this is true, but elsewhere i have heard Zizek more or less cynically praising/endorsing the starbucks approach as more realistic than naïve dreams of leftist revolution. so idk our boy Slavoj is all over the place on that one lol

@@priapulida stop spamming.

@@priapulida Im gonna have that quote on a shirt one day

@@priapulida What falsehoods is he peddling? I missed them.

I Like GUMMO

yes, this professor has an authentic and sincere profile on youtube as he analyzes profiles for authenticity and sincerity. There's a Gödel joke in there somewhere, probably; proof left to reader.

Rainbow Capitalism! Have you heard about the REI Union Busting meeting that begins with everyone introducing themselves with their pronouns and then also acknowledging the First Nations peoples land they are speaking from?

@@toddthing i have not but i work at a health clinic ( in the united states ) and I have recently been accepted to participate in our "IDEA Council" standing for inclusion, diversity, equity, antiracism. my suspicion was that the council likely consists of mostly upper middle class white ladies talking to each other on zoom about how terrible racism is without actually doing anything about it. after our first meeting as a cohort, my suspicions have been more or less confirmed, however i'm trying to keep an open mind. it's a wonderful synchronicity tho bc shortly after the meeting i watched this video and learned that jordan peterson quit his tenured position like a baby in reaction to an insurgent leftism that does not exist, and that "woke" ppl should "DIE" or something. subtle, mate. real subtle... 😒

@@toddthing that sucks a lot. especially bc REI is supposedly a co-op. nothing is sacred.

Insurgent leftism + rainbow capitalism = the current state of matters? A dove tail of interests? I dont know if the synthesis of the two would be more or less to worry about. I dont even really know the depth of the problems becuse the clamour of the culture war.

Sure, but why is the market woke, and demanding wokeism?

@Jo Jo Wokeism is a product of neoliberal capitalism....it is cultural neoliberalism

The whole point of the video is to show that acedemics turns into an industry, is corporatized. It is presumed from the beginning, that things like wokeism are used formost in companies (to create a profile of moral goodness) and that these developments are now also taking place in academics.

He HAS said that already. This video is about academia, but he's given plenty of examples of business doing this in other industries as well in the course of his other videos. The CIA example mentioned in the first comment for instance, was extensively covered by this channel in their previous videos on wokeism.

The sensitivity training was so bad and the managers were absolutely not qualified to teach it (legit one manager complained about being a red head). We got all this “3rd place” training while they casually cut labor hours and decreased benefits.

Divide and conquer is a tries and true strategy to subdue a population. The frantics obsession with diversity and inclusion is no doubt a strategy to drive wedges between workers, so that they don't question the power of their employees.

Once you have eaten the bag of chips you cannot return it to the store.

@@priapulida "The woke rot" is non-existant boogeyman you made up instead of worrying about things that actually matter.

@@priapulida This is very funny to read. Go on I wanna see more.

@@priapulida let me guess, you're not involved with academia or research? neoliberalization and the 'publish or perish' mindset are by far the leading causes of the degradation in research by a long shot. that's not even going into the whole issue of private companies pushing fundamental research to the academic sector to maximize profit

Boys can be girls, education quality is nonexistent, degrees are pumped out indroves and required for jobs that shouldn't even require a 4 year degree despite that... sure, no problems to see, here.

@@priapulida maybe the reason why universities are - and always have been - so 'woke' is because they are places where critical thought and evidence-based positions are praised, and in doing so the majority of tenets of conservative ideology and its associated stunted social understandings are left in the dust

If we manage to see the Neoliberal endgame, then we would get there is no society and there are no people, just capital worth. As nice as it is, what you say still assumes that we are people.

Colleges partially or maybe even mostly exist to let job seekers advertise that they're good enough for potential employers. This was what I found and why I went back to school. After getting the right degree magically employers were ready to take me in. Despite all this, I will be sure to point out the waste that is college. You learn most things on the job

I definitely empathize. But it didn't use to be better. Universities may undergo a qualitative transition from traditionalist or authenticity based identity production to profilicity based identity production (if we are to believe Moeller). That doesn't mean things were better centuries ago. The secluded garden of free thought was never provided by any university. Free thought depends on free speech and protection from violence. Watching this video and commenting on it is the secluded garden.

If I've learned anything from Joni Mitchell, all things are deemed to be parking lots.

What rock did you live under? Why was schelling appointed as councillor, because schelling was religious and the young hegelians are scary. Why was husserl thrown out like a mad dog and Heidegger magically assigned a rector( a special event that happened in 1933).Why was Maurice blondel unemployed for the first couple of years of his life? Stop crying about the “woke mob” that ruined the everlasting and ever thinking western civilization and it’s totally unbiased thinking in universities.

