This reminds me of Zizek's rant against Starbuck's Ethos water programme, a water bottle where when you buy it, part goes to helping thirsty children all around the world. This programme is of course not about helping children, but selling 'good conscience'. A good moral conscience has become part of the profile that companies use to sell products. As universities become corporatized, as you correctly point out, 'being progressive' becomes another part of the profile a university must sell. I think you could have added that universities especially must chose this particular branding, because their targeted demographic are young and progressive - if your target demographic are rural, non-educated and older, your profiling must of course be different.
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
this analysis nails it. i've been looking for a good breakdown of how "wokeness" - in academia as well as culture and media - is less what peterson calls an insurgent leftism and more "rainbow capitalism", or as you say corporate neoliberalism simply responding to market forces. well done and thank you sir 🙏
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... 😒
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.
Couldn't you also say that corporate capitalists have a stake in distracting their workers by having them focus on things like sensitivity training instead of giving them better material resources for living? I don't think it's a phenomenon seen only in academia. In the United States, Starbucks workers had to undergo racial sensitivity training years before they were even able to unionize. Good video
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.
I'm always extremely pleased to see more activity on this channel and wish you all the very best! For whatever reason, even though you might seem to keep a bit of reserved distance from the audience, you are one of the most "close" and "real" seeming UA-cam presenters and content creators around, and I appreciate so much all the effort made to make you and your work and expression available online and accessible worldwide, it is a tremendous gift! I like to check in on here to see how you are doing!
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.
When I went to high school, we had a somewhat novel track team. Anybody who wanted to join could join, and they could participate in any event they wanted to. The result was an ongoing spring fitness party where everyone got together and trained after school. There were many great achievers on that team, but everyone got to become a better athlete. This is the vision we need to fix our education systems, everyone can learn and grow, and a good educational system is one that provides as much education as it can to everyone it can. No need to convince the world you are worthy, just show up and do your best.
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
As someone who recently toyed with getting into the academic industry with a lot of post graduate study, the more and more I experienced it the more abysmal it became. The professor is right, universities aren't really about teaching anyone anymore, they are about selling products (degrees). Whether anybody learns anything along the way is secondary to the neoliberal university. If the product is purchased, they are really happy. Also the general appreciation of research by university administrators has declined so greatly over the last 30 years. Working in a university is about output output output. It is not about taking a lot of time to find great outcomes in your relevant field or pursuit. Plus new academic staff can expect to be only casually employed for year after year, with their contracts only being renewed for each teaching period, with no long term job stability at all. In some universities (in Australia), a lot more courses are being pushed online (with the initial pandemic being used as an excuse), with no return to face to face, with no lecturers being used for the course, just people who write the course and casual markers used. Of course, someone can still enjoy a good academic career amongst all of this, but it is becoming harder and harder to enjoy an academic career for learning and academias sake itself. Desperately need to bring back reform to view learning as a public good. Also trust Peterson to observe phenomena and radically misattribute the cause. It's basically his hallmark. But yeah, I wouldn't totally recommend a career in the academic industry at this stage.
@@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
Jordan Peterson-related content might get more engagement, but I would prefer to see your online brand gain more independence from his. Also, not that it particularly matters, but my favorite content of yours is the Philosophy in Motion channel, and I’d love to see more of that
Sometimes just one thumb up is not enough. I was a student of philosophy in Berlin in when this hostile takeover of European academic culture took place, and it was absolutely disgusting. Some professors rebelled, some became depressed, but most of them just adapted and tried to find out how they could improve their market value as fast as possible. But all felt clearly that this secluded garden where free thought could grow for centuries was being bulldozed and turned into some parking lot.
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.
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 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?
i live in a third world country and we are living this process between old university and new university. Very good insight in how commodification permeates everything
I remember being astonished by the culture in cognitive science at my university. Older professors were fantastic teachers, delivering their lectures with passion, but seemed distraught by the students fighting for higher grades but less work. If you asked questions about the material itself, if you were curious to understand, they seemed thrilled. I was almost put off by their shock and excitement. As an older and engaged student, this seemed insane to me. Not only was it easy to get good grades, but it was extremely enriching so it was very easy to dedicate time to these papers and projects. Many of the younger professors seemed put off by these same questions. Many seemed intellectually unqualified to me. It was hard to take them seriously. Some clearly got by with BS, copying slides or simply indulging politics in classes that allowed for that sort of flexibility (a minority of the philosophy classes I took). Something was very very strange. It seemed like there were 2 worlds. The old school which is now dealing with the new dynamics, the administration and the student culture, and clearly frustrated. And then the new school, which seemed intellectually inadequate and generally underinformed, but fit to be good controllable workers. I remember a professor giving me advice when I asked her what to do if I'm writing an essay in philosophy but would like to say what I believe, and what I believe is that her own understanding of the concepts being taught was faulty... and she told me straight up, "you're very smart and educated on these topics, but you need to take the scientist hat off and put the salesman cap on"... there were social standards she seemed to imply had to be met to make it. Years after leaving academia, I maintained my own studies of philosophy of mind on my own, and continued writing in private. I attended a free weekly seminar during the pandemic, one organized by a professor and some graduate students (one being an old friend). She invited me knowing my background, having gone out of my way to study all theories of consciousness in depth. My experience was again quite shocking. Graduate students who were working under these particular paradigms, presumably writing papers pushing the theories of their advisors, did not know much at all about their own ideas. They were mathematically inept, and seemingly incapable of engaging on their own subjects of interest. It seemed like I had interrupted an organized meeting where different people took turns reading the slides they had prepared. People would simply give compliments "very interesting, thank you" and clap. It was very strange and honestly shamefully useless. For those who play music, you might understand this analogy. The students today, and presumably the professors, have a product to sell, themselves. And so, what I think we have is a commodifiction of intellectual work, but this ends up giving us "instagram guitarists" instead of actual guitarists. They give you something seemingly impressive to non-musicians, a quick 1 minute lick with a bunch of bells and whistles (guitar tricks, fast playing, sweeping, tapping, etc) but might never be able to play productively with other musicians, or take the time to write something more substantive. The social/economic incentives have changed the game. Academic philosophy struck me as a show. It had become theatrical. Many of the participants, and the one's getting positions, didn't seem to think about the subjects they studied on their freetime. My hope is that this is a problem contained to the Humanities. It would make a lot of sense. But surely there must be bleed over into the STEM fields via social/cultural osmosis.
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 ua-cam.com/video/v3pYRn5j7oI/v-deo.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.
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 UA-cam 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."
@@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)
Professor Moeller as usual, brilliantly explaining the nightmare zeitgeist that we live. It is not that we can't see this BS but the transparent and simple way he explains in the way even a child can understand.
@@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.
This all intersects with the students' internalisation of themselves as commodities (you need to "sell yourself", don't ya?), pursuing degrees solely for the purpose of boosting their own marketability, with no desire for intellectual development, no awareness of the value of critical thinking. Their only goal is to pass exams, there's minimal participation (and the teachers don't encourage it, lectures are top-down practices, and they never alternate with engagement-oriented symposiums). Outside of the class, one hears nothing but juvenile frivolities, the subject of study is only ever raised when confirming what is needed to learn to pass the next exam. Homogeneity is near-absolute, no one dares to take risks, to challenge professors out of conceptual curiosity, all too disaffected, shallow, and subconsciously afraid they'll compromise their chances to get a job in an ever more precarious world. Fear, hopelesness and habituation are behind this sham. Oh, and greed, of course. Greed started it all.
This is so accurated!!!. Im a teacher in a private university here in Bolivia and all that was expoused happens. The idea of "commodification of education/instruction" is so brillant and terrible at the same time. Thaks for the video l..l,!!!
In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher pointed all this out over a decade ago. Peterson’s experiencing how neoliberalism will subsume anything it can in pursuit of profits. He can’t find it in himself to lament the process, he’s just angry that Wokeism is more profitable than neoconservativism. Too bad, so sad, get back on pills, Peterson.
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.
I many times find myself in a tricky position in these debates. Because on one hand i see many of the issues symbolic "wokeness" in academia causes, how it manifests itself in classes, structures debates and publications, on the other hand most of the critique that comes from namely figures like Peterson completely ignores many of the actual issues and historical structural wrong doings that are addressed and tackeled by "wokeism". I don't want to be in a position where I find myself defending superficial neoliberal social media ideology, (especially since european racism is a lot more complex and multilayered than it's american counterpart that drives the western discourse) but neither should modern christian capitalist conservatism ala Peterson be the driving force in any public institution or academia. I think "wokeness" is a arbitrary symptom of neoliberalism. Just like outlined in the video the underlying problems are profiling, brand building, faux-moralism, the job market, established industries and people actually buying into things like "nike being the good guys" because they have a POC as a spokesperson. "Wokeism" is indirectly reproducing the economic system with it's superficial symbolism but Peterson style conservatism just openly doesn't want it to change anyways, he just doesn't like it being diverse, inclusive or even attempting to be critical, because of 'brilliant' arguments like "that's against human nature and western values". Why not focus on the bigger picture without letting yourself get radicalised by conservatives?
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.
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...
Fall of the Faculty is a great text on point A), the commodification of the universities, in the United States at the very least. Edit: the point about distraction @22:00 or so is very well taken also. I remember being in college back in 2011 and some of the activists on campus really wanting to devote this huge push to making the bathrooms gender neutral. The anarchist / left-political population on campus that hung around the Infoshop got kind of dormant and this was their big comeback. It really puzzled me as to why they weren't fighting about the incredibly unaffordable cost of the institution we attended, instead, which made it inaccessible to virtually anyone from the working class. Or even the excessive presence of campus security that was getting ramped up more and more, and created an increasingly tense, oppressive environment.
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 recommend the last part of Erwin Panofsky's essay collection, Meaning in the Visual Arts. In it he discusses the differences between the German universities he knew from 30s pre-war Germany and the American universities he came to teach in during the 60s, after his emigration. It confirms and covers a lot of this stuff and is a grim glimpse into how long this stuff was in the making, wrt the commodification of academia. Panofsky was a complete humanist to the end, and he remained optimistic about the future, our present, but we all know how well that's turned out.
Academic bloat has been a huge issue from the 1990's onward, and the manufacture of positions for otherwise unemployable "acad elites" is one of the major erosion factors of quality higher education this century. Thank you for releasing this vid.
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.
Prof. Moeller, thank you very much! I am still watching this video, but your point about neoliberalism pervading the academia, struck me because I had myself some intuitions towards that direction. I will actually admit that it arose by listening to John Gray (uk philosopher) talking about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher.
