Memetics and Evolution

Social Justice Warriors, Jihadists, and Neo-Nazis: Constructed Identities

Sparkle Pony SJW

Excellent piece (“The Problem of Social Justice Elitism”) in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion by Matt Sheedy, highly progressive faculty member at the University of Manitoba, which gets at the heart of what is wrong with Social Justice Warriors and their quasi-religious belief in their own righteousness regardless of truth:

I have been thinking about this problem ever since an experience I had as a Master’s student at Harvard Divinity School. While the political culture of HDS was overwhelmingly progressive, seminars were often plagued by the sort of one-upmanship described by Ahmed, wherein the perfect were made the enemy of the good. Then one night there was a party in the courtyard of Beckwith Circle, an apartment complex for divinity students. A large, slightly inebriated man wandered up from the street and joined us. The stranger turned out to be a Neo-Nazi who proceeded to debate us about whether the holocaust had really happened. He also asserted that deporting all Jews from the United States and Western Europe was the only way to prevent widespread violence and rioting when the population rises up against “Jewish arrogance.”

The divinity students made a few efforts to debate him, but of course, the Neo-Nazi had come prepared for this debate. No one asked him to leave. Instead, one by one, they excused themselves and retreated into their apartments. I was one of only two students who continued to talk with this person. While I became mildly concerned the encounter might end in violence, everyone remained calm. I stopped trying to argue with him and instead asked him how he became a Neo-Nazi. He told me he was a quarter Jewish and that he had been attacked in a nightclub “for being Jewish.” He also praised the intellectualism of the Boston Neo-Nazis he had met, who could allegedly read Sanskrit. My overall impression was of someone struggling to form a sense of identity from the resources available to him. Eventually, he left of his own volition.

I woke up the next morning feeling frustrated with my fellow divinity students. What did it mean that we spent so much time in seminar challenging each other over increasingly subtle concessions to the kyriarchy, but retreated when confronted by an honest-to-goodness Neo-Nazi? What if well-meaning academics had made this Neo-Nazi feel vilified and ashamed, driving him into the arms of the white supremacists?

In the years since this incident, I have thought a lot about the difference between sincere discussion about social justice and the more self-interested rhetoric described by Ahmed. First, true discussion about social justice is conjunctive rather than disjunctive. That is, it creates connections by promoting an understanding of the experience of the other. By contrast, the rhetoric of social justice elitism divides people by assessing the degree to which they contribute to a system of injustice. Second, while sincere dialogue about social justice requires courage, social justice elitism rarely involves risk. Speaking truth to power is a frightening undertaking. So is talking about social justice in a way that leverages one’s privilege or runs the risk of being misunderstood. The rhetoric of social justice elitism generally occurs through channels in which there is no risk of being challenged: online comment sections, gossip, and seminars full of like-minded people.

Ironically, I suspect that we engage in social justice elitism for the same reason an otherwise reasonable man became a Neo-Nazi: out of a desire to construct and perform an identity. While the SJWs really do care about social justice, they are also invested in constructing a heroic self-narrative. This often entails a Quixotic project of creating villains by casting whoever is around them as the forces of oppression. As a teaching assistant, an undergraduate asked me about a paper she wanted to write on the Bible and gay rights. She explained that she was very pro-gay but knew “by word of mouth” that the professor opposed gay rights. In essence, she wanted to know if she would be punished for defending gay rights against an intolerant authority figure. The problem with this narrative was that there was no such authority figure. The professor was an arch-progressive and the victim of malicious gossip. At its worst, the move to create villains where none exist can amount to “weaponizing” the values of social justice. I have even seen cases where undergraduates have used the rhetoric of tolerance to punish faculty for giving them low grades. There has probably never been a religion professor who “hates other cultures,” but this accusation has been made on teaching evaluations.

This game of heroes and villains is not merely annoying or hypocritical. It directly undermines the very causes that SJWs advocate. When well-meaning students fear being attacked for their lack of sensitivity, the opportunity for a sincere dialogue or a teachable moment about structural injustice closes. A judgmental classroom environment also lends credence to the canard that higher education claims to promote critical thinking while actually enforcing “liberal brainwashing.” The most ironic consequence of these sorts of attacks is that untenured white male professors (i.e. professors like me) may feel discouraged from discussing those voices and traditions that have historically been neglected by academia. Had the professor I worked under not invited students to write on Biblical hermeneutics regarding homosexuality, he probably would not have been slandered as homophobic.

