than it is in the US. In the US, we look across the water and see the battle amongst the side of truth as being positive, strong, having arguments and holding the line, where in Europe, even the good countries have been succumbed into that EU of hating themselves and of rewriting history and all of that. How do you see that as an American? Well, I'll point out first, because I do agree with you generally, not the Flemish, the Flemish do not have that attitude. For certain and I found that I was spending quite a bit of time with it with Flemish men and women and some of the Italians do not have that attitude and they were very nice to spend time with, even a few Germans would they're very German, you know, everything must be according to the protocol, you know, very, I love Germans, but no, the fact is, what I see in Europe is that Europe is far more tipped to socialism, far more tipped to kind of this overarching, less accountable or even unaccountable governance. This bureaucracy that's beyond the reach of the people, and it knows better, and therefore, you know, it's going to deal with the people for them than we see here in America. But it's not nearly as woke and that was actually kind of the crux of this conference that they wanted to put together is yes, yes, we know we're very socialist and we know we're very far down that road, but whatever's happening in the Anglosphere, so the UK is actually heavily included in this, it's a very different animal than continental Europe, is very crazy. It's properly almost insane. There was no confusion that I ran into among virtually anybody, about what a man and a woman for example, and in the European context. But the idea that the taxpayer money would just be wasted on everything that they want to do is, you know, just kind of taken for granted. It's just something they say, of course, this is how things work. Of course, the taxes will be crazy. Of course, we'll waste money on flying a stupid American over here and giving him lots of beer or something like this, you know, to show him a good time in Belgium. So it's a very different attitude. Europe is very dangerously tipped toward favourability toward socialism, but it's still repelling, and that was really again the crux of the conference, it's still repelling the very almost antinomian, insane, woke kind of, whether it's race, race politics is actually the most relevant. The sex and gender politics, people are a little bit naturally repellent to that still, but I don't think that that can last if they open the doors. So my goal was to warn Europe, like, yeah, you guys are already pretty well screwed up with socialism and maybe, you know, talking to the Flemish, maybe you can turn some of this around or do something with it in the future, but you do not know your danger if you think that you can kind of just not be proactive in keeping the woke ideology out. Yeah. You end, I don't know if it was actually the end or in the middle, telling them that according to Marx, socialism was not economic but religious in essence. Do you want to just kind of unpack that and is that why we are having this difficulty because it is religious in nature? Well Marx made it, he tried to make it look very much like it was economic. But if you read his earlier works, which sort of set the foundation and you catch the flavour of it throughout his as later works, Marx was very invested in this idea of understanding the world and man at a fundamental level. What is man? Who is man? And to answer these deep fundamental questions, and what does it require of man to do this? And so I actually think that he's more of a theologian in a kind of an anti-theology way. He's casting down God and replacing God with not man, but man enlightened to the secret truth of reality, which is that man is a social animal, a perfectly social being that lives not for himself but for the species when he's properly awakened to who he is. My contention is that if you take that as a fundamental substrate so that then it separates the world into the people who have access to power and the people who do not have access to power, then that they're intrinsically in conflict so that the underclass has to to awaken to its nature's true historical agents of change and seize the means of production, that the means of production are, in a sense, fungible. You can change them out. But the idea is that what are you producing? And everybody thinks it's, oh, it's economics. You're producing in the factory with goods and services. You're producing in the field with food and agricultural goods, and that's the hammer and the sickle, obviously. But no, you're producing man. You're producing man as who he's meant to be, which that's a fundamentally theological project, not a fundamentally economic project. And Marx believed that economic conditions to determine who man is. But if you were to say, well, it doesn't work, obviously in Britain and obviously in the United States and in Canada, economic conditions were not successful at agitating people into the historical class consciousness as change agents of history. But if you say that race or sex or gender or sexuality or whatever, those are actually the determinants. When you have material comfort. When you have, as some of the Marxists in the 20th century put it, an advanced capitalism that delivers the goods and allows people to build a good life, you are not going to get them on economic conditions. Economic conditions are not determinant of who they are. They are, but on a deeper level that they don't perceive. This is the thesis of Marcuse's one-dimensional man. You've been made one-dimensional. You can't even perceive the fact that economic conditions are relevant to your life. So instead, you have to come where it matters, which is in personal identity. If you're comfortable, where do you turn? You turn to yourself and you think about your identity and who you are in the world. And so identity politics became the weapon that allowed to subdue the West. So if you take out economic conditions as the producer of man, where the means of production have to be seized and you put in cultural issues around race or what it means to be a certain sexuality or what it means to be man or woman in terms of sex itself and gender, then you can just kind of get these other dimensions, whether it's critical race theory or queer theory or feminism as a kind of a Marxist flavour of feminism or within what they call critical pedagogy in education. It's who gets to be a knower and who doesn't. So being considered knowledgeable becomes a form of social property that has to be challenged by the people who are excluded from it by the existing knowing system. Listen to the way the woke talk. It's all about other ways of knowing and knowing systems and all of this. That's where this comes from. But it's the same fundamental architecture. It's, you have this theology of man, or maybe I think the technical word is an Anthroposophist, I can't even say it, anthrosophist, something. Anthro for man, sophi for, you know, sophistry. Sophistry of mankind. Somebody else can say it for me. I can write it. Type it out on the screen for you, but it's technically that, but you have this theology that has at its heart the idea that man is producing himself by some mechanism, and that mechanism can be seized by the underclass of its dynamic and taken over to transform what man and society is. And every one of their theories just, once you understand it that way, every one of their theories just falls out. So you can start making very keen guesses on what's going to happen as this progresses and develops. Here's one, I think I mentioned this in the EU, and I think it's very pertinent for the both European but also the UK context. So if you'll forgive me, just for simplicity, I'm going to consider the UK part of Europe. I know, we can't do that, but I don't want to have to say UK and Europe over and over again. So the broadly European, maybe I'll use broadly European context, that side of the Atlantic context, what you actually have, you guys live in, there is actually a text you can read. If you want to figure out what's happening in Europe, you read Douglas Murray's, The Strange Death of Europe. There is a single text, it's not that long, that you can read to fully understand whose Europe you live in, and it's John Paul Sartre's Europe. He wrote the foreword to Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, so you're not going to go find one of Sartre's books. You're going to go get Wretched of the Earth, which is by Franz Fanon, who was a post-colonialist in the 50s and 60s in France. You're going to go get his book. And then he is from, I always get it wrong, Martinique. He's from Martinique. And so he was in this kind of colonized condition, but also a French psycho analyst. And so that forward though has a very important part. The book is all about, the colonial condition. So who's a native and who's a settler. And now you have that same dynamic, that same mentality, the same exact structure of how it creates who you are as a person. And Fanon argues that violence is the only way to overcome the colonized condition. And Sartre writes in the foreword to this that Europe, he has a letter to Europe, and he's like, Europe, you better listen. The payment for colonization is coming. And this is in the 60s. What you need to do, early 60s, you need to do is you need to decide, are they gonna get it by violence or are you going to propitiate yourself and give it away and hope that the violence doesn't come? And he urges Europe to start giving away their society to their former colonies. When they come and make a claim on your society, give it to them. Maybe they won't be violent. Maybe they'll spare you. So in the kind of very Trumpian, I see a Trump hat behind you, so very Trumpian kind of slang language of the 2020s, go ahead Europe and cuck yourself before the people who you previously colonized, give your societies away to them or else there'll be blood, is the message. And that is literally the message that Europe adopted. So while you haven't in Europe broadly construed, although the UK has taken up with quite a bit of woke. Scotland is, in Ireland or Scotland especially, is particularly bad. You guys have taken up quite a lot of this, but the element of the broad woke pantheon of powered gods or whatever that really strikes hardest is this post-colonial status, which has allowed you or made it so that not only have you guys opened your borders utterly, but that the entire social welfare state that you guys have built up around your socialist sensibilities pours into this yawning black hole of need. And the reason is discoverable in a French existentialist Marxists wailing about a post-colonialist saying that there must be blood to pay for colonization, which is a very obviously you're not allowed to even say these things, but a very one-sided understanding of, the impacts of colonialism. Yes, bad, but also you're not even allowed to mention that yes, good, too. It was a mixed bag brought through brutality and much injustice for certain, but at the same time time. Ethiopia famously is the least or the only completely uncolonized, if I remember right, country in that area of Africa. And they're also the ones that have been struggling the most and the most backwards in many regards for so long. They were the Somalia and Ethiopia where when I grew up as a kid, it was, you know, the starving kids in Ethiopia, eat your peas because the starving kids in Ethiopia don't have any, you know, they were the, they the poster child of backwards and broken. Maybe that was a meme that's not true, I don't know, anyway, Europe has that on its plate, and I think that's comprehensible. I actually think the strange death of Europe is utterly comprehensible out of the foreword that, Sartre wrote. If you read any of Sartre, who the hell wants to live in his world? What a nightmare. Well, you do, and what a nightmare. Tell us, because you mentioned colonialism, that's one of the battle lines, the critical race theory is one of the battle lines, you talked about that and how that fits under socialism. I know it was last year you published Race Marxism, the truth about critical race theory and people can get that. The links will be in the description for them to get hold of that and to go deeper into it. But how does critical race theory fit under the umbrella of socialism or Marxism? Well, it's a redistribution of cultural capital that ties into actually redistributing material capital. So the idea is that there's this form of cultural property that white people erected for themselves during the colonial eras, particularly to justify colonialism and to justify slavery in the 17th century, primarily 16th and 17th centuries, going some into the 18th century. And falling apart in the 19th century. So this idea of whiteness as a cult form of cultural property that generates white supremacy and racial superiority and even racial identification was created by white people to enshrine their own power and to impose, racial identity and inferiority, social and cultural and even economic inferiority on others. So-called people of colour, but particularly blacks and critical race theory builds out completely from this. And the goal then is to seize the means of cultural production around the ideas of what it means to be a member of a certain race. And it's actually a very interesting theory because it's still, unlike some of these other woke theories which seem just off in the air, it's got one foot very firmly still rooted in material reality. It's in a sense a lot more, not explicitly Marxist, but much more critical and materialist. And if you read their early writings, in fact, if you read virtually all of their writings through the 1990s, and I expect, so 70s through the 90s, and I expect we're gonna see another rash of this writing coming now, given what's happening in the United States Supreme Court. It's a very American theory, by the way. It doesn't really fit in other contexts, and Europeans have noticed, as have Brits. Like, we didn't do this, what are you talking about? But the fact is what it's really centered around is seizing the means of affirmative action, is what it's ultimately about. And I don't say that to be cheeky. If you read their books, affirmative action is brought up as a core and key issue hundreds of times. It's not mentioned kind of tangentially here or there, it is a central issue that comes up again and again. And their goal is that they're seeing affirmative action gaining public disfavour through the, say, the 80s. They see, you know, the Supreme Court starting to say, well, maybe it needs a time limit. And they explicitly say, no, it doesn't need a time limit. Not only do we need to maintain it, we need to expand it. It needs to be bigger and more and more and more. So it's like it's very materialistic, seize the means of opportunity redistribution, I guess, in material resources. This is where the reparations conversations come in. And so it takes the entire architecture of literally of Marxism, infuses it with the later critical theory, and then recentres it in race. And in fact, you can find authors like Gloria Ladson Billings is a famous critical race theorist. In the 90s, she writes a paper called Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education. And what she says is in that paper, and I can't quote it from memory anymore, I used to do it a lot, but she says that, the point of critical race theory is to make race the central variable for understanding all inequality. So is where a classical Marxist would say that access to capital is the central concern that determines all inequality, and that's the production of man for critical race theorists, is that race actually supersedes that. And there's a wonderful book explaining all this that I thought was extremely clarifying and elucidating. It's one of the better books that I've read. It's by a former philosopher of race. I've been told I'm not allowed to call him a critical race theorist, technically. His name's Charles Mills, very famous guy. He wrote a book called The Racial Contract, which takes Rousseau's social contract and turns it into a racial phenomenon. But he also wrote a book called From Class to Race, where he explains how he moved from being a classical Marxist to a critical race philosopher. And he argues that he became convinced that at least in the American context, when we understand what Marx was really saying, what he really meant by ideology, what he really meant by social structures, superstructure, infrastructure, the base, and how they interact to create a structure of society, that race is by far the more relevant variable in American society, in American history. So he moves from, it's a book about his own philosophical journey, From Class to Race. And it's the title of the book, From Class to Race, by Charles Mills. It's a staggeringly interesting book. The first chapter was so eye-opening to understand Marx. It's one of the top three most important things I've read to understand Marx. And he's got a very heterodox view, according to Marxist standards. So people criticize my view of Marx, as I've largely derived it from Charles Mills, who's a Marxist, just a fairly heterodox one. He's late Charles Mills to be clear. I don't know if I mentioned he died a