I think that with regards to the development of compliance, there is an element of risk management for universities as well. There are genuinely bigots and those who abuse their power over students within academia, and they pose a risk to the brand of the university. The recent case of sexual harassment and its fallout at harvard come to mind, but there are numerous cases of professors creating environments hostile to certain students where bildung cannot take place. What's more, the ubiquity of social media means that cases of bigotry or harassment are far more likely to go viral, thus hurting the university's profile within the aesthetic economy. Here in the US, the legacy of segregation is still poignant. The (neo)liberal integrationist ethos in the wake of the civil rights era means that schools must plaster their landing pages and pamphlets with non-white skin in order to present the façade of this ethos. Here, an increasing demand for higher education coincides with both the industrialization of the university with the increasing necessity for a degree in the job market, as well as a further democratization of the types of people welcomed to the university. The top-down enforcement of the egalitarian aesthetic through things such as DIE statements often clashes with the human reality of professors causing conflict through their position of power over students. Any perceived fracture in the façade means resources have to be spent on damage control, because in the end, it's hard to believe that universities as institutions really care about bigotry outside of how it affects the bottom line. There is a pernicious double-action at play here. There are people within universities who truly care about combatting our social ills, and may really believe in developing an inclusive pedagogy. A lot of these people would have no issue with openly committing as such, at least at face value. It also seems reasonable to screen professors for views which may prevent them from treating students equally and thus preventing them from being a good teacher. You wouldn't want a transphobic professor at an institution which allows trans students to attend. However, the way by which modern universities realize this is through more bureaucratic hoops to jump through on the part of the professors. Any passion that a professor may have for social change is parasitized by the profit motive and marketing. So at once, the real energy and care that people have for the ideals of education is used by the ambivalent university as a selling point, while the risks and work are off-loaded onto the faculty, not all of whom actually care about such pursuits. While I mentioned the power that professors have in the classroom, it must be said that that environment is no longer as insular in the era of social media. Students increasingly function in a role of surveillance, much in the same way a customer surveils a retail worker. I've definitely seen viral posts of students with misplaced indignation, leading to the unfair targeting of professors for innocuous or institutional decisions. The real neoliberal rub is the blurring of the lines between a good product and a rewarding education. A petulant consumer and a marginalized student are formally identical within this paradigm. This allows for intractable argumentation about which of these moralized categories is correct in any given situation, and a PR strategy by institutions to wipe away both cases with the exact same procedure for each. No real justice for those who deserve it, and plenty of ammunition for conservatives to lambast the shallowness of university branding strategies. Though I bemoan the nihilism and superficiality of "woke" discourse, I appreciate this channel's approach to searching for the materiality of this discourse. Cheers!
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.
This is what the late Mark Fisher had to say (among other things) on the subject of "Academic Industry": "The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and measure forms of labour which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'." From chapter 6 (Titled "All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production") of Capitalist Realism
The university doesn't just sell the diploma, it also sells the experience of college. If it only sold the diploma it could save a lot on those buildings, gyms, sports teams, and soda machines.
Im an Aboriginal Australian. I love academia as in the pursuit of knowledge, warts and all. I freelance as a community researcher. Have worked short term for two Universities and two NGO's on projects. We don't do enough of it in our community. I have been lucky in that my work is focused on Aboriginal communities particularly the one I belong to and live within. My areas of inquiry as a researcher so far is in Family Violence and Mental Health. What is maybe surprising to those outside of truth seeking is that many members of the community I have engaged with are sick of the glossing of issues that are affecting them. In the course of my work, all have seen the sources around these issues to be internally manifested, intergenerational and damaging. They seek to have a more honest acknowledgement of its source and manifestation within our communities. What has let our community down is this broad spectrum framework that State agencies develop priorities and fund which has no bearing on the lived realities of communities now. This 'wokeness' permeates all policy priorities with no tangible local application for communities desperate to take on their issues in an honest way.
Thank you so much for all of your videos. Everytime I watch one of them I feel like I'm being exposed to a fresh perspective. It helps me a lot to think about my own studies and I have even used your academic material on some of my graduate papers. I wish you all the best! :)
One thing i find frustrating about the uni set up at the moment is the way classes are structured. With the ammount of units you take on to do full time and the assignements neccesary in those units, i find that the classes become secondary, if not irreleavant. By the latter half of the semester not that many people are keeping up with class content, they are just trying to get there assignments done. This is not a problem of laziness but of structuring. Surely, there is a better way to do it. However, saying that my experience with humanities and the teachers has been overall really good, even though everything said in this video is true. There is still some really amazing things going on in the humanities and i am so happy to have been studying this stuff, and to have a spot to study it.
Currently involved in labour disputes as the colleges in Ontario, Canada negotiate our collective contract and what's unfortunate is, as aware of how much the neoliberal agenda has our system in its grip on the one hand, the wokeness is seen by many faculty as a way to counter that agenda and not a result of it. I could never show my colleagues this video and have them take it seriously as it references Peterson but thanks Prof. Moeller for the cogent arguments. Perhaps I can effect things through conversations. Hearts and minds.
Do you remember the story of Peter Higgs? He took two different pieces of physics worked on by others and put them together and postulated the Higgs boson must exist. The maths he tried to publish was the proof. The paper he submitted was a few equations which occupied 3/4 of a sheet of A4. It was probably one of the most important things ever to be refused publication. In today's idiot world he would have been thrown out for not producing enough work. Sometimes the shortest of writings are the most profound of the lot. In another time long ago lawyers were also paid by the number of words they wrote. This was revised for good reason!
Your content is always really interesting! :) I must say, though, that I really thought, from all the readings that I had gathered, that there was already a symbiotic symbolism implied in the notion of brand, even before the brand 2.0 (or profile). How could the brand not be impacted by the public or the persons who associate with it? That seems to be the reason why the director of the clothing brand "Abercrombie & Fitch" wouldn't provide clothes in XL or XXL sizes for women, because people they deemed ''uncool'' would otherwise ''tarnish'' their brand. The people who associate with a brand (like rappers wearing Timberland boots that were initially designed for workers) change what we think of a brand, and therefore change the brand. Or at least that's what I thought! 😅
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.
Excellent analysis. Nowadays universities are no different from brands such as cocacola or apple, and "wokeism" is the easiest way to increase their ESG score and become more appealing for investors
Thank you for your enlightening content, as a "minority" it's a strange thing to reconcile when you agree with those who say there are issues but the same people you are in agreement with view YOU as the problem. There is something definitely wrong with education- it doesn't feel like its about learning or "bildung" , to call it left-wing and anti-white seems insincere because education these days seems to benefit no one
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.
Only problem with that though, what so many people think is making money currently is kind of starting to plummet. They’re essentially diluting them selves into continuing to pander to something that’s getting less and less interested in those things. Most people are sick of this and there’s very few people with this mindset left.
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.
Selling degrees... Interesting idea. Reminds of the economic model of signaling. Meaning we essentially provide a marker of how much time we can afford to put in something to reflect our value. This always seemed weird to me, but now I think I get it.
Really awesome video, Professor. I do have some critical points though: 1. Universities, as a historical project have always carried a utopian function - campuses have been always engaged in knowledge, in discussion, in seeking, an institution independent of the government and the governmnet agenda. Thus, I believe that this embrace of wokism - but more likely, this exercise in care about the political inside the university but also outside of it is something that has a huge history and not one or two revolutional movements have their roots in the political energy of the students. Which leads me to the second observation: 2. The Universities are a joint effort or in your language a joint profile - its a collaboration between students and professors. Add the more and more increasing tuition fees, the working students that somehow find time for university as well, and I believe that the outcome is that the students themselves feel more responsible about the university they are studying in. Thus, I don't believe its that strange to see students rejecting professors because of they are paradigm of teaching. If you are a known missogenist as Peterson, its only obvious that students working 30 hours a week to be able to afford the university would want you out of it. They will strive in enjoying what they are paying for.
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.
I think it would be interesting for you to make a follow up video analyzing the boot camp trend that has really been taking off. Training people for short term jobs, promising them a prosperous career in return for the student going into a large sum of debt with the boot camp when in reality it would be better to just go to a university and get a degree.
What you need to understand is that the accademia operates as a parasitic monopolistic system within the greater parasitic monopolistic system of the world. Therefore it cannot reveal the origins of most all human-generated misery on the planet as it itself is operating as one of those mechanisms that is contributing to the overall misery of humanity. Monopoly over economy and monetary unit are the main ingredients we used to determine the misery index and this is so despite the fact that the actual misery index is calculated factoring and the unemployment rate and rate of inflation as these two mechanisms are more deeply embedded in Monopoly over economy and monetary unit. It is the opposite thereof that you require which is economic freedom and a sound monetary unit to represent a store of your labour that allows you to demonstrate your ability to be free. Naturally this is something that your professors cannot and will not tell you as you will then have the answer to most all social problems, but rather what you got from them is the symptom what's wrong with society and not the root cause of what ails Society I'm afraid the facts don't care about your feelings on this matter if your opinion differs from this actual fact of our reality and how this world actually operates. You do not require a tinfoil hat to understand that all monetary systems in the world are in the hands of private family is they force every government to borrow from them and that an interest for which the people who ultimately become indebted to this massive ever-growing debt find themselves unable to pay it back and ultimately find themselves back at square one starting all over again or back to the actual Plantation one huge massive superfreakonomics Cycles complete their process. All throughout history we can see every economic boom bust cycle what's caused by government policy with the convenient effect of transferring most all wealth from the majority to the minority from time to time. That which we used to store the value of our past labour is simply just a coupon backed by nothing and subject to massive inflation and ultimately reduce to the purchasing power of zero in due time just like all currencies throughout history that were backed by nothing and that their intrinsic value of 0. This would have the effect of wiping out massive amounts of collective wealth from the majority stealthily transferring it to the very few anointed and privileged I'm sorry I have to be the one to burst your bubble on your perspective and perception of reality, but somebody's got to do it because the only thing your professors are going to do is help you remain at the mentality of a child by giving you colouring books and teddy bears, and this will not help you in the long run. Feel free to give me a thumbs down or thumbs up so that I know I was not censored. Also feel free to reply with genuine comments. You're welcome
I only have anecdotal experience of this, but my experience in academia at an elite research university is that aspiring academics appeal to their identity to climb the ranks, receive funding, and unburden themselves of responsibilities that might otherwise be required of them. I'm very cynical at this point of certain iterations of identity politics as little more than middle-class social climbing.
From listening to your analysis, It seems as if Dr Peterson's ire is not with the neoliberal university paradigm per se but instead to do with the clash between his own profile and that of his university. As being the most famous anti-woke intellectual, Dr Peterson's profile is not compatible with Harvard University which maintains a so-called "woke" profile. If the University's profile hadn't changed to be irreconcilable with his own, then he would probably be quite satisfied with it. I don't really see how Dr Peterson's white male students are objectively at a real disadvantage in their future career prospects though, studying under such a famous yet divisive figure can be leveraged both ways under profilicity. If they happen to agree with the ideology of woke universities they would just need to curate their woke profile astutely to counter the presumption of being anti-woke. On the other hand If they happen to be ideological disciples of Dr Peterson they can find prospects in conservative media and think-tanks.
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.
Every time Jordan Peterson glimpses his shadow, he takes to the internet to project it on others. His platform makes him a fascinating man, but for all the wrong reasons.
I agree in some points, but the main problem for me with your lecture is the notion of suffering. I think that capitalistic energy in the case of "wokeism" is trying to use it to cover real economical difficulties, but also trying to make it homogenous as possible - once again use it with instrumental rationality. I think "wokeism" springs from real pain and suffering of many students and also people around the world, from racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia. Its main goal was to open the world and society to particular, to heterogenous, without categories. To see Otherness and radically feel different. (On the other hand - there is Fear of loosing oneself in this Other - threat to rational categories and known which causes strict racist/homophobic reaction.) Opening heterogenity is also threat to capitalism so it is trying to tie it into categories and, as you suggested, in profiling. It would be interesting if you could also include the concept of suffering in your next analysis of wokeism (I missed it in previous videos as well), because now it looks that there are no real social problems from which "wokeism" emerged and those people who are suffering are just making it up for branding.
Thank you professor - I really like your channel. As a post-graduate from one of the 'top 20' universities in the world that is based in the UK, I was disappointed and frustrated by the whole experience. I went with such high expectations and got them crashed in 3 months. It wasn't about reading, debating ideas, criticising theories,. It was about money, prestige, and safe spaces. I remember that at the time there were even planned strikes about pension schemes that the university was going to cut. To distract people from it they became louder about LGBT issues. Classes were superficial and I remember one of the lecturers discussed Habermas's theory and didn't know what they were talking about - just parroting interpretations about Habermas and Foucault. My hope is that universities in Europe will not follow the Anglo-American model - unfortunately, Netherland is getting closer and closer which is worrying for me.
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.
super)I added this to my thesis, as did the promotional video of my university, where my professor promote that at this univercity they teach to select right simbols :)
Hi Professor, I was wondering if you could provide me with some advice/suggestions. I am a US history high school teacher. I recently made a casual suggestion that I would start a philosophy club, without expecting any students to press me on this. Well, a couple of students have, and now here I am...asking for some suggestions of where I should begin as I don't want to negatively present philosophy with a bad first impression, turning them off. With this club I'm hoping to sincerely spark interest in philosophy. At this point I'm thinking of introducing existential philosophy, but even with that I'm not sure how to go about it. Any thoughts? Thank you.
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
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.
Like the rest of the comments here, I really like the content on this channel. I like how the lecturer synthesize different social scientific theories to expand on current events and social trends.
I do truly enjoy the way you break down the component parts of what is also a complex living system, or symbiotic relationship between enterprises and the people who attach themselves to them. Just now when you ended this talk I laughed at the Warning symbol about the fact that this platform, UA-cam, is constructed to be addictive and to promote this channel. And it was extremely funny then because one could say that similar elements for profiling exist here as well, in the subscribers, likes, and views...as well as comments ;). I think you are aware of this already though, I just found it funny that at the end of this video you also said, "you are a part of this too." Please continue to create material. Another professor who creates material on youtube is Wes Cecil - Humane Arts is what he calls his channel. I find him also very insightful. He has also commented on Education and historical classification systems.
Professor Moeller, I'm very interested in your work and would like to buy some of your books. Most of them are a bit expensive though. When it comes to social theory as you discuss in your videos, which of your books would you recommend someone start with? I'm leaning towards "You and Your Profile," but also interested in Luhmann and don't know where to start with him either? Thanks!
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
One again the professor 👨🏫 telling it like it is ! 👏🏻 You have a huge capacity to see “through BS” professor. I am grateful for what I’ve learned in your channel. Even though I’ve discovered that I’m basically FuBaR in this Profilicity age 🤷🏻♂️ I don’t have an internet profile. I wonder if you could talk or reflect on what can people like us do in this new order of things (middle aged people who’ve worked all their life, but don’t have profile on the internet, only a few real human connections, we have some experience and knowledge but no URL to “prove it”) how can we face these new challenges? How to live within this new order?
I'm 26 and in the same situation - no social media (other than UA-cam, 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!
Excellent analysis. I think JBP gets so caught up in his 'post-modern neo-marxist' rhetoric he misses the problem right in front of him. The profile building that's part of the modern university experience is certainly part of the neo-liberal tale over of the universities, but I think people often overlook an equally important aspect in the network building. Universities are more and more the gatekeeper to the middle class job market. Having a strong profile is nessecary to accessing this job market, but the environment is so competitive now that it's no longer enough to have a strong CV, you need to know people. It creates a kind of nepotistic job market that makes it easier for companies tofilter for these DIE compliant workers.
well, the Professors are also being evaluated by people (administrators) who are not qualified to evaluate the Academic work, so they change the focus to quantification on a seemingly trivial basis.
Appreciate your videos. I don't know how to feel about your argument. Diversity is a genuine problem in academia; as a person of color in higher education I see very little diversity. Representation is important. I would love to live in a post-race world where these inequalities that "wokeism" brings to light are just a matter of "profile building," and I believe we need to work towards a reality that "wokeism" isn't needed, but the construct of race has a major impact on people right NOW--on a personal and institutional level--and we need to consider that. Regardless of "wokeism" this is work that needs to be done. I agree it's not always done in a healthy way. I am also skeptical of wokeism. It's definitely a corporate godsend, an easy way to shed off any responsibility to the unequal landscape corporations and people in power have created (higher education INCLUDED). I think that's why my generation (late millennial/early gen z) seems to have a distaste for any company who tries to promote BLM or social awareness. It only irritates us and infuriates older white people who are unwilling to question the social structure they grew up in. This is why we need people to talk about it with a level head. I would argue you are one of those people! People like Jordon Peterson are angry that we are questioning the structures that have perpetuated these issues, and he ties himself closely to this structure and takes it as a personal attack when we question values that have been carried down generationally for centuries. Sure, "wokeism" makes it often overly simplistic, but the fact of the matter is the role of public thinkers is to constantly consider the invisible forces that shape society and question them. Jordon Peterson seems to glorify them instead.
Your work is always extremely interesting and, to me, unexpected. I feel there is some kind of conceptual convergence between your work and the work of French philosopher Frédéric Lordon that attempts to reframe social sciences through Spinozian concepts. Your concept of profile feels like the concept of affective complexion publicized while retaining all its properties (e.g obsequium as joyful obedience).
Quite the corageous video, sir. It just might be that Harvard would be slightly apprehensive of hiring you after this! Thanks for the great video yet again.
I taught at an Indiana, USA “university” for 6 years. I was a contract faculty member. University hired me with the promise of a tenured position eventually, because what I was hired to teach (web) no one on the faculty had any knowledge or idea in this domain. The place where I taught used to have solid middle class jobs. NAFTA guttted the small city. All the factories closed or moved abroad. My former university became the largest employer in the region, fulfilling the neo-liberal status quo of our time. Second largest employer became the hospital. It is not a coincidence the two largest sources of inflation in the USA since the 90s in the USA has been college and healthcare. Academia is a lie. I felt unethical being a part of this system. Your analysis is spot-on. My university cares more about its brand and marketing than anything else. It’s a business. Students graduate as debt slaves with limited prospects. Academia has become a scam. Capitalism has turned academia into a parody of itself. It’s a dying institution in this country, and only going to degrade further.
Recommendation: Turn off your camera auto focusing and just focus it once for your distance. Your hand movements will cause it to refocus and sometimes take awhile to focus back on your face.
As a european med student I'm incredibly glad that we are too busy to deal with bs like that. There is still a number of issues but at least they are not political.
Adam don’t you think both of their criticisms can coexist? The commodification of education allows for administration to take the safest path to not upset their customers, which is adopting wokeness. Haidt has some good insight on this in his coddling book.
Well, I think the teachers too have a weird relationship with the administrators selling their ability to teach.. which is where the oddity of the d.i.e. statements come in. Thus the question about esg ratings and the modern d.i.e. dilemma. Also, why did the Prof not actually take a stance on that, except the localise it within his profilicity framework 🤔🤔🤔
Probably a good thing considering that relationship resulted in a lot of students getting sexually assaulted. Whether you're teaching boxing or calculus, it's usually a good thing to not believe your own hype and know that you're working for the student.
@@Adam-Friended CFW acknowledges Petersons problem with DIE initiatives but says he misdiagnoses it. In reality CFW is misdiagnosing, by saying wokeness stems from neoliberalism rather than radical leftism (i know it's a point that Sitch harps on about on stream). Other than that, the customer model of colleges is a great thing CFW pointed out. He notes a shift in goals: from molding students into independent/cultivated people to the profile building of students to look desirable to a certain career. This shift in goals reminds me of Haidts book (coddling) where he talks about the universities telos shift from "truth" to "social justice." CFW is only focusing on the profile shift in university (we want to build a positive profile, this includes diversity), I think Haidt and Peterson accurately point out the telos shift as well (we are not here to find truth, but to combat oppression and bigotry in broader society). ua-cam.com/video/kaQ-ZF9S3uk/v-deo.html
As always, great content and presentation. I'm learning more about Luhmann by reading some of your articles. I had a question about the following statement: ‘Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate’ (Luhmann). I've gone over this several times, and I find it really thought provoking, almost irritatingly so. By suggesting that "only communication can communicate", is Luhmann saying that society evolves independently of human thought and reason? Anyway, I'm not sure if you have a video on Luhmann specifically, but I'm really enjoying the journal articles you wrote on the subject.
I wonder how much of relationships work in this neoliberal logic. "You are toxic because you say something I dont believe in", * ghost * ... if you somehow try to break the ghosting, then you are a stalker, a creep or some other derogatory term of their choosing. In fact, even discussing this dynamic may place the stigma on you as being a creep.
He explains how institutions will commodify wokeness or virtue (which is unfalsifiable), but he never explains why wokeness is in the zeitgeist in the first place. His profilicity framework can't answer that. Nominalism is the problem.
thank you for taking the time to teach us plebians whom dont have the time to read all the classics. You synthesize your subjects to form a very truthful delivery. Im of Chinese descent in Canada and I love your work/energy. We see what youre doing to help the people, which is from the heart and for me already worth more than what a modern day university class will get you. A real human trying to guide you on life. Once light is lost it can stay lost forever. if we overcondition the next generation to all not think properly or to forget about the cycles we end up in places we dont wanna be... We are demons on this earth without proper guidance
On one hand I think university should be a free place to explore while gaining knowledge at any time in life, but there's also a part of me interested in the east Asian system of universities being ranked and using entrance exams that guarantee a job, complete with people who's job it is to find jobs for students. In America, the model is to let you go a job hunt yourself. The pulling your self by the bootstraps mentality.
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.
