James Lindsay has been hated on the left for some time because he’s been actively involved in ridiculing the woke left. He’s recently become somewhat similarly hated by some on the right as he’s spent the last few months talking about the “woke right.” I haven’t engaged in any of those battles online but today I came across this article in which Lindsay tries to define our modern politics as boiling down to three basic views of the self which then sometimes (often) become pathological and become extreme. It’s an interesting argument and I think our readers will enjoy mulling it over as much as I did.
First, he starts from the idea that political discussions are often derailed because they are not simply about facts but about identity.
Most of the time, everyone believes they’re talking about the facts, the “what’s happening” level of conversation,…