few years ago. But that's, in a nutshell, what critical race theory is. Rather than capital being the special form of private property that basically appropriates every deterministic thing in society, including who you are as a person, race becomes, whiteness in fact, becomes the central piece of private property. This is based off of a paper explicitly called Whiteness as Property, written by Cheryl Harris, a famous critical race theorist, in 1993. I think, they're always in really big ones, I think that one's Harvard Law Review. It might be Cornell Law Review. I have to always kind of look up and check where it was published, but it's one of these very big universities law review. And it's a very, it's like 93 pages. It's a very long article arguing that whiteness functions in parallel to the way that Marx lays out capital as a form of bourgeois private property. She even uses the phrase bourgeois property a few times in the paper, that the white people have set themselves up as a racial bourgeoisie and everything just kind of follows from there. And so critical race theory becomes this, that's why I titled the book Race Marxism, as a matter of fact, this Marxist theory of race. It latches onto that post-colonial, just for you broadly UK, European context folks, it latches onto that because there are often racial components to colonialism. I mean, if you've colonized Africa, most of the people you've colonized happen to be black. If you've colonized Asia, most of the people you've colonized happen to be Asian. So you can understand why they would attach these arguments about whiteness and race back through, and that's kind of the back door there in the UK-European context, is that they're using the colonial context and then saying, well, the real reason for all this was racial, where it's not, it's straight up, it's directly, openly, unabashedly, historically, imperial. It's the British empire was proudly an empire. The Spanish empire was proudly an empire. You know, their goal up until World War II, I think every European country threw on its hat to try to conquer the world of its empire. And then finally we realized with nuclear weapons and machine guns and jet airplanes and things like that, carpet bombing, maybe that's not good anymore. Maybe military colonization is not a functional approach for a humanity that wants to survive, into the 21st century. Well, can I, then another battlefront, and you raised this so that you didn't really go into it in the speech, is queer theory. And I think that's where we have more of a battleground in Europe. Critical race theory seems to be less an issue, certainly in our education system, where it is queer theory, and of course, we're celebrating the holy month of pride this month. But tell us, how does that- How does that-  The power be upon us. And how does that fit under socialism queer theory? Yeah, well, it's the same model. So if we understand this concept that there's economic conditions blah blah blah and you get all of Marxism that falls out from the Marxist kind of axioms, and then you say well if we consider economic production to be fungible for racial production as a cultural property, then you get critical race theory Well, if we consider both of those again to be fungible and we pull out that and we say well there's a certain class in society that have designated themselves by virtue of their larger numbers by virtue of having been successful and put themselves in positions of power, but they've declared themselves normal. And other people outside of that are not normal, or they're abnormal, or they're aberrant, or they're perverts, or they're queer, queer against normal, and the kind of even old meaning of the word, then queer theory falls out in your lap. It's just that simple. But this is a very scary phenomenon, whereas critical race theory at its very bottom has, and Marxism both at their very bottom, have a blatant visible grift involved. We're going to seize the means of production. We're going to establish a permanent and stronger and increasing, accelerating affirmative action regime. These are very blatant grifts. We're going to take resources and power for ourselves as an identifiable group of people or whatever. With the queer theory, it's a very different thing. They're looking at the cultural production, it is largely sex, gender, and sexuality, but it can apply to anything. Fat studies emerged mostly in the UK, as it turns out. So did the study of ability, what's called the social model of disability, is from a a man named Michael Oliver, who was a Brit. I don't remember where, if he was London or where, but they actually use the same underlying architecture and engine as queer theory. So now instead of it being about sex or gender or sexuality, it's about your body weight, your health status, your ability status as a very awkward politically correct term we use to not say handicapped or whatever. Well, in America, is fatness now a designated characteristic in New York? I don't know how that's going to work, but yeah.  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I've been I noticed in December that I had some fatness going on. So I, believe, get this I started eating less and moving more and the fatness started to go away. It's incredible  Revolutionary  Yeah, I know you guys use fake measurements like kilos or stones or whatever that nobody knows what they are, I think I lost like I'll do it in stones. I think I lost 1.6 stone If I'm making up numbers correctly, whatever that works out to is 28 pounds. Maybe you could get repatriations for the time you were over with at all. I don't know could be  I hope so but the idea with queer theory is anything that kind of the broad consensus of society considers normal is, illegitimately determined so that certain people get to have power. So what they're trying to do is seize the means of production of of normalcy, what people consider within the boundaries of normal or normative or even healthy or good behaviour, presentation, being, society. And that's very dangerous because unlike the other ones, see, critical race theory has to at the end of the day maintain its grift, right? Marxism at the end of the day has to maintain its grift. Queer theory, the second is let's say that they get LGBT or just LGB, they get gay acceptance, gay marriage, gay equality, gay everything, full civil rights movement that succeeds. I actually think that that's separate, by the way, the civil rights movement was more of a broadly liberal phenomenon, and I think it was separate from this very radical phenomenon. And there's a much historical and theoretical reason to accept that I know what I'm talking about with that claim, but you get broad LGBT acceptance in society, full equality in society, etc., and that becomes a new norm. Immediately you have to attack the new norm, and they actually have names for this. They have words. Homo-normativity. You've heard of heteronormativity that has to be combated. Homo-normativity has to be combated, and homo-normativity means the the broad acceptance of homosexual people in society, that's a problem because it actually prevents them from being radicalizable. Anything that would cause somebody to become a stable functioning member of society within the boundaries of normal has to be attacked. So every inch of ground queer theory takes, it has to turn around and wage war on its previous success to take it even further. They have to constantly, they call it queering. They have to constantly say, well, if you actually look at the people who designated that they're normal, a lot of them are perverts and private. So are they really normal? Or are they just repressed and have to keep their perversion in the closet? And that's just like other people being in the closet and they blur out all these contexts. But it's a war against normalcy. It's a war against norms. It's a war against decency and expectations of decency. It's also a war against any boundaries. The boundaries, you could say that, maybe it's artificial, the boundaries between heterosexual versus homosexual. But at some point, we're not talking about artificial boundaries, the paedophilia, bestiality, these kinds of very perverse things. The boundaries between what in the slang terms get called vanilla and kink. There's some kind of boundary. They say that these things are all actually, there is no boundary. There's no meaningful boundary and their goal is to dissolve those. So what ultimately happens is, queer theory is like a universal solvent. It's an acid that will dissolve anything. And anything that you try to put as a container around it, it necessarily has to dissolve that too. They even have, I thought there was just one, I looked it up, There are many papers that have some variation of queering queer theory as their title in their queer literature, Because queer theory itself had become too normative. So they have to queer that they have to make it even weirder less normative, and so it's uh it's socialist though in the sense that it's trying to seize the means of production and redistribute shares of social acceptance and opportunity, according to whether or not you're considered normal. Phrases like bring your whole self to work are very queer. Like, no, do not bring it. Leave most of yourself at home, as a matter of fact, is actually what we call professionalism. And that they would say that that's restrictive of people who say want to wear fetish gear to the office, kind of like we have in our White House happening right now. Kind of very visibly what we have. There's military officials wearing literally pup fetish, we had this bizarre character in charge of our nuclear waste and other things who was stealing women's clothing from airports and he's been arrested now three times for this. And it turns out he's a member of this troop that's now controversially the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Los Angeles that is doing the very antinomian religious provocation at Dodger Stadium that's all in the news. He's not a current member, he was a former member Sam Brinton is this character's name, you know, bald, shiny head, looks like an alien, has a moustache dressed in a fabulous gown he stole from some woman of colour immigrant who built it, that you know herself. Very bizarre, but queer theory is well, who's this? There's an old sketch on Saturday Night Live. I encourage people to look this up It's it's the character's name is sex ed. So it's sex ed Vincent. His name is Ed Vincent. He's a sex educator Everybody should look this up This is the perfect expression of queer theory and actually post-modernism where he's describing very bizarre fetishes as a joke, right? It's very funny and he's obviously very nerdy weird guy, but then it's his tagline is, is that weird? well who's to say, and he's teaching like a class, is that weird? and everybody says like who's to say, that's the ultimate idea of queer theories is that outside of the boundaries of normal? Well who gets to say that obviously people who set themselves up that way so we're gonna redistribute who has the power to determine what is and is not normal including drag queens in front of children and you know, provocative displays pride parades as a parade for for civil rights or even to celebrate the fact that for many years homosexuals were very oppressed in society, often viciously oppressed in society a pride parade that would just march and you know wave flags or whatever for a day, as it used to be would be one thing. This isn't what happens at all this thing is this crazy celebration that sprawls now across not just a month with a season. The entire public square turns into a rainbow for for upwards of 60 days and beyond. It's you know, there are fetishists running around enticing children and doing crazy things. It's really turned into something like a much grosser version of carnival, and it's, their fundamental view is well, is that out of bounds? Well, it's illegitimate if anybody but us decide, every individual should get to decide for themselves what's publicly out of bounds. So this is, literally like it to some very Jordan Peterson issues. It's the chaos monster right or the chaos dragon It's Tiamat being released on society that will ultimately tear it apart. Just to finish off, your latest book published in December was an education, The Marxification of Education, Paolo Ferrer's critical Marxism and the Theft of Education. We have no time to go into the topic at all, it is there, links are all there for the viewers and listeners, but could I just ask you as we finish, why you wanted to write a book specifically on education. Well I got sucked into it. I was gonna, I knew it was important and nobody was covering what's called Critical Pedagogy, the Critical Theory of Education. So I read a couple of books on it, got a little informed. I thought I would do a flyby, and just, you know, a reconnaissance flyby, give some people some pictures. And it turns out it was like trying to do a flyby of Jupiter, I just got sucked into the gravity and stuck. It's just a huge universe, and it's so complicated. But I wrote the book particularly, I call it, you know, The Theft of Education, because I kept encountering parents who were saying, they're telling me they're not doing this in our school, but I know they're doing it in our school, I experience it with my children. What's going on? And so I had read enough to understand the magic trick, how they've stolen education, what the mechanism is. And it actually is the same trick I've described. We don't have to go into the nitty gritties, but they've set up who gets to be constituted as a knower. Who does society recognize as a knowledgeable person versus somebody who's recognized as ignorant or outside of that. And they've created a Marxist seize the means of production program, where Paolo Ferrari did out of that. And then he created a mechanism in education where you use the academic material as an excuse to have political conversations. So that's how they do it. They don't technically teach critical race theory. They show a math problem and use it as an excuse to have a discussion about racial injustice and do this over and over and over again. Informed by critical race theory would be more accurate than teaching critical race theory. And so I wanted to pull back the veil on how that happens and what's really going on and that this is actually a cult brainwashing program. And the book has been very helpful to parents across at least the United States in that regard. It's being translated into Portuguese now, so we'll see what happens with that. Well, James, I appreciate you coming on. The issue of woke is, I think, the issue in whether society and cultures will survive or collapse, how you respond to them. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights on those. Yeah, well, I'm very glad to talk to you, very glad to get to spread the word. I think the European context has an interesting opportunity. UK is a little bit harder. You've already taken in a lot. But Europe has actually a chance, the ID group being that we mentioned before, being a great bulwark to stand up to this particular, very toxic aspect that will, as you can see, and whether it's the UK or Australia or Canada or the United States, that will rip a society apart if you let it in. Yeah, we're seeing that happen. And you mentioned in Brussels, their issue is immigration. 30% Islamic.  That clash between separate ideas of what culture should be and what freedom should be is why I would never want to live in Brussels. So, sorry.  Yeah. Well, I'll tell you the truth just quickly that this whole, if we look at Marx as a theologian philosopher-ish kind of character, A lot of his model, he says he inverted it, but he derived it from Georg Hegel preceding him. And Hegel's belief, and Marx definitely adopted this part, was that history is this inexorable force, almost like a deity itself that has a trajectory and a purpose and a defined endpoint. And the key part is that it moves through conflict. And if you understand nothing else about everything we've just talked about, that the people that think this way, that have adopted this worldview, understand that they move history to a desired endpoint through generating conflict. You don't have to get into the granular details of how until later. You can understand many of these decisions. Why are you pulling in 30% of your population now is going to be a different religion with a different culture, and then you take tremendous care of them and inflame these tensions across the divide and cause these conflicts, because conflict moves history. In other words, truly their view, religiously speaking for Hegel explicitly, is that the conflict working itself out through history actually finishes or actualizes God. So God doesn't become God until the conflicts have all played out, so they have to generate the conflicts to create the finalized deity, at which point everything will be perfect at the so-called end of history with the people that live in it called the last man.  Yeah. Well, we'll finish, James. The viewers and listeners @ConceptualJames on GETTR, Gab, Truth, Minds, wherever your preferred social media platform is, you'll find James on it, and of course newdiscourses.com. So thank you so much once again for your time, James.  Yeah, thank you.

Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion at Williams College. He's working on a new book titled How To Live Free in an Age of Pessimism. We discuss the legacy of Charles Mills' scholarship on the racial contract, freedom, and transforming society from the bottom up. Racial Contract White supremacy has shaped modern society in ways that may not be immediately obvious. Charles Mills proposes in the Racial Contract that we've operated under the assumption that rights belong to whites and are theirs to give away. By changing our conceptions about the racial contract and, in turn, racism, we can work towards constructing a new approach towards living free in our democracy. Living Free Living free isn't simply the lack of enslavement. In our world, social and political orders are constantly changing, creating new dynamics of subjugation. If we choose to think of freedom outside of the context of enslavement, then living free requires the individual to grow a sense of awareness of their surroundings and the political system they exist in. For example, suffrage is a hallmark of a democratic and free society. Positive and Negative FreedomsPositive notions of freedom are about the visions of freedom that are desired in a body politic, such as autonomy or plurality. They also include public policy, legislation, and constitutions. Negative notions of freedom are about non-interference and non-domination. One example is mask mandates, which is considered by some to be an interference of freedom. FIND OUT MORE:Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion at Williams College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with a specialization in political theory. Roberts is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors. His present writings deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concept of freedom. His most recent book is A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (The University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Roberts was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19 and, since July 2018, he has served as the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies. His next book is How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism.You can follow Neil on Twitter @neildsroberts.Additional InformationFuture Hindsight PodcastMore shows from The Democracy Group

Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion at Williams College. He's working on a new book titled How To Live Free in an Age of Pessimism. We discuss the legacy of Charles Mills' scholarship on the racial contract, freedom, and transforming society from the bottom up.   Thanks to Native for supporting Future Hindsight! Get 20% off your first purchase by visiting nativedeo.com/hopeful or using promo code HOPEFUL at checkout.   Racial Contract  White supremacy has shaped modern society in ways that may not be immediately obvious. Charles Mills proposes in the Racial Contract that we've operated under the assumption that rights belong to whites and are theirs to give away. By changing our conceptions about the racial contract and, in turn, racism, we can work towards constructing a new approach towards living free in our democracy.   Living Free  Living free isn't simply the lack of enslavement. In our world, social and political orders are constantly changing, creating new dynamics of subjugation. If we choose to think of freedom outside of the context of enslavement, then living free requires the individual to grow a sense of awareness of their surroundings and the political system they exist in. For example, suffrage is a hallmark of a democratic and free society.   Positive and Negative Freedoms Positive notions of freedom are about the visions of freedom that are desired in a body politic, such as autonomy or plurality. They also include public policy, legislation, and constitutions. Negative notions of freedom are about non-interference and non-domination. One example is mask mandates, which is considered by some to be an interference of freedom.   FIND OUT MORE: Neil Roberts is Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion at Williams College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with a specialization in political theory. Roberts is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors.  His present writings deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concept of freedom. His most recent book is A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (The University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Roberts was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19 and, since July 2018, he has served as the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies. His next book is How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism. You can follow Neil on Twitter @neildsroberts.