The sealed grievance bubble of like-minded true believers is impervious to facts and assumes only they have a connection to “truthiness.” In that, it resembles a cult or one of those hate groups the Southern Poverty Law Center likes to label dangerous, but of course the prevailing politics gives them a pass because they “mean well.”

Young people who latch onto a belief system and self-righteously hurt others are also in the news: jihadists leaving privileged backgrounds in Western countries to behead innocents also fit the pattern. They seek glamour and meaning at the expense of human values, defending an abstract victim class by crucifying real people.

As moderate Muslims give a pass to Jihadists because they are “just trying to do good,” older and wiser academics fail to stand up to SJWs because they are sympathetic to their ideals, but they are doing great damage to freedom of thought in their schools.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech

Google Sign

GigaOm has a good overview of the recent diversity data released by major tech companies after a push by Jesse Jackson. The data shows women, and blacks underrepresented compared to total US population ratios, but no comparison to Silicon Valley-specific numbers. Asians are massively overrepresented, but this reflects the large number of Indian and Chinese engineers who have migrated to the Bay Area. There is no data on age, which would likely show a deficiency of older workers.

This is a fine example of the conflict between meritocratic equality of opportunity and equality of outcome proponents. The lack of representation of women and blacks in computer science and engineering courses, majors, and graduates means it is impossible for all or even one company to recruit enough qualified women or minority workers to show proportional representation. Great pressure to do so would mean compromising quality and hiring less capable employees, and less capable programmers are actually worse than useless to a team — they hold back progress on a task. A super-programmer is capable of producing 100x as much valuable output as a mediocre programmer, and a bad programmer produces output that actually decreases the viability of the product.

The apparent belief of our bureaucratic masters is that there is a binary function: qualified or unqualified. A company which hires the objectively best candidate for a job is not protected from claims of discrimination; the bar must be set low enough so that there is a pool of “qualified” candidates, and the hiring should prefer the candidates from underrepresented classes until the workforce is representative. This views employees as replaceable cogs that each have the same value to the work product, very much an old industrial union idea — where those who did more were pressured to stop overachieving so as to make slackers look average.

This is, of course, a recipe for failure in a competitive, international marketplace. We all await their efforts to equalize men in nursing and teaching, as well as all the other fields where there are notable group differences in interest and ability.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Modern Feminism, Social Justice Warriors, and the American Ideal of Freedom

Marxist-Feminist Poster

Some degree of gynocentrism in culture is probably evolved out of sexual strategies pursued under natural selection. Relations between men and women in traditional cultures were delicately balanced, with more or less overt or covert power sharing, depending on the culture; it’s easy to look at those cultures with our modern-day glasses on and see the powerlessness of some women, but not to see the powerlessness and abuse of low-status men in those cultures. There has been no shortage of mistreatment and callousness toward fellow human beings in the past, and only advancing civilization brought forward the concept of universal rights and respect for all.

Modern feminists and Social Justice Warriors, having fixated on the flaws of the highly progressive and rights-sensitive culture of the West they are embedded in, have a tendency to see Western culture as soiled and unjust, while other cultures have greater authenticity and deserve respect. Thus it is when you discuss the genital mutilation practiced by some Muslims on girls or the pogroms against the Muslim Rohingya people of Burma by Buddhists, their outrage is muted by a desire to agitate only against the villains in their own parent culture. They take to Twitter to emotionalize the kidnapping of hundreds of young girls by Boko Haram while failing to exert their outrage on behalf of the hundreds of boys killed in similar incidents.

By choosing to notice only the bad things that happen to women in our own time as well as other cultures and times, modern feminists have failed to work for truly equal treatment of men and women. Instead of seeing individuals and their rights as important, modern feminists and other Social Justice Warriors believe the relentless focus on oppression of some categories of individuals by others is the key to righteousness, and their collectivist view of group rights leaves little space for sympathy for anyone who cannot claim membership in an oppressