Commentary

We become what we hate

merica is turning into an anti-meritocracy. If you could put America on the couch, it would probably say it all started when it was a child, and some of its citizens decided to avoid imposing value judgments on others. Their goal, whether admitted or not, was to make the individual weak by reinforcing weakness wherever it appears: to make victims the most powerful group in society, and make victim status the most coveted position.

Daniel Greenfield has a good description of it here if you want the gory details. The ultimate goal is obvious: the weaker the individual, and the weaker the bonds among people, the more government has to step in. Why they did it is also obvious: to take those who missed out, and put them on top of the social hierarchy. You might say multiculturalism is an ideology for losers. WARNING: Political philosophy triggers ahead! People whose phobias are triggered by long articles with hard words should stop reading now!

The latest example of it is those trigger warnings that college students need so they can be protected against shocking new ideas like racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, or domestic abuse. The idea is that college kids are little flowers that are weak and easily bruised, so new ideas and descriptions of the real world must be compartmentalized and labeled to protect them. It's another way the anti-meritocracy seeks out weakness wherever it can be found, so it can be nurtured and encouraged to grow.

It also adds meta-information (the content of which is decided by someone else), thereby ensuring that the student understands what he or she is supposed to believe about what they are about to read. It does no good to call Tom Sawyer racist, for example, if the student has already gone and read it, and knows better.

The purpose of calling a book “racist” is, of course, to prevent people from reading it in the first place, for fear that the dreaded label will stick to the reader. The word ‘racist’ has been so overused that it has little objective meaning, but we are now so terrorized that the mere suggestion of it is enough to destroy one's life. No student will risk that.

But left to themselves, people gravitate to the truth. So an anti-meritocracy can only be kept in place by lying or by force. Currently, we're at that awkward point of transitioning from the lying phase to the force phase. In the past, environmental activists just lied to get policies passed that would bring them vast financial returns. Politicians just lied to get more power for themselves. People in the news media lied to help get their favorite politicians elected. Academics lied because their goal was not to teach students WARNING: This paragraph may trigger memories of trauma caused by reading the editorial page of the New York Times! but to produce social change. But that is so 2000.

Ah, the good old days. The lying is now gradually being replaced by threats. Now we're being forced to pretend there is no such thing as race or IQ and to violate our personal beliefs. Those who justified the forced resignation of Brendan Eich, by saying Mozilla is a private corporation that can do whatever it wants, need to explain why people are now being forced by the government to bake wedding cakes for gay couples. The lying is now starting to be backed up by the force of law. It's only a short jump from where we are now to imprisoning dissenters. If they refuse to comply, it's inevitable.

Now, I am really not trying to be political here. Political ideology makes you predictable. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, for example, is so predictable that someone created a web page that creates his editorials automatically. They're better than the original, and more imaginative. You know you're in trouble when you fail a Turing test to a simulation of yourself.

In the book A Troubling Inheritance, Nicholas Wade describes how genetics has played a major role in culture. By “troubling,” Wade means that some people are disturbed by the idea that human behavior is partly determined by genetics. They claim to belive that human nature is a blank slate. Some anthropologists have even claimed that race is a social construct, which is to say it doesn't really exist.

Strangely, many of these same people are the same ones who run around calling anyone who disagrees with them “racist.” This has become such a popular sport they have taken to inventing new races for our convenience, so we have a virtual smorgasbord of races to discriminate against. It used to be, for example, that Hispanics were white people, which meant Hernán Cortés was an evil, racist white colonialist. Suddenly, it became more convenient to define Hispanics as a separate race, which makes them victims and therefore immune to charges of racism. Is it now racist to criticize Cortés, or Italians like Columbus, or do they magically change into white people when we discuss their faults? Is Europe therefore a multiracial society, making it racist to criticize Berlusconi? What a tangled web they have weaved.

It seems to me the multi-cultis have somehow gotten ‘race’ confused with ‘ethnicity.’ Logically they should be running around shouting ‘Ethnicicisist!‘ instead of ‘Racist!,’ though I guess the probable result of the recipient doubling over with hysterical laughter would dampen the feeling of sanctimony they felt. What seems to be happening is a denial of biological reality. Some have called it a new secular religion, but I think it's more like a War on Science. It can't be a War on Common Sense, because common sense was defeated a long time ago.

WARNING: May trigger traumatic memories about trigger warnings! Free humans make value judgments about other social groups. When you call a someone racist you automatically create a new social group—the set of people who are racist—for the very purpose of being judgmental. So you become even more intolerant and judgmental than before. You can pretend you're only criticizing the behavior, but it never remains so, and the fact remains that being judgmental about judgmentalism is an inescapable contradiction. How that works I described here, but in short it's a demonstration of a universal truth: You become what you hate.

(Philosophically speaking, of course. There's little danger that anyone will turn into a plate of Brussels sprouts or a JavaScript pop-up ... although, given a few million years of evolution, who knows?) WARNING: If you give too many warnings, people will ignore them!

We used to hate communism. Now we have a president who talks openly about redistributing our wealth. We had a War on Poverty. Now we have a permanent welfare class. We had a War on Drugs. Now we drug our male schoolchildren to make them quiet in class. Whoever this “we” is, they seem to have become our worst enemy.

Maybe there's a universal rule that denying something makes it happen—a type of earth-bound Karma. General Motors employees are not allowed to say words like death-trap, genocide, cataclysmic, rolling sarcophagus, Kevorkianesque, or Corvair-like. Understandable, I guess, but they left out the most toxic brand name of all: General Motors, which I shall not discuss further, other than to suggest that Chevy™ Karma© has a nice ring to it [1].

Self-contradiction is the inevitable product of any anti-meritocracy. Social orders, whether they are corporations, governments, or ideologies, always evolve until their sole purpose is to promote the continued existence of the organization. The employees, ideologues, or citizens have to stop doing their jobs and spend all their time servicing the organization. The organization's original purpose becomes a threat. Like big corporations, ideologies and governments always mutate until the phrase “Don't be evil” becomes ironic. The difference is: when that happens to a company, it just goes bankrupt and you create a new one. When it happens to your government, it's not so easy.

[1] We can negotiate the price.