Handling What Comes Next (After 'Woke')

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I didn't go with the video title for this thread because James (Lindsay) seems to be focusing more on the different tribes who are hoping to shape culture either after woke or in reaction to woke. I share a lot of his concerns about inauthenticity, ie. that if anyone is going to answer woke by embracing the idea that life is strictly performance (LARP) and that power is all that matters then we're headed right off into some radical extreme or another (pick your flavor - right or left). What I do worry about though - his solution, and the four core values he lays out for a proper reboot from the sort of postmodern malaise, are the kinds of things where people have to do their own work at grappling with the bigger questions of reality (for example he has 'truth' as the first of those four reboot values) and if I've noticed - most people really, really don't want to do that - in fact it almost seems like a sign of failed Darwinian fitness for a person to submit themselves to truth and it seems to cut almost in the opposite direction of what our genes want us to do.

I'm posting this either way because I find it an interesting set thoughts. My question - even if he's right about all of this can anything actually be done with his solutions? While on some level I hope so I also consider that we'd really need some way to chain and bind Darwinian game theory and so far we've had no luck pretty much anywhere in history outside of places where we've practiced ruthless self-selection and penalties (thinking of Druidry, the so-called 'penalties' of Freemasonry, etc.).

Anyway:

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"Golden Age For Real Exposed Now"

"Beauty, Responsibility, Justice, And Merit";

True, Take the Art Part Out of smART And heART;

Take the FLESH AND BLOOD Moving, Connecting, Co-Creating Out of Life

And Life Loses Its Colors; Losing Muse Driving Folks Forward More Now;

Yet Conversely, Bonding

Over Us Versus Them; Yes,

In the Old Reptile Brain (Tribal)

Way of Being Snakes For Survival...

Yet it is True, in 'the First Renaissance' About

5 Percent of the Folks in 'the Big Village' Participated;

That Is Gonna Change Even More in Huge Multi-Cultural Pots of

Humans Who May Get Lost Playing 'Candy Crush' At 'the Bus Station';

Never Actually

Living A Real

'Forrest Gump

Life' Worthy of Story;
Why We Don't See Many

Mozart's, Beethoven's, Buddha's
And DaVinci Folk's These Days FOR REAL;

A Thousand Paper Cuts And All We Can/WiLL Even Faster

Download 'Pretty Birds' off the Internet Before Puberty;

True, 'Candy Crush' Is Getting Bigger Every Day And Humans

Are Getting Lost in Gold Fish Attention Spans on Average As Science

Shows Now Rates Less Than Three Seconds; Very Rarely is the 'Average Gold Fish'

Paying Attention to 'Two Hour Podcasts', unless they are looking for 'Religion' Desperately Finding

Something Anything to Fill the Void of Emptiness of Not Belonging to 'the Village' That's Real We Touch/Feel/DO...

'Before', 'Those Kinda

Folks' Actually Doing

Focusing on Narrow Areas

of Productivity That Folks Will

Feel and Touch on Task in Flow;

Painting Sistine Chapels And Such;

Sculpting Other Timeless Works of

Art; Developing New Frontiers of Science

Renaissance Continues on Yet It Seems Always Less than 5 Percent of 'The Village';

Nature of the Beast; Even More So Where Distractions Rule Potential Flowing Focus For

'The Hobby At Hand'...

We LiVE IN Societies

Where Humanity

Is Watered Down

to the Edge of the

Cliff of TRuMP iGNoRaNCE;

All That's Holding Us Up is Materialism;

Relatively Speaking, Truth Is As Dead As IT's

Ever Been; It's Just Not Afraid to Come Out of 'The Motel' in Broad Daylight

Where Truth Becomes Lies For Folks To Celebrate Behind Screens on 'Propaganda TV';

The '5 Percent', Do Not Have Enough 'Float' to Bring That Up; However, As LonG as Peace

Enough Lasts i'm Gonna Party...

There's A Much Bigger

Picture Than

'Podcast Life';

Nature Is Clearly

Screaming at the Top

of Its Forest Lungs NO MEANS NO;

STOP HARMING, MAIMING, RAPING,
KILLING THE REST OF NATURE WITH OVER CONSUMING

OR WE SUFFER WAY MORE CONSEQUENCES THAN SO FAR;

'Us Versus

Them'

Will (Does Already)

Pale in CompariSon...