Ryder consumed over 50 books and about 200 podcasts in 2021. Walking through concepts of the origins of bureaucracy and how the protestant work ethic shaped corporations and consumer behavior, he moves into healthcare related to liberty, how to solve many problems on our way to utopia, and a model for transitioning away from capitalism into a nature-based economics.https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-52-best-of-2021-review-by-books/My two favorite books“Moral Mazes” and “The Culture of the New Capitalism“Both of these are sociology books about how the world has changed. They both reference Max Weber, discussing how bureaucracy came out of the military and in America the Protestant work ethic became conflated with capitalism and eventually led to conspicuous consumption and wealth as a signal of virtue: $ = wisdom and salvation.Moral Mazes, by Robert Jackall, focused on the life of middle managers in large corporations, and how the politics needed to survive do not align with the professed values: hard work does not pay off, but appearing to be a tam player while brutally shifting blame and burning through company assets means you are a go-getter, with gumption and grit. Equally, Jackall maps out how middle managers hide behind jargon, because they can't appear to not know what they are talking about (can't look weak), which is bad for the company… but also, considering legal repercussions, they learn to use vague, coded language so as to be able to shift positions: never be caught with a strong opinion, while always seeming to decisive with strong opinions.These are the guys/gals who make decisions with their “gut,” which means they keep perpetuating the same behaviors and stereotypes, but are crafty at the optics of appearing fair or sympathetic.Richard Sennett follows up on this offering broader examples of how capitalism effects the working class, the brain-drain on talent for dumb factory labor, and discussing things like why a nurse may stay at her job, despite the terrible hours and mistreatment: people don't work for jobs, they work in a place where they can make a difference… they need to know where they fit in the world and have relevance.But they go to factories because they need a steady paycheck so they can get a mortgage from the bank, which means a competition to take the best from the labor pool, then put them to work doing mind-numbing labor: companies do not want innovation, they want subservient, blind loyalty from you. But they reserve the right to have no loyalty to the employees. Even the business owners now distance themselves, and hide at the first sign of responsibility and accountability, pushing it off onto subordinates and use technology as a distancing mechanism.All in all, we have come to embody the whole “rational actor” of economic theory, which promotes selfish, transactional relationships rather than community. It rewards sociopathy.Say you are a well-intentioned millennial, then you have been taught not to give voice to discontent: your mental health is more important than job frustration. You simply exit. “Exit over Voice,” as Sennett calls it. Old people argue, which makes them a pain when a company demands unwavering, un-considering loyalty and any question is interpreted as dissent. Institutional memory and wisdom are liabilities, so companies hire those who will just move on without a fight, which means they only get task completion instead of deep consideration from their employees. We all become mercenaries, who scream about politics, but (wisely) are afraid to lose our jobs because survival is not guaranteed in our country.What both books point out is that our society is cutting itself off at it's own knees, and feeding on them. It is like auto-cannibalism, where to be successful you must take risks, upending the stability that made our nation profitable (successful) in favor of destruction and precarity, just so you can prove “you have what it takes” or are as amoral as the leadership team you aim to join.We burn down the world our great-grandparents built, and we do it behind a gold-plated mask of jargon. Faced with the specter of uselessness, we market and promote meaningless differences as highly important.Philosophy books?Honest to god philosophy: William James and BaudrillardI read a lot of small snippets about philosophers or their viewpoints, but sitting down and actually working through multiple books? Only two authors this year. Though I did read some Deleuze, Nietzsche, Zizek, and Lyotard as well.Reading Pragmatism by William James was great. We can argue about things all day, but he discusses moving beyond ideological or semantic quibbles into a practical reality, not being a slave to your position, but grounding ourselves and carving ourselves. Providing space for spirituality he says, swim up, touch the divine, and get some spiritual energy to direct your path.Coming up with increasingly obtuse theories isn't helpful. He was really pushing back against monism, or the notion of one fixed universal truth, and equally he wasn't a fan of the notion that everything could be measured and figured, a type of determinism. He spoke a lot of a middle path, a middle road, a central corridor from which doors into other ideas can branch off, but you needn't stay cloistered in there.I think Baudrillard would suggest that these philosophies are fooling themselves. He might propose that they wouldn't even know it. His work on the idea of simulacra and simulation would say we have lost the plot, lost the purpose, we are “a man adrift without a shadow,” and we can only keep simulating achievement.But what if we have not lost the plot, but the story has already been written and we are merely enacting our roles? The memes and ideas of the world are moving us to claim “liberty” and “freedom.” We have none, no direction, so now simulate liberty, acting out of libidinal desire without understanding.The most optimistic?“Utopia for Realists”It is nice when someone spends the time to look at things like Poverty, or Universal Basic Income and says… wait a second, this doesn't make sense… the world we live in keeps saying “pull yourself up by your own boot straps”… taking a handout is a moral failing, or it is a lack of character to be poor. We need to punch through these moral myths that keep us imprisoned in pain as we end up with deaths of despair and the opioid crisis wiping out those who have been isolated in this competition where everyone loses, even when you win.Rutger Bregman proves multiple times over in “Utopia for Realists” that the government helping and protecting its citizens, (instead of profiteering) would stabilize the population at a lower cost than the current system bears. Which would help business, government, education, and other institutions.Examples provided show Universal Basic Income, eradicating poverty, and making healthcare free you both grant human dignity and “it is cheaper” than the long-term costs of prisons, emergency room visits, rehab clinics, diabetes, police, etc… We should cut the well-fare system, too. No hoops to jump through to prove you are deserving of a handout: just give people cash. The simplest solution works: eradicate poverty not with systems, but with money. The vast majority of people will not take advantage of this, but will better their own lives.The darkest?Our MaladyAs we just mentioned healthcare and human dignity, one of my favorite authors nearly died in 2019 or 2020 because of inept health care systems motivated by money over human concerns. Timothy Snyder's Our Malady walks through how our inequality as a society leads to needless death, despair, and division. He also discusses the need to fluctuate between solitude and solidarity.As a contemporary historian, his books walk us through how our fragility becomes a breeding ground for corrupt officials and corporations to continue abuse: when your health is at risk (or your family) you are a serf or slave, who can never voice dissent.And so, when our journalism turns into an untrustworthy shit-show, and we rely on social media for news because we can't trust anything, this is a symptom. If you can't be honest because you will lose your job, and your insurance, then fear and survival win out over principled moral obligation. This is simply the logic of free-market capitalism's “rational actors” or “economic agents” fulfilling the shallow logic of the market, eroding trust and long-term stability, opening our nation up for abuse and corruption: making us susceptible to tyranny.The best economic book:Sacred EconomicsCharles Eisenstein does a great job of reorienting us away from the faulty logic of the neoliberal capitalist myth. Pros vs cons… there is a cost to everything, and we need to look at this neoliberal capitalist train and wonder if the engine up ahead, where we can't see it, has fallen into the ravine and is just dragging the rest of us into a fiery explosion. Is there still time to bail? And what does that look like?Eisenstein maps out 7 steps, an interlocking system to ascend from our self-administered despair, using the bones of capitalism in which we sheltered to grow up… but I am simplifying it into 3 steps.realign money with natural decay (negative interest)alter the way land is used, letting it become the currency backing or capital as a communally shared resource, andletting pre-pollution taxing redirect innovation towards enriching a sustainable commons.The point is, we don't need more trinkets: we need a planet, a world, that works. We need to stop being selfish children or adolescents. We need to behave like responsible grown ups. Eisenstein brings up 2 great parables, the eleventh round to show how usury and the tragedy of the commons to show how “individual rational actors” destroy communion and solidarity.A key point is that money is not evil, it is a technology. But we let it have unnatural properties and try to apply it to the natural world. We need policy that will realign money with nature, society with people, and make nature our capital that we depend on instead of extracting from.Race?“The Racial Contract” by Charles MillsIt spoke to me in a way White Fragility didn't. And even the fact that Mills had to couch his arguments and ideas in academic terms to get through to people like me is brought up in the book. Thanks to L for the recommendation on this one.Self Help and Behavior books“Awareness” by Anthony DeMelloBest book maybe ever, but I didn't podcast on that. I still hold it in too much reverence.I read some self-helpy, achievement books like Atomic Habits and Judson Brewer's The Craving Mind. Along with more behavioral science books like Noise by Daniel Kahneman. The most career oriented were So Good they can't ignore you and Range, which fall into a kind of Malcolm Gladwell type of book, but less expansive, more like a field guide to creating an interesting career and life, not getting trapped.But the stand out in this strange field of “make yourself better by having knowledge of knowledge” is How to Take Smart Notes which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to actually make use of their reading, wants to write or publish or podcast.My favorite episode to make:Free guyFree Guy was great because I got to really dig into pop-culture that seems very shallow as a way to discuss pretty profound ideas of desire, identity, and Artificial intelligence as a type of government or state apparatus. We touched on Arendt's work, action, labor distinctions, where the subject is turned into a cog… but we need differences for change, not similarity… one way to manifest “difference” is through radical repetition, which invokes the transcendence of Nietzsche's eternal return.Bonus section!!FictionI finally finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest this year. hooray. That took like a decade. Worth it, but I now feel like I need a book club or philosophy class to decipher all the depth and strangeness of it.My favorite  was The Overstory. It is long, but really worth it. The book reshapes the flaring human desires and personalities, their companionships, against the backdrop of ultra-long-lived trees under threat.If you are looking for something fun, check out the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. If you want some good fantasy, check out N.K. Jemison's stuff.A type of ConclusionThrough the podcast these books are tools that I can use to widen my perspective and let me come to a better understanding of how we ended up here. In a type mirroring, having past knowledge also sparks ideas of how we can  escape (or move beyond) the current predicaments we are in.Or not, because humans are messy and things are complicated, but at least with this knowledge we aren't subjected to basic binaries… we have graduated to advanced binaries. hooray!Doing the show, over the last nearly two years, I feel a little bit better prepared to engage the world, to offer alternatives rather than nod along. Questioning long held assumptions is the podcast goal, and reading is the tool. None of these ideas are my own, they are just cobbled together from the wisdom of others. For the first time in a long time, I feel I am working towards a version of wisdom and richness of life, and I would like to thank you for spending some time with me on this journey. 

