"Critical theory is a universal solvent, and the problem with a universal solvent is finding a container that can hold them. Spill enough and dissolve society." -- James Lindsay
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"Critical theory is a universal solvent, and the problem with a universal solvent is finding a container that can hold them. Spill enough and dissolve society." -- James Lindsay
If this tactic seems familiar, it’s because it’s the same mechanism as “you can’t have morals without a god.” If it was about the X or the morality, it wouldn’t matter to them how you care about X or live morally. But it isn’t. It’s about disparaging those who don’t comply with or submit to its specific ideological demands. Because echoing their belief is more important than shared goals.
By: James Lindsay
Published: Jun 7, 2020
Before I got involved in studying Critical Social Justice like I do now, I mostly studied the psychology of religion. One thing I learned was that most religious and cult conversions outside of childhood occur by using doctrine to resolve emotional vulnerability.
Sometimes, that emotional vulnerability is there for personal reasons, or as a result of life events. It is often manufactured for the purpose, however, especially in the case of cults. Would-be indoctrinators ask manipulative questions and try to catch people on the spot.
With religion, obviously, many of these manipulations involve asking about one's fears of death. They also can center on making one feel morally deficient, however. "Did you know you're a sinner?" ... "Did you know you're complicit in racist systems?"
Once this vulnerability has been successfully manufactured (or identified, if already present), doctrine is given as the solution to the problem. "Christ died for your sins, so you can be forgiven." ... "Be an antiracist. Help us dismantle the system and build a better world."
The next step once the doctrine is initially accepted is to make the person feel morally welcome, like they're now doing the right thing where they were doing the wrong thing before. "You can be one of the saved and repent for your sin." ... "You're on the right side of history."
Once the person feels morally welcome, the indoctrinator will start to increase the depth of the doctrine (teaching the quieter parts) while informing the new recruit that they'll be surrounded by temptation, especially from former friends and family who don't understand.
This is a willful move to bring the person further into the cult and to separate them from other emotional and personal ties that might cause them to doubt their new faith position while it is still shaky. The person hasn't devoted enough to the cause to be fully committed yet.
To get people more fully committed, the usual methods are public pronouncements of faith to the in-group and requests to make costly personal sacrifices to be considered a full part. This can be money, cutting ties with relations, making pledges, doing "the work," etc.
When people like Robin DiAngelo tell us that "antiracism is a lifelong commitment to an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-critique, and social activism," she is providing a mid-level cult indoctrination path. Change yourself to be in the cult, endless process, do the work.
This process progresses over time, demanding more costly sacrifices, costly signals, doing work for the cult. These are meant to increase emotional investment and commitment. Meanwhile, the mark is to consume more doctrine and cut more ties with outside voices of reason.
Depending on the degree of vulnerability generated at the outset, this process can go quite quickly, taking only weeks, though months is more common. Take a step further in, rationalize why it was good. Every step in means more investment in the cult and a harder path back out.
Before long, the cultist will convince the mark that every voice that disagrees w/ the cult is somehow "demonic" and out to pull the mark away from the cult. This is relatively hard at first, with sunk cost keep marks in, but then they "see it," and lose all trust in outsiders.
Once the cultists start to turn on outsiders as though they are bad influences only trying to pull people out of the cult, it is *extremely* difficult to get them to change course. They're more or less indoctrinated completely and very stuck. Then the project changes completely.
Once the mark is properly indoctrinated (that's step 2, vulnerability/doctrine is step 1, initiation), the objective becomes to reprogram the mark to get them to think in line with the cult doctrine, to see it for themselves everywhere in the world. That's "Woke."
Sorry to break the flow! Getting people to engage in ritual behaviors and other communal/group behaviors like group singing, prayer, etc., is very important in Step 2, indoctrination. It dramatically increases groupishness and commitment to the group as a new family.
In the case of Woke programming, there is a more formal name for it, which is having a "critical consciousness." A critical consciousness is being able to see the "problematics" in everything. It is the cult mentality of Marx's conflict theory.
It's very important to stress just how difficult it is to break someone free once they have adopted the cult consciousness. They will perceive all attempts as ones to drag them back to the bad place that they associate with that awful vulnerability that was used in Step 1.
In this sense, anyone trying to talk sense to them or pull them out of the cult is, in some sense, interpreted as trying to do harm to them by taking them back to that awful vulnerability. More than that, it will be framed in terms of "not understanding" and rejected both ways.
This is obviously the case, though. The point of cult programming is to make it so one's inner pain and pathology can ONLY be understood in terms of the cult doctrine. The doctrine is the resolution to the vulnerability and has always been established as such.
The only ways I know of to effect a deprogramming of this are to introduce a severe shock (death of a family member) or to find an emotionally intolerable contradiction INSIDE the cult doctrine, though this is usually very difficult as highly evolved doctrines have fixed these.
One that sometimes works within Wokeness is that the abysmal treatment of women and homosexuals under fundamentalist Islam is both intolerable and absolutely defended, though this only works on a small fraction. Ways the doctrine harms its charges in general can work.