Yeah We Need more REAL WOKE;

The 'Human Pandemic' is Reaching
A Tipping Point it Already Passes with 'Advent' of 'Trump Life'...

Welcome to the Human Condition in All Its Glory Revealed And Exposed For All to See;

We See IT Now In ALL ITs DarK And LiGHT Full Play of 'Bates Motel' 'Renaissance Fair Style'

A Few

Do at least...

Truly Being 'Woke' Is 'Seeing'

What Difference it Makes May
Not Even Be Anymore Relevant
Than Thousands of Years ago Still...

Birds Still Fly Free Over Human CR8P;

The Shark Will Still Swim And Eat Just As they Did 400 MiLLioN

Years Ago After No Trace of the Human Blip is Left AS Star Dust on Earth....

Yet It's True

For me at

Least the Irrefutable

FacT IS i'm Living in Heaven

Now; Just A Small Sliver of Opportunity

For A Living Being to Experience Mastery of Bliss Forevernow...

That's A Real Miracle NOW, So Easy to 'See' At Least From my Place of

Nature in a UNiVeRSE Full of Hot And Cold Rocks And Humans Like that too...

i'll be 61 Years Old on 6.6.21; Empirically Measurable As Stronger Feeling

Younger And Happier Than Any Point

of my Life Eternally Now;

i Crack the

Code for

Heaven Now

And Really Did (DO) IT'

IF i Stop Breathing The Next Now,

Now i Lived Forever Young Now That's Pretty COOL FOR REAL;
PARTICULARLY WhERE YOU DOCUMENT THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE

AND PROVE IT'S

REAL NOW.

WAKE UP.

THIS IS WHAT

'WOKE' REALLY
MEANS FOR REAL NOW at least FoR Me...

Meh... 'Different Strokes' As Many GRAiNS oN A Beach of Eternity now...

Hehe And That Many Podcasts too For Every New Pocket of 'Religion' Next...

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After "woke" would be...'insomnia'?

Maybe oblivion?

Yeah.... So... This guy hasn't read or understood the postmodern philosophy he's trying to overcome.
The problem with moving "back" to authenticity and truth is that these never existed.
What James Lindsey implies is that the postmodern philosophy of Baudrillard describes people having abandoned authenticity and "reality". But that's not right. Baudrillard wrote that reality has ended, in the same way Nietzsche described that god has died. And that means, in hindsight, there never was a god, or a reality, just people believing things. Postmodern philosophy states that what you think is your authentic self is really a hodgepodge of cultural influences and contingencies.
And neuroscience goes even further in dismantling reality and authenticity. Reality, truth, - justice. These things depend on your current mental state, which depends on your current physical state, down to banal things like bloodsugar levels.


Oh god. This is infuriating to listen to.
This is as bad as Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson.
Why aren't these guys actually reading the things they want to move beyond? They're fighting windmill-sized strawmen....

The whole thing I feel like I've been watching is a bit like Ricardo Montalbán in Star Trek saying he'd rather rule hell than be a subject in heaven. Any which way you turn it's back toward humanity's most vampiric tendencies.

This is also why I'd take Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, or James Lindsay any day of the week over woke or faux-trad telling us that all is a lie, life is performance, and anyone who thinks they're not lying is either too feeble to realize it or really, truly that cursed being who'd have good intentions for their own sake - who needs to be stomped out of existence for being so unfit as to believe that there's any value whatsoever in actually doing one's best to be 'good' for it's own sake let alone care about the future of the species (it's a lot like tone-deaf people asserting to the world that music doesn't exist or a cartel of blind people asserting that sunrises or sunsets are 'woo'). To have an anti-aspirational culture is to have one where we simply do what our genes want us to do, at which point you can pretty much kiss anything like liberal democracy goodbye.

IMHO if that mindset wins - we devolve.

So, wokeism is problematic etc. - but what (actual) postmodernism leaves us with is this: the world as it is now is largely our construction, however, we don't know which parts are constructed and which are given, and we could construct it differently.