For our final fall episode before our winter break hiatus, Michael Borshuk sits down with Dr. Sebastian Ramirez, the Humanities Center's 2021-2022 Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities.  Sebastian speaks with us about his research on white supremacy and "white backlash" and how his scholarship builds on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Mills, and others.  Over the course of the conversation, Dr. Ramirez shows us how philosophy's disciplinary focus might contribute to anti-racism, and reminds us of the importance of conceptual clarity as we look critically at white supremacy's history and legacy.Some of the works Dr. Ramirez mentions in our conversation: Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism by Charles Mills,  Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth Anderson, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender by Himani Bannerji.

"The sex industry has existed in various forms from the dawn of recorded human history. Sex workers have always been a part of societies, economies, and civilizations. Despite countless attempts at banning, regulating, shaming, and controlling the sex industry, it continues, relatively unfazed. So why does society treat sex workers as criminals, when they have been such an integral part of civilization for so long? Aren't sex workers themselves often the ones who are the victims of crimes? Paradoxically, it is not the existence of the sex industry itself which causes this victimization to occur, but rather the way that we view sex workers as a culture. Further, the way that we view sex workers is a reflection of the way that we view all women. When a person experiences violence or abuse in any other line of work, she has both social and legal recourse to seek support and justice. Sex workers, be they full-service, strippers, porn stars, webcam models, or otherwise involved in the industry, do not have this same recourse. While this creates a dangerous situation for sex workers, it also creates a dangerous situation for all women. Our respect for women as a culture is often related to how we perceive their sexuality, and this is demonstrated by rampant violence against women of both a physical and epistemic nature. The way society treats a woman employed in the sex industry speaks volumes about the way it treats women in general. Sex workers are the canaries in a very deep and dark coal mine. In his 1997 book, The Racial Contract, Charles Mills introduced the concept of “epistemologies of ignorance.” These epistemologies are systems of obtaining knowledge which benefit people in privileged positions of power and allow them to maintain their power (Mills). The systematic silencing of sex workers who try to share their experience is a prime example of how these kinds of violent epistemologies are born. Gaps in public knowledge about the perspectives of marginalized groups are not always accidental, but often intentional, with the goal of justifying the inhumane treatment of these marginalized groups (Tuana). “Territorial imperatives structure and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them with a reasonable expectation of uptake and “choral support”: an expectation of being heard, understood, taken seriously,” writes Lorriane Code in Rhetorical Space, Essays on Gendered Locations. Sex workers do not and have never had this expectation of being heard, understood, and taken seriously." --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/support

