 As I critically reviewed the activities of the Jewish people throughout long periods of history, I became anxious and asked myself whether for some inscrutable reasons beyond the comprehension of poor mortals such as ourselves, destiny may not have irrevocably decreed that the final victory must go to this small nation. Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind. That was Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Even now, as I study the activities of white people throughout recorded history, did I yield to oppressive thoughts and am I still filled with profound anxieties? As I critically interrogated activities of white people, I asked myself if, for reasons I could not fathom, fate may have demanded that a final victory would be bestowed upon this relatively small group of underpigmented yet supremacist and colonialist people. Should the whites and their co-constituted doctrines of white privilege continue to be accepted as foundational and apodictic, they would lead to the cementing of economic and social order and the erasure of personal and racial sovereignty. Whiteness, then, must be disrupted. For should whiteness, with the aid of supremacist doctrines, triumph over the people of this world, its crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind. That was me. I translated Mein Kampf in a paper for a feminist gender studies journal. And so what happens if that lands? If that lands? Well, I don't know how, you know, all these people run around saying everybody's Hitler. There's been Hitler creep, you know, concept creep, everybody's Hitler. You don't agree with me, you're Hitler. Everybody's Hitler. If this lands, people will be put in a very, very awkward position of defending Hitler. I was very interested to pick your brain. I think there's one thing that you've said a couple of times has become more clear to me over the course of research I've been doing. You've said this a couple of times. I don't butcher it, but it's that abstract philosophical concepts when put in practice can have life and death consequences. And so I just wonder if you could elaborate on that, because my goal here is to absorb vast amounts of information and then somehow illuminate that for the public, for as many people as humanly possible. And there is a clear divide. And it's very, very difficult to bridge this gap where you speak to everyday people who don't have academic background, who don't actually even know much about what's going on in academia. And it feels to them as though this is this strange, obscure thing that's happening over in the corner of culture, of where they lived. But to me, the more I look into this, it's like there's distribution. The people that make the templates for thought, they end up having huge consequences for culture, for the business, for everything. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on that thought. Yeah, that's a good introduction. Yeah, thanks for that. So, you know, one analogy is to think about starting with theoretical physics and you can start talking to theoretical physicists and they come up with all these strange mind bending things and so on. But as we have developed science, we know the theoretical conclusions then get to applied physics and then the engineers do things with things and then the technologists do stuff and then finally the entrepreneurs are creating products that make a huge difference. Now, we all then are the end users of the technology and we can appreciate it. And to some extent it seems like magic what's going on inside the technology but it really is that abstract theoretical physics made tangible. So the same thing holds for abstract philosophy. So there are all sorts of technical issues in metaphysics and epistemology and philosophy of course has a reputation for being weird because 90% of it is weird. Yes. Those abstract principles we are smart beings we think in terms of generalities and we make big term plans and commitments. So to the extent that we get our general principles wrong by the time we put them into practice it makes a huge difference. So you might then say in technical ethics there's a difference between deontological and consequentialist ethics and those are big multi-syllabic words and initially it's off-putting and what does that mean. But one of the rubber meets the roads issues is going to be do you project stay your life's happiness as your ultimate goal and that's already to translate an abstract concept into something more particular. Now thinking about your ultimate life's goal and what happiness means that's all still pretty abstract but already by thinking in that territory you're thinking very differently than someone who says no my life is not really about happiness rather it's about a set of duties or obligations that I am born into and my life should be about doing what is expected of me and fulfilling my duties. Now that's then to take a kind of consequentialism and a kind of deontology as we the philosophers would talk about it but to operationalize it and how a young person makes a decision. I sometimes think of a young woman who is 18 or 19 years old and she has some ambition she wants to go to university and get a degree maybe start a business and she wants to have a family but she wants to have the whole package and put it all together by the time she's 30 so she's thinking consequentialist and she has a long range plan but we know that you know there are many young women in her situation who might announce that they want to go off to university and her parents will say no no no you shouldn't be so selfish you know you have an obligation to the family to carry on the name you to get