The Religious Similarities of Retroactive Cancelling, Wokeness w/James Lindsay | Joe Rogan

But it's like times have changed. But you're mad at you for something you did when you were little, which is funny. That's one of the things that's going on now, is people are retroactively getting canceled for things. Yeah, like they did when there were kids. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's like everything's a permanent stain on you. There's no growth. You can't become a better person. What do you think that is? What is the desire that people have to do that? Like, where's that coming from? Well, you know, there's two ways we could talk about it. We could talk about the psychological side of it, which is like a moral purity thing that's going bonkers. Or we could talk about it in terms of the idea as the theory that's fueling this. And that's all about... It has this idea that comes from French philosophy, that words and ideas and thoughts and patterns have traces that don't ever really go away. And so if something used to be associated with something bad and we still use the word, or even if you pretend that it was the case and you still use the word, then it carries this negative trace. So the moral panic and the psychology side of it is fueled by this kind of stupid idea that words always have to mean kind of what they meant in the first place. Are people aware of that though? Is this just conveniently connected to it or conveniently similar? Or do you think that people are actually aware of this concept? I don't think most people do. So we're generally talking about this whatever woke thing that's happening, right? And so you got to think of woke kind of like a church, right? I grew up Catholic, so it's like you got cultural Catholics, they kind of go to church and maybe they go to confession sometimes and they don't really... Do they do it, but they don't really do it? And then you have the hardcores. I had a friend in high school that took notes at church. Oh, wow. A serial killer. Yeah, it's like you do what? You take notes. And then you've got the pastor and he obviously studies it or the priest in a Catholic context and they study it. And then you've got the theologians that really study it. And so the stuff I'm talking about is like theology level. That's like the scholars. And then your average person just wants to feel like a good person. So you've got like the woke academics, like the seriously, the woke people that are teaching it to kids that really teach it as like critical theory, like critical race theory. That's right. Yeah. So those are the ones that are probably aware of all the nonsense. They're making the nonsense actually. I think they pick some of it up from culture, from activist groups or whatever, but then they refine it and turn it into something. And it has this really weird feeling to it. You get the impression that it's like they're wrestling with their inner demons and then like writing it down. Like this book now, White Fragility, right? Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility. That's the one that Matt Taibbi destroyed. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God for Matt Taibbi. Yeah, so good. Thank the baby Jesus and Odin. That's right. It's so good though because he's right. He's actually right about it. So if you read the book, there's all these weird vignettes that she tells, these stories. She's like, oh, I went to this potluck for work and I'm walking around. I walk up and then I see there's two parties and we're at the park and there's two groups of people. One of them's all black and one of them's not. And I had this moment of panic that I might have to be in the all black group. And it's like, lady, what's going on? And then it's like, all white people are racist. It's like our conclusion from this. And it's like, maybe it's you. So she had this panic that she was going to have to party at the park with black people. Yeah. And she was worried that she was racist because of that and therefore all white people are racist. See, that's what I'm thinking is going on, right? So I'm thinking, I've thought this for a number of years, is that a lot of this stuff where you get these like woke activists doing their blogs or these scholars writing this stuff down is that they're looking at their own lives. So you have these people that are like, they're walking down the street, you know, maybe whatever. They walk into the hotel, they walk into the restaurant and they're like, I saw a black guy. And then it's like, I'm not supposed to notice that. And then they start having like this thing in their head and then they go write an angry blog about how terrible racism is because they're wrestling with it themselves. It's like Sigmund Freud, right? He had that whole idea that everybody wants to have sex with their mothers. And like your psychology is all how you resolve that problem. And it's like, maybe you just wanted to have sex with your mother, Sigmund Freud, you know? And then now it's everybody's a racist is kind of the vibe of the new thing. And there's like this weird religious kind of thing happening around it. That's really the thing that gets me is how similar this is to religious or religious, not just religious ideology, like how rigid it is, but also indoctrination, like religious cults, how they indoctrinate people. And one of my friends, Kurt Metzger, really funny guy who was a Jehovah's Witness when he was younger. And so he's really, really, really sensitive to this stuff. He's like, I know where this is going. This is the same thing that I got when I was in the Jehovah's Witness. This is cult shit. It's these rigid ideologies that cannot be challenged. You can't in any way veer from the course. That's right. And they set you up, right? So every single one of these things sets you up. So for example, one of my favorite examples of these kind of like setups, right? In the book, I talk about historically, the black feminists came along and they're like, oh, feminism is too white. Feminism isn't paying attention to black feminist issues or black women's issues. And so then these feminists were like, oh, we have to fix that. And they start writing about black issues to the best of their ability. And then three years later, the lady writes a paper saying, oh, you're just sticking black things in and it's fake