June 1, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment, “Social Justice in Action” concludes the section on American Philosophy in the Nihilism series. Thus, we have completed two of the three sections of the series, the first being American Human Rights History. Next week will begin the third section: American Culture. This segment looks at the philosophy of the Social Justice movement and its numerous Critical Theories we have investigated in segments 10 through 15. These beliefs and values are contrasted against the philosophy of our traditional values and beliefs.
My Takeaways:
A Listing of Social Justice Beliefs and Values
Listing of Traditional Beliefs and Values
Concluding Question: The great push to put people into oppressed (victim) groups and oppressor (perpetrator) groups is an objective of the social justice movement. But why? Is it to assist people to socialize, to find comfort and seek support and compassion? Or is it to tear down our current culture so it can be replaced by Socialism? Or is it something else? It appears you will have to select one of the two philosophies for America, you won’t be able to mix and match.
Commentary:
As a wrap up to the philosophy section, I proposed a number of questions to myself relative to the Nihilistic question of good or bad for the two philosophy alternatives. I will share this with you as you may wish to do the same.
It is two hundred and forty-five years since the American Revolution – a fairly short period of time in the history of civilization, but a very robust era of progress in the world’s history. We know how the traditional philosophy has turned out. So, I challenged myself to envision how the U.S. and the world would be today if the Social Justice Advocates philosophy had been implemented in 1776 versus the traditional philosophy that prevailed. Some of the questions I asked myself were:
Next:
What culture must prevail for the philosophy you choose to be robust? Or to unite us? The next segment will present a debate surrounding these two questions and set the stage for section three of the series: The American Culture.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment, “Social Justice in Action” concludes the section on American Philosophy in the Nihilism series. Thus, we have completed two of the three sections of the series, the first being American Human Rights History. Next week will begin the third section: American Culture. This segment looks at the philosophy of the Social Justice movement and its numerous Critical Theories we have investigated in segments 10 through 15. These beliefs and values are contrasted against the philosophy of our traditional values and beliefs.
My Takeaways:
A Listing of Social Justice Beliefs and Values
- Everything in life is a political choice and a political act and always their aim is to “deconstruct everything” so we can start anew with the precepts of Critical Theory.
- The aim of the Social Justice warrior is to take each oppressed group (gay, women, race, trans) and present their case as a “rights” grievance and make the case as inflammatory as possible. Their desire is not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame, not to dampen but to burn.
- Central to Theory is that bigotry is everywhere, and racism and supremacist attitudes are omnipresent, and the job of Social Justice is to root bigotry out.
- Theory ascribes collective blame to dominant groups – white people are racist, men are sexist, straight people are homophobic.
- Anyone who isn’t white, gays, women and people who are trans are kept down, oppressed, sidelined and otherwise made insignificant by the white patriarchal heterosexual system.
- Social Justice encourages tribalism, group identity, and identity politics.
- Theory believes knowledge is completely created by humans – not experimentation, science or what has been learned objectively by reality.
- Social Justice is authoritarian in its attempt to dictate what people must believe.
- Theory focuses on victimhood.
- The belief is that their Theories will not fail, despite evidence of similar theories failing catastrophically – like Communism.
- Theory cannot be criticized. And if criticized uses the weapons at hand to defend itself (accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia).
- Social Justice has successfully transformed academia via activism for a new internal bureaucracy of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Its officers are rapidly increasing in number, power and costs (earning three times as much as the average American and more than academic faculty). This phenomenon is spreading to corporate America and the government.
- To show belief in their system and recognizing the plight of people of color, women, gays, and trans and how their movement is overcoming the plight makes one a good person. Those who disagree are bad people.
Listing of Traditional Beliefs and Values
- A desire to gradually make society fairer, freer, less cruel, one practical goal after another building on our heritage and successes. A system of conflict resolution but always a work in progress.
- A system that is intrinsically goal oriented, problem solving, and self-correcting.