@@massacreee3028 Here Here

​@@massacreee3028 still,it reveals who holds the lock and key for today's university, if it was conservatives back then it is capital today. i wonder if it could ever be truly unbiased?

It’s not a new argument, it’s common conception for Marxists even outside traditional academia. I’m sure the same could be said for some other movements/practices who act as adversaries to neoliberalism.

As others have said, he is far from the only one who says this. You can find a lot of people exploring this connection in different ways on Jacobin's KZfaq channel, for instance.

He isn't. Slavoj Žižek did it to Peterson's face, and Mueller and Žižek are friends I think. What is also not new is a complete failure to understand the problem Marx was responding to in the first place: it's not poverty! It's clear that Marx's primary concern was desocialization, and alienation, a systemic relocation of the human being away from being centered in community, to being a lone operator in the endless cycle of meaningless production. And that is precisely what we have today. Worst yet, neoliberalism has become adept at mimicking the inclusion of its critics voices by a seeming concession in the realm of culture - they're happy to embrace woke everything as just another stakeholder consumer whose niche tastes the markets can accommodate as long as the actual power firmly rests in the hands of the global capital elite and no concessions are made in the realm where they actually matter - no, not money - give the trade unions their pathetic 2% annual raise, hell, that's less than inflation in recent years, as long as you deprive them of the means of organization, since our corporate overlords now control it all - from this medium, to Facebook which is banning people for the very opposite of what they say, to their incessant buying up of public infrastructure for their terrible projects. Anyways, Angela Nagel was the first on this, even before Žižek. Glenn Greenwald, Prof. Wolfgang Streeck predicted this 25 years ago with his edition of "How will capitalism end." In it, he coined the now famous phrase so characteristic of our lives today: "coping, hoping, doping and shopping."

@Quizzer i see, i rarely watch Jacobin Channel nowadays, back then people still call this Wokism as Liberal left

@@vucko2885 as a marxist myself i already knew that wokism have a deep root with Liberal idealism rather than maxism, but rarely people point that out (even in the academia level)

People are impatient for change. The correct solution is to invest heavily in early years education in deprived neighbourhoods, which will yield results a generation later. Trouble is, this is too long term for it to be meaningful in an election cycle.

I don't think wokism does tackle those problems, what it does is take legitimate class issues and obscures them with race, effectively squashing any progress.

Well said, Franco! (See my comment above) Fraternal greetings from UK. 🙂

I think that the legal dimension also destroys wokeism in a sense that demanding things like "diversity declarations" when it should be completely natural to accept other groups in academia and in other social departments. For me it's like a simple human decency. But the world is unfortunately different.

Peterson is so mired into his own conservative prism that he often rambles nonsense, even admitting he never really read Marx but is all the more qualified to say it's all worthless because... lobsters I guess? But taking his rant as a starting point of critiqur should not be ridiculed, sometimes it's the extreme, the outlandish, the local buffoon, jester, that holds the key to start discussing things. Saying "Kermit Lobster bad, ERGO any reference to his nonsense makes your whole point invalid" is actually making him seem right because that's what he expects of you. But then again I just studied philosophy and learned how a serious critical debate should examine all the standpoints, not just the ones that serve your side...

I have loved learning about cognitive science in my time at university, especially from a philosophic viewpoint. I've taken quite a few philosophy classes from the old school teachers that you describe, whereas other humanities classes from the "new school" professors are usually complete garbage and lack any demanding engagement whatsoever. I don't believe the harder STEM fields are nearly affected as much, but I think the social sciences have been noticeably affected by the academic equivalent of "instagram guitarists" (I like that analogy by the way).

I feel the same problem in Europe (Portugal) secondary school but differently. I have an interest in many subjects related to the class but when I ask the teachers about something in-depth most of them don't know how to answer, they are not used to students having a humanistic side and curiosity. They are used to teaching what is on the curricula and for the exams. This is very frustrating when you are trying to actually learn and not just pass the exam. This is the reverse of what happens in university. Old teachers get excited about students asking stuff while secondary school teachers have such bad work conditions and are so used to the "customer" student that they no longer care about humanistic education. This is not what education in my country is supposed to be, our education is inspired by Edgar Mori...

Although we can't compare the USA to Portugal. In Portugal, this is an issue is due to other factors such as disinvestment in public schools and teachers... But also the commodification of education is growing, we are starting to see "universities" that work as a company and "wokism" in some public universities.