married to that nice boy down the street and start a family and that's a more important thing you have obligations young lady and you know this is a rubber meets the road life changing decision that she has to make so to the extent that philosophers have had the you know what I would call the consequentialist versus deontological debate and sorted it out and one side has prevailed in the culture young women will then be making very different decisions so one such decision you know certainly you can take this example of young women you know three centuries ago young women would not be thinking about I'm going to go off to university and I should be able to vote by golly and start my own business and marry whom I choose that's a revolution in thought but behind that was a lot of hard philosophy fighting against other entrenched philosophical systems and it wasn't until that abstract debate was won that then we saw a cultural revolution and how women start to think about their lives so another example I would use is more overtly political you know we're kind of familiar with the connections between Karl Marx and the the Russian Revolution so you know Marx in the middle part of the 1800s is developing an abstract philosophy and an economic and political system and his PhD was in philosophy he had an entire philosophical system his political economy is nested and so the connections between very abstract philosophy and then converting a generation of intellectuals and then a generation of activists who then had an effect on hundreds of millions of people's lives that's abstract philosophy making a making a huge difference we can make the same argument about the connections between John Locke and the American Revolution again abstract philosophy convincing a large number of intellectuals in the early part of the 1700s and then we see the American Revolutionaries the Founding Fathers they're all young activists but very well educated in the middle part of the 1700s and then another kind of revolution occurs well this this is interesting I like to use the word revolution because what I've noticed in trying to map this territory is that we're in the midst of some kind of soft revolution if I can tell you what I see and I've brought this up and I think there's some truth to it I haven't really articulated too many people just yet but if you take Marx there's a fundamental realisation in Marx that is that power is nested in wealth so all the power and oppression is you get classes that are hooked up to wealth and that creates the oppression so if you believe this Marxist philosophy if you believe it and you want to change the world in line with it in order to make a more equitable world step one would be seize the means of economic productions so take over the means of economic production and then redistribute in order to equalise that seems like the revolutionary enterprise that comes from this Marxist philosophy so what I'm seeing in the stage two is I mean there's the streams into this you've got the Frankfurt school, you've got Gransky, hegemony, you've got then you've got the the realisation then becomes the power is hooked up in discourses so it's in the way we speak about things and essentially knowledge production and so if you believe this and you're revolutionary just like people were Marxist revolutionaries and you want to equalise the oppression that comes from that powerful creating the way we speak about things and then that going into culture and having all these effects step one would be to seize the means of cultural production and so what I'm seeing is that taking place would be education, it would be arts and entertainment it would be media and it would be religion which is strangely enough a lot of the stuff is moving into and so it's not I'm using the word soft revolution because it's not guns and bombs it's PhDs and passive aggression, that's their weapon and what I'm seeing here is this soft passive aggressive it's almost a takeover I don't want to speak too emotionally about it but they're pretty explicit when you go and read this stuff they're explicit that this is some kind of revolution that's the realisation and that's the kind of broad mean version of what I think is going on what do you think about that do you have some thoughts on that? No that's a very good analysis clearly it is a soft revolution when you talk about the soup or the stew of all of the movements that are going on in the middle part of the 20th century critical theory and hegemonia analysis in frankfort school and the early postmodernist and so on out of that there is a somewhat pessimistic conclusion by most people in that movement that the corridors of power political and economic have been closed off to them in the liberal democratic capitalist west so they don't think they're going to be able to achieve their ends through the business world they think that that is a lost cause from their perspective or from the political world they think that is corrupted as well a significant number of them in the 1960s did turn to overt terrorism so it's fascinating in the 1960s how many leftist organizations the Montaneros, Beiger, Meinhof, Red Palmer Traction and so on all of them by very well educated well read young people who said enough of democracy, enough of capitalism we need to take it to the streets their aim was to resist fascism where their parents had failed they were known as the red army faction this state has a fascist fear which is only filled with a mask and that was their theory that if you want to show the faded fascism you only have to tear the mask from the face and that's only when you attack it to fit with your thesis those people in the 1960s they were extraordinarily active but by the time of the early 1970s came along all those terrorist organizations had been defeated and shut down so if you are then a far left strategist sympathetic to Marxism we can't just wait around for somehow a collective consciousness to arise in the proletariat and the revolution is going to come we need to do something but we are not going to do it through business we are not going to do it through democratic republic and politics we can't do it through terrorism anymore what is left to us it is going to be the softer cultural centers and that's where your thesis comes in this is quite explicit in thinkers like Marcouza we have to stop thinking of ourselves as positioned outside the system and that we are going to in some sense wait for the revolution to develop or force a revolution on the system from the outside we need to get inside the system in especially education and higher education and what came to be called the long march through the institution so we will train the teachers we will train the journalists we will train the artists and so that has become a cultural movement instead of a bomb throwing movement or an overtly political movement yeah bombs and guns so this is the I started feeling a lot of passive aggression and this is the way things have to be within the arts and entertainment world here in Australia so it was very unsettling to me what was going on many experiences and that's kind of what had maybe head down this path it was like there's some kind of sociological shift here I don't think this is just people creating art there's something else going on here and I mean it's hard because if you spoke to these people face to face they wouldn't even understand what the hell you were talking about and so I culture is downstream from the academy is what I kind of stumbled upon I guess is I followed the language and the concepts and ended up in the academy and so once I got the hoax project an observation that of how much of this revolutionary post-modern stuff is in pedagogy which is just a fancy word for the theory of education I guess the philosophy of education and so you've got Henry Jiru, you've got Bell Hooks you've got all the people it's very Paulo Friarie, it's very him he's got the Marxist side and then it's kind of intertwined with post-modernism through all these other people and so I worked with Paulo Friarie for about 15 years and during that time we did the almost impossible we started a series in education and cultural studies through which we got about 100 people tenure and we saw that as an important kind of political intervention sort of bringing people together in ways that suggested a kind of solidarity that went beyond simply getting them jobs putting them in positions where they could actually make a difference in the world in which they found themselves I want to argue that we need to think about what it means to create a formative culture that actually provides a language that links the notions of critique to traditions of the past historical memory, public memory with the need to revitalize a sense of individual and collective agency one that's tied in some fundamental way to the fundamental way to the gap between what is and what ought to be that great sort of tension that has mobilized revolutions all over the world mobilized institutions allow people to think otherwise in order to act otherwise something is happening in the world today that's very encouraging and what's happening is that people are recognizing that nothing is going to change allowing yourself to get trapped in single-issue issues don't get me wrong single issues matter indigenous issues matter racism matters labor exploitation matters but they've got to be brought together we need a more comprehensive politics that links these things in ways that will be able to mobilize people into larger social formations and we need to imagine not just simply reforming a society that's broken we need to imagine eliminating it we need a new kind of society we need a new discourse we need a new set of institutions and maybe the place to begin to do that is to take seriously what it means to take education seriously what it means to take pedagogy seriously what it means to recognize that we're not just altering knowledge we're altering consciousness and we're creating new kinds of subjectivities on pedagogy, I just this past year published a piece called liberal education and it's post-modern critics and so it's exactly focused on the philosophy of education battles between those who have various forms of post-modernism and what is now the standard modern liberal arts education ideal so if you think of liberal education which is a relative newcomer in the history of education several centuries old now but it's something that arose in the context of the modern world when we think of people as individuals not as members of a feudal class and so what kind of education is appropriate for individuals generically part and parcel of the modern project is to say that people are rational and they have their own senses and so they need to be taught how to look at the world how to use their and develop their rational capacity to sort out competing hypotheses and to be open to debate and discussion and if we're going to not have a feudal system if we're going to have some sort of democratic republican system in the early modern world those kinds of political systems are being revived well we have to have large numbers of the citizenry who can read who know some history who know geography so they know the different parts of the world they need to have some math so they can start their own businesses they need to know how to discuss and argue so that they can get into all of these complicated political debates so that by the time they vote they can vote in an informed way and so on so in all of that context early science, early democratic republicanism there's a huge dose of course of religious toleration that's going to be necessary it's a liberal ethic right it's what I'm picking up here it's the whole liberal ethic broader liberal philosophy to train people so that they can take on this living freely in a complicated open-ended world and so liberal education with its emphasis on broad-based education you need to know a lot about a lot of things and it's also not got to be not only theoretical but it also needs to be applied so you can actually take the knowledge and use it in your life knowledge is power like Bacon said that you are respectful of other people's own judgments and that they're going to go off in different paths in their own life and then having a whole civil discourse ethic in place and so on so then it's only on the basis though of that very broad philosophy that you get a specific liberal arts education ideal coming into being now then what happens though of course is that the post-moderns they're well aware of what liberal education is all about present both sides or all sides of an argument particularly on the controversial issues and that they you know they should have faculty who are diverse in their outlooks so that students get exposed to all of the viewpoints and that ultimately you're not trying to indoctrinate students you might have things that you profess as a professor but only once the student is up to speed on what the issues are and what the arguments are then you jump in and then the final analysis you move it up to the students to make up their own minds and you respect those students who make good arguments for positions that you disagree with so the post-moderns are very well aware of that entire liberal philosophy modern enlightenment and the education system and so in people like Freire and Jiru and Bell Hooks and the others they are explicitly piece by piece going through all elements of that undercutting them and then asking what is going to be the post-modern replacement for that and you end up with an opposite kind of education system this this looks to me like if you're in the control room of western civilization you're just pulling out the wires on the navigation system like this and so it's the more of this I read I feel like going in the streets and yelling there's a revolution of foot and you start saying that as people and they're like you're a madman an absolute madman it's very because there's something inherently morally dubious about that unless you believe what they believe there's a dozen I mean we could probably pivot into the religious aspects of it here but there's this kind of non-stick special knowledge aspect to it so there's this discourses thing where they believe that the world in its in its default form is races and sexes and so much so that the discourses and the knowledge and the way we speak about things are oppressing marginalized groups true to some small degree not to the group that they're taking it to and so keeping them and giving them a false consciousness and this is the non-stick element that you have so the false consciousness is widespread due to mass capitalistic media but then only the specially trained critical theorist that's you and me the special guys we can rip off the veil or rip off the masks to use Foucaultian metaphors to see what's really going on underneath so I'll be just I can't emphasize this enough this is not useful just get rid of it it is not possible to avoid being socialized into a racist worldview if you're white it's not possible it's coming out as 24-7 the only way to resist it is to be able to see it and think it through so to deny it is not going to help you I think that the key props or supports that keep racism unabated today are color blindness or celebrate diversity narratives those are the two versions of the doc that I showed you individualism this emphasis on ourselves as individuals and that we can be exempt from all of this conditioning socialization even as I do these talks often times people get their backs up just in the fact that I'm generalizing and that's like a very sacred ideology right you can't generalize well actually as a sociologist I can the critical theory becomes absolutely important as it's called here and critical theory the elitism the elitism as well is sorry the elitism is built into that because I think I just I like to draw it into everyday people's experience and they are very much experiencing this kind of clergy of people telling them what to do so the first person experience of this is some kind of elite class telling you that you're morally wrong right and that's the thing that people are feeling on the street but it's all philosophically it's all there right sure so you you know all of the standard accusations right you're a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or whatever it is and the person says what yeah I have no idea what you're talking about and then or even worse I hope not what am I doing wrong like yeah yeah exactly and then and then just the false consciousness and then we start looking for you know microaggressions but it's only the person who who knows how to spot what the microaggression is and how properly to interpret it and and so on so there's a certain amount of Freudian psychoanalysis that got imported by the Frankfurt school people so they were wanting to argue that kind of external political and economic oppression was not enough to explain what was going on that somehow westernism was so imperialistic that it gets inside people's psyche and gives them verbal formulations that they use on themselves to then repress and drive subconsciously or into their unconscious things that they are not aware of so they will deny overt racism or subtle racism or any sort of awareness of their own oppression so then it really takes the critical theorists to get inside the heads of people who are not only oppressed but also repressed and they're doing it to themselves to reeducate them. Now these consequences are often invisible to the naked eye and the naked eye is the eye that's not accustomed to looking at issues through an intersectional prism. There is however a solution a practice that can heighten our capacity to see the limitations of a non-intersectional feminism or non-intersectional racism. And here we are to save you from your racism and sexism. Yeah, so you're unconscious racism or sexism. In a way there's a theoretical argument that gets developed here. Marx has an early version of this and there are other theorists in the early part of the 20th century who have versions of it as well but the critical theorists are making it explicit. My view though is aside from the philosophical issues that the fact that they were so focused, at least not we some of us are so focused on trying to find microaggressions and the tiniest hints of something that is in fact a sign of great health in our culture. That we have succeeded in getting rid of the macroaggressions so to speak and all of the over so it's you know if you are really resorting to getting out the microscope to try to find some residual elements of racism and sexism well that means we've come a long way so we should pat ourselves. There's some interesting element to this where we came so far that all the low-hanging fruit had gone all their heroes Mandela or Martin Luther King or the suffragettes who had a mission they deserved to go into the streets and they're heroes they're heroes and so if you get to a point where all the low-hanging fruits gone and you can't run into the streets and get that kind of the social adoration that all their heroes had how do you do that? It has to take on some kind of spiritual aspect to it it has to move away from reality in some sense and I think that the post-modern you sprinkle modernism onto our current day and all of a sudden you swept up into this cosmic battle between good and evil. Well there are some deep philosophical theories and psychological sociological theories behind critical theory and post-modernism and so on but I think the further we get into it we're now second and third generation a lot of it I think is can be explained by easy careerism so if you are a second or third rate mind and there are lots of them in an academic world you're just a good student, you showed up you turned in your papers and you got your Ph.D and you get a nice job as a professor but you're not really a first rate person and you know but nonetheless you want to have the sense that you are making a difference some of the very easy causes to get behind it's not that hard to be anti-racist or it's not that hard to be anti-sexist and to show that you care about the poor so if you have already made vocabulary and a whole cause available to you and it seems to have some cultural cachet you can make a career out of that and you can get some notoriety out of that without being particularly... You can also convince yourself of it, right? If you read this stuff there's a type of derangement that goes on we shouldn't talk about the motivations of the people but I think there's different kinds there are cynical people just careerists and then there are people who genuinely believe it people are halfway who are kind of convincing themselves that it's true and maybe have a little bit of cognitive dissonance That is a huge occupational hazard because we know there are any number of true believers and people can genuinely talk themselves into just about anything and if you're a smart person you also have the reinforcer, you know that you're smarter than the average person so you're more likely to trust your own mind and there are lots of philosophical and psychological positions that initially can be very appealing and there are good arguments that can be made but to the extent that you're intelligent you follow them down the rabbit hole and you think you're being honest but you do end up in a very weird place because of some subtle mistake in that initially appealing position that's another variant as well But it's also the degrading of the quality it's quite obvious from what I've seen, the further you go back the more solid it becomes and I would say that's built in this is why I love your initial comment because it's kind of there's a predictive element to philosophy that I'm starting to realise and enjoy because it's built into the philosophy that would degrade because if you're not optimising for truth if you don't necessarily believe that we can achieve truth then you wouldn't why would you try and so all of a sudden this is a big change and this is fundamentally what most cycloporos have been it very much happened in the late 80s through the 90s this clear, we were calling it applied post-modernism but it's this clear we're not optimising for truth we're optimising for change we're optimising, they're optimising for something else and so it was open for the hoax project the dog park paper it's so ridiculous how would anyone end up there the author fairly one every hour sexual encounters between dogs as rape without providing a strong basis for the researchers knowledge whether these encounters were wanted or unwanted the author defines consensual dog sex as when the penetration was not resisted but what are the author's credentials for assessing dog behaviour to this extent that's what this paper was about it's trained men like we train dogs it is also not politically feasible to leash men yank their leashes when they misbehave or strike men with leashes or other objects in an attempt to help them desist from sexual aggression in other predatory behaviours it's not politically feasible it's not politically feasible it makes sense right the basement is as you put it predictive in the general principle because you have the idea that the seeking for truth as a regulative ideal in your thinking that high aspiration means that when you are a younger person and you are training you're going to set your standards very high and you're going to train your critical faculties in a certain direction and you're going to learn how to spot contradictions and be careful about evidence and probabilistic claims and different ways of framing partial evidence and so on but once the truth as a regulative ideal goes out the window then all of those logical, definitional careful attention to observation and so on those go out the window but on the normative side and there's a strong connection there as well once you start you make a commitment to autonomous agents with any locus of self-control and self-responsibility you make the shift and you see people as avatars for various sorts of group identities or there are just these shifting collectives in collision with each other once you go down that road then there's going to then be another kind of debasement you're not going to treat other individuals with respect or or be willing to tolerate argumentation and differences of opinion and challenges to your own viewpoint or the idea that through discussion we can sort out what's the best compromise or the best principle together again all of those civil ethical skills will be suffering debasement as well so both on the cognitive side and the normative side we go down the road we're in a very much in the late 80s early 90s when it moves into a normative it's a moral enterprise and this is where I would argue it becomes some kind of religious entity it's a moral intuition it can take to be the religious markers what are the religious markers everywhere so this started abstractly what do you mean by religious here is that it's an article of faith I'd say Durkheimian it's just taken for granted or there's kind of an eschatological end state that you're striving for what are you picking up on it is all fair and so I've got a lot of thoughts around this but it's mainly from a Durkheimian perspective where this is a moral community and I'm sorry after Durkheim you broke up for a few seconds can you repeat that so Durkheimian perspective this is a moral community and so I mean his most basic description of a religion and this is where I'm coming from is beliefs and practices in relation to a sacred which is something that's set apart and set apart from the profane what I think has taken place and I might be a madman here but I think there's something to it which is what has been made sacred in the late 80s into the early 90s was oppression based on identity which in some loose humanist perspective is suffering to them it's the only suffering worth looking at the summary that is sacred and so all the scholarship is circling around the sacred victim and it's a set of beliefs and practices it's the reams and reams we're talking 20 years of just beliefs and practices and rules in order to stay away from this sacred oppression based on identity which in my mind is suffering I think they've done James and I laugh about it but it's kind of I'm oppressed therefore I am they've got rid of everything except for that and then circled around that and I know this is a strange way of looking at it but I think that it's a tool I'm using to understand what the hell is going on there so if the words make sense it's a secular religion because you don't have spiritual beings or a robust metaphysics but you do have all of the normative patterns playing themselves out well I can probably start chipping away at that the sympathy for the meek who hopefully will inherit the earth the great Satan is the rich and the powerful there's lots of attraction you can get there there's also a metaphysic I'm starting to see there's a metaphysics of discourse which is it works in a big container of humanism and so the discourses are moving through people and you can change the world world by suppressing certain speech and so it's this and you don't have an act of God anymore it's all in this humanist kind of realist world view so I think they're fitting into our culture so well and recruiting people really well because they're operating within this this kind of moral paradigm that we're all in but they have a very strange reading of the text it's kind of like a sect well I would suggest a different framing the idea of remediating suffering eliminating oppression that's got a long history and there's nothing uniquely postmodern about that so I think that goes back particularly in the modern form but with a positive emphasis to people like Francis Bacon and John Locke where they say we want to remediate human suffering but rather than just removing enough suffering so that life is tolerable we can in fact improve the human condition we can make progress we can set the pursuit of happiness as a realistic goal that emphasis on the positive as well as solving the problems and eliminating all of the oppressions of the past that's very deep in the DNA of