- A system that builds on the tenets of individual liberty, equality of opportunity, free and open inquiry, free speech, debate, and humanism.
- A focus on the individual and universal human values.
- A Theory of Truth developed via debate, disagreement, science, and objective reality.
- Continued “melting pot” inclusion and identity versus tribalism and group identity.
- Encouraged criticism, debate, and difference of opinions on its tenets.
- A system in which meritocracy is encouraged and rewarded.
- Recognition of the fact that there are 73 countries in the world where it is illegal to be gay and 8 in which being gay is punished by death. Recognition that in countries across the Middle East and Africa women are denied some of the most basic rights of humanity. Recognition that nowhere in the world are the rights of trans people to live lives the way they wish and to be protected by law except by the developed West. These are achievements to be celebrated and built upon, not torn down.
Concluding Question: The great push to put people into oppressed (victim) groups and oppressor (perpetrator) groups is an objective of the social justice movement. But why? Is it to assist people to socialize, to find comfort and seek support and compassion? Or is it to tear down our current culture so it can be replaced by Socialism? Or is it something else? It appears you will have to select one of the two philosophies for America, you won’t be able to mix and match.
Commentary:
As a wrap up to the philosophy section, I proposed a number of questions to myself relative to the Nihilistic question of good or bad for the two philosophy alternatives. I will share this with you as you may wish to do the same.
It is two hundred and forty-five years since the American Revolution – a fairly short period of time in the history of civilization, but a very robust era of progress in the world’s history. We know how the traditional philosophy has turned out. So, I challenged myself to envision how the U.S. and the world would be today if the Social Justice Advocates philosophy had been implemented in 1776 versus the traditional philosophy that prevailed. Some of the questions I asked myself were:
- What would be the country’s borders? Would the Louisiana Purchase have been made or would the central part of today’s country be ruled by the French? Would the Indian Wars have taken place, or would the western part of the country be the domain of indigenous people? Would Texas and California be part of Mexico? Would the country today just be the original thirteen colonies? If so, would slavery have been abolished when it did?
- With equality of outcome being pervasive and meritocracy and capitalism being nonexistent, would U.S. innovation have been more or less? What would our economic system be? Would the prosperity and standard of living of the world’s population be more or less than that of today? How about for the U.S. population? Would the world’s life expectancy be the same, greater, or lessor than today? In the U.S.?
- Would oppression and poverty be more or less that it is today both world-wide and within the U.S.? When would slavery have been abolished?
- How would you define the resultant society after 245 years of equality of people in every aspect of life as dictated by the government based on morality defined by judges? Would it be tribal or integrated, poverty stricken or wealthy, unified or polarized or something else? What type of government would you expect to find in place – a democracy with checks and balances, a tyrannical bureaucracy of the majority, a tyrannical monarchy, or multiple groups of socialist-like communes like the technology resistant Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites?
- What would you speculate our liberties and freedoms to be today – greater or less?
- What would the status of Germany and Japan be? Would there have been the Civil War? What would be the status of the U.S. today, would we exist as a country, or would we have been a victim of conquest?
- Would we have greater or far less diversity than exists today?
- What would be our standing in the world today? How would that have affected the rest of the world – positively or negatively?
- What would you envision the prosperity of the blacks and indigenous people to be today – greater or less? How about income inequality – more or less? How about the income of blacks and indigenous people – more or less?
Next:
What culture must prevail for the philosophy you choose to be robust? Or to unite us? The next segment will present a debate surrounding these two questions and set the stage for section three of the series: The American Culture.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 16
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ACTION – EXCERPTS
THE SOCIAL JUSTICE PYRAMID OF OPPRESSION AND EXPLOITATION: Capitalism is at the top of the social justice pyramid of oppression and exploitation. The top tiers of this hierarchy pyramid are inhabited by different types of people. At the top of the hierarchy are people who are white, male and heterosexual. They do not need to be rich, but matters are made worse if they are. Beneath these tyrannical male overlords are all the minorities: mostly the gays, anyone who isn’t white, people who are women and also people who are trans. These individuals are kept down, oppressed, sidelined and otherwise made insignificant by the white, patriarchal heterosexual, ‘cis’ system. Just as Marxism was meant to free the laborer and share the wealth around, so in this new version of an old claim, the power of the patriarchal white males must be taken away and shared around more fairly, with the relevant minority groups. At the outset this ideology was not taken seriously by its opponents. Some of its claims seemed so laughable, and its inherent contradictions so clear, that coherent criticism was almost absent. This was a mistake.
