While I appreciate your synthesis of the history of the ideas you discuss in this writing, I think you are missing a crucial principle which undergirds much of the ideas you are opposed to.
Namely, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Communism and socialism will always fail because of the difficulty in constructing a form of government which bars those desiring power to manipulate the system to take the power they crave. And most are unable to resist the instinct that those who carry the sense of powerless that is prevalent in human beings, which drives those with power to accumulate more and more.
And whether they feel they are doing it for the greater good is irrelevant. Which is an important benefit of questioning reality. Hitler believed in what he was doing. That it was good. And the road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. The point of questioning reality is to question what you think is the right thing to do. To evaluate whether what you believe is actually not going to lead to the subjugation or disenfranchisement of other human beings, who you may believe to sub-human. Which is a common and powerful thing that people can be taught to believe as demonstrated throughout all of human history.
George Washington was a truly rare bird. He was an idealist who understood that the intoxicating offerings of power are an illusion. He understood that heavy weighs the crown. And didn’t want it. And he understood that he was a rare bird. And therefore supported the construction of a secular state where no one could usurp too much power.
But he was a fracking slave owner. Blind to how unjust that was. You are trying to say that oppression doesn’t exist?
Your writing wreaks of privilege. You obviously have never lived with the realities that people who are treated as second class humans face every day.
Like in Palestine. Propoganda is a real thing. And finally young people are realizing this and are turning away from corporate sponsored media which those in power use to gaslight their audiences and maintain a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I love America’s form of democratic government. And I do believe it is in danger. And I believe that independent news sources like Democracy Now and The Young Turks are offering real journalism which will always empower those who watch it to stand up to the powerful and insist on a more just and equitable society. Democracy requires an informed populace. And the refrain throughout all of history is that the powerful create propaganda to help those that they are exploiting accept their reality.
The education you are slamming is helping young people to see through the gaslighting of the mainstream media. Which is laying the foundation for them to have the power to hold the powerful accountable to the people’s priotities and not to their corporate donors.
You are a blind person. Blind to corruption. Blind to history. Please stop leading the blind. You are a false priest. Or should I say just a priest. Selling the opiate of the masses. And I hope that people who read my comment are enlightened to your ignorance. Even if you won’t be.
I love how you have nothing to say about the ideas I pose in my comment. Maybe there’s nothing to actually refute in what I’ve said? And I especially love how you find issue with the fact that my response is intelligent, logical, and well thought out. It’s pretty telling that you can’t wrap your head around someone being able to write off the cuff in this way. That you believe only computers are intelligent enough to quickly produce something that draws together so many simple ideas to make a powerful point. I’m honored to be complimented in this manner.
That is the one supreme lesson to be learnt from human history: ideology and phantasmagoria are integral part of our existence. And upon being able to discern this fact so clearly, are we just supposed to ignore it? Its implications are huge, and they radically shape our life today!
It's the material relations, the substructure, that we should be truly concerned with. We've torn down the Veil of Maya, and we ought to act like it!
I think there is both truth and falsehood in the critical and postmodern lens. I think most people would agree that they sculpt their behaviors according to their setting. This is the essence of the critical lens—that we are not free to be or do whatever we want at all times. There are settings that we sense a pressure to modulate how we conduct ourselves so as not to seem like we are out of step. Where these pressures come from stem from the dictates of those who govern those areas of our lives. In the workplace we often trade our own convictions for those of our employer. In some ways this can feel oppressive or exploitative. Where I think the critical lens goes wrong is that it focuses too hard on the frustrations of this reality. Rather than accepting the mild amounts of oppression we all face to be a functional human being, it harps on the grievances. That’s not to say that there never comes a time when what one has to do to survive seems less optimal than risking your life to change it. When those times come, the critical lens may offer some explanatory power. But in the western world, we’ve erected so many institutions that make those times rare. Perhaps this is why the critical lens has met so much resistance? The circumstances aren’t bad enough. When it comes to postmodernism. This lens also has utility. There is a subjective nature to truth. The sky is not only composed of gases in different forms, space, stars, etc. It’s also a heaven or a potentially fatal place to be without a parachute. My embodied/experiential understanding of the sky is true, just as a more sterile scientific definition is true. There is really no way from me to decouple my subjective truth of the sky from the scientific one. I can’t somehow escape my body and memories to experience the sky like some abstract non-embodied being. I genuinely enjoy your critiques of critical theory and Marxism; however sometimes I think you’re a it given over to panic. These lenses have utility in some realms. Yes there excesses are draining, but I dont know that we should throw the baby out with the bath water.
I like your comment about postmodern education asking endless questions but never answering them. That seems to be what gen alpha is best at - not even having the attention span to answer a question before being distracted by the next question.
I was inspired by the New Discourses essay, “The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory”, by James Lindsay, themes which your article, Logan, deals with. I focus an eschatological lens on the subject in “Communism, Socialism and CRT: The Clamoring for a Dictator: Biblical Relevance and Symbols”; we certainly recognize the salient nature of the debate as we approach the US elections.
While I appreciate your synthesis of the history of the ideas you discuss in this writing, I think you are missing a crucial principle which undergirds much of the ideas you are opposed to.
