He’s quite a smart chap, perhaps a good deal smarter than me, but he is one of the most intellectually dishonest people on YouTube, and he is misinforming people for ideological reasons.
Olly is a communist who uses the appearance of neutral authority to sell his ideology to those interested in philosophy, and employs bright colours and theatrics, as well as a trendy aesthetic to distract from the extensive distortion of the content he criticises, and a selective ignorance of political history.
The easiest example is his series of liberalism, where he claims Mill and Locke are racists. There is very little evidence for this. The only evidence that Mill was a racist, is a quote of his from On Liberty, where he argues that illiterate societies with “barbarian” cultures (read: pillagers and peasants) should be grateful to be ruled by a skilled emperor. The examples are telling: “a Charlemagne or an Akbar”. That means Europeans and Indians, the two civilisations he most admired. The notion that illiterate people are too uninformed to fully participate in parliamentary democracy is not an extraordinarily controversial statement. He admired the Indians so much that he insisted, while he was seconded to the East India Company, that they be educated in their own languages, in their own traditions, what would nowadays be called decolonised pedagogy, a hundred years ahead of his time. He argued for a principle of non-interference in Indian affairs, and a tolerance of their traditions (except for Sati, the burning of widows).
On John Locke, Olly deliberately overlooks the lengths Locke went to to argue to his peers that indigenous Americans were intellectual peers. And while he is often credited with co-authoring the Carolina constitution, there is no evidence that he wrote the parts guaranteeing slave-ownership, and never defended it in his philosophy. In fact, he wrote into law harsher punishments for attacking or murdering natives and blacks than for attacking or killing whites. While Locke was thoroughly aware of the cruelties of the slave trade, and did nothing about it, that counts for every man woman and child to walk the earth until the 18th century.
Olly’s piece on the philosophy of Antifa is completely uncritical of the book despite the numerous historical inaccuracies, the most central of which is the blatant lie that “freedom of speech” is what allowed the Nazis to flourish. In fact, the Weimar republic was the first to institute hatespeech laws, and Nazis wore their convictions and jailtime as badges of honour, as evidence of the Weimar government’s conspiracy with Western Imperialists to keep the German people down. Victimhood, perceived or otherwise is extremely important to fascists. Its how the NSDAP justified building their own paramilitary movement - they were “defending themselves” against violent communists. There are other gaping inaccuracies in that propaganda tome, but those best undermine the philosophical argument for the need for antifascist street gangs. Antifa is the biggest recruitment tool for the right, and they should stop.
He claims to be “giving away his degree”. He isn’t. He is teaching an extremely watered down version of philosophy, which doesn’t involve learning to analyse texts, to take ones interlocutors charitably, or to approach topics neutrally before applying judgment. There is no outline of how to make arguments, or how they work. There is no explanation of the ethics of truth-seeking. These things are the core of philosophy, so what he really is doing is a sort of philosophy-lite with a communist slant. He has no interest in delivering a (neutral (or as neutral as possible) guided tour through the important thinkers and schools of thought and how they apply to life and how to live.
He has one mission - to sell ideology. It leads him to elide extremely pedestrian facts which undermine every argument he erects, and which take 30 seconds of Googling to discover. For one trivial example, the housing crisis. He argues that we need to just give homeless people houses to solve homelessness. Putting aside the complications of real attempts to do this around the world, most empty houses in Britain are owned by the state, not private individuals. Its just that people don’t want to live in dying Durham, where there are no jobs, they want to live in London. To fill these houses, you would have to forcibly transplant people. That sounds pretty nasty to me.
Of course, the worst in my opinion, is that while he claims to stick by the principle of never attacking anyone, he dehumanises neoliberals by calling them “garbage humans”. Whatever you may think of this nebulous and ill-defined school of governance, this is not an appropriate way to talk about people, especially if you claim to abide by a principle of decency.
I cant attack everything he does here, or this would be a book, but suffice it to say, he is not an ethical presenter, and he is not what he says he is. Which is disappointing, and unpleasant
https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-the-YouTube-channel-philosophy-Tube?top_ans=134014537
youtu.be