It is an ideology with very clear ideological precursors, an ideology that provides a lens for understanding the world and a purpose for an individual’s action and life within the world. It is no surprise at all that the academics who spent years tinkering with the ideas that have evolved into this theory of intersection special-interest groups all of which have the same historic interests in common. These thinkers view everything solely through the prism of “power.” For them absolutely everything in life is a political choice and a political act. And always and everywhere the aim is then to “deconstruct” everything. Academia in recent decades has found almost nothing it does not wish to deconstruct, apart from itself. The process of taking apart occurred in a number of fields, but nowhere did it happen faster or more comprehensively than in every-metastasizing offshoots of the social sciences. Anybody who got in the way of this direction of travel found themselves mown down with astonishing vigor. The weapons at hand (accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia and finally transphobia) were all too easy to wield with no price to pay for wielding them unfairly, unjustifiably or indeed frivolously. The analysis of ideas is commonly replaced by political smears and personal attacks. The purpose was not academia, but activism.
HOW THIS AFFECTS THE BROADER WORLD: Social Justice with a capital S and capital J refers to the “Social Justice Movement” – a very doctrinal interpretation of the meaning of “social justice.” “Social justice in the lower case describes the broader and generic meanings of the term. It is becoming increasingly difficult to miss the influence of the Social Justice Movement on society – most notably in the form of “identity politics” or “political correctness.” It isn’t gong to work. Social Justice is a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail, and which could do tremendous damage in the process. Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are unreliable. Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives, but liberalism and science are not. Liberalism and science systems – not just neat little theories – because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain, by design. This is a reasoned – not a radical – skepticism. They put the empirical first, rather than the theoretical. They are self-correcting. Liberal systems like regulated capitalism, republican democracy, and science resolve conflicts by subjecting human economics, societies, governments, and provisionally true statements about the world. The proof is that almost everything has changed over the last 500 years, especially in the West. As Theory points out, that progress has sometimes been problematic, but it has still been progress. Things are better than they were 500 years ago. For most people most of the time this is undeniable.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO SOCIAL JUSTICE – LIBERALISM WITHOUT IDENTITY POLITICS: Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another. Liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively; Theory seeks knowledge as completely created by humans – stories we tell ourselves, largely in the unwitting service of maintaining our own social standing, privilege, and power. Liberalism embraces accurate categorization and clarity of understanding and exposition; Theory blurs boundaries and erases categories while reveling in manufactured ambiguity. Liberalism values the individual and universal human values; Theory rejects both in favor of group identity and identity politics. Liberalism across the board centers on human dignity. Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth. Theory rejects these as these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives and insists that we cannot get to “the” truth, but only to “our” truths, which are rooted in our values. Liberalism accepts the correspondence theory of truth – that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality; Theory promotes the idea that truth is a “language game” and that words, ultimately, only point to other words and can never correspond concretely to reality – unless those words describe oppression. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachment to methods is call “critical.” By tolerating difference of opinion and viewpoint diversity, liberalism allows for people not to support liberalism. By insisting on freedom of debate, liberalism explicitly permits and even welcomes criticism of its own tenets. Liberalism is not perfect. Nevertheless, it is the antidote to Theory.
Liberalism is perhaps best understood as a desire to gradually make society fairer, freer, and less cruel, one practical goal after another. This is because liberalism is a system of conflict resolution, not a solution to human conflicts. In being a system that works through the inputs of its participants, it offers up no one in particular in whom to place our trust. It is not revolutionary, but neither is it reactionary: its impulse is neither to turn society on its head nor to keep it from changing. Instead, liberalism is always a work in progress. This is because it actually works – it leads to progress – so it solves each problem. Theory doesn’t understand Liberalism. Liberalism has firm tenets of individual liberty, equality or opportunity, free and open inquiry, free speech and debate, and humanism, and although these are expansive ideals, they are also strong and consistent. This is why they have slowly but surely won out over the last 500 years and produced the freest, most equal societies, with the least suffering and oppression, the world has even known. It is intrinsically goal-oriented, problem solving, self-correcting, and – despite what postmodernists think – genuinely progressive.
Critical Social Justice threatens to reverse – and seems to be reversing – much of the progress racial minorities, women, homosexuals, and trans people have made, and it does so in two ways. First, Social Justice approaches re-inscribed negative stereotypes against women and racial and sexual minorities by the kind of Theory it develops. Authoritarian attempts to dictate what people must believe about gender and sexuality and the language they must express those beliefs in the name of Social Justice are rapidly creating a hostile resistance to mainstream acceptance of trans people in particular. Secondly, the critical approach to Social Justice encourages tribalism and hostility by its aggressively divisive approach. Whereas Civil Rights Movements worked so well because they used a universalist approach – everybody should have equal rights – that appealed to human intuitions of fairness and empathy. Social Justice used a simplistic identity politics which ascribes collective blame to dominant groups – white people are racist, men are sexist, and straight people are homophobic. This explicitly goes against the established liberal value of not judging people by their race, gender, or sexuality, and incredibly naïve to expect it not to produce a counter-revival of old right-winged identity politics.
Source: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity and Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (2020).
CONCLUSION: What is really going on. If the absence of serious discussion and the innate contradictions alone were enough to stop to this new religion of Social Justice, it would hardly have got started. People looking for this movement to wind down because of its inherent contradictions will be waiting a long time. Firstly, because they are ignoring the Marxist substructure of much of this movement and the inherent willingness to rush towards contradiction rather than notice all these nightmarish crashes and wonder whether they aren’t telling you something about your choice of journey. But the other reason why contradiction is not enough is because nothing about the intersectional, Social Justice Movement suggests that it is really interested in solving any of the problems that it claims to be interested in.
Perhaps they will have their way. Perhaps the advocates of the new religion will use gays and women and those of a different skin color and trans individuals as a set of battering rams to turn people against society they have been brought up in. Perhaps they will succeed in turning everyone against the “cis white male patriarchy” and they will do it before all of their interlocking “oppressed, victim groups” have torn each other apart. It is possible. But anyone interested in preventing that nightmarish scenario should search for solutions.
Victimhood rather than stoicism or heroism has become something eagerly publicized, even sought after, in our culture. To be a victim is in some way to have won, or at least to have got a head start in the great oppression race of life. At the root of this curious development is one of the most important and mistaken judgements of the social justice movements: that oppressed people (or the people who can claim to be oppressed) are in some way better than others, that there is some decency, purity, or goodness which comes from being part of such a group. In fact, suffering in and of itself does not make someone a better person. A gay, female, black or trans person may be as dishonest, deceitful and rude as anybody else. There is a suggestion in the social justice movement that when intersectionality has done its job and the matrix of competing hierarchies has finally been nixed, then an era of universal brotherhood will ensue. But the most likely explanation of human motivation in the future is that people will broadly go on behaving as they have done throughout history, that they will continue exhibiting the same impulses, frailties, passions and envy that have propelled our species up till now.
Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them; in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orienting ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centers of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice and intersectionality is a waste of a life. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin color mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything would be fatal.