Namely, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Communism and socialism will always fail because of the difficulty in constructing a form of government which bars those desiring power to manipulate the system to take the power they crave. And most are unable to resist the instinct that those who carry the sense of powerless that is prevalent in human beings, which drives those with power to accumulate more and more.
And whether they feel they are doing it for the greater good is irrelevant. Which is an important benefit of questioning reality. Hitler believed in what he was doing. That it was good. And the road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. The point of questioning reality is to question what you think is the right thing to do. To evaluate whether what you believe is actually not going to lead to the subjugation or disenfranchisement of other human beings, who you may believe to sub-human. Which is a common and powerful thing that people can be taught to believe as demonstrated throughout all of human history.
George Washington was a truly rare bird. He was an idealist who understood that the intoxicating offerings of power are an illusion. He understood that heavy weighs the crown. And didn’t want it. And he understood that he was a rare bird. And therefore supported the construction of a secular state where no one could usurp too much power.
But he was a fracking slave owner. Blind to how unjust that was. You are trying to say that oppression doesn’t exist?
Your writing wreaks of privilege. You obviously have never lived with the realities that people who are treated as second class humans face every day.
Like in Palestine. Propoganda is a real thing. And finally young people are realizing this and are turning away from corporate sponsored media which those in power use to gaslight their audiences and maintain a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I love America’s form of democratic government. And I do believe it is in danger. And I believe that independent news sources like Democracy Now and The Young Turks are offering real journalism which will always empower those who watch it to stand up to the powerful and insist on a more just and equitable society. Democracy requires an informed populace. And the refrain throughout all of history is that the powerful create propaganda to help those that they are exploiting accept their reality.
The education you are slamming is helping young people to see through the gaslighting of the mainstream media. Which is laying the foundation for them to have the power to hold the powerful accountable to the people’s priotities and not to their corporate donors.
You are a blind person. Blind to corruption. Blind to history. Please stop leading the blind. You are a false priest. Or should I say just a priest. Selling the opiate of the masses. And I hope that people who read my comment are enlightened to your ignorance. Even if you won’t be.
If you're not an AI bot you certainly sound like one
I love how you have nothing to say about the ideas I pose in my comment. Maybe there’s nothing to actually refute in what I’ve said? And I especially love how you find issue with the fact that my response is intelligent, logical, and well thought out. It’s pretty telling that you can’t wrap your head around someone being able to write off the cuff in this way. That you believe only computers are intelligent enough to quickly produce something that draws together so many simple ideas to make a powerful point. I’m honored to be complimented in this manner.
That’s just a shill.
That is the one supreme lesson to be learnt from human history: ideology and phantasmagoria are integral part of our existence. And upon being able to discern this fact so clearly, are we just supposed to ignore it? Its implications are huge, and they radically shape our life today!
It's the material relations, the substructure, that we should be truly concerned with. We've torn down the Veil of Maya, and we ought to act like it!
tl;dr
I think there is both truth and falsehood in the critical and postmodern lens. I think most people would agree that they sculpt their behaviors according to their setting. This is the essence of the critical lens—that we are not free to be or do whatever we want at all times. There are settings that we sense a pressure to modulate how we conduct ourselves so as not to seem like we are out of step. Where these pressures come from stem from the dictates of those who govern those areas of our lives. In the workplace we often trade our own convictions for those of our employer. In some ways this can feel oppressive or exploitative. Where I think the critical lens goes wrong is that it focuses too hard on the frustrations of this reality. Rather than accepting the mild amounts of oppression we all face to be a functional human being, it harps on the grievances. That’s not to say that there never comes a time when what one has to do to survive seems less optimal than risking your life to change it. When those times come, the critical lens may offer some explanatory power. But in the western world, we’ve erected so many institutions that make those times rare. Perhaps this is why the critical lens has met so much resistance? The circumstances aren’t bad enough. When it comes to postmodernism. This lens also has utility. There is a subjective nature to truth. The sky is not only composed of gases in different forms, space, stars, etc. It’s also a heaven or a potentially fatal place to be without a parachute. My embodied/experiential understanding of the sky is true, just as a more sterile scientific definition is true. There is really no way from me to decouple my subjective truth of the sky from the scientific one. I can’t somehow escape my body and memories to experience the sky like some abstract non-embodied being. I genuinely enjoy your critiques of critical theory and Marxism; however sometimes I think you’re a it given over to panic. These lenses have utility in some realms. Yes there excesses are draining, but I dont know that we should throw the baby out with the bath water.
I like your comment about postmodern education asking endless questions but never answering them. That seems to be what gen alpha is best at - not even having the attention span to answer a question before being distracted by the next question.
I was inspired by the New Discourses essay, “The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory”, by James Lindsay, themes which your article, Logan, deals with. I focus an eschatological lens on the subject in “Communism, Socialism and CRT: The Clamoring for a Dictator: Biblical Relevance and Symbols”; we certainly recognize the salient nature of the debate as we approach the US elections.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jlparker/p/communism-socialism-and-crt?r=1hky4n&utm_medium=ios