​@@miguelramiro3326 I'm Canadian and so I attended McGill in Montreal. I remember students searching for the easiest courses. They even had a nickname for these... If I remember correctly, "bird courses". I had read so much before ever applying to the program, I simply was using the courses as a way to learn, regardless of my grades. I couldn't stand repetition. Meanwhile most students around me took classes with overlapping material on purpose, to save time. To be honest, that's totally understandable if you're not confident already that you'll always do fine. But there were extreme versions of this I witnessed which really put me off. I was an older student in my late 20s. I had returned after initially doing 2 years of Physics and taking a long break between working and reading on subjects I thought could interest me. It turned out to be philosophy of mind and neuropsychology. Either way, the whole experience stifled my commitment to higher ed. There were a few aspects that really scared me off. I was not impressed by the level of understanding. I felt as though it was implied I couldn't get away with being so critical of dominant philosophical camps. Heck, the philosophical issue I was working on clarifying involved me exposing half the field as charlatans and people seemed to think that was innappropriate. As if I had to wait to play my cards only once I was secure in a position. I'm not exactly surprised by this, again, understandable, but it wasn't for me. I enjoyed confrontation and getting to the bottom of things regardless of the social taboos. I think I could have stomached it all and held my tongue when convenient had it not been for the insane wokeness. Even highly intelligent students I respected were two faced about political issues, or simply feigned ignorance or played dumb to serve some delusional narrative. It was often quite mean and cold-hearted. That really drove me away. Staying and biding my time before I could speak honestly felt like self-betrayal, a disregard for my own principles. I'm glad to simply have others to relate to on this because it really killed me at the time. My idealism died a painful death.

This reply made me view my own approach to studying differently, and so thank you for that. :) Years ago I got into reading about psychology, Kahnemann, Ariely, Ekmann, that sort of stuff. What left a deep impression was this differentiation between *symbol* versus *substance* . Symbol being the markers that other people could see and infer the substance was there (degrees, jargon, references, etc.) and substance being the Qualia, or the actual meat of the matter. It's hard to put it into words but if you're familiar with physics, it's one thing to talk about "enthalpy" and "increase in entropy" and "kinetic energy of the particles" versus what those fingers pointing to the moon actually point towards. Feynman shows this fantastically, so here's a clip kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rJmgjLWfmtCbn30.html. Your reply rings a bell that, with the younger generations, they've accrued the right *symbols* to make people view them a certain way. In Moeller's words, curated a profile of themselves as ambitious, intelligent and top-class individuals, and yet when you engage them beyond those symbols, you find a lack of substance - an actual interest in the matter and a curiosity to peer beyond the requirements of established degree track materials. There could be many, many reasons for that, for example the inflation of academic degrees, the increased pressures to curate a profile of yourself as an A-class student (which leads to less risk-taking and branching out - in a word, loss or degradation of academic freedom), and a bloating infrastructure of academic administration. I guess, when so much emphasis is put on profile markers, something is lost along the way that's much harder to qualify. Something that only becomes apparent with time.

Yet JP will still not get it

@@carlocporosus And doesn't follow his rule to "be precise in speech" himself

@@carlocporosus JP is financially incentivised to be blind. Like every conservative, every bit of intelligence that he has, he invests into indoctrinating people into his absolute dogmas.

@Stratos I I remember when JP was becoming famous it was because people were complaining that they can't find a job after their studies. JP made his career by telling those students to shut up and man up. Now that he's famous and has followers, these followers are telling him the same. But this time it's not their fault, it's those other guys that were complaining before. They are the bad guys now who are stripping the good guys (his fans) out of their jobs.... Don't you think that this is a bit... Nuts? The guy is the same Exact carbon copy conservative moron, as every conservative moron before him. He had no connection to reality, just his own biases.

@Stratos I it seems your bias clouds your thinking, you still belive there are only 2 genders...

Watching Peterson tell an anecdote where he tears up over some man stopping him in the street or whatever almost draws you in, until you see his dozens of speaking tours across the world with tickets costing over £100, or his interviews where he wells up like clockwork at the same things over and over again, and you realise "oh right, this is all just an act."

@@priapulida apparently a "grifter" is somebody who engages in petty or small scale swindling. That's not what I'm accusing him of at all. I'm saying he's a typical self-help guru using his charisma to peddle mediocre advice and make lots of money doing so. I suppose his USP is that he combines that with a shallow and inconsistent veneer of a political ideology that is just vague enough that nobody could ever accuse him of holding any particular belief. He's a performer, and a very successful one, but he's not profound; and that's totally fine, just so long as you're aware that that is what he is.

@@priapulida holy fuck, I'm sorry for insulting your dear leader dude...

@@priapulida you really don't hear yourself, do you?

@@priapulida These people will never streelman, and when you ask what they mean, they will say it's not their job to educate. Once they're the status quo, they push opposition underground, because they implicitly care nothing for logos, only power. I mean, they cynically say that's what they believe all the time.

Really loved your comment. Thanks

Great points.