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-45-free-guy/Part IThis week, we were offered a story of an NPC, non-player character, in a video game called Free City. And what happens when Guy, played by Ryan Reynolds becomes sentient. He is triggered awake by seeing a girl. Shocker right? He becomes a sentient algorithm, able to see his desires, take action, and even judge the relative value and merit of his actions. Well, the backstory is, the two programmers, a girl and guy, develop an AI, artificial intelligence engine, that allows characters to grow and change without human input or interaction. Naturally, the programmers are maybe in love, but are maybe too immature to know how to express it. A totally rad, bro capitalist buys the AI and scuttles their “pure and sweet dreams”, basically an AI “garden of eden” terrarium.NOTE: two young, awkward genius programmers, who can't get out the words to get someone out of their pants, frustrated, make a petri-dish to grow life in… so, yeah, they made a baby making machine, because they couldn't get past their emotional immaturity to make their own baby… so now, we have sentient NPCs crying in the garden to two clueless parent/gods. Long synopsis even longer: The female programmer falls for the NPC, of course, and eventually has to tell his creator he is simply “a love letter from the author.” Yuck. Gross. Bleh. FIRST THING: The moralRomance and Capitalism. The moral?  pursue Noble Passions, do not cave to the temptation of the base and mean, though it surrounds you. The reward is beyond money, and will reward you more deeply for longer, and who knows? maybe you will get the girl, or guy, or hunky algorithm… or the dopey, buff algorithm. SECOND THING: Work, Labor, ActionWhy do we need an AI? (This is answered at the end, but given “human idiocy” making anything like us is bound to be a failure.)To comment on the story and AI, we will borrow Hannah Arendt's terms for WORK, in which she distinguishes between the drudgery of labor, the productivity work, and the self-becoming of action.Labor is the NPC without sentience repeating tasks over and over. This is like a robot making the same widget over and over or humans having to get food and eat it over and over… then poop over and over.While work is the effort to create a new AI engine, or make a factory, something that will outlast you and supersedes nature.And finally, action is to engage in the world in such a way that you create a story of yourself in the world. ~ SO, this is kind of the notoriety Guy receives in the movie, moving from repetitive, endless labor of the NPC into work to level up and get the girl, into being a Contender, which affects the world and alters other people's understanding and actions.The AI is a challenge progression: from robot labor to creative work mimicking human behavior to self-aware action… to create something that can meta-cognate and make value distinctions.We are just attempting to leap the uncanny valley, and hoping the artificial grass is greener. RyderBut, what if we get past anthropomorphization?  If the AI can see that Goodness, Love, and Purity are really our Kryptonite… then when you dangle some lovey, attractive cuddly thing in front of us we go stupid. The best way an AI could get protection is to exhibit cutesy love. And, of course, this is the plot of many sci-fi books and movies, such as Ex Machina or Vivarium, where the true test for an intelligent machine or species is to prey on the human weakness of emotions and love. This is that ugly deep sea fish, the angler, with the little dangling light it uses to attract the other fish. The little light is the dangling Ryan Reynolds…  THIRD THING: DifferncePursuing Desire (once you have it, generally from discontent) takes work and action . To create your own story, where your actions effect the world is your will to power. A negative (discontent) moves us from our Contentment, that banal sameness that produces nothing new. however, difference… difference produces change.This where in Nietzschian terms we begin to move beyond good and evil, because the fascinating thing is, negative and positive are both forms of difference, they actually mirror and contain their contrariness in each other, they are just categorized by degree and distance. The more difference, the more transformative it becomes. Sameness, contentedness, can be when we are subservient to the same illusions… it is not really being alive, it is merely enacting historical, conservative values repetitively: these are phantasms. That's what movie projectors and shadows on cave walls are… They are the flattened, inverted forms of life.To escape this flattened category is to increase the difference, negate the sameness, even if it is through radical repetition.We thought we had an identity before… but this big “D” Difference is beyond the lame-ass category of identity: by enacting such a difference, we break the category… we approach transcendence, we manifest the beautiful soul, and enter the Eternal Return. In Free Guy: The hapless coders produce an AI, the crooked capitalist produces douchery and employs tons of people, and the awestruck NPC levels up to get the girl, then transcends that ~ all of them go to extremes of difference, they power through, and to each there is an affirmation. We are talking about Action, and Difference… about being aware, being motivated and taking action. We are talking about breaking the script. At the end of the day, why are we trying to make an AI that is sentient or aware?Because we lazy humans would like to stay at the WORK level, never taking the  ACTION to become AWARE ourselves. We will build a machine, an AI, to achieve enlightenment for us.  Call now, and for a limited time we can get ship you three cans of Deleuzian Difference Spray. Stand out. Smell difference, be difference. and watch her eternal return to you….  Now, we mentioned caves and movie projectors… These are Representations of the world, the re-presentation of the same. These re-presentations mediate everything.Adding more, an infinite repetition of forms with infinitesimally tiny differences, keeps us trapped in the same point of view. It is the logic of the simulacrum, with no grounding, fractally expanding and dispersing with no purpose. Capitalism and the market feed us small consumable changes: over-valued, over-marketed. This incepts (or coopts) our desire to move beyond the sameness, feeding us infinite multiplicity as novelty. It is saccharin, artificial fulfillment.As Anthony DeMello says, “We must wake up.” Drop your illusions.As Deleuze says. Quit becoming the Representation, become an experience. (pg 51?) THING 4: LeviathanLet's talk about the state, or the government. People set up these frameworks that are meant to serve the citizens, yet they are rife with contradictions: the state has coercive power over us, yet it allows us liberty. This is Isaiah Berlin's Positive and Negative Liberty.Setting up an AI and a State have similar problems… namely intentions and the blind spots of the authors.The NPC in FREE GUY is constrained by the limits of the game… the limits of the state… and in this way, government limits and shapes us, because even when we enact our highest state of Action, self-actualizing within the community, that happens under an umbrella of the state, in response to the state, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The state is the story in which our story begins. It is our terrarium in many ways.Thomas Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan, is one of the earliest ideas of a modern state, a state that recognizes individuals wanting freedoms rather than a sovereign's dictates determining people. It uses artifice, a bit of deception, to constrain and balance for human brutishness, but overall, it's goal was to serve individuals. So… the key innovation here is individualism.Hannah Arendt, seeing what the Nazi regime perpetrated, despised Hobbes's “mechanistic” reduction of the citizens turned into subjects… and the subjects turned into cogs. Because she saw the evil a cog, a bureaucrat like Eichmann, could perpetrate. Her notion of how the state could serve individuals was radically different.We now have Representative Democracy here in the US, and a fascinating idea is not to think of “Democracy” as the key point, but “Representation” as the key point. This points out that the founders were quite fearful of true democracy, the “tyranny of the majority” as Tocqueville says.When our founders built the political AI engine, that we call a constitution, it appears to be based on premises of “equality” and “liberty” that actually never allowed for equality or freedom. The contradictions within the system means that as it evolves, particular points increase in prominence and divergence. These points come, in part, from author bias.conclusionOne thing I have not discussed too much, but is key: for Arendt, to take ACTION is to manifest your story in public. Not private. The path should be open for you, but it often isn't for many people. There is a friction here, often between the Story told (individualism and freedom) and what will be tolerated (reality, law). There exists an interstitial GAP between the story and the law, society and privacy, spaces that some people occupy and work to expand. As GUY found out in the game, as an “NPC” his actions were not explicitly denied, because they were new… never considered. He was not considered, because he was not a “he” or any type of human. This gets into some concepts I recently learned from Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, where colonizing imperialists saw indigenous people as “sub-human” thus not human.The logic is, someone like Kant, the Western world's preeminent moral philosopher, could be extremely racist because his morality only applied to “civilized men” which were by default posited as “white men.” His categorization blinded him. So will it be with Artificial Intelligences. The NPC is a soft entry to this concept of how we treat the sub-human.In the movie, Guy the NPC, due to not being “seen” as sentient or intelligent was at first unrecognized, then written off by incurious system admins. This allowed a modicum of Freedom, wiggle room in that interstitial space, until his difference became so pronounced that people had to take notice.  As he took action, his “difference” became excessive, beyond the category of NPC, which at first is negative for the game but affirmative for him, and as Deleuze and Neitzsche may say, “The extremes of difference are productive.”And thus, we fall back into capitalism: Excess production is a value to be captured. Recognize, extract…. Love produces excess, and in this case, frustrated love produced a new type of sentient being, that is now not only producing love in the world but introduces a novel untapped resource to be colonized for the capitalist. Capitalism collapses love back into a category, rather than BEING. We tend to allow capitalism to stimulate and feed our DESIRE for Love: It multiplies and reflects back desire but without the Love itself. But, to wrap this up as a Hollywood Ending:The warmth of new love, in this story anyway, created something new in the world… the reciprocal feedback loop of difference between two people made something new rather than replicating suffering. And capitalism itself, with its infinite multiplicity of redundant permutations is really a shambling zombie, merely feeding on the products of frustrated love, but unable to produce anything itself.

Join us for our final thoughts on the Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills.  Spoiler alert, we loved it and think that it should be required reading.

Join us as we wrap up our reading of The Racial Contract a book that we now believe should be a mandatory part of any American Education.

Join us as we explore the global side of the Racial Contract.

On this episode of The Hennessy Report podcast, Dave speaks with Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism." Michael Eric Dyson wrote the forward to Robin's latest book, stating it was a "vital, necessary, and beautiful book." Robin has been a tenured professor at Westfield State University, received her PhD in Multicultural Education from University of Washington where she is an associate professor today. During the podcast, Robin recommends the following authors and thinkers, along with their works, that have influenced and inspired her on this subject: Layla F. Saad - "Me and White Supremacy" Charles W. Mills - "The Racial Contract" Eddie Moore Jr - 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge Reni Eddo-Lodge - "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race" Carol Anderson - ex. "White Rage" Michael Eric Dyson - "Tears We Cannot Stop" Ijeoma Oluo - "So You Want to Talk About Race" Resmaa Menakem- "My Grandmother's Hands" Next up on the podcast is Yolanda Butler Stephens, Chief of People and Culture at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago

Join us as we learn and discuss why the existence of the Racial Contract is so obvious to those not in the prevailing hegemony.