Source: The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ACTION – EXCERPTS
THE SOCIAL JUSTICE PYRAMID OF OPPRESSION AND EXPLOITATION: Capitalism is at the top of the social justice pyramid of oppression and exploitation. The top tiers of this hierarchy pyramid are inhabited by different types of people. At the top of the hierarchy are people who are white, male and heterosexual. They do not need to be rich, but matters are made worse if they are. Beneath these tyrannical male overlords are all the minorities: mostly the gays, anyone who isn’t white, people who are women and also people who are trans. These individuals are kept down, oppressed, sidelined and otherwise made insignificant by the white, patriarchal heterosexual, ‘cis’ system. Just as Marxism was meant to free the laborer and share the wealth around, so in this new version of an old claim, the power of the patriarchal white males must be taken away and shared around more fairly, with the relevant minority groups. At the outset this ideology was not taken seriously by its opponents. Some of its claims seemed so laughable, and its inherent contradictions so clear, that coherent criticism was almost absent. This was a mistake.
It is an ideology with very clear ideological precursors, an ideology that provides a lens for understanding the world and a purpose for an individual’s action and life within the world. It is no surprise at all that the academics who spent years tinkering with the ideas that have evolved into this theory of intersection special-interest groups all of which have the same historic interests in common. These thinkers view everything solely through the prism of “power.” For them absolutely everything in life is a political choice and a political act. And always and everywhere the aim is then to “deconstruct” everything. Academia in recent decades has found almost nothing it does not wish to deconstruct, apart from itself. The process of taking apart occurred in a number of fields, but nowhere did it happen faster or more comprehensively than in every-metastasizing offshoots of the social sciences. Anybody who got in the way of this direction of travel found themselves mown down with astonishing vigor. The weapons at hand (accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia and finally transphobia) were all too easy to wield with no price to pay for wielding them unfairly, unjustifiably or indeed frivolously. The analysis of ideas is commonly replaced by political smears and personal attacks. The purpose was not academia, but activism.
HOW THIS AFFECTS THE BROADER WORLD: Social Justice with a capital S and capital J refers to the “Social Justice Movement” – a very doctrinal interpretation of the meaning of “social justice.” “Social justice in the lower case describes the broader and generic meanings of the term. It is becoming increasingly difficult to miss the influence of the Social Justice Movement on society – most notably in the form of “identity politics” or “political correctness.” It isn’t gong to work. Social Justice is a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail, and which could do tremendous damage in the process. Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are unreliable. Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives, but liberalism and science are not. Liberalism and science systems – not just neat little theories – because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain, by design. This is a reasoned – not a radical – skepticism. They put the empirical first, rather than the theoretical. They are self-correcting. Liberal systems like regulated capitalism, republican democracy, and science resolve conflicts by subjecting human economics, societies, governments, and provisionally true statements about the world. The proof is that almost everything has changed over the last 500 years, especially in the West. As Theory points out, that progress has sometimes been problematic, but it has still been progress. Things are better than they were 500 years ago. For most people most of the time this is undeniable.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO SOCIAL JUSTICE – LIBERALISM WITHOUT IDENTITY POLITICS: Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another. Liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively; Theory seeks knowledge as completely created by humans – stories we tell ourselves, largely in the unwitting service of maintaining our own social standing, privilege, and power. Liberalism embraces accurate categorization and clarity of understanding and exposition; Theory blurs boundaries and erases categories while reveling in manufactured ambiguity. Liberalism values the individual and universal human values; Theory rejects both in favor of group identity and identity politics. Liberalism across the board centers on human dignity. Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth. Theory rejects these as these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives and insists that we cannot get to “the” truth, but only to “our” truths, which are rooted in our values. Liberalism accepts the correspondence theory of truth – that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality; Theory promotes the idea that truth is a “language game” and that words, ultimately, only point to other words and can never correspond concretely to reality – unless those words describe oppression. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachment to methods is call “critical.” By tolerating difference of opinion and viewpoint diversity, liberalism allows for people not to support liberalism. By insisting on freedom of debate, liberalism explicitly permits and even welcomes criticism of its own tenets. Liberalism is not perfect. Nevertheless, it is the antidote to Theory.