God Dame this comment is in point , are a professor or something

Lots of good points in here, but I disagree with you about pre-screening professors for any wrong opinions that "may" affect their teaching. Imagine a professor who says, "I don't think trans women should compete in women-only sports." Is he banned? I know at least a dozen progressives who would declare this opinion transphobic and its speaker a "bigot." But the professor may well treat all of his students equally, regardless of their gender, assigning them grades on the basis of their work and participation, without prejudice. Assuming he's not teaching gym, the belief about women's sports has nothing to do with what happens in the classroom or with fairness toward his students. Should this professor be passed over, even if he is a good teacher without any animus toward his trans students? What about other situations where someone cries "bigot! bigot!" but the supposedly "bigoted" opinion has no effect on the professor's teaching? There is a huge swath of moderate, liberal, and even progressive opinion that the University considers verboten.

​@@ceruchi2084 I appreciate that you want to nuance this discussion, and I think it's valuable to consider by what criteria we evaluate a professor's ability to teach. I'm a recent college drop-out, so I don't have much skin in the game at this point, but my perspective is largely that of a student, and not that of an administrator or faculty member. I cannot speak for what is most desirable out of a new hire from the perspective a university or department. I do not assume by default any question that a screening process may ask, as those questions are driven primarily by profit within our current society. From my perspective, I have no knowledge as to the specificity of interview questions that any given applicant may have to answer for any given institution. My (admittedly naïve) assumption is that questions asked would be relevant to the position, and so someone exclusively teaching economics would not be asked about trans identity in relation to sports. This may seem to be a cop-out, but I wish to make the limitations of my perspective clear. I think that any institution asking about trans athletics for a position which has nothing to do with athletics would be a performative waste of time which has more to do with risk management than any genuine concern about transphobia. It sounds just as silly as asking a potential astronomy professor about who art grants should be given to. I never claimed any one position on trans people competing in sports was bigoted, as I figured dissecting the nuances of transphobia for each hypothetical applicant would become intractable. My main concern is that the bureaucratic deployment of ideological screening processes is more to do with the development of a compliant faculty than a real adherence to the beliefs implied by such screening processes. Anyone can talk the woke talk if they need to in order to get hired, and so a shallow screening process which polls for ideological purity ultimately doesn't guarantee that transphobes won't make it in. In my original comment, I suggested that true bigotry within a classroom is impossible to determine in our given paradigm. I don't like the industrial model of education which enforces market-oriented wokeness, and I also pointed out that professors very well may be unjustly called bigoted for innocuous or institutional decisions. The second-order observation of a belief as bigoted is given priority over the content of said belief, truly bigoted or not. Whether or not a professor's beliefs on trans students in athletics comes from a transphobic position is ultimately subsumed by the desire of an institution to build a certain profile in line with its profit motive. To directly address your first comment: if a professor said that about trans women while in the classroom environment, current-day students would call that professor bigoted, and any trans woman athlete in his class would feel like their identity was not respected. If a trans woman student athlete heard this, then they would not feel comfortable enough in that class to full express themself in a way that is in accordance with the learning process implied by bildung. If we're striving for bildung, then this situation is untenable. Whether or not this belief is transphobic is irrelevant compared to its perception as such, at least in the eyes of the university and in the eyes of students who feel like the university is a space to fully develop themselves as humans. Even if such a professor were to somehow separate their beliefs about trans people in sports from their beliefs about trans people in academia, contemporary students would not believe that the professor could do so. Also, as a student, my personal relationship with professors has had an outstanding impact on my grades, so much so that I have to belief that if a professor was bigoted against me I would have not gotten the good graces that have been given to me. So I don't really believe that within the real world the grading process isn't deeply subjectable to personal bias, and I believe that this understanding of grading as deeply subjective is held by many students today. The idea that a professor has animus towards trans women in some respects but not others is hard to swallow, inductively speaking. Like I said, no real arbitration of justice can take place for those who deserve it, whether they be student or professor. Screening for bigotry is contaminated by prolificity, and thus can't be taken to say anything about the true quality of a candidate. My point about not having a transphobic professor was directly to do with the classroom environment they created, not about the perceptions of this environment. A professor's teaching capability is in part determined by their ability to facilitate free discourse within a classroom. If a professor were to say "rap music has no real artistic value", then many black students would take that as a sign that the professor is close-minded in a way which suggests that their experience of rap as a rich genre of human expression would be denied. Thus, the humanistic element of bildung cannot be fully achieved. To be clear, I don't think universities should ask every professor about their opinions on music, but for an increasingly democratized/diversified student body (i.e. customers), the types of environments that universities must cultivate in order to appease their customer base coincides with whatever boundaries of inclusiveness the market demands. The *performance* of not being a bigot for the sake of selling a product is not distinguished from *actually* not being a bigot for the sake of good teaching. The whole hiring process is a wash from jump because of the industrialized model. To conclude, what is verboten by the university cannot be taken seriously until profit and prolificity is removed from the hiring process. To do so is to miss the forest for the trees.

