Repressive Tolerance

[Occam's Banana]

[RELATED: Critical Theory threads]

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[TD="colspan: 3, align: center"]Repressive Tolerance Series[/TD]
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[TD="align: center"]PART[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]TITLE[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]VIDEO[/TD]
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[TD="align: center"]1[/TD]
[TD]How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]POST #2[/TD]
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[TD="align: center"]2[/TD]
[TD]One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Herbert Marcuse and the Administered Society[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]POST #3[/TD]
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[TD="align: center"]3[/TD]
[TD]Repressive Tolerance: Left Good, Right Bad, What Could Go Wrong?[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]POST #4[/TD]
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[TD="align: center"]4[/TD]
[TD]Critical Theorists as Grand Inquisitors: The Logic of "Repressive Tolerance"[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]POST #5[/TD]
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[TD="align: center"][/TD]
[TD]How the Woke Fail the Paradox of Tolerance[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]POST #6[/TD]
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[Occam's Banana]

How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 17 (26 January 2021)

Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 1 of 4

We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails. That’s because it is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the right, that broken logic is centered in the no-longer-tolerant left. The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is “Repressive Tolerance.” The thesis statement of this essay can be boiled down to “movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.” This asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960s, and we’re living in the fruit of that catastrophe now.

To help people understand this vitally important and intrinsically totalitarian essay and its relevance to our present moment, James Lindsay walks the listener through Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” in a four-part lecture series. In this series, he reads the essay in full and attempts to make clear how it is the logic underlying the present moment. The goal is to explain the essay as Marcuse would have understood it, in his own context, and to show how his own logic has become dominant and the monster that he believed he was fighting.

In the first part, Lindsay begins by framing the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to give background on Marcuse. He also explains that Marcuse seems to be attempting to give a solution to Karl Popper’s famous “Paradox of Tolerance,” which was provided as an aside in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, which analyzed how fascism can arise and overtake liberal societies. Marcuse’s answer to this conundrum is that a “discriminating tolerance,” a “liberating tolerance,” must be practiced that offers favoritism to the left and actively suppresses the right, as he defines them (from a perspective of Critical Theory).

https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/how-not-to-resolve-the-paradox-of:b

 

[Occam's Banana]

One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Herbert Marcuse and the Administered Society
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 18 (29 January 2021)

Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 2 of 4

In this second part of his annotated reading of Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” James Lindsay reads and explains the portion of the essay where Marcuse defines the “administered society” that he claims we live in. The listener will find striking parallels to today’s world, which certainly qualifies as the type of “administered society” far more accurately than the world that Marcuse inhabited in the 1960s when he wrote the essay, but paradoxically, or ironically, because it adopts the logic of this very essay as justification for its administration! This part of the series, then, raises particularly interesting questions about whether or not Marcuse would support the fruits of his own work and thus sheds interesting light on the problem we currently find ourselves in. It sets the stage for answering at the end of the series how we might go about solving this problem while avoiding the mistake Marcuse plainly made.

https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/one-pill,-two-pill,-red-pill,-blue-pill:c

 

[Occam's Banana]

Repressive Tolerance: Left Good, Right Bad, What Could Go Wrong?
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 19 (03 February 2021)

Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 3 of 4

In this third part of James Lindsay’s lecture series on Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” we see how the essay takes a particularly dark turn. Having set up the framing of the essay in the first part and explaining the condition of the “administered society” in the second, Marcuse now turns to answering the question of what a Repressive Tolerance should look like, including what it must suppress and what it must tolerate, including the sorts of violence and extralegal behaviors it must tolerate. The statement, which we arrive at near the end of this part, is simple, in Marcuse’s own words: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” In this part of the lecture series, Lindsay walks the listener through the darker part of Marcuse’s argument to show how he arrives at this blatantly biased and ridiculous conclusion that has set the stage for the totalitarianism we see today in Wokeness and from Big Tech.

https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/repressive-tolerance-left-good,-right:a

 

[Occam's Banana]

Critical Theorists as Grand Inquisitors: The Logic of "Repressive Tolerance"
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 20 (08 February 2021)

Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 4 of 4

In this fourth and final part of his four-part lecture series about “Repressive Tolerance,” James Lindsay takes the reader from the darkest point of the essay, which was the exciting climax of Part 3, through the end of Marcuse’s argument. In this part, Marcuse dedicates the rest of the original 1965 essay to explaining why it is him and people like him (that is, Critical Theorists) who get to decide what constitutes good violence and bad violence, truth and falsity, liberating tolerance from the kind that must not be tolerated and must be suppressed. In our own time, it is the Woke and the high-powered elites in government, media, education, and law who have taken up this mantle of being able to decide, in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse, what must be tolerated, no matter how bad it is, and what must be suppressed, no matter how legitimate it is. The parallels to our own time are undeniable, and, as Lindsay has claimed throughout, the unavoidable conclusion is that we live in the asymmetric and totalitarian logic of “Repressive Tolerance” today.

The second half of this episode leaves the essay itself and dives into a postscript to the original essay that Marcuse added three years later, in 1968, after the logic of his essay had already caused innumerable riots and episodes of civil unrest at the end of that tumultuous and transformational decade. In exploring this postscript, we see Marcuse sticking to his guns, but we also see just how blatantly obvious it is that his repressive tolerance has become the monster it sought to slay, which sheds considerable light upon what some people are now calling “the Great Realignment” in our societies, cultures, and politics.

https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/critical-theorists-as-grand-inquisitors:4

 

[Occam's Banana]

How the Woke Fail the Paradox of Tolerance
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 21 (11 February 2021)

In 1945, even as the Nazis fell from power, Karl Popper told us how to find the line where free, liberal societies are in imminent danger in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, most simply summarizing a crucial part of the argument in a short footnote about “The Paradox of Tolerance.” There, Popper lays out a short summary of when a free society should and must not tolerate intolerant movements if it is to survive. It is not only when they espouse and preach intolerance but when they also cease to be amenable to reason and rational debate, forbid their followers from listening to reason and rational debate, cannot be held in check by public opinion, and encourage their followers to respond to arguments with “fists or pistols,” i.e., violence of some form or another. I contend that the Woke, uniquely, have crossed this line in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast. They are absolutely intolerant, will not debate or listen to alternative perspectives, and, unlike all other hate movements that fail those two criteria, have grown to be completely unchecked and uncheckable by public opinion. This places them outside of the range to which tolerance should be extended in free, open societies, and it identifies them uniquely as a threat to their continuance. Join me to hear my argument for how Karl Popper warned us in 1945 so that we might see this situation when it arose.

For more on the idea of tolerance, check out the entry on “tolerance” in my Critical Social Justice Encyclopedia and check out the four-part series on Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” on the New Discourses podcast. [see post #2 to #5 above - OB]

https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/how-the-woke-fail-the-paradox-of:4

 

[ClaytonB]

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/LPNH/status/1641600656082456577

https://twitter.com/LPNH/status/1641610776145166336

 

[Anti Federalist]

Thanks for posting that, although I doubt anybody will read it.

We are in the middle of a Marxist revolution.

My question is this: is there any society or nation state that has withstood such an attack and survived?

 

[Occam's Banana]

We are in the middle of a Marxist revolution.

My question is this: is there any society or nation state that has withstood such an attack and survived?

All of them have survived, in one way or another [1] - just not in the form in which they previously existed, and not without first experiencing injustice, suffering, and death on a massive scale.



[1] In the limit, Marxism is self-annihilating. That's the ultimate "white pill" - even though it may be bitter as hell.