9:30 you say the university was the product of the Enlightenment. No doubt that was a big part of it, but don't forget that they grew out of Christian institutions
Dear carefree wandering. I would like to hear your analytical view on psychology as a science and also the way it affects society in terms of the mentallity. What do you think is the symptom of the such wide spread usage of the psychological therapy? Is it creating more problems than solving them? And is it just an exstension of a selfhelp culture totally out of control? Thanks alot
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.
this is great, we need more like it! question: why is the right (at least in the u.s.) so afraid of the words 'socialism' and 'communism', when the exact things those words are used to describe, become 'capitalism' if the critique is coming from the (rational) left? e.g. why does Jordan Peterson say that wokeism is a function of left hysteria, when your analysis finds it springing out of neo-liberalism? (sorry if this isn't well worded)
Interesting question. Several thoughts: First, Zizek refers to Claude-Lévi Strauss when talking about how a social divide is never seen the same way from both sides. Strauss' example is that of tribes people who draw differently structured maps depending on their status in the tribe. Zizek turns this into: the left see the difference between 'right' and 'left' differently than the right. In your question, this would turn into: the right see capitalism as one thing, the left as another. Another thought, I will again use Zizek here, because he is the most well known: he frequently talks about his disagreement with Judith Butler's ideas about gender, because he does not think they are at all revolutionary. They play in fact right into the neo-liberal framework, as can be deduced from observing the ease with which they have now been incorporated into it (This last bit is my addition). However, my preferred, albeit very radical, historical/metaphysical take on this phenomenon comes from Jean Baudrillard, as well as a little known metaphysician called René Guénon, who is usually dismissed because of his fundamentally religious outlook (it follows from my personal analysis that the seeming paradox you have called attention to in your question is also found in Prof. Moeller's work with regards to religious ideas. He thinks he is somehow arguing against religion, but is actually closer to it than he has the capacity to see, at least when you assume something like a Guénonian starting point). Baudrillard and Guénon share a common thread in their thinking which followed from having stumbled across the same problem/question that you have, which Prof. Moeller also kind of talks about at a higher level of analysis. One way to formulate it would be: whence the paradoxical nature of modern reality? Another way to phrase it (in Guénon's terms) would be: how has identity (actual quality) broken down into indistinguishable quantity? In Baudrillard's terms it would be: what separates life in a symbolic value system from life in simulation (Prof. Moeller's profilicity seems like a specific case study of Baudrillard's more overarching concept here)? A lot of Baudrillard's philosophy is about characterizing and emphasizing the paradoxes that arise in simulation through very evocative language, whereas Guénon cuts straight to the point. For both thinkers, (post)-modern life is characterized by an unlocalizable drive for ``instability'', or flux. The heavier things are, i.e. the more they possess a stable identity, the less they are able to flow, and they need to be cut loose. Think of cryptocurrencies, gender fluidity, the stock market, brand images, profiles...all of them are the result of a ``cutting loose'' from fixed qualities, i.e. things you can put your metaphorical finger on. It is the world of signs which keep other signs afloat and engender them. Where everything is strangely interchangeable, but individual. Where things are desperate to mean something (hyperteleology), because they have no more meaning (people who have nothing to say are most eager to speak). Where things seem to be moving at lightning speed, but everything is set in stone (Guénon's analysis of Cain and Able regarding space and time is absolutely incredible [The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of Time]). Baudrillard and Guénon are superior in their analysis to every other philosopher I've come across, because they are able to think the ambiguous/paradoxical, not the different, nor the identical. To answer your question using what I've briefly hinted at above, right and left seem paradoxical in their opinions because they are not seeing their shared premises. They are both slaves to the underlying (I like to call it metaphysical) movement of dissolution that is propelling the world onward (interestingly, Baudrillard ended up implicitly agreeing with Guénon, whom he didn't actually know, that time is cyclic, and that every single thing carries within itself the seed of its own destruction). As Baudrillard liked to say, and Cesar saw this a long time ago, binary divisions only serve to keep stable the underlying hegemony. I could go on, but you know, no time :)
@@RydSpyn thanks for your comments, I didn't know Guénon but he sounds fun. and thanks for such a full and interesting commentary. favorite part of what you wrote: "they are not seeing their shared premises." ... I want them to see their shared premises, the fools.
The right is by definition the status quo. The traditionalists. The left are the ones introducing change, flux, progress, etc. So the right never really questions and always reacts which isn't a diss, it's just categorically true. They necessarily will be less educated which doesn't mean they are stupid, it means they pay attention to different things, on an intuitive level rather than explicit level. If the right understood Plato and Aristotle's Metaphysics, then they'd be more prepared, but generally the communist and socialist are all about deconstructing categories. That's what they react to, they just don't call it nominalism.
Why would you expect his analysis to match that of the right wing? He's an admitted Marxist himself, so of course he finds it springing out of neoliberalism. Whether one agrees with that or not, it doesn't somehow the reveal the right as hypocrites, since their analysis would likely be quite different. They identify is as a function of left hysteria based on their own diagnosis, not his.
Just read your book "You and Your Profile" couldn't stop marking it up, excellent work! I think the comparison of wokism to religion is spot on. To quote Eric Fromm from his book Escape From Freedom, "By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual couple cope to be acceptable to God [profile]". This rings a bell of Zizek speaking about how expressing a lack of power and insignificance one then gains a tremendous amount of power. How many white liberals go on the offensive saying how this is "racist" to the point of not even caring if something is racist but boosting their profile and getting along with tearing others down who do not 100% align with their own thoughts and ideas. In You and Your Profile, there is a line directed towards Germans and their guilt of their past in World War Two which is comparable, psychologically speaking, to the white guilt felt in America. "This act of accepting almost unacceptable shame and admitting almost inadmissible guilt quite ingeniously recycles shame and guilt into form of postheroic grandeur. Guilt is converted into guilt-pride. IT is a moral pride that claims ethical exceptionality for having strength to remember and thereby to take on responsibility for one of the greatest sins ever committed" Is this not paradigmatic of the white liberal wokism that we see today in establishing their own profile to confess to the world how righteous they are and expel "sin" in terms of freedom of speech? To quote Fromm again "The hostility in which this modern kind of humility and sense of duty is rooted explains also one otherwise rather baffling contradiction: that such humility goes together with contempt for others and the self-righteousness has actually replaced love and mercy" One great take away form your book professor is that to engage in second order observation is to not engage authentically, but by virtue of the median it is "nonauthentic". We should need to take a step back from moralizing and start addressing issues on their own terms. Robert Reich goes into the issues of even looking at "profiles" of companies and considering that looking at companies as good or bad is a misstep and distracts rather than enhances our understanding, as wokism distracts from or creates issues. Example looking at Walmart either condemning or praising with how they handled issues such as morning-after pill in 2006. "Corporations do some good deeds but corportate thank-you rituals mislead the public into believing companies do these things out of selflessness- indeed, that there is a "self" there deserving commendation in the first place. But there is no corporate selflessness, and there is no corporate self." Just enjoy parallels of thought that can smoothly transition to one another and how we need this kind of analysis today because discourse so wrapped up in our profile-identity that we're becoming slaves to culture. Long comment, surprised if anybody made it through, just collecting my thoughts in one area ; )
You might enjoy this because it kinda ties in with some of what you say: Zizek in his big book on Hegel (Less than nothing) opens with a remarkable taxonomy of idiocy which he relates to Lacan's concept of The Big Other (which you can read as the symbolic order of language). An idiot is the lowest form in this hierarchy. He is completely without the big other. Then there is the imbecile who needs the big other but deeply distrusts him (like a grumpy old man who throws his walking-stick away) and lastly the moron, the intelligent kind of idiot, who is lost in the big other. Zizek sympathizes with the imbecile and affectionately dubs his book: "Hegel for imbeciles" - precisely because for him imbecile suggests this dialetictic tension between the big other and us. An imbecile is the negation of a becile but what even is a becile and why can we not return to it? Zizek suggests that a becile is a double negation who redoubles the lack and transposes it back into the big other itself. In this sense the becile is aware that if he were an imbecile the same would apply to god himself, to the big other. As our entire being is mediated by partaking in the big other (or the big other partaking in us) I think the same applies to these societal acts of humility. In such acts we put everything but ourselves down, we try to close the gap, fill the need, to become nothing, which is much more than we are (this is Zizek's speculation, reality is less than nothing and it strives towards nothingness). Profile building seems to me perhaps one of the most advanced forms of the big other partaking in us. It is where we come the closest to crushing our own non-identity with our identity (our manifestations in the big other) or at least where this conflict is most present, that is being the signified (the object) instead of the signifier (its symbol), that is the way in which you are actually not [your name] but that strange mass behind it. But in a way here is the big problem with being authentic too because you can not just be that mass behind your name. Unless you decide to go the way of the idiot (maybe you know Werner Herzog's film Kaspar Hausar, Kaspar Hausar at the beginning is perhaps an idiot, he is without the big other) you can not escape the big other, you can not escape a profile of you, you can not escape the signifier (your name) being the version of you that is constantly circulated, not the signified. At the very best you can try by dialectics to take a step away from it (for instane in understanding the underlying implications in you building this profile for yourself or others building this profile for themselves - and then also the role a corporate profile might play). I think this is also what Moeller does. I mean Moeller is very obviously building a profile on this UA-cam channel and we are all also partaking mediated through profiles. So in a way the true task presents itself as how to live with this defilement. In a way once you become too caught up in it (like perhaps Peterson and his followers) you always lose because then the profile has you, you have become lost in the big other, you have become a moron. But maybe with Zizek the true task is to maintain your imbecility, your skepticism of the big other, while knowing that you also need it to walk. Also obligatory sorry for the long comment (this ties in wonderfully with Zizek's joke as well).
The problem with the universities today is the same as with business today: they do not think in the long term, preferring instead instant gratification such as quarterly results. The result is that they do not invest in the future. It's not a failure of the profit motive, it's just plain stupidity. I think some have called it the MBA-ization of business. Administration by "experts" who have neither depth nor breadth of knowledge, much less knowledge that pertains to business.
Peterson's need to perform "moral outrage" and "righteous anger" as if he's Moses come down from the mountain to chastise us latter-day Israelites for worshipping false idols is one of the most insufferable things about him.
I think its important to note the radical/liberatory potential (and origin)of the calls to making universities more diverse institutions. It makes explicit how the co-option of said ideas, say identity politics moving from the claim of a communist collective(Combahee River) to the capitalist market, are a reactionary move typical of neoliberal institutions that are designed to empty and subsume any ideology, dressing in their shells for the institutions own continuation without meaningful change.
i had an intresting video idea for you, about the metaverse, as its becoming yk more and more popular in our society (not rlly everyones shitting on it lol) but it still has got that hype. I guess if a vid was to be made on it itd be about how it wud affect us. To be honest i think its good and evil of social media on a much larger scale
This reminds me of Zizek's rant against Starbuck's Ethos water programme, a water bottle where when you buy it, part goes to helping thirsty children all around the world. This programme is of course not about helping children, but selling 'good conscience'. A good moral conscience has become part of the profile that companies use to sell products.
As universities become corporatized, as you correctly point out, 'being progressive' becomes another part of the profile a university must sell. I think you could have added that universities especially must chose this particular branding, because their targeted demographic are young and progressive - if your target demographic are rural, non-educated and older, your profiling must of course be different.
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
this analysis nails it. i've been looking for a good breakdown of how "wokeness" - in academia as well as culture and media - is less what peterson calls an insurgent leftism and more "rainbow capitalism", or as you say corporate neoliberalism simply responding to market forces. well done and thank you sir 🙏
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?
Couldn't you also say that corporate capitalists have a stake in distracting their workers by having them focus on things like sensitivity training instead of giving them better material resources for living? I don't think it's a phenomenon seen only in academia. In the United States, Starbucks workers had to undergo racial sensitivity training years before they were even able to unionize. Good video
@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.
I'm always extremely pleased to see more activity on this channel and wish you all the very best! For whatever reason, even though you might seem to keep a bit of reserved distance from the audience, you are one of the most "close" and "real" seeming UA-cam presenters and content creators around, and I appreciate so much all the effort made to make you and your work and expression available online and accessible worldwide, it is a tremendous gift! I like to check in on here to see how you are doing!
@@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.
If students are paying customers. I want my money back. The service was horrible lol
Once you have eaten the bag of chips you cannot return it to the store.
When I went to high school, we had a somewhat novel track team. Anybody who wanted to join could join, and they could participate in any event they wanted to. The result was an ongoing spring fitness party where everyone got together and trained after school. There were many great achievers on that team, but everyone got to become a better athlete.
This is the vision we need to fix our education systems, everyone can learn and grow, and a good educational system is one that provides as much education as it can to everyone it can.
No need to convince the world you are worthy, just show up and do your best.
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
As someone who recently toyed with getting into the academic industry with a lot of post graduate study, the more and more I experienced it the more abysmal it became. The professor is right, universities aren't really about teaching anyone anymore, they are about selling products (degrees). Whether anybody learns anything along the way is secondary to the neoliberal university. If the product is purchased, they are really happy. Also the general appreciation of research by university administrators has declined so greatly over the last 30 years. Working in a university is about output output output. It is not about taking a lot of time to find great outcomes in your relevant field or pursuit. Plus new academic staff can expect to be only casually employed for year after year, with their contracts only being renewed for each teaching period, with no long term job stability at all. In some universities (in Australia), a lot more courses are being pushed online (with the initial pandemic being used as an excuse), with no return to face to face, with no lecturers being used for the course, just people who write the course and casual markers used. Of course, someone can still enjoy a good academic career amongst all of this, but it is becoming harder and harder to enjoy an academic career for learning and academias sake itself. Desperately need to bring back reform to view learning as a public good. Also trust Peterson to observe phenomena and radically misattribute the cause. It's basically his hallmark. But yeah, I wouldn't totally recommend a career in the academic industry at this stage.
@@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
Jordan Peterson-related content might get more engagement, but I would prefer to see your online brand gain more independence from his. Also, not that it particularly matters, but my favorite content of yours is the Philosophy in
Motion channel, and I’d love to see more of that
Sometimes just one thumb up is not enough. I was a student of philosophy in Berlin in when this hostile takeover of European academic culture took place, and it was absolutely disgusting. Some professors rebelled, some became depressed, but most of them just adapted and tried to find out how they could improve their market value as fast as possible. But all felt clearly that this secluded garden where free thought could grow for centuries was being bulldozed and turned into some parking lot.
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?
i live in a third world country and we are living this process between old university and new university. Very good insight in how commodification permeates everything
I remember being astonished by the culture in cognitive science at my university. Older professors were fantastic teachers, delivering their lectures with passion, but seemed distraught by the students fighting for higher grades but less work. If you asked questions about the material itself, if you were curious to understand, they seemed thrilled. I was almost put off by their shock and excitement.
As an older and engaged student, this seemed insane to me. Not only was it easy to get good grades, but it was extremely enriching so it was very easy to dedicate time to these papers and projects. Many of the younger professors seemed put off by these same questions. Many seemed intellectually unqualified to me. It was hard to take them seriously. Some clearly got by with BS, copying slides or simply indulging politics in classes that allowed for that sort of flexibility (a minority of the philosophy classes I took). Something was very very strange.
It seemed like there were 2 worlds. The old school which is now dealing with the new dynamics, the administration and the student culture, and clearly frustrated. And then the new school, which seemed intellectually inadequate and generally underinformed, but fit to be good controllable workers. I remember a professor giving me advice when I asked her what to do if I'm writing an essay in philosophy but would like to say what I believe, and what I believe is that her own understanding of the concepts being taught was faulty... and she told me straight up, "you're very smart and educated on these topics, but you need to take the scientist hat off and put the salesman cap on"... there were social standards she seemed to imply had to be met to make it.
Years after leaving academia, I maintained my own studies of philosophy of mind on my own, and continued writing in private. I attended a free weekly seminar during the pandemic, one organized by a professor and some graduate students (one being an old friend). She invited me knowing my background, having gone out of my way to study all theories of consciousness in depth. My experience was again quite shocking. Graduate students who were working under these particular paradigms, presumably writing papers pushing the theories of their advisors, did not know much at all about their own ideas. They were mathematically inept, and seemingly incapable of engaging on their own subjects of interest. It seemed like I had interrupted an organized meeting where different people took turns reading the slides they had prepared. People would simply give compliments "very interesting, thank you" and clap. It was very strange and honestly shamefully useless.
For those who play music, you might understand this analogy. The students today, and presumably the professors, have a product to sell, themselves. And so, what I think we have is a commodifiction of intellectual work, but this ends up giving us "instagram guitarists" instead of actual guitarists. They give you something seemingly impressive to non-musicians, a quick 1 minute lick with a bunch of bells and whistles (guitar tricks, fast playing, sweeping, tapping, etc) but might never be able to play productively with other musicians, or take the time to write something more substantive. The social/economic incentives have changed the game. Academic philosophy struck me as a show. It had become theatrical. Many of the participants, and the one's getting positions, didn't seem to think about the subjects they studied on their freetime.
My hope is that this is a problem contained to the Humanities. It would make a lot of sense. But surely there must be bleed over into the STEM fields via social/cultural osmosis.
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 ua-cam.com/video/v3pYRn5j7oI/v-deo.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.
how come you are the only person who correctly diagnose wokism as symptom of Neo-Liberalism? great job professor
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 UA-cam 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)
Professor Moeller as usual, brilliantly explaining the nightmare zeitgeist that we live. It is not that we can't see this BS but the transparent and simple way he explains in the way even a child can understand.
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...
This all intersects with the students' internalisation of themselves as commodities (you need to "sell yourself", don't ya?), pursuing degrees solely for the purpose of boosting their own marketability, with no desire for intellectual development, no awareness of the value of critical thinking. Their only goal is to pass exams, there's minimal participation (and the teachers don't encourage it, lectures are top-down practices, and they never alternate with engagement-oriented symposiums). Outside of the class, one hears nothing but juvenile frivolities, the subject of study is only ever raised when confirming what is needed to learn to pass the next exam. Homogeneity is near-absolute, no one dares to take risks, to challenge professors out of conceptual curiosity, all too disaffected, shallow, and subconsciously afraid they'll compromise their chances to get a job in an ever more precarious world. Fear, hopelesness and habituation are behind this sham. Oh, and greed, of course. Greed started it all.
This is so accurated!!!. Im a teacher in a private university here in Bolivia and all that was expoused happens. The idea of "commodification of education/instruction" is so brillant and terrible at the same time. Thaks for the video l..l,!!!
There is no such thing as reverse discrimination. Only discrimination.
In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher pointed all this out over a decade ago. Peterson’s experiencing how neoliberalism will subsume anything it can in pursuit of profits. He can’t find it in himself to lament the process, he’s just angry that Wokeism is more profitable than neoconservativism. Too bad, so sad, get back on pills, Peterson.
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.
I many times find myself in a tricky position in these debates. Because on one hand i see many of the issues symbolic "wokeness" in academia causes, how it manifests itself in classes, structures debates and publications, on the other hand most of the critique that comes from namely figures like Peterson completely ignores many of the actual issues and historical structural wrong doings that are addressed and tackeled by "wokeism". I don't want to be in a position where I find myself defending superficial neoliberal social media ideology, (especially since european racism is a lot more complex and multilayered than it's american counterpart that drives the western discourse) but neither should modern christian capitalist conservatism ala Peterson be the driving force in any public institution or academia.
I think "wokeness" is a arbitrary symptom of neoliberalism. Just like outlined in the video the underlying problems are profiling, brand building, faux-moralism, the job market, established industries and people actually buying into things like "nike being the good guys" because they have a POC as a spokesperson. "Wokeism" is indirectly reproducing the economic system with it's superficial symbolism but Peterson style conservatism just openly doesn't want it to change anyways, he just doesn't like it being diverse, inclusive or even attempting to be critical, because of 'brilliant' arguments like "that's against human nature and western values". Why not focus on the bigger picture without letting yourself get radicalised by conservatives?
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...
Fall of the Faculty is a great text on point A), the commodification of the universities, in the United States at the very least.
Edit: the point about distraction @22:00 or so is very well taken also. I remember being in college back in 2011 and some of the activists on campus really wanting to devote this huge push to making the bathrooms gender neutral. The anarchist / left-political population on campus that hung around the Infoshop got kind of dormant and this was their big comeback. It really puzzled me as to why they weren't fighting about the incredibly unaffordable cost of the institution we attended, instead, which made it inaccessible to virtually anyone from the working class. Or even the excessive presence of campus security that was getting ramped up more and more, and created an increasingly tense, oppressive environment.
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 recommend the last part of Erwin Panofsky's essay collection, Meaning in the Visual Arts. In it he discusses the differences between the German universities he knew from 30s pre-war Germany and the American universities he came to teach in during the 60s, after his emigration. It confirms and covers a lot of this stuff and is a grim glimpse into how long this stuff was in the making, wrt the commodification of academia. Panofsky was a complete humanist to the end, and he remained optimistic about the future, our present, but we all know how well that's turned out.
Academic bloat has been a huge issue from the 1990's onward, and the manufacture of positions for otherwise unemployable "acad elites" is one of the major erosion factors of quality higher education this century. Thank you for releasing this vid.
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!
Prof. Moeller, thank you very much! I am still watching this video, but your point about neoliberalism pervading the academia, struck me because I had myself some intuitions towards that direction. I will actually admit that it arose by listening to John Gray (uk philosopher) talking about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher.
I think that with regards to the development of compliance, there is an element of risk management for universities as well. There are genuinely bigots and those who abuse their power over students within academia, and they pose a risk to the brand of the university. The recent case of sexual harassment and its fallout at harvard come to mind, but there are numerous cases of professors creating environments hostile to certain students where bildung cannot take place. What's more, the ubiquity of social media means that cases of bigotry or harassment are far more likely to go viral, thus hurting the university's profile within the aesthetic economy.
Here in the US, the legacy of segregation is still poignant. The (neo)liberal integrationist ethos in the wake of the civil rights era means that schools must plaster their landing pages and pamphlets with non-white skin in order to present the façade of this ethos. Here, an increasing demand for higher education coincides with both the industrialization of the university with the increasing necessity for a degree in the job market, as well as a further democratization of the types of people welcomed to the university. The top-down enforcement of the egalitarian aesthetic through things such as DIE statements often clashes with the human reality of professors causing conflict through their position of power over students. Any perceived fracture in the façade means resources have to be spent on damage control, because in the end, it's hard to believe that universities as institutions really care about bigotry outside of how it affects the bottom line.
There is a pernicious double-action at play here. There are people within universities who truly care about combatting our social ills, and may really believe in developing an inclusive pedagogy. A lot of these people would have no issue with openly committing as such, at least at face value. It also seems reasonable to screen professors for views which may prevent them from treating students equally and thus preventing them from being a good teacher. You wouldn't want a transphobic professor at an institution which allows trans students to attend. However, the way by which modern universities realize this is through more bureaucratic hoops to jump through on the part of the professors. Any passion that a professor may have for social change is parasitized by the profit motive and marketing. So at once, the real energy and care that people have for the ideals of education is used by the ambivalent university as a selling point, while the risks and work are off-loaded onto the faculty, not all of whom actually care about such pursuits.
While I mentioned the power that professors have in the classroom, it must be said that that environment is no longer as insular in the era of social media. Students increasingly function in a role of surveillance, much in the same way a customer surveils a retail worker. I've definitely seen viral posts of students with misplaced indignation, leading to the unfair targeting of professors for innocuous or institutional decisions. The real neoliberal rub is the blurring of the lines between a good product and a rewarding education. A petulant consumer and a marginalized student are formally identical within this paradigm. This allows for intractable argumentation about which of these moralized categories is correct in any given situation, and a PR strategy by institutions to wipe away both cases with the exact same procedure for each. No real justice for those who deserve it, and plenty of ammunition for conservatives to lambast the shallowness of university branding strategies.
Though I bemoan the nihilism and superficiality of "woke" discourse, I appreciate this channel's approach to searching for the materiality of this discourse. Cheers!
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.
This is what the late Mark Fisher had to say (among other things) on the subject of "Academic Industry":
"The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and measure forms of labour which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output.
Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'.
This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'."
From chapter 6 (Titled "All that is solid melts into PR: Market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production") of Capitalist Realism
The university doesn't just sell the diploma, it also sells the experience of college. If it only sold the diploma it could save a lot on those buildings, gyms, sports teams, and soda machines.
Im an Aboriginal Australian. I love academia as in the pursuit of knowledge, warts and all. I freelance as a community researcher. Have worked short term for two Universities and two NGO's on projects. We don't do enough of it in our community. I have been lucky in that my work is focused on Aboriginal communities particularly the one I belong to and live within. My areas of inquiry as a researcher so far is in Family Violence and Mental Health. What is maybe surprising to those outside of truth seeking is that many members of the community I have engaged with are sick of the glossing of issues that are affecting them. In the course of my work, all have seen the sources around these issues to be internally manifested, intergenerational and damaging. They seek to have a more honest acknowledgement of its source and manifestation within our communities. What has let our community down is this broad spectrum framework that State agencies develop priorities and fund which has no bearing on the lived realities of communities now. This 'wokeness' permeates all policy priorities with no tangible local application for communities desperate to take on their issues in an honest way.
Always a treat. Thank you to you and your crew.
Thank you so much for all of your videos. Everytime I watch one of them I feel like I'm being exposed to a fresh perspective. It helps me a lot to think about my own studies and I have even used your academic material on some of my graduate papers. I wish you all the best! :)
One thing i find frustrating about the uni set up at the moment is the way classes are structured. With the ammount of units you take on to do full time and the assignements neccesary in those units, i find that the classes become secondary, if not irreleavant. By the latter half of the semester not that many people are keeping up with class content, they are just trying to get there assignments done. This is not a problem of laziness but of structuring. Surely, there is a better way to do it. However, saying that my experience with humanities and the teachers has been overall really good, even though everything said in this video is true. There is still some really amazing things going on in the humanities and i am so happy to have been studying this stuff, and to have a spot to study it.
Currently involved in labour disputes as the colleges in Ontario, Canada negotiate our collective contract and what's unfortunate is, as aware of how much the neoliberal agenda has our system in its grip on the one hand, the wokeness is seen by many faculty as a way to counter that agenda and not a result of it. I could never show my colleagues this video and have them take it seriously as it references Peterson but thanks Prof. Moeller for the cogent arguments. Perhaps I can effect things through conversations. Hearts and minds.
Do you remember the story of Peter Higgs? He took two different pieces of physics worked on by others and put them together and postulated the Higgs boson must exist. The maths he tried to publish was the proof. The paper he submitted was a few equations which occupied 3/4 of a sheet of A4. It was probably one of the most important things ever to be refused publication. In today's idiot world he would have been thrown out for not producing enough work. Sometimes the shortest of writings are the most profound of the lot. In another time long ago lawyers were also paid by the number of words they wrote. This was revised for good reason!
Your content is always really interesting! :)
I must say, though, that I really thought, from all the readings that I had gathered, that there was already a symbiotic symbolism implied in the notion of brand, even before the brand 2.0 (or profile). How could the brand not be impacted by the public or the persons who associate with it? That seems to be the reason why the director of the clothing brand "Abercrombie & Fitch" wouldn't provide clothes in XL or XXL sizes for women, because people they deemed ''uncool'' would otherwise ''tarnish'' their brand. The people who associate with a brand (like rappers wearing Timberland boots that were initially designed for workers) change what we think of a brand, and therefore change the brand. Or at least that's what I thought! 😅
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.
Thank You for your thoughts Professor!
Excellent analysis. Nowadays universities are no different from brands such as cocacola or apple, and "wokeism" is the easiest way to increase their ESG score and become more appealing for investors
Thank you for your enlightening content, as a "minority" it's a strange thing to reconcile when you agree with those who say there are issues but the same people you are in agreement with view YOU as the problem. There is something definitely wrong with education- it doesn't feel like its about learning or "bildung" , to call it left-wing and anti-white seems insincere because education these days seems to benefit no one
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
Amazing. I love having my perspective changed on a topic so radically and so compellingly.
Only problem with that though, what so many people think is making money currently is kind of starting to plummet. They’re essentially diluting them selves into continuing to pander to something that’s getting less and less interested in those things. Most people are sick of this and there’s very few people with this mindset left.
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.
Selling degrees... Interesting idea. Reminds of the economic model of signaling. Meaning we essentially provide a marker of how much time we can afford to put in something to reflect our value. This always seemed weird to me, but now I think I get it.
Another great video. Thank you. Having spent some time in academia in New Zealand all of this stuff is sadly all too familiar.
Really awesome video, Professor. I do have some critical points though:
1. Universities, as a historical project have always carried a utopian function - campuses have been always engaged in knowledge, in discussion, in seeking, an institution independent of the government and the governmnet agenda. Thus, I believe that this embrace of wokism - but more likely, this exercise in care about the political inside the university but also outside of it is something that has a huge history and not one or two revolutional movements have their roots in the political energy of the students. Which leads me to the second observation:
2. The Universities are a joint effort or in your language a joint profile - its a collaboration between students and professors. Add the more and more increasing tuition fees, the working students that somehow find time for university as well, and I believe that the outcome is that the students themselves feel more responsible about the university they are studying in. Thus, I don't believe its that strange to see students rejecting professors because of they are paradigm of teaching. If you are a known missogenist as Peterson, its only obvious that students working 30 hours a week to be able to afford the university would want you out of it. They will strive in enjoying what they are paying for.
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.
I think it would be interesting for you to make a follow up video analyzing the boot camp trend that has really been taking off. Training people for short term jobs, promising them a prosperous career in return for the student going into a large sum of debt with the boot camp when in reality it would be better to just go to a university and get a degree.
"how it wants to be seen, or seen as being seen" i like that statement.
What you need to understand is that the accademia operates as a parasitic monopolistic system within the greater parasitic monopolistic system of the world. Therefore it cannot reveal the origins of most all human-generated misery on the planet as it itself is operating as one of those mechanisms that is contributing to the overall misery of humanity. Monopoly over economy and monetary unit are the main ingredients we used to determine the misery index and this is so despite the fact that the actual misery index is calculated factoring and the unemployment rate and rate of inflation as these two mechanisms are more deeply embedded in Monopoly over economy and monetary unit. It is the opposite thereof that you require which is economic freedom and a sound monetary unit to represent a store of your labour that allows you to demonstrate your ability to be free. Naturally this is something that your professors cannot and will not tell you as you will then have the answer to most all social problems, but rather what you got from them is the symptom what's wrong with society and not the root cause of what ails Society I'm afraid the facts don't care about your feelings on this matter if your opinion differs from this actual fact of our reality and how this world actually operates. You do not require a tinfoil hat to understand that all monetary systems in the world are in the hands of private family is they force every government to borrow from them and that an interest for which the people who ultimately become indebted to this massive ever-growing debt find themselves unable to pay it back and ultimately find themselves back at square one starting all over again or back to the actual Plantation one huge massive superfreakonomics Cycles complete their process. All throughout history we can see every economic boom bust cycle what's caused by government policy with the convenient effect of transferring most all wealth from the majority to the minority from time to time. That which we used to store the value of our past labour is simply just a coupon backed by nothing and subject to massive inflation and ultimately reduce to the purchasing power of zero in due time just like all currencies throughout history that were backed by nothing and that their intrinsic value of 0. This would have the effect of wiping out massive amounts of collective wealth from the majority stealthily transferring it to the very few anointed and privileged I'm sorry I have to be the one to burst your bubble on your perspective and perception of reality, but somebody's got to do it because the only thing your professors are going to do is help you remain at the mentality of a child by giving you colouring books and teddy bears, and this will not help you in the long run. Feel free to give me a thumbs down or thumbs up so that I know I was not censored. Also feel free to reply with genuine comments. You're welcome
I only have anecdotal experience of this, but my experience in academia at an elite research university is that aspiring academics appeal to their identity to climb the ranks, receive funding, and unburden themselves of responsibilities that might otherwise be required of them. I'm very cynical at this point of certain iterations of identity politics as little more than middle-class social climbing.
From listening to your analysis, It seems as if Dr Peterson's ire is not with the neoliberal university paradigm per se but instead to do with the clash between his own profile and that of his university. As being the most famous anti-woke intellectual, Dr Peterson's profile is not compatible with Harvard University which maintains a so-called "woke" profile. If the University's profile hadn't changed to be irreconcilable with his own, then he would probably be quite satisfied with it.
I don't really see how Dr Peterson's white male students are objectively at a real disadvantage in their future career prospects though, studying under such a famous yet divisive figure can be leveraged both ways under profilicity. If they happen to agree with the ideology of woke universities they would just need to curate their woke profile astutely to counter the presumption of being anti-woke. On the other hand If they happen to be ideological disciples of Dr Peterson they can find prospects in conservative media and think-tanks.
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 am reading Genuine pretending, it is second book after Moral fool and despite complex narration I love it's ideas, Thank you!
Every time Jordan Peterson glimpses his shadow, he takes to the internet to project it on others. His platform makes him a fascinating man, but for all the wrong reasons.
Excellent, this is exactly the point. Acquiring a degree is not important, but acquiring knowledge is. This is basically what he was saying.
Sadly that 'knowledge' is not often required in society: engineers only use 10% of their degree.
A gem of a channel, very real representation of today’s academic world
I agree in some points, but the main problem for me with your lecture is the notion of suffering. I think that capitalistic energy in the case of "wokeism" is trying to use it to cover real economical difficulties, but also trying to make it homogenous as possible - once again use it with instrumental rationality. I think "wokeism" springs from real pain and suffering of many students and also people around the world, from racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia. Its main goal was to open the world and society to particular, to heterogenous, without categories. To see Otherness and radically feel different. (On the other hand - there is Fear of loosing oneself in this Other - threat to rational categories and known which causes strict racist/homophobic reaction.) Opening heterogenity is also threat to capitalism so it is trying to tie it into categories and, as you suggested, in profiling. It would be interesting if you could also include the concept of suffering in your next analysis of wokeism (I missed it in previous videos as well), because now it looks that there are no real social problems from which "wokeism" emerged and those people who are suffering are just making it up for branding.
Your last sentence is absolutely and completely SPOT ON.
Well said g
Thank you professor - I really like your channel. As a post-graduate from one of the 'top 20' universities in the world that is based in the UK, I was disappointed and frustrated by the whole experience. I went with such high expectations and got them crashed in 3 months. It wasn't about reading, debating ideas, criticising theories,. It was about money, prestige, and safe spaces. I remember that at the time there were even planned strikes about pension schemes that the university was going to cut. To distract people from it they became louder about LGBT issues. Classes were superficial and I remember one of the lecturers discussed Habermas's theory and didn't know what they were talking about - just parroting interpretations about Habermas and Foucault.