If someone begins to deprogram from a cult, it is very important that they are welcomed and NOT SHAMED for their participation in it, no matter how bad it was. They have very low trust for outsiders due to their indoctrination and will still see the world largely as programmed.
Wokeness is a cult. It might even be a proper religion at this point. Antiracism, in particular, under its auspices is explicitly framed religiously and with clear patterns of cult initiation written all over it. This is what we're up against.
PS: Doctrines within the cult are often designed to maintain and amplify the state of vulnerability used in the initiation. This is what "white fragility" is about. Every possible doubt is more confirmation of one's sin, explicitly explained as a moral failing. It keeps them in.
When dealing with cults, it's important to realize how much of the doctrine is set up in this nasty double-binding way (damned if you do or don't). This keeps that vulnerability strong while positioning the doctrine as the means of its resolution (though it is the actual source).
You can learn more about white fragility the concept here.
You can learn more about White Fragility the book and the racket built upon this concept here.
You can learn more about how manipulative white fragility, as a concept (and book) is here, by reading this slightly modified real chapter from the book. It just turns the manipulation up a little to make it more visible:
“Dear White Women: Do Not Commit Suicide because You’re Racists”
https://archive.vn/Zh5jK
This is an open letter from a white woman to all white women to let them know that it is necessary for them to do antiracism work, and that no matter how hurt they are about their own complicity, they must not take steps like ending their own lives. Suicide should always be discouraged, of course, and people who are suffering should reach out and do everything they can to get the help and resources they need to do otherwise. White suicides over discovering one’s complicity in murderous systems of racism, though, must be understood as political acts that recenter white suffering and distract from Black pain and Black suffering, which is just another form of white supremacy. So, fellow white people, stay alive and support us in antiracism work! Do not talk about your suicidal despair, and do not take your own lives, and recenter whiteness yet again. This isn’t about you.
[Continued...]
For those playing along at home, it’s a warmed up rewrite of Chapter 11: White Women’s Tears.
By way of illustration of the point James is making, the above is a real, published, cited paper, titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”
While one might have reasonably thought otherwise, it’s actually not a parody or hoax paper. You can verify this yourself. Download it in PDF from here. You’ll find the “sexual and intimate” encounter with glacier water on page 17.
The artwork described that the paper’s authors argue should be considered glacier knowledge comparable with ”Western science” can be found on the artist’s website.
The paper did, however, inspire the Grievance Studies paper titled “Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy” which makes pretty much the same argument about including feminist and queer astrology into the astronomical sciences.
Although it was not published prior to the reveal of the Grievance Studies probe, the authors claim the journal had been still pressing them for their revisions.
Science uses rigorous, highly structured methodologies for a reason. The arts do not, also for a reason. Because they serve different purposes to society.
The frustration about not getting random touchy-feely projects acknowledged by the scientific community as scientific knowledge indicates a severe lack of understanding of what the scientific process is intended to achieve.
The call to change STEM into STEAM or STREAM is a call to corrupt, dilute and make incoherent the most successful process we’ve ever used to understand our natural world, gain advantage over diseases, disasters and other things that will kill us, and improve quality of life.
Humans have both emotional and logical aspects to how they think. They need both. Society is the same. Art and science can work together (e.g. the design and technology of Apple products), but they still need to be their own thing, and they absolutely need to retain the integrity of how they work.
This is not science.
If we continue fighting back—for pushing back is no longer enough—intelligently and firmly against the ideology of Critical Social Justice and the Woke movement it has spawned, we will find ourselves on the road to a post-Woke world, and it is not yet clear what that might look like.
By: James Lindsay
Published: March 19, 2021
The fight against the ideology called Wokeness is gaining ground for the first time in a decade, if not decades. People increasingly understand what it is and why it is a terrible, inhuman, and inhumane ideology that has no place governing our societies. They also increasingly and rightly see it as a puritanical religious movement built upon a perverse faith, which they are starting to reject. They also increasingly understand it to be a takeover ideology with profound roots in totalitarian, racist, and communist thought that should not be empowered and must be fought. Certainly, we have a great deal of work still to do, especially practically, to fight this ideology and its remarkable bid to take over our society and culture, but people are waking up. Though I may look a bit far down the road in saying so, now we need somewhere to go.
If we continue fighting back—for pushing back is no longer enough—intelligently and firmly against the ideology of Critical Social Justice and the Woke movement it has spawned, we will find ourselves on the road to a post-Woke world, and it is not yet clear what that might look like. It is therefore necessary now, even this early in this ideological war, to set the values that should guide us into a post-Woke era so that we might enter a new era of flourishing and prosperity after this diabolical attempt to snuff out the light of Western civilization and human freedom. These values must be comprehended and asserted starting now as we begin the next phase in the fight to leave Woke ideology behind us, hopefully in the dustbin of history. Here, I offer four cardinal values to orient ourselves toward for the establishment of a post-Woke world that’s full of promise and prosperity. These are truth, beauty, liberty, and merit.
Uniting humanity through division.
Under Critical Queer Theory, social constructivists agree with fundamentalist Xtians: “Born This Way” is a myth and being gay is a “choice.”