Look up Eric Weinstein on what he calls the Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO), which came about after the Second World War. He puts the tipping point at about 1972, but the results only started to be overwhelmingly obvious a couple decades later.

@@alanlight7740 Thanks for the info!

if they signed up with the expectation of this cynical game it would be a different story but they did not. all of the work world and especially the academic work world is about 1 or 2 people deciding whether you are in or out. its the structure of the pyramid. if you want up you need to pass gate keepers. gate keepers that are Petersons enemies.

I think there's some confusion here. Peterson has not been employed at Harvard since 1998. The university he resigned from was the University of Toronto in 2021.

I think many of us simply do not want to be forced into promoting a one-sided worldview that confirms the biases of the consumers it sells itself to.

What's the alternative to neoliberal instiutions? I would say as far as you want to work in any institution this is par for the course.

I won't defend Neo conservatives, but you miss his point and pretend that you can read people's minds. The implicit belief that these values are arbitrary or in constant flux is the problem. A "disintegration of categories" is Peterson's words. i.g. nominalism.

​@@bradspitt3896 Disintegration of categories has, contrary to what Peterson states, nothing to do with marxism. In fact, it has everything to do with commodification of profilicity. If categories are being deconstructed, it is either for the pursuit of profit or for virtue-signaling - all in lieu with the current state of capitalism. Capitalism profits tremendously from postmodernism as postmodernism opens up the possibility of deconstructing an idea to basically mean everything - branding is an example of a true postmodern construct that is dynamic and shifts over time. Marxism would be directly opposed to deconstruction of categories - Marxism has it's historical narrative and thus every argument and thesis is teleologically derived from the idea of class struggle. Marxist thought ends when class struggle ends; thus in the realm of ideas there is an end. Postmodernism never ends, and promises a dream of eternal deconstruction, and thus, eternal growth of new exciting brandings, identities and profilicity to fuel the economic machine. The funniest thing about He Who Shall Not Be Named (JP) is that he's both extremely postmodern in his sophistry, and categorical as he actually has an historical narrative - a sort of Hegelianism i guess? Biblical?. Nevertheless, he's way less capitalist and more allike marxism in his methods (teleological derivation from his narrative of western thought as the be all - end all). Much less openminded than he'd like, as he's very eager to muddle his reasoning with his arbitrary ethics.

@@brorium Marxism isn't the problem, nominalism precedes Marxism, the belief itself goes back to antiquity but the name itself comes later. Marxism is a product of that, evidenced by the materialist metaphysic.

if that was the case he would be selling 1500 dollar carpets with woke slogans. dude is a ruthless capitalist but this is a matter of principles to him.

I want you to understand the profound irony of what you are saying. Mark Fisher literally committed suicide because (on top of his personal struggles) he saw how easily wokeism ate his field and consumed Academic-Marxism to the point where Professors in his area who were able to think critically and challenge Capital were outnumbered 20:1 by wokeists using Critical Theory and Marxist Dialectic to push Wokeism.

not to detract really from your point, but I gotta ask: was the increased cost of tuition or campus security something you were trying to do something about when there? and if not, why? full disclosure: I did not do anything about any of these issues when in college. I'm just curious whenever seeing people speculate about what *others* might have done differently.

@@dawaltco I tried to do something about campus security, which was speaking out against their actions at a meeting, after they had the police come and taze a student. Also emailed them, challenging their policies, etc. Also briefly, vocally protested to my fellow students about actions the college took that would raise tuition for students. But it was hard to know what else to do. And at 20 years old, I had no organizing experience as yet. So some things, but could have done much more in retrospect. But I don't really think you should need to justify yourself before criticizing activists' priorities. Everyone's entitled to an opinion.

I dont think we should pit these things against each other, though I can imagine that students (being one myself) rarely concern themselves with material interests of themselves, professors or staff if at all. I kind of caught myself there, though I have to admit that I just didnt know the state universities are in right now, especially in the country I am studying in, Germany. I only know the state of affairs as a student, with the little time I was in uni taken into consideration.

@@caesurios949 Students did concern themselves with those. That is in fact the basis of campus student politics insofar as it ties in with the larger national political scene i.e. student politicians associated with (or even part of) national political groups. But nowadays the youth in many places are so politically disinclined and apathetic that these campus societies have been sidelined, in favor of supposedly 'neutral' student tickets whose reach is limited to just the campus in question. Basically the young doesn't want to have anything to do with politics or politicians, including aspiring politicians. But its those institutions that effectively tied the university scene to that of the larger national (or even international!) scene. With their sidelining, these larger issues have also fallen away, replaced with only the minor causes that're the only things student association on campus can actually deliver (since larger socio-economic changes require a larger and more comprehensive movement behind them).

@@ArawnOfAnnwn I'd disagree when it comes to my own experience. As students in the social sciences, we generally are not apathetic to politics, and mostly advocate for the safety of poc, queer, or otherwise marginalized people while largely dismissing class and therefore the capitalist realities we and professors exist in, because theres always this liberal tint to our critique of capitalism. Even I am guilty of it, which this video made me realize very clearly.

I agree with what you're saying, but for me all examples you are giving are after brand 2.0, not before. I think you're thinking "profile" in terms of social media profiles? Which [I think] is not what is meant. It's about the brand selling a "profile", which is a phenomenon that [I think] is enabled mainly by mass media. Social media is just a more pervasive form of mass media that has made this even bigger. One example that I see cited quite often is the mac vs windows campaign, which was largely responsible for the apple/mac rebranding that made what it is today (one can say the product became a profile/lifestyle, not just a computer anymore), that was way before social media. My understanding is that before brands were focused on selling a specific product, the branding would be around "this is a good product". It gradually shifted towards selling a profile ("you are good if you use this product"), this shift happening faster and faster as media becomes more pervasive.

Take a look at the late John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of American Education". The dumbing down is deliberate - but it seems to have far exceeded what those who initiated it even thought possible.

it benefits low IQ folks so you are wrong

Yes thank you for making these points, coming from a student worker :)

In response to your first point (which is a great observation about the historical role of universities): I think utopian ideologies can be split into two categories: those which are based on the exercise and observance of inviolable principles (i.e. which focus on the means rather than the end) and those which tend to justify any means in the pursuit of their ends, as we can see wokeism does. Like other past cults & movements which have gone the same route, wokeism is bound to produce bad outcomes and reproduce the same kind of structural pathologies that we have seen before - the logical contradictions within wokeism are neverending and eventually either lead to staunch resistance or placid submission to the dogma of the group - neither of which are beneficial to society for obvious reasons. I think wokeism is in the course of setting back progress, as those holding the reins appear to take delight in aggravating social tensions, ostracizing massive segments of the population for no good reason, and shutting down the free and open sharing of ideas and information. These are not the moves of a faction which intends to assume a legitimate role within society by consensus, but rather by censoring and othering those who pose any kind of threat to it. With regard to your second point, all this desire for "value for money" on the part of students demonstrates is the already-complete ultra-commodification of education. If students think that forming witch hunts against professors whose views they disagree with is somehow going to get them more "bang for their buck" then... fine. That's not an education in thinking for yourself, though. You learn to think for yourself by engaging with the views of those you disagree with - given some fundamental shared assumptions and rules of inference, and basic rules of civility, otherwise the whole exercise is futile - an education cannot be purchased or attained by cancelling or hounding people who hurt your feelings by challenging your views out of a job. That is what cults do - silence and exile dissenting voices. Now, if people want to pay thousands of dollars or euros a year to go to the modern equivalent of a church for civil religion, fine. But I would urge them to consider the possibility that attending lectures and taking exams for 4 years doesn't give you some ultimate moral authority to lord over others, and that it may be possible for you, and others who think like you (as this is a belief system, not an empirical or deductive science) to be just as racist, hateful, and regressive as the people you claim to hate... as Feynman said, you are the easiest person to fool.

​@@paulcassidy4559 I don't agree with what you are saying at all. So lets start from the first point. Wokism is a reaction of adaptation towards the particular utopia that the university provides, its not the utopia itself. Wokism is a set of rules and set of rules (checklists, compliance and so on) are things that rulling parties in a particular social sphere wants to imply, because then they know what to expect, they know how to behave to reach a particular form of purity (of professionalism), student utopias don't. Now, the reason why I pointed that out was because most of the time someone points something is changing, most of the time it was ALWAYS changing and the particular person just happen to live in a transition period. And if you think about colleague campuses and "College" culture, you would see that for a while this utopia, I'm talking about especially in America was for a while male dominance and literal abuse over other students, the so called "frat" culture. And even then we didn't had this "open sharing of ideas" - it was simply the rulling thoughts which you should accept and that would lead to your acceptance from the professional society. Meaning it was probably never a "open sharing of ideas", except in someone's wet dreams. About my second argument it is not "value for money" at all. This is not what I meant. It is participation because you know that being in an university is not free and because of that you are no longer an obedient brat, whos university tuition would be paid by his incoming job in less than 10 years - you are someone seeking knowledge, looking to participate in a dynamic environment and take whatever he can from it. The authority of professors is no longer a given. They need to prove, they need to persuade their public that what their saying means something, that it matters. And this is a point which Peterson especially detests, because (if you have noticed) he relies heavily on his title for his bullshit to proliferate. The moment you don't take his title seriously (and you shouldn't since what he is saying is mostly out of his studies), then he crumbles in bullshit. And this is a huge topic, the topic that people won't accept some "strange" "quirky" and most of the time heavilly abusive professors without any form of protest. For example in one of the elite universities locally, there was a guy who had 20 years of teaching experience and was clearly telling racist slurs in his lectures for sociology and at times even using words directly from the book of Hittler. And just because here its not a norm to protest about such things and you just accept it and move on, the guy was dethroned just 2 years ago. And that's quite common. So its absolutely normal to expect that the person teaching you, should be able to persuade you why they are right.