Join us as as we discuss the depressing global reality and consequences of The Racial Contract.

Where is the outrage?  Join us as we explore the concept that Western Civilization was unquestionably founded upon genocide and racial exploitation, and the reality that our modern society still avoids this uncomfortable truth is yet more proof of the Racial Contracts existence.

Join us as we explore the revolting and barbaric ways in which Western Civilization has enforced and maintained the Racial Contract.

Join us as we learn and discuss how the Racial Contract has continually evolved by altering the definitions of White.

Were the Enlightenment philosophers enlightened when it came to race? Nope.  Join us as we learn how the most "enlightened" minds from the foundations of modern western civilization were in full support of white/european supremacy. 

Systemic racism does not exist today, solely due to actions from the past.  Join us as we explore the aspects of modern western civilization that ensure the continued existence of the racial contract.

Subpersonhood is not a byproduct of Western Civilization but a built in and necessary feature.  If you would like to be able to confidently explain this notion this is a great episode to listen to

Join us as we find out just how ubiquitous the idea of white/European superiority is in modern Western Civilization.

With the Overview behind us we can begin to look into the actual underpinnings of The Racial Contract that Western Civilization is based upon.

We delve into the unsettling lack of diversity behind the hegemony that created our "esteemed" western culture.  

Join us as we conclude the overview section of The Racial Contract by Professor Charles W. Mills.  Once again, we cannot stress enough how important this literature is to further understanding the systemic racial problems still faced my modern day America.

Bolaji (Bob) joined us to talk through histories of Poland's colonial extraction and the impact of whiteness, religion and (polish) centrism on racialisation and racism. *We want to be clear that we understand and do not make light of Jewish persecution in Poland. We are always looking to improve our racial literacy especially in relation to Jewish populations across the world* Useful papers/links: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/people/academic-staff/bolaji-balogun Balogun, B. (2018) ‘Polish Lebensraum: The Colonial Ambition to Expand on Racial terms', Ethnic & Racial Studies, 41: 14, pp. 2561-2579. Balogun, B. (2020) ‘Race and racism in Poland: Theorising and contextualising ‘Polish-centrism', The Sociological Review. pp. 1-16. Balogun, B. (forthcoming) ‘The Racial Contract, The Whiteness Contract'

Join us as we continue our reading of The Racial Contract.  We promise that this book will provide you with the information necessary to convince even your most ignorant coworkers that systemic racism is real.

Join us as we read and discuss the political, moral, and epistemological underpinnings of the Racial Contract. Contact us at: and.um.otherstuff@gmail.com

Join us as we continue to read through "The Racial Contract"  by Charles W. Mills.  If you know that systemic is a very real problem but have trouble articulating it, this is the season for you. 

Season Two will feature the, "The Racial Contract" by the philosopher Charles W. Mills.  We are excited not only because of the quality of the book but also because of how pertinent it's information is to understanding the nature and meaning of systemic racism. As always, feel free to reach out at: and.um.otherstuff@gmail.com 

This week's guest is the academic philosopher, and political theorist, Charles W. Mills.  Mills is a professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of multiple books – most famously The Racial Contract published in 1997.  This conversation, between Charles Mills, and ourEconomy's Europe Editor, Laura Basu, delves into the concepts of racism and capitalism – dissecting the historical role of the nation state, and asking whether any form of capitalist system requires racial differentiation and thus racial discrimination. For the other interviews in our series on capitalism and racism, including conversations with Vijay Prashad and Gargi Bhattacharyya, head over to https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/ (opendemocracy.net/oureconomy)

Black Lives Matter! Join us this month as we amplify black stories by the supremely talented Danez Smith (they/them/theirs) in their collection of poems "Don't Call Us Dead." Black Lives Matter Links: Sign the Petition: https://www.naacp.org/campaigns/we-are-done-dying/ Sign the Petition: https://blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice/ More Petitions: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#petitions Ways to Act: Text or Call Your Elected Official: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#text For Protestors: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#protesters Register to Vote: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#vote Some Book Recommendations: "Racism without Racists" (2003) by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva "Outlaw Culture" (1994) by bell hooks "Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools" (2015) by Monique Morris "The Racial Contract" (1997) by Charles W. Mills "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" (1982) by Audre Lorde "13th" (2016) by Ava DuVernay [Movie/Documentary] -- Welcome back to "3 Friends and the Apocalit," a once-a-month book club podcast hosted by three ol' college friends: Annie, Elba, and Hallie, during the apocalit. Next Month's (July) book is "The Fifth Season" by N.K. Jemisin. May's Episode is "Dark Matter"(2016) by Blake Crouch. April's Episode is "Solaris" (1961) by Stanislaw Lem. For more past episodes and books, check out our (beta) website: bit.ly/browseapocalit. Sponsor Highlight http://www.audibletrial.com/Apocalit Get a month of Audible and one free audiobook! For your next beach trip, listen to an Audible original podcast or audiobook while you chillax (and socially distance). Link for one month + free audiobook: http://www.audibletrial.com/apocalit. (You'd also be helping us keep the lights on here, at @apocalit_pod) Patreon If you feel like you're in a giving mood & want to hear extra (hidden) episodes recorded by us, you can support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/apocalitpod. We love our listeners!! (We have a surprise podcast episode on drafting fictional characters to save us during the apocalypse...only for our Premium members!)

We are currently living in an age where poverty and disease are big business. In a world where race and class produce and reproduce ways of interacting. This process has found ways to attach itself to our very construction of individual and group realities, therefore entrenching conscious and unconscious acts of racism as being natural and/or universal occurrences. We live in a world where racial diversity is misunderstood as ideological diversity…a constructed reality where the ascription of power is imposed on old ideas of identity and re-incorporated in new forms of marginalization. This holds true, despite any claim of post-this-or-post-that…that is made by dominant discourses. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 in Souls of Black Folk that: “THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, —the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” Today, in the 21st Century, we are still confronted with this color line, which is exacerbated by a symbiotic relationship with the drive to secure material wealth at rates that often rival the height of the age of imperialism, where the total control of Africa as well as other resource rich lands were dominant behavioral expressions in geopolitics. Prophetically, in his later writings, as W.E.B Du Bois is known to do, expands or situates his conceptualization of the color line into being intimately linked with class formations. In the Preface of the 1953 Edition of the Souls of Black Du Bois argues that: “I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.” Often ignored by the sympathetic democratic rhetoric of liberals, are the racialized consequences of massive poverty and cultural displacement integral to the globalizing project of democratization (a euphemism for the unbridled proliferation of capitalism). Within this environment, the meanings of race are constantly re-configuring itself as various forms of exclusion built upon the consequences of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism are perpetuated and refined. Today: We will dive deeper into understanding race. What we will hear next is Charles W. Mills describe how race was materialized with the advent of modernity. He argues that capitalism is racialized, and white supremacy was interwoven within it from its origins. Charles W. Mills is a Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He is the author of numerous books on race and political theory, including The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), and the forthcoming Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017). Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program