The white pill summarized in a single meme:

 

[ClaytonB]

 

[Anti Federalist]

 

[Anti Federalist]

It may be too little, too late, but people are finally starting to wake up.

https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1642223133594640384

https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1642222800340504580

 

[osan]

How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 17 (26 January 2021)

Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 1 of 4

We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails. That’s because it is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the right, that broken logic is centered in the no-longer-tolerant left. The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is “Repressive Tolerance.” The thesis statement of this essay can be boiled down to “movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.” This asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960s, and we’re living in the fruit of that catastrophe now.

The real question this raises is this: Why, oh why, did non-left America, erm... tolerate this rank, low idiocy and evil? Once again I must point out that the greater evil was not, in fact, the left, but was manifested by those who failed either to ignore the nonsense and implied threat, or hunt the perpetrators to terminal ends. The rattlesnake cannot be blamed for biting because that is what they do. We, the people who so sanctimoniously profess our love of and devotion to freedom are a raft of liars because when that liberty is threatened, rather than find the source and beating it to within an angstrom of its life, we comply; retreat; demur; recede, give in, *** out in embarrassingly shameful form. We are the real problem, not those who do the only things of which they are capable, which is to encroach upon and tyrannize by whatever means with which they are able to get away. Sure Theye suck, but we suck far, far more.

As for resolution of the paradox at issue, this is yet another question the gratuitous drama of which is idiotic on its face precisely because the answer is so simple and obvious: one tolerates the tolerable and nothing other than that. It ain't rocket surgery, but once again individual corruption of the sort that evades all responsibility at nearly any cost manages its magic here through the employment of overwrought, pedantic false logic that obfuscates the glaringly obvious answer, leaving people wandering hither thither with their heads in their rectums, wholly bewildered and missing that which which is waggling its willie in their faces. These left-bent foobs tell you right up front that all things they approve must be tolerated and you don't have the sense or courage to dope out whether what they say is valid. You *** out in spectacular fashion the moment they begin threatening, when in fact you should dare them to raise their hands, laughing in their faces when they slink away, or smiting them with extreme prejudice if they prove foolish enough to make good.

The ostensible good guys in this play are the real problem, not the marxists. We should be ignoring them or, barring that possibility, beating them further senseless, or in the most extreme cases, killing them, a resort to which I have absolutely no compunction when the conditions call for it.

We are a lost people. Seeing and understanding without the requisite courage and moral cloth to take correct action in response to serious threats seems as the ultimate in decay. We who know better have no excuses. Indeed, we are the worst humanity has to offer, so far as I am concerned because we waste our understanding on ineffective action as we bitch, moan, expose Theire crimes, yet accomplish nothing toward excision of the cancer.

It amazes me that anyone could fall for the false logic of this so-called paradox.

 

[osan]

...“Repressive Tolerance...”

Craftily written - technically poor, yet holding strong appeal for young people seeking ideals that promise much and appear to ask little or nothing in return. The essay is rife with bullshit, taking partial truths and mixing them in ways that seem to speak of a noble cause that, if examined more closely, we see is at best vaguely painted. There is no dearth of implication with no meat to back it up. The logical fallacies of blind assertions are many. Given how wildly successful the messages of this essay have proven over the years, a grand subtext, perhaps an unintentional result, is that any sufficiently worded body of raving bullshit will seize the minds of enough people such that vast and highly destructive changes result... in time. The "left" has by all means taken the long view approach. What else were they to do? Looking at it from their standpoint, they hd nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Viewing this essay in the greater context of the past fifty years should lead one to justifiable fright. The authors did a good job of capitalizing on every human weakness, and look where it has taken us. We are being actively and blatantly consumed, like a great Cape Buffalo that has been taken down by a pride of lions, watching its living self being eaten from the back-end, forward. We've lost the sense in precisely the ways depicted in the essay, watching ourselves destroyed, refusing to hunt and kill those who destroy us.

We don't love liberty. We love bullshit that sounds cool, our collective suicide notwithstanding.

 

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: New York Times reporter spat on for "trying to eliminate trans people."

 

[Occam's Banana]

"Repressive Tolerance" in a nutshell:

 

[Occam's Banana]

 

[Occam's Banana]

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