My hope is that universities in Europe will not follow the Anglo-American model - unfortunately, Netherland is getting closer and closer which is worrying for me.
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.
super)I added this to my thesis, as did the promotional video of my university, where my professor promote that at this univercity they teach to select right simbols :)
Hi Professor,
I was wondering if you could provide me with some advice/suggestions. I am a US history high school teacher. I recently made a casual suggestion that I would start a philosophy club, without expecting any students to press me on this. Well, a couple of students have, and now here I am...asking for some suggestions of where I should begin as I don't want to negatively present philosophy with a bad first impression, turning them off. With this club I'm hoping to sincerely spark interest in philosophy. At this point I'm thinking of introducing existential philosophy, but even with that I'm not sure how to go about it. Any thoughts?
Thank you.
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.
Like the rest of the comments here, I really like the content on this channel. I like how the lecturer synthesize different social scientific theories to expand on current events and social trends.
I do truly enjoy the way you break down the component parts of what is also a complex living system, or symbiotic relationship between enterprises and the people who attach themselves to them.
Just now when you ended this talk I laughed at the Warning symbol about the fact that this platform, UA-cam, is constructed to be addictive and to promote this channel. And it was extremely funny then because one could say that similar elements for profiling exist here as well, in the subscribers, likes, and views...as well as comments ;).
I think you are aware of this already though, I just found it funny that at the end of this video you also said, "you are a part of this too."
Please continue to create material.
Another professor who creates material on youtube is Wes Cecil - Humane Arts is what he calls his channel.
I find him also very insightful. He has also commented on Education and historical classification systems.
Professor Moeller,
I'm very interested in your work and would like to buy some of your books. Most of them are a bit expensive though. When it comes to social theory as you discuss in your videos, which of your books would you recommend someone start with? I'm leaning towards "You and Your Profile," but also interested in Luhmann and don't know where to start with him either? Thanks!
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 🤫😉
As always a great use of Luhmann and overall a very convincing interpretation! Thanks
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by virtue signalling.
One again the professor 👨🏫 telling it like it is ! 👏🏻
You have a huge capacity to see “through BS” professor. I am grateful for what I’ve learned in your channel. Even though I’ve discovered that I’m basically FuBaR in this Profilicity age 🤷🏻♂️ I don’t have an internet profile.
I wonder if you could talk or reflect on what can people like us do in this new order of things (middle aged people who’ve worked all their life, but don’t have profile on the internet, only a few real human connections, we have some experience and knowledge but no URL to “prove it”) how can we face these new challenges? How to live within this new order?
I'm 26 and in the same situation - no social media (other than UA-cam, 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
Excellent analysis. I think JBP gets so caught up in his 'post-modern neo-marxist' rhetoric he misses the problem right in front of him.
The profile building that's part of the modern university experience is certainly part of the neo-liberal tale over of the universities, but I think people often overlook an equally important aspect in the network building.
Universities are more and more the gatekeeper to the middle class job market. Having a strong profile is nessecary to accessing this job market, but the environment is so competitive now that it's no longer enough to have a strong CV, you need to know people. It creates a kind of nepotistic job market that makes it easier for companies tofilter for these DIE compliant workers.
Amazing channel. I just discovered it and am amazed. Thank you for making this type of content!
well, the Professors are also being evaluated by people (administrators) who are not qualified to evaluate the Academic work, so they change the focus to quantification on a seemingly trivial basis.
Appreciate your videos. I don't know how to feel about your argument. Diversity is a genuine problem in academia; as a person of color in higher education I see very little diversity. Representation is important. I would love to live in a post-race world where these inequalities that "wokeism" brings to light are just a matter of "profile building," and I believe we need to work towards a reality that "wokeism" isn't needed, but the construct of race has a major impact on people right NOW--on a personal and institutional level--and we need to consider that. Regardless of "wokeism" this is work that needs to be done.
I agree it's not always done in a healthy way. I am also skeptical of wokeism. It's definitely a corporate godsend, an easy way to shed off any responsibility to the unequal landscape corporations and people in power have created (higher education INCLUDED). I think that's why my generation (late millennial/early gen z) seems to have a distaste for any company who tries to promote BLM or social awareness. It only irritates us and infuriates older white people who are unwilling to question the social structure they grew up in. This is why we need people to talk about it with a level head. I would argue you are one of those people!
People like Jordon Peterson are angry that we are questioning the structures that have perpetuated these issues, and he ties himself closely to this structure and takes it as a personal attack when we question values that have been carried down generationally for centuries. Sure, "wokeism" makes it often overly simplistic, but the fact of the matter is the role of public thinkers is to constantly consider the invisible forces that shape society and question them. Jordon Peterson seems to glorify them instead.
Your work is always extremely interesting and, to me, unexpected. I feel there is some kind of conceptual convergence between your work and the work of French philosopher Frédéric Lordon that attempts to reframe social sciences through Spinozian concepts. Your concept of profile feels like the concept of affective complexion publicized while retaining all its properties (e.g obsequium as joyful obedience).
We live within reflections and still cry tears of bitterness for the faults in our eyes 💿
Peterson is a fanatic. He reaches so hard for the emotional impact that he shoots over his mark and comes across as hysterical.
Quite the corageous video, sir. It just might be that Harvard would be slightly apprehensive of hiring you after this! Thanks for the great video yet again.
I taught at an Indiana, USA “university” for 6 years. I was a contract faculty member. University hired me with the promise of a tenured position eventually, because what I was hired to teach (web) no one on the faculty had any knowledge or idea in this domain.
The place where I taught used to have solid middle class jobs. NAFTA guttted the small city. All the factories closed or moved abroad. My former university became the largest employer in the region, fulfilling the neo-liberal status quo of our time. Second largest employer became the hospital.
It is not a coincidence the two largest sources of inflation in the USA since the 90s in the USA has been college and healthcare.
Academia is a lie. I felt unethical being a part of this system.
Your analysis is spot-on. My university cares more about its brand and marketing than anything else. It’s a business. Students graduate as debt slaves with limited prospects. Academia has become a scam.
Capitalism has turned academia into a parody of itself. It’s a dying institution in this country, and only going to degrade further.
Recommendation: Turn off your camera auto focusing and just focus it once for your distance. Your hand movements will cause it to refocus and sometimes take awhile to focus back on your face.
As a european med student I'm incredibly glad that we are too busy to deal with bs like that. There is still a number of issues but at least they are not political.
it is coming for you and all of us.
This customer/customer server relationship really inverts the traditional teacher authority relationship between students and educators.
Adam don’t you think both of their criticisms can coexist? The commodification of education allows for administration to take the safest path to not upset their customers, which is adopting wokeness. Haidt has some good insight on this in his coddling book.
Well, I think the teachers too have a weird relationship with the administrators selling their ability to teach.. which is where the oddity of the d.i.e. statements come in. Thus the question about esg ratings and the modern d.i.e. dilemma. Also, why did the Prof not actually take a stance on that, except the localise it within his profilicity framework 🤔🤔🤔
Probably a good thing considering that relationship resulted in a lot of students getting sexually assaulted. Whether you're teaching boxing or calculus, it's usually a good thing to not believe your own hype and know that you're working for the student.
@@Trapping_ackbar7 I think the video acknowledges that both criticisms co-exist, CFW just has another insightful lens to look at the problem.
@@Adam-Friended CFW acknowledges Petersons problem with DIE initiatives but says he misdiagnoses it. In reality CFW is misdiagnosing, by saying wokeness stems from neoliberalism rather than radical leftism (i know it's a point that Sitch harps on about on stream).
Other than that, the customer model of colleges is a great thing CFW pointed out. He notes a shift in goals: from molding students into independent/cultivated people to the profile building of students to look desirable to a certain career. This shift in goals reminds me of Haidts book (coddling) where he talks about the universities telos shift from "truth" to "social justice." CFW is only focusing on the profile shift in university (we want to build a positive profile, this includes diversity), I think Haidt and Peterson accurately point out the telos shift as well (we are not here to find truth, but to combat oppression and bigotry in broader society).
ua-cam.com/video/kaQ-ZF9S3uk/v-deo.html
Thank you for the warning at the end.
Love your channel Prof. Always illuminating.
This channel is one of the best. It must be protected at all costs, lol...
A very amazing and eye-opening video, I really hope it finds more people.
As always, great content and presentation. I'm learning more about Luhmann by reading some of your articles. I had a question about the following statement: ‘Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate’ (Luhmann). I've gone over this several times, and I find it really thought provoking, almost irritatingly so. By suggesting that "only communication can communicate", is Luhmann saying that society evolves independently of human thought and reason? Anyway, I'm not sure if you have a video on Luhmann specifically, but I'm really enjoying the journal articles you wrote on the subject.
love this channel😩 so many points of interest for me are hit at once. please keep up the amazing work.
I wonder how much of relationships work in this neoliberal logic. "You are toxic because you say something I dont believe in", * ghost * ... if you somehow try to break the ghosting, then you are a stalker, a creep or some other derogatory term of their choosing. In fact, even discussing this dynamic may place the stigma on you as being a creep.
He explains how institutions will commodify wokeness or virtue (which is unfalsifiable), but he never explains why wokeness is in the zeitgeist in the first place. His profilicity framework can't answer that. Nominalism is the problem.
Can you elaborate please
Aaahh I would love for the Jordan Peterson bros to watch this!
Don't worry, they'll find this video soon enough.
One of my wishes in life is to host you, plasticpills, 1dime, epoch philosophy and the living philosophy for a nice casual dinner/drinks :)
You should check out Cck Philosophy if you like those channels
@@alexstrixner1156 oh yes! i forgot about jonas ceika's channel. him too.
thank you for taking the time to teach us plebians whom dont have the time to read all the classics.
You synthesize your subjects to form a very truthful delivery.
Im of Chinese descent in Canada and I love your work/energy.
We see what youre doing to help the people, which is from the heart and for me already worth more than what a modern day university class will get you.
A real human trying to guide you on life. Once light is lost it can stay lost forever. if we overcondition the next generation to all not think properly or to forget about the cycles we end up in places we dont wanna be... We are demons on this earth without proper guidance
On one hand I think university should be a free place to explore while gaining knowledge at any time in life, but there's also a part of me interested in the east Asian system of universities being ranked and using entrance exams that guarantee a job, complete with people who's job it is to find jobs for students.
In America, the model is to let you go a job hunt yourself. The pulling your self by the bootstraps mentality.
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.
very fair. much stronger content than those attempts to slander beliefs.
9:30 you say the university was the product of the Enlightenment. No doubt that was a big part of it, but don't forget that they grew out of Christian institutions
He said *modern* university- you're not wrong, but universities now are very different from the pre-enlightenment ones
Just a great analysis. Insightful and clear. Thank you.
Dear carefree wandering. I would like to hear your analytical view on psychology as a science and also the way it affects society in terms of the mentallity. What do you think is the symptom of the such wide spread usage of the psychological therapy? Is it creating more problems than solving them? And is it just an exstension of a selfhelp culture totally out of control? Thanks alot
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.