But here's a guy telling us to a) seek to be our authentic selves and b) listen to science on whether transgender kids should be given hormones.
Well, the science won't tell you whether they should be given hormones. Maybe the hormones cause cancer - but if you still think that's what's necessary to find your authentic self....? And why is cancer unacceptable when it comes to hormones, but something we have to live with in case of environmental pollution in the name of the economy?
There's not really a "truth" to be found in any of this...

Btw., These guys better start defining what they mean by truth.
There's been millennia of people thinking about "truth"

People come to the conclusion that "power is all that matters" because that's how the powerful act these days, and they are bad at hiding it. There is no notion of noblesse oblidge in our hyper-individualist culture... only ruthless competition.

I think the difference of opinions between factions, at least from where I stand, is that this a problem to solve - not a duty to follow.

There are all kinds of known-knowns and unknown-knowns that we've never properly plugged in (we went almost directly from religion to such radical skepticism that it seemed open to question whether anything was real).


He said a lot more than that, particularly trying to order his four points in a manner where - just from a utilitarian sense - suffering is decreased and thriving is increased as much as we know how to.


We're in an awkward place where we have to figure out many kids transition at 11 or 12 and commit suicide at 19 because they tried something on, find out that they had the wrong idea about it, and find out that certain moves (like removing breasts) are irreversible. He has a lectured called 'The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism' where he covers that concern a bit more adequately. We'll need a professional body to do a formal peer reviewed write-up on it before it would be okay to call that a disaster if or when such a situation came to pass.


As a reductive materialist atheist and rationalist I think we can count Lindsay's definition as nearly identical to Sam Harris's definition.

I think what I'm trying to criticize these guys for is best illustrated by a Werner Herzog quote: that truth is not facts, that the new york telephone registry contains a lot of facts, every entry is correct, but from reading it, you gain nothing. Facts create norms, yet truth creates illumination.

These guys, Harris, Lindsay - they are ignoring that truth is an inherently human category, while facts are non-human.

I also listened to the episode on "medical Lysenkoism". It was hard to listen to, frankly, because Lindsay was so busy repeating his views on what other people were doing that I was struggling to hear about the things they actually were doing.
Wokeism is a silly, dangerous idea, but anti-wokeism is the same thing just with an "anti-" in front.

So I do have a particularly strong disagreement with the above:

1) If you fall off a cliff or a tall radio antenna while working on it - the results aren't socially constructed.
2) If a doctor gives a patient the wrong medication or the wrong dosage and they die - that's not socially constructed.
3) If an architect builds a bridge and decides that he can negotiate with the steel and concrete to hold up in odd configurations - it'll collapse, hopefully long before it had any civilian traffic and hopefully without harm to any of the poor contractors stuck working on it.
4) If NASA doesn't pay acute attention to details we don't get into space, might not even get lift-off without rockets blowing up.

Said succinctly - nature is filled with the unyielding, and we're really good at forgetting about it when we have the luxury to and really good at either dying or wising up in such situations where that luxury isn't or is no longer present.

The other problem - there is unyielding with people as well. For example no one can completely ignore their social environment and survive long without getting dominated. Similarly if someone wants to believe in things that aren't real they either have to keep doubling down and keep getting increasingly brittle or they have to keep carving off the debunked pieces of that belief until they either no longer believe it or harvested the 5-10% signal where there was some truth-matching basis. You can maybe try some third way or new ideas in a social void but it's incredibly difficult to make anything stick, even within yourself, if it doesn't catch with other people.


What I think we're talking about here though is not science, math, or medicine being social constructs and to the degree that pop or 'practical' CRT and postmodernists would call anything they don't like a social construct means we get pulled toward gruesome absurdities. I'd add - I don't think Darwinian game theory can be called a social construct, it's what happens when agents of the same type with the same procreative needs get together and find out that they're after the same things (enter Rene Girard and memetic desire), and from that there's a way of deciding who gets access and who doesn't, in a more desirable society competence decides it, in a less desirable society power decides that, and under the hood of something like liberal democracy you'll likely have some degree of both varying on what organization your in, and it tends to get worse in the power direction when you enter some multinational where they've been known to be 'the place to be' for a long time, because they fill up with the worst kinds of social climbers and sharp elbows with a lot less going for them in the way of sharp minds.