modernism and so I think if you want to use a humanist label that makes sense rather than saying that God will save us or that we should be suffering because God wants us to punish us for our sins the original humanist move is then to say we are in charge of our destinies we have the tools and the power to improve the human condition I think postmodernism though is a new kind of anti-humanist movement more fundamentally so here all of the pointing back in philosophy I think becomes important so the second and third generation people you're talking about they point back say to Foucault and Leo Tarr and so forth and Rory and all of them as your formulation is right they're focusing on remediation of suffering but when you see who they're pointing back to it's someone like Martin Heidegger who is very much anti-humanist fundamentally and Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx and Hegel and what you find all of them of course is they're interested in power and how power works but one common theme running through all of them is the exact opposite it's not that humans are the frame and discourse or whatever form of power is something that we use they are de-emphasizing the human human beings are something through which a force beyond themselves or underlying them works it constitutes them and it uses them for their purposes so Hegel has some sort of providential power force working through using human beings and discarding them as it works its purpose out for Marx we're born as kind of lumps of plasticine and there are underlying economic forces that constitute us and use us for our purposes for Nietzsche it's the will to power power is that fundamental substratum and it constitutes us and uses us for its some sort of evolutionary purposes and you get a variation on that in Heidegger so someone like Foucault I think is very perceptive on this and he will say I read a lot of Heidegger and I read a lot of Nietzsche and basically I am a Nietzschean on this point so I take your point about the humanism that the focus is on and I think this is the attraction of postmodernism to many people before they get sophisticated we care about your suffering and the people who are still being oppressed and that's a humanistic impulse but the whole rest of the philosophy is anti-humanistic and using that as a hook so I guess the hook I love that you said that I think that's the point that's what I was trying to achieve with the big frame, little frame because there is this strange question that how could something so actually fundamentally different be getting so much traction humanism is hard because everyone is experiencing a version of this but Carol in HR hasn't read Foucault do you know what I mean I'm looking at it all up and I'm like how is that actually happening and so it has to be that it's masquerading as some kind of humanism I think that you were spot on when you say that's the hook and I guess that's what I'm trying to achieve with that formulation it's not quite right but you understand what I'm saying and there's also a natural benevolence that we all have partly this is a cultural achievement that we have it as strongly as we do in the modern world we've learned that there is oppression there are bad people there are victims but we're very optimistic about thinking we should be able to solve all of those problems and eliminate all of the oppression and it matters to us that we do so and we're optimistic enough again this is a modern inheritance to think that we should be able to make progress in all of these social dimensions so someone who comes along with a cause and says there's a victim group we're very sensitized to that and we're willing to give that person the benefit of the doubt and if the person then takes that benefit of the doubt and our natural benevolence and then starts to turn it against us well we're already we've let them in the door and then they've got the sophisticated ideological apparatus to know what to do with that and it's strong as hell I guess it's scary as well like to go back to I like before when you were adding the if you understand these frameworks and there's a predictive element to it and the thing that worries me is that if you press play on this this ideology war is built in some kind of some kind of just all out battle between go back to the philosophers for Hegel it is conflict and oppression that moves the forces of history forward in Marxism it is there's the necessity of violent revolution to take the class struggle to the next stage in in in Nietzsche it's explicit conflict exploitation power the strong dominating the weak are necessary to move forward so so absolutely war is built into it and I think that again is in contrast to the whole tendency of the modern liberal ethos because there the argument has been since we are rational beings if we can get enough people educated and rational and we can respect people as individuals and we can develop all sorts of trading institutions that bring us together we want to trade rather than make war and so you know the nations that became commercial republics stopped going to war against each other in the modern world shocking the religious toleration developing institutions in scientific method of being open to debate and discussion it will let our theories go to war in a peaceful thing and rather than having to fight it on the streets and so on so the whole movement toward peace toleration and progressive conflict resolution that's the modern liberal ethos that's explicitly under attack for philosophical reasons by the post-modernist the interesting thing I want to get your thoughts on this because I realize we're bumping up