"Profilic synergy" is a great way to conceptualise a lot of the identity based movements
this is great, we need more like it! question: why is the right (at least in the u.s.) so afraid of the words 'socialism' and 'communism', when the exact things those words are used to describe, become 'capitalism' if the critique is coming from the (rational) left? e.g. why does Jordan Peterson say that wokeism is a function of left hysteria, when your analysis finds it springing out of neo-liberalism? (sorry if this isn't well worded)
Interesting question. Several thoughts: First, Zizek refers to Claude-Lévi Strauss when talking about how a social divide is never seen the same way from both sides. Strauss' example is that of tribes people who draw differently structured maps depending on their status in the tribe. Zizek turns this into: the left see the difference between 'right' and 'left' differently than the right. In your question, this would turn into: the right see capitalism as one thing, the left as another. Another thought, I will again use Zizek here, because he is the most well known: he frequently talks about his disagreement with Judith Butler's ideas about gender, because he does not think they are at all revolutionary. They play in fact right into the neo-liberal framework, as can be deduced from observing the ease with which they have now been incorporated into it (This last bit is my addition).
However, my preferred, albeit very radical, historical/metaphysical take on this phenomenon comes from Jean Baudrillard, as well as a little known metaphysician called René Guénon, who is usually dismissed because of his fundamentally religious outlook (it follows from my personal analysis that the seeming paradox you have called attention to in your question is also found in Prof. Moeller's work with regards to religious ideas. He thinks he is somehow arguing against religion, but is actually closer to it than he has the capacity to see, at least when you assume something like a Guénonian starting point).
Baudrillard and Guénon share a common thread in their thinking which followed from having stumbled across the same problem/question that you have, which Prof. Moeller also kind of talks about at a higher level of analysis. One way to formulate it would be: whence the paradoxical nature of modern reality? Another way to phrase it (in Guénon's terms) would be: how has identity (actual quality) broken down into indistinguishable quantity? In Baudrillard's terms it would be: what separates life in a symbolic value system from life in simulation (Prof. Moeller's profilicity seems like a specific case study of Baudrillard's more overarching concept here)? A lot of Baudrillard's philosophy is about characterizing and emphasizing the paradoxes that arise in simulation through very evocative language, whereas Guénon cuts straight to the point. For both thinkers, (post)-modern life is characterized by an unlocalizable drive for ``instability'', or flux. The heavier things are, i.e. the more they possess a stable identity, the less they are able to flow, and they need to be cut loose. Think of cryptocurrencies, gender fluidity, the stock market, brand images, profiles...all of them are the result of a ``cutting loose'' from fixed qualities, i.e. things you can put your metaphorical finger on. It is the world of signs which keep other signs afloat and engender them. Where everything is strangely interchangeable, but individual. Where things are desperate to mean something (hyperteleology), because they have no more meaning (people who have nothing to say are most eager to speak). Where things seem to be moving at lightning speed, but everything is set in stone (Guénon's analysis of Cain and Able regarding space and time is absolutely incredible [The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of Time]). Baudrillard and Guénon are superior in their analysis to every other philosopher I've come across, because they are able to think the ambiguous/paradoxical, not the different, nor the identical.
To answer your question using what I've briefly hinted at above, right and left seem paradoxical in their opinions because they are not seeing their shared premises. They are both slaves to the underlying (I like to call it metaphysical) movement of dissolution that is propelling the world onward (interestingly, Baudrillard ended up implicitly agreeing with Guénon, whom he didn't actually know, that time is cyclic, and that every single thing carries within itself the seed of its own destruction). As Baudrillard liked to say, and Cesar saw this a long time ago, binary divisions only serve to keep stable the underlying hegemony.
I could go on, but you know, no time :)
@@RydSpyn thanks for your comments, I didn't know Guénon but he sounds fun. and thanks for such a full and interesting commentary. favorite part of what you wrote: "they are not seeing their shared premises." ... I want them to see their shared premises, the fools.
The right is by definition the status quo. The traditionalists. The left are the ones introducing change, flux, progress, etc. So the right never really questions and always reacts which isn't a diss, it's just categorically true. They necessarily will be less educated which doesn't mean they are stupid, it means they pay attention to different things, on an intuitive level rather than explicit level. If the right understood Plato and Aristotle's Metaphysics, then they'd be more prepared, but generally the communist and socialist are all about deconstructing categories. That's what they react to, they just don't call it nominalism.
Why would you expect his analysis to match that of the right wing? He's an admitted Marxist himself, so of course he finds it springing out of neoliberalism. Whether one agrees with that or not, it doesn't somehow the reveal the right as hypocrites, since their analysis would likely be quite different. They identify is as a function of left hysteria based on their own diagnosis, not his.
Just read your book "You and Your Profile" couldn't stop marking it up, excellent work! I think the comparison of wokism to religion is spot on.
To quote Eric Fromm from his book Escape From Freedom, "By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual couple cope to be acceptable to God [profile]". This rings a bell of Zizek speaking about how expressing a lack of power and insignificance one then gains a tremendous amount of power. How many white liberals go on the offensive saying how this is "racist" to the point of not even caring if something is racist but boosting their profile and getting along with tearing others down who do not 100% align with their own thoughts and ideas. In You and Your Profile, there is a line directed towards Germans and their guilt of their past in World War Two which is comparable, psychologically speaking, to the white guilt felt in America.
"This act of accepting almost unacceptable shame and admitting almost inadmissible guilt quite ingeniously recycles shame and guilt into form of postheroic grandeur. Guilt is converted into guilt-pride. IT is a moral pride that claims ethical exceptionality for having strength to remember and thereby to take on responsibility for one of the greatest sins ever committed"
Is this not paradigmatic of the white liberal wokism that we see today in establishing their own profile to confess to the world how righteous they are and expel "sin" in terms of freedom of speech? To quote Fromm again
"The hostility in which this modern kind of humility and sense of duty is rooted explains also one otherwise rather baffling contradiction: that such humility goes together with contempt for others and the self-righteousness has actually replaced love and mercy"
One great take away form your book professor is that to engage in second order observation is to not engage authentically, but by virtue of the median it is "nonauthentic". We should need to take a step back from moralizing and start addressing issues on their own terms. Robert Reich goes into the issues of even looking at "profiles" of companies and considering that looking at companies as good or bad is a misstep and distracts rather than enhances our understanding, as wokism distracts from or creates issues. Example looking at Walmart either condemning or praising with how they handled issues such as morning-after pill in 2006.
"Corporations do some good deeds but corportate thank-you rituals mislead the public into believing companies do these things out of selflessness- indeed, that there is a "self" there deserving commendation in the first place. But there is no corporate selflessness, and there is no corporate self." Just enjoy parallels of thought that can smoothly transition to one another and how we need this kind of analysis today because discourse so wrapped up in our profile-identity that we're becoming slaves to culture.
Long comment, surprised if anybody made it through, just collecting my thoughts in one area ; )
You might enjoy this because it kinda ties in with some of what you say: Zizek in his big book on Hegel (Less than nothing) opens with a remarkable taxonomy of idiocy which he relates to Lacan's concept of The Big Other (which you can read as the symbolic order of language). An idiot is the lowest form in this hierarchy. He is completely without the big other. Then there is the imbecile who needs the big other but deeply distrusts him (like a grumpy old man who throws his walking-stick away) and lastly the moron, the intelligent kind of idiot, who is lost in the big other. Zizek sympathizes with the imbecile and affectionately dubs his book: "Hegel for imbeciles" - precisely because for him imbecile suggests this dialetictic tension between the big other and us. An imbecile is the negation of a becile but what even is a becile and why can we not return to it? Zizek suggests that a becile is a double negation who redoubles the lack and transposes it back into the big other itself. In this sense the becile is aware that if he were an imbecile the same would apply to god himself, to the big other.
As our entire being is mediated by partaking in the big other (or the big other partaking in us) I think the same applies to these societal acts of humility. In such acts we put everything but ourselves down, we try to close the gap, fill the need, to become nothing, which is much more than we are (this is Zizek's speculation, reality is less than nothing and it strives towards nothingness).
Profile building seems to me perhaps one of the most advanced forms of the big other partaking in us. It is where we come the closest to crushing our own non-identity with our identity (our manifestations in the big other) or at least where this conflict is most present, that is being the signified (the object) instead of the signifier (its symbol), that is the way in which you are actually not [your name] but that strange mass behind it. But in a way here is the big problem with being authentic too because you can not just be that mass behind your name. Unless you decide to go the way of the idiot (maybe you know Werner Herzog's film Kaspar Hausar, Kaspar Hausar at the beginning is perhaps an idiot, he is without the big other) you can not escape the big other, you can not escape a profile of you, you can not escape the signifier (your name) being the version of you that is constantly circulated, not the signified. At the very best you can try by dialectics to take a step away from it (for instane in understanding the underlying implications in you building this profile for yourself or others building this profile for themselves - and then also the role a corporate profile might play). I think this is also what Moeller does. I mean Moeller is very obviously building a profile on this UA-cam channel and we are all also partaking mediated through profiles. So in a way the true task presents itself as how to live with this defilement. In a way once you become too caught up in it (like perhaps Peterson and his followers) you always lose because then the profile has you, you have become lost in the big other, you have become a moron. But maybe with Zizek the true task is to maintain your imbecility, your skepticism of the big other, while knowing that you also need it to walk.
Also obligatory sorry for the long comment (this ties in wonderfully with Zizek's joke as well).
@@tobi2731 Thank you for the comment, I enjoyed it!
This is a nice complement to Haidt's and Lukaniov's 'Coddling of the American Mind' ... Very interesting book!
This is very good.
I thought conservatives were supposed to like it when things are done for profit.
Which is why the problem addressed is not economic but cultural and merely uses the economic system like any memeplex would.
The problem with the universities today is the same as with business today: they do not think in the long term, preferring instead instant gratification such as quarterly results.
The result is that they do not invest in the future.
It's not a failure of the profit motive, it's just plain stupidity. I think some have called it the MBA-ization of business. Administration by "experts" who have neither depth nor breadth of knowledge, much less knowledge that pertains to business.
@@alanlight7740So profit seeking has led to widespread stupidity....
Short term profit is necessary to avoid bankruptcy
Peterson's need to perform "moral outrage" and "righteous anger" as if he's Moses come down from the mountain to chastise us latter-day Israelites for worshipping false idols is one of the most insufferable things about him.
How do you know it's a performance?
thank you 💜 i appreciate you talking down the sophism
I think its important to note the radical/liberatory potential (and origin)of the calls to making universities more diverse institutions. It makes explicit how the co-option of said ideas, say identity politics moving from the claim of a communist collective(Combahee River) to the capitalist market, are a reactionary move typical of neoliberal institutions that are designed to empty and subsume any ideology, dressing in their shells for the institutions own continuation without meaningful change.
That potential does not exist anymore if it ever did. Would seem almost misleading to mention it.
It's nice to see this analysis on academia in connection with neo-liberalism and wokeness.
i had an intresting video idea for you, about the metaverse, as its becoming yk more and more popular in our society (not rlly everyones shitting on it lol) but it still has got that hype. I guess if a vid was to be made on it itd be about how it wud affect us. To be honest i think its good and evil of social media on a much larger scale
No such thing as reverse racism. 🙄 It is racism in either direction.
An absolutely brilliant analysis!😊