We need to look at this and say that it's a problem of social contracts. Social contracts are a very specific, very narrow, set of problems where we try to determine what kinds of human-to-human dynamics we have any say in. This is part of where I'm big on GameB, they recognize Darwinian game theory as a juggernaut and the question isn't how to get rid of it or imagine it away, the trick is figuring out how to hot-wire it for more sustainable and pro-liberal and pro-Enlightenment outcomes.

The 'It can never happen, it can never work, it's all about power, my group vs. your group, words are just manipulation and tools of the enemy camp' - it's insane. It's as regressive, as reactionary, as you can possibly get. To some degree I'd have to side with Brendan O'Neil that there isn't a problem on the left because this isn't leftism, it's more akin to farm peasants having eaten ergot-loaded grain and trying to burn witches.

As someone who's actually read leftist theory, I completely agree on the ergot-loaded peasants part.
But I've also read postmodernists, and they do not say stuff like the stability of reinforced concrete is a social construct. That's as silly as pretending postermodernism says that any interpretation of a text is as good as any other. Those are strawmen;

But we can't clearly draw a line between what is a law of nature and what is a social construct. That Darwinian logic? Well, you maybe know Robert Sapolski's anecdote about the baboons that ate infected meat, and all tge alpha animals died, because they ate the most, and the baboons developed a happy pieceful society afterwards - which would teach aggressive newcomers to the pack how to be nice and peaceful? - the aggression in baboon behaviour is a social construct. Given the right circumstances, baboons can be peaceful. There's reason to assume that goes for humans, too, on any scale.

Now, about resource distribution: the problem is that it's really hard to tell power and merit apart. And stripping resources from people who havenot yet acquired merit also prevents them from ever earning any.
So, merit creates power, and it becomes even harder to tell whether you are getting ever more of the resources because of warranted merit - or based on the power you got from some initial merit.

And nothing is done and these kids go through the wrong puberty by doing nothing, aren't we running the same risk of things like boys getting breasts they never would have been comfortable with, and girls not getting theirs? The answer then should be the types of kids at 11 or 12 who are thinking that they might want to transition to be given something where they can postpone their puberty until they are closer to 19 so that they can make a more informed decision of what would be right for them.

The good news is that this is actually the procedure, there is absolutely no cases where children are being transitioned medically, because puberty blockers are not transitioning, they are postponing for the kids to figure stuff out before making the decision. Whenever someone gets this wrong, it shows that they are incredibly misinformed on the subject and should not be listened to because they can't show enough good faith to actually do research or present the subject authentically.

What comes next after 'woke', is the same thing that has always happened. You don't people asked these sorts of questions about things being based on lies after such things as women being allowed to stay in the workforce, or black people being treated as the exact same as white people? You can dang well expect there were people saying they were doctors at the change of those times saying they had medical expertise and the social change was unnatural. People like Jordan Peterson are still doing it.

It might suck for some of you, but a lot of those beliefs that many might see as radical 'woke' are going to become more mainstream. And the 'anti-woke' positions will more seem like the same as thinking women should only be mothers and stay out of STEM, that intelligence naturally varies based on race, that homosexuality should be punished by imprisonment, that whoever can swing a sword hard enough should have the land, and left handed people are the devil. Gender is going to more be seen as something one chooses what is right for themselves and will even be a spectrum, much like sexuality or a choice of career from any number of traits. And there will still be people saying it is unnatural and wrong much like a bunch of fundamentalists trying to stop evolution from being taught at school.

The question is really going to be how much people are going to want to continue to hurt their own circle in refusing to follow the updated understanding of humanity, whether they want to be the new age people telling women to stay in the kitchen.

Generally the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction after it's done swinging, right?

*But where will this end???*

Well, actually, if you took a person at the beginning of the 20th century, asking this in regards to womens' suffrage or whatever was a social issue at the time, and you answer to that person with: boys will decide to become girls and vice versa, and socialized medicine will pay for it (in some European countries) - that person might genuinely be horrified.

I mean, looking at history, the answer to "where will it all end?" Is always: you can't even imagine!