@@priapulida The fact that Peterson helped many women and men as a therapist or through his self-help books etc. is not what most people have a problem with. The problem is his politics. The misinformation he spreads, building walls instead of bridges, seeing enemies everywhere. Whether he is a misogynist is questionable. I do not think that is the right label. However, I can certainly understand why Peterson is a controversial figure and not everyone is a fan of his, even if he did a lot of good as a therapist, which I do not doubt.

@@priapulida he literally said that the problem with women is that you cannot hit them. His quote was something like - "if you have a man in front of you, you know your boundary, you can hit him if he goes weird. And if its a woman you cannot. And there are so many crazy women out there." Mr. Feminist Icon himself.

Your last sentence is absolutely and completely SPOT ON.

Well said g

Many thanks for your interest in my books. “You and Your Profile” may be the best one to start. If you buy it from the Columbia University Press website and use the promo code CUP20 , you should get a 20% discount. I also strongly recommend Luhmann’s book “Introduction to Systems Theory.” As an introduction to Luhmann, I recommend Michael King’s book on him which you can download for free here: www.holcombepublishing.com/products/systems-not-people-make-society-happen --hgm

@@carefreewandering and your own book Luhmann Explained is 2006 but very readable 🤫😉

Indeed. The problem is not the business model of a university - universities have _always_ been a business. The problem is that the business model itself is falling apart, dominated by idiocy and short-term thinking, which itself may be a function of our monetary system with its built in inflation which favors the present over the future. Perhaps the Peter principle has been too much at play - too many useless people promoted to get them out of the way of the people who were actually getting things done, instead of being fired as they should have been. Eventually they came to dominate the decision-making process. Ultimately, in the pursuit of short term profits they devour the business itself and piss off all the customers they depend on, until they wake up one day to find the company or university bankrupt (though the administrators themselves are likely to come out well). Heh, Bernie Sanders's wife _did_ bankrupt Burlington College in Vermont. I'm sure she cries about it when she's at one of their three homes.

Thanks for writing. The philosophy club sounds like a very good idea-and existentialism is a great topic. You might want to do some Nietzsche and could use Walter Kaufmann’s “classical” edition “The Portable Nietzsche.” If you want to read something much shorter, a good text to start is Sartre’s essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” --hgm

@@carefreewandering Thank you very much. I have Sartre's essay and will now look into The Portable Nietzsche.

Start with Plato. It has been said that all philosophy is but commentary on Plato, and that is more or less correct. Also, Plato is direct and to the point, whereas most modern philosophers deliberately obfuscate what they are saying in order to appear more intelligent and relevant than they really are. For something more relevant to the modern world, Robert Nozick is good.

Compliance training preceeded the current "woke" generation in the US as well. It was far more present during the 1980s Reaganomics era. And even more present during the previous McCarthyism years. It was certainly present during the segregated all male, all white, all christian university system in the US for the past 150 years. It of course strongly present in the church schooling system that preceeded the modern day system and during the European enlightenment era academies as well. I'm sure the pharoahs also had their version. Professor Moeller is not upset that this the idea of compliance training is unprecedented, he's merely upset that he is no longer the pharoah. His demographic has been so historically privileged that he mistakes the loss of absolute power over campus culture as oppression. He is used to being the only voice in the room. Now that he's been marginally downgraded to only the loudest of many voices he perceives this as some fundamental shift in the very nature of the universe. This is white fragility at its finest.

Yeah, ideological tribalism exists under any sort of economic system.

@@yessum15 are you going to even pretend you can substantiate this sort of thing you are claiming. The idea that we had these sorts of mandated compliance trainings which are so focused on projecting the "group dynamics" into the individual (the whole point of DEI) is completely out of line with the actual history of academia/corporate HR.

Marxism-Leninism was abandoned after Kruschev, except maybe Albania.