and you're tokenizing it and you're fetishizing it. And it's like, so you can't do it right. That is cult, the indoctrination stuff. So it's like you and I could be talking about something like this and you could say something and I'm like, don't you think it's a little bit racist? And then the next step is like, what are you going to say? You're going to say yes or no. If you say yes, now you've owned it, right? So now you're like racist. And so I'm like, well, do you interrogate your racism? Like, do you spend time working on that? And see, you're dragging people into it. And if you say no, I can say, well, one of the symptoms of participation in systemic racism is an inability to see it if you're white and it's invisible to you. And so maybe you need to look harder when it seems like you're getting a little defensive. Oh, you start panicking. And then you start panicking. And when you start to panic, you start to stress out. They're like, literally, this lady emailed me the other day, this Indian woman. I get a lot of insane number of emails about people. From India? No, no, from Canada. Oh. But an insane number of emails from people who are in different levels of stress with different things that are happening in their lives around this woke explosion that's happened in the last month or so. So this lady's like, I had to go through a brown fragility training at work. What? Yeah, brown fragility is a thing. So it's not even black? Now they're working their way down to brown people? Yeah, brown people have fragility. Oh my God, those poor people. So people who racially were sort of like Switzerland, like Indians, like in India, like no one ever thought they were racist. You would never hear about racist Indians. Maybe Russell Peters would joke around about it. You know Russell, the comedian? Yeah, yeah, now you hear about it. And what they're doing is that they had, what happened was they explained to the ladies, or not the lady, there's like the whole group. It was done in a room in front of a bunch of people. And they explained brown people in general, like it's some kind of block of brownness or whatever. Brown people have anti-black racism too, and that upholds white supremacy. And then they start just doing this. And it's almost like cold reading, right? You know like the Edwards guy, whatever that guy's name was, that show. And so it's like they cold read and they wait for somebody to start looking like they're getting the sweat or something happening. And then they say, now what we need to do, now that we've introduced this idea of your brown fragility is we need to, your anti-blackness, is we need to interrogate the feelings that came up. And so they go one by one through the room and made every single one of them confess their feelings. Like who's not going to participate? And here's that double bind, because it gets to you, right? And so what do you say? Well, I don't really know what you're talking about. Well, they're going to say you're hearing it. Exactly. And then if you confess to it, then you're falling in. So this is straight up cult indoctrination stuff. It really is like those people in Game of Thrones. You remember those people that almost like took over the crown and kidnapped Cersei? It is. It's like that sort of pattern for whatever reason just seems to reoccur with humans. I think it comes down to our natural religious impulses. Yeah. That I think, I mean, pretty well from my background, I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist. How dare you? Oh, well, we get along. And so I still do think that we have certain impulses underneath that lead people to build religious structures around themselves and have religious thoughts and feelings and want to have spiritual development and all of this. And so religions can kind of do one of two things. I used to be kind of hard ass about religion and tough, angry atheist kind of picture, but I thought about it more, which you're not allowed to think about things and change your mind now, but I did. And what I realized is that some religions look up. They're like looking at God and they're afraid of sin, but they're paying attention to God. They're thinking about renewal. They're thinking about redemption. They're thinking about forgiveness. And then some religions look down and all they do is look at the sin and they focus on the sin. And that's where the witch hunts came from. That was when the Calvinists got like, you know, fire and brimstone, Jonathan Edwards screaming, you know, sinners in the hands of an angry God. You're hanging on a spider's thread above the fires of hell and God knock you into it because everybody's full of sin. Next thing you know, they're killing witches. So it's like you start focus. If you look up, you know, then religion can be great. It can actually lead people if they spiritual development community, so on. But if you're looking down, you're going to start obsessing about everybody. If you're obsessing about sin, you're going to start obsessing about everybody else's sin too. Yes. Because you're going to want to like, there's this feeling with again, reading Robin D'Angelo's wife, agility, is this feeling like that she doesn't want to feel alone. Like she has these struggles and she doesn't want to be alone. So she's a white lady? Oh yeah. Robin D'Angelo's a white lady who goes in and for like $12,000 a pop does these corporate seminars. What? And she goes and tells white people that they're racist and then like interrogates their feelings when they get defensive about it. Oh my goodness. It's like the biggest corporate training hustle ever. And her idea of white fragility, you can't disagree with it. There's no way to disagree. I've absolutely like rammed it on some people on Twitter who are these wokies that come and try to trash me. And I just say, you know, that looks a little bit like white fragility. And I give some reason that's kind of out of the literature. And then they are like, I can't have white fragility. You know, I'm whatever. And it's like, oh, that's definitely you're getting defensive. Defensive is one of the symptoms of white fragility. You just want to deny your complicity in the system of racism that you benefit from. And it's just like, you can't get away from it because the end. That kind of language, like what you just said, it's like, that's like a checkmate.