against now but there is this way in which they make it true so if you believe that power is fundamental and the world is some kind of power battle if you then take that on as a gospel and you believe that then you will start behaving in that way and then other people will start behaving that way toward you because you're behaving that way all of a sudden you're surrounded in the world that you bought into and so the more people you teach about this the more that it becomes true yeah it's a self-creating reality ESI creates has been an amazing role in our school to have time dedicated to come together to talk about how do we create anti-racist schools our number one goal was to close the achievement gap and for ten years we did this by focusing just on academics and we realized that is not enough and that we really need to rethink our curriculum and rethink the culture of our school to be culturally responsive and to be actively anti-racist I see teaching as a very political act when we are engaging with our students whether it's on social justice issues or multicultural issues or culturally relevant teaching I see that as foundational to all learning we are learning a lot about different issues in this world and what's happening around we're mostly thinking about racial and culture in my class and how we can change the future we have all of these different people that are activists we have gay people we have transgender people and we have people that are taking action and we're learning how to take action in social studies now in my school we can read books about people that has brown skin we've seen our students become empowered we've seen them see that even at the age of four that they can take an active role and be activists and so it's through this work that we realize that education without this conversation isn't going to make a difference for our children there are all these ugly things built into this philosophy so it's hard for me to be optimistic when I see it in so many places well I am optimistic but I take your point that it's hard to be optimistic and when you surround yourself with the readings and you go into that world it fills your consciousness and so all you see is it but there are positive trends the fact that we are now for the last five years talking seriously and overtly about postmodernism those kinds of conversations were not happening 10 years ago or 15 years ago so there's at least awareness and there's significant pushback by a significant number of smart people so Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Hyde and others are first-rate people and they're all standing up from different parts of the political spectrum like this is a problem and that's a good sign I think students are not stupid I think particularly those who go to university and they want to make something up their lives those students typically don't follow postmodernism very far they go into classes and they're saying I'm not really interested in a whole semester being told that I'm a bad person because of the color of my skin or whatever I want to do something so I think there's only disaffected people who by and large are significantly attracted to postmodernism and I think it's also interesting that as globalization has occurred wealth is rising around the world and there are all sorts of people who are very realistic coming from poorer countries and they want to make something of their lives and be prosperous and they're not going to buy into everything it's just a social construct and so forth it seems to be more of a disease of the rich western it's a first world problem there's a lot in India and actually I want to look into this with my dad country which is an African island Mauritius I think a lot of the postcolonial stuff moved into there by the Indian population so I mean it's there and it's a way to capture some form of power in those countries I think human beings particularly younger people they want to do something significant with their life there's a lot of wealth there's a lot of opportunity we now have the tools yes institutions can be co-opted we also are very good at building new infrastructures and making a go of them it's just the fact that Facebook and Amazon didn't exist 20 years ago and neither did Google 30 years ago now I suppose it is we can do that again bricks and mortar matter but also we're also very good at building new bricks and mortar institutions so the fact that smart people are turning on postmodernism and trying to develop alternatives and attack it the rising generation they want to do something with their lives and we've got lots of tools I don't think we should give up I think we should be optimistic good there's a kind of relaxed relaxed wisdom there that I'm going to try and embody alright well good luck with your film project and the grievance studies work that you're doing with Bokassian and Lindsay that's important stuff thanks mate it was really good to speak to you alright bye for now in trying to expose Germany's hidden past they had unearthed something far more complex and far more sinister than they had bargained for I had begun to realise that fighting against the state by armed groups with this revolutionary strategy in mind was bringing up fascistic and dense tendencies in the reaction of the political class but the people too we ourselves became in the same way fascistic as the fascists were we didn't realise that our enemies our opponents are human beings this is what is in the hard fascism the oppression of other meanings of the political opposition and oppression means oppression we understood something we understood that fascism is a component in all of us