@@RyanOManchester You're joking right? Virtually every era of history has seen some form of compliance training to support specific values and group relationships in the individual. How do you think we got here today? Typically these sorts of trainings were provided through specialized workshops, classes with ambiguous titles like "civics" or "personal development" or by going through mass produced propaganda material. Segregation ideology & practices were taught in schools, patriotism training, Catholic schools often teach a whole host of behavioral indoctrination training in line with their values, anti-communist teaching & loyalty oaths, abstinence education, homophobic education, and so on. Given that contemporary diversity, sensitivity, and anti-harassment training tends to teach relatively benign and pretty much universally agreed upon values, these represent far less of an incursion on freedom than what we've seen historically. These trainings can be more reasonably compared to basic "workplace safety" videos than the earlier eras' straight up indoctrination efforts.

The answer to your question: www.youtube.com/@newdiscourses/videos

He said *modern* university- you're not wrong, but universities now are very different from the pre-enlightenment ones

I'm 26 and in the same situation - no social media (other than KZfaq, obviously, due to having a Gmail account... but I'm planning to migrate off that ASAP as well). Personally I'm just very aggressive about staying in touch with people. Not online but in person as much as possible. It still feels like it's not enough but it feels like it's the best I can do.. I dunno. In any case, I comfort myself with the fact that the internet isn't real life. It's a different world entirely, and the older I get the more I realise I want as little as possible to do with it. Solitude also isn't the worst thing if you can live with it. That depends on the kind of person you are though. If I had give a piece of advice, I would say, double down. People like us are becoming rarer and rarer and in my experience when you're not as visible online it makes you more of a novelty when seeing other people in person. Hoping you find a way that suits you. Cheers!

Wouldn't this turn him into a self-help guru like Peterson

As a psychologist/psychotherapist I would like to hear his opinion, too. I would agree with the self-help culture and blame CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.) for it. They capitalise on the "Evidence-Based model" which isn't evidence-based at all - It is a marketing tool. Also, it isn't strange at all that CBT became the dominant modality in the USA in the 80s with neo-liberalism, and more recently in UK. CBT is not as popular in other European countries that don't have a neo-liberal market. If really look at the studies, it isn't working. I can go on-and-on about it but I will stop there.

I was under the impression self-help culture came from schools. I’ll have to find my notes later, but the culture doesn’t really inspire CBT with the “everyone gets a medal” or “we’re all equally amazing”. Some people in the field, that I’ve spoke to so admit my limits, don’t really care for the self-help industry and critique it more than anything. Wouldn’t mind being proven incorrect, I just take it that second wave therapy just so happened to coincide with self help without it being intimately related.

​@@kboci88 Also a psychologist/Psychotherapist but just started recieving my first patients in training right now. Ofcourse CBT will be "evidence based" as the whole method is designed to be measureable. The issue isn't that CBT has better evidence, but it's that other methods aren't accurately measureable, and thus it's meaningless to compare the methods. That's my understanding on the situation. And totally agree with you; I find behavioralism very interesting (partly because of the patient group i work with) but i would never for the love of my life discredit the effectiveness of psychoanalytically derived therapies.

@@brorium Congratulations on your first patient!! I wish you all the best because it will be a great learning journey. I agree - maybe my message was confusing. What I meant was that in the 80s when neo-liberalism was rising, CBT was the most suitable psychological modality for neo-liberal policies and insurance companies preferred it as it suited them better with the 12-20 sessions. This gave an advantage to CBT academics and they had more resources to conduct more studies, and they entered in conversation with policymakers as the therapy that works -at least more than other modalities, hence the 'evidence-based'. CBT grew both in research and reputation as the most effective model of psychological therapy. This is not to say that CBT is not effective. It is more to say that neo-liberalism commodified mental health through CBT, and unfortunately, CBT academics have played their part in commodifying mental health. Hope this clarifies my previous comment.

That potential does not exist anymore if it ever did. Would seem almost misleading to mention it.

What

@@fakenamerealchungus9851 You read me right, the whole gender categorisation, both traditional binary and liberal non-binary are trash. Both are brain dead and oppressive ideologies trying to push people in boxes and control their life. Creating more genders won't change it, the only solution is abolition.

awful comment

@@john_smith_john Lame comment

Do we believe that the perceived authenticity of our claims entitle us to something? Do we seek these entitlements? The right to belong to a community, the right to have an effect on the world, et al.

Your story about Habermas reminds me of a prof I had who made us read Gadamer and spun every passage she selected into some contemporary radical feminist rant. It was so forced, I used to have a hard time hiding my grin. It was genuinely hilarious.

Recognizing the problem is the first step. We just need to make more people conscious consumers regarding universities and the invisible hand of the market will create universities which do actually teach properly.

Many wont want to accept it because they can't through life, wanting to spend the least mental resources possible but still get the same recognition and respect. They want to be lazy.

There is still a lot of effort students have to exert, at a relatively young age, to get on that right track. I don't think it's right to characterize East Asian students as being coddled, if that was your intention.