Who are we?
Savage Minds was launched in 2020 and is run by Julian Vigo, Editor-in-Chief. We are a collective of writers drawn from journalism, academia, politics, science, psychology, and labour organising.
Why subscribe?
Over the past decade, “cancel culture” has narrowed cultural debate, a trend that has crept into far too many newsrooms, where even editors at independent outlets now refuse stories out of personal bias or fear of losing subscribers. Combine this with the spread of fake news, driven largely by publications’ failure to pay their writers, and the case for an independent outlet became clear to me. I created Savage Minds to take up the issues central to political and cultural debate today. I have written for Quillette, Spiked, TruthDig, Truthout, Dissident Voice, Forbes, CounterPunch, Black Agenda Report, Morning Star, and The Ecologist, among other publications.
My priority is to bring you daily articles that draw on my background in cultural anthropology and investigative research, producing fact-based news and analysis. As funding permits, I plan to bring on additional writers to build a more eclectic publication with a diverse set of contributors covering their own fields of expertise.
Background Noise
As a subscriber, you have access to every story published here, my forthcoming books, and my previous book, Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development (2015), in electronic format. The Savage Minds podcast features weekly interviews with some of the leading voices on the political and cultural scene, and more writers will join the publication as funding allows.
Since 2005, when the HuffPost model of publishing took hold, writers have watched blogging erode their livelihoods. Blogging has its place, but it cannot replace well-informed, fact-checked investigative journalism. It is no coincidence that “fake news” has risen alongside the decline of journalism as a paid profession: when journalists aren’t paid for their work, they are instead offered paid publicity pieces, writing about a specific company, CEO, or legal dispute on commission. Paid content of this kind runs throughout CNN, Forbes, and most major outlets today, shaped by the corporations supplying the angle. Consider the flurry of travel and vacation pieces that ran on Forbes at the height of COVID-19: not a coincidence, but fake news doubling as marketing copy, designed to encourage people to spend on tourism.
The only way to bring journalism back to its more noble roots is to rethink its purpose, which, in the words of the American Press Institute, is “to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.” Savage Minds exists to return to journalism that asks hard questions, covers perspectives absent from major media, and pushes the conversations necessary to move us forward as a society and a global citizenry. Three ideas anchor how I conceived this publication.
The first comes from the British-American journalist Sydney J. Harris: “The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.” That distinction is rarely made today, since people tend to treat information as something readily transmitted and absorbed. In an age saturated by social media, it has become harder than ever to separate gossip and opinion from fact. I try to honour that distinction here, publishing information that you, the reader, can in turn communicate to others. The second idea comes from Oscar Wilde, who summed up the relationship between legibility and the choice to read: “The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.” I want Savage Minds to build a journalistic core that is fact-based and informative, yet readable in the literary tradition Wilde gestures toward. We need not sacrifice either readability or substance to the other.
My aim is to publish pieces that present facts, strive for objectivity, and hold all parties to the same standard of scrutiny, alongside op-eds that bring a critical approach the major media and think tanks rarely attempt.
Why Savage Minds?
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage (1962), translated as The Savage Mind, is a landmark work of structural anthropology. In it, Lévi-Strauss critiques totemism, arguing that it never existed as a coherent category at all. Rather than accepting the nineteenth-century anthropological consensus, he contends that totemism is merely one arbitrary mode of classification among many, in which “heterogeneous beliefs and customs have been arbitrarily collected together under the heading of totemism.” Lévi-Strauss drew sharp criticism from anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, who championed an interpretive approach to anthropology. Yet Lévi-Strauss offered the world a deconstructive approach to the discipline, insisting that “ethnology is first of all psychology.”
Ultimately, Lévi-Strauss teaches us that structures are to be interrogated, minds queried, and questions asked, and asked again. Where Geertz faults Lévi-Strauss for failing to grasp “how people conceptualize, understand their world, what they are doing, how they are going about doing it, to get an idea of their world,” my mentor Vincent Crapanzano turns the critique back on Geertz himself, arguing that the ethnographer’s claim to specificity is an illusion: “His conventional tale of entry serves as a deictic function… It gives the illusion of specificity when there is no specific temporal or spatial vantage point. It attests to the ethnographer’s having been there and gives him whatever authority arises from the presence.” Crapanzano goes further, questioning the authority of the ethnographer’s gaze: “When Hermes took the post of messenger to the gods, he promised Zeus not to lie. He did not promise to tell the whole truth. Zeus understood. The ethnographer has not.”
Journalism, too, can never know the whole truth. But like Hermes facing his own dilemma, and like Lévi-Strauss’s pensée sauvage, we must persist in trying to read it.
Our Ethos
Savage Minds centres class without distorting it or constraining it within identitarian or liberal frameworks. The publication is anti-identitarian, offering political criticism from outside the bounds of the culture war, though we will inevitably publish pieces that take on identitarianism directly, given its outsized and corrosive hold over current political discussion. The representational politics of identity, in our view, have produced a spontaneist liberal drift on the left. This publication stands against the identitarian modes of governance that have become hegemonic, modes that suppress critique while confining expression to passive reflection, assimilation, and conformity.
With critical engagement at its core, Savage Minds addresses key social issues and the means by which they might translate into political action. For readers already skeptical of these trends, we offer this publication as a riposte to the conflation of leftism with progressivism. After all, when so much street-level political organising today is funded and led by the wealthiest, we must ask: by whose consent has leftist politics been hijacked? And why have academics and the economically powerful become the managerial class so often cited as the de facto leaders of movements like “anti-racism” and #MeToo? Might these movements themselves function as ideological apparatuses, manufacturing neoliberal capitalist subjects?
Our position is that the left has been labelled and corralled in this way, pressed to conform to progressive ideals without ever consenting to them; in this sense the left has been an unwitting participant in the game. Likewise, the right is recruited into a fruitless culture war against an unassailable progressive “left,” a dynamic that serves the capitalist elite and does no justice to the right’s own political thought either.
Our goal, fundamentally, is to think and enact new ways of doing politics. Below are the axioms and questions that guide what we aim to explore at Savage Minds:
Critical thought must not be the accomplice of late capitalist institutionalism.
We reject the ex cathedra labelling of the left as progressivism by ideological actors and institutions, and the threat of being “cancelled” used to enforce it.
We focus on solutions to the current aporia of theoretical overload paired with a lack of social engagement.
We need mediation between ideas that have the right instincts but that repeat old dynamics already proven not to lead anywhere.
What does “progress” even mean, given that Western notions of progress are bound up with slavery and colonial enterprise, since morphed into low-wage and immigrant-exploitative practice?
We must address how half the population has been written out of history, public policy, and intellectual life by a capitalism that values only one mode of social and political participation. Women are now referred to as “individuals with a cervix,” while men retain the linguistic and social dignity of being named outright. This is no coincidence: it serves both neoliberalism and conservatism, each of which treats women as instruments toward its own ideological ends.
This project turns the analytic axis on its head, to examine how subjects are addressed within legal, philosophical, and cultural frameworks.
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Submissions
Savage Minds welcomes submissions: essays, analysis, opinion pieces, and investigative journalism. Our budget pays professional writers only. To keep the magazine open to contributors who make their living in other professions, we don’t exclude them, but we don’t pay them either: funds raised through this publication and its subscriptions are reserved for our full-time writers and journalists.
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Terms of Service
Refund policy: This publication is fully visible and not paywalled, so we offer no refunds on subscriptions. We don’t have the staff to manage subscription changes or refund requests.