Liberalism is perhaps best understood as a desire to gradually make society fairer, freer, and less cruel, one practical goal after another. This is because liberalism is a system of conflict resolution, not a solution to human conflicts. In being a system that works through the inputs of its participants, it offers up no one in particular in whom to place our trust. It is not revolutionary, but neither is it reactionary: its impulse is neither to turn society on its head nor to keep it from changing. Instead, liberalism is always a work in progress. This is because it actually works – it leads to progress – so it solves each problem. Theory doesn’t understand Liberalism. Liberalism has firm tenets of individual liberty, equality or opportunity, free and open inquiry, free speech and debate, and humanism, and although these are expansive ideals, they are also strong and consistent. This is why they have slowly but surely won out over the last 500 years and produced the freest, most equal societies, with the least suffering and oppression, the world has even known. It is intrinsically goal-oriented, problem solving, self-correcting, and – despite what postmodernists think – genuinely progressive.
Critical Social Justice threatens to reverse – and seems to be reversing – much of the progress racial minorities, women, homosexuals, and trans people have made, and it does so in two ways. First, Social Justice approaches re-inscribed negative stereotypes against women and racial and sexual minorities by the kind of Theory it develops. Authoritarian attempts to dictate what people must believe about gender and sexuality and the language they must express those beliefs in the name of Social Justice are rapidly creating a hostile resistance to mainstream acceptance of trans people in particular. Secondly, the critical approach to Social Justice encourages tribalism and hostility by its aggressively divisive approach. Whereas Civil Rights Movements worked so well because they used a universalist approach – everybody should have equal rights – that appealed to human intuitions of fairness and empathy. Social Justice used a simplistic identity politics which ascribes collective blame to dominant groups – white people are racist, men are sexist, and straight people are homophobic. This explicitly goes against the established liberal value of not judging people by their race, gender, or sexuality, and incredibly naïve to expect it not to produce a counter-revival of old right-winged identity politics.
Source: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity and Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (2020).
CONCLUSION: What is really going on. If the absence of serious discussion and the innate contradictions alone were enough to stop to this new religion of Social Justice, it would hardly have got started. People looking for this movement to wind down because of its inherent contradictions will be waiting a long time. Firstly, because they are ignoring the Marxist substructure of much of this movement and the inherent willingness to rush towards contradiction rather than notice all these nightmarish crashes and wonder whether they aren’t telling you something about your choice of journey. But the other reason why contradiction is not enough is because nothing about the intersectional, Social Justice Movement suggests that it is really interested in solving any of the problems that it claims to be interested in.
Perhaps they will have their way. Perhaps the advocates of the new religion will use gays and women and those of a different skin color and trans individuals as a set of battering rams to turn people against society they have been brought up in. Perhaps they will succeed in turning everyone against the “cis white male patriarchy” and they will do it before all of their interlocking “oppressed, victim groups” have torn each other apart. It is possible. But anyone interested in preventing that nightmarish scenario should search for solutions.
Victimhood rather than stoicism or heroism has become something eagerly publicized, even sought after, in our culture. To be a victim is in some way to have won, or at least to have got a head start in the great oppression race of life. At the root of this curious development is one of the most important and mistaken judgements of the social justice movements: that oppressed people (or the people who can claim to be oppressed) are in some way better than others, that there is some decency, purity, or goodness which comes from being part of such a group. In fact, suffering in and of itself does not make someone a better person. A gay, female, black or trans person may be as dishonest, deceitful and rude as anybody else. There is a suggestion in the social justice movement that when intersectionality has done its job and the matrix of competing hierarchies has finally been nixed, then an era of universal brotherhood will ensue. But the most likely explanation of human motivation in the future is that people will broadly go on behaving as they have done throughout history, that they will continue exhibiting the same impulses, frailties, passions and envy that have propelled our species up till now.
Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them; in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orienting ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centers of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice and intersectionality is a waste of a life. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin color mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything would be fatal.
Source: The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 16_nihilism_long_social_justice_in_action_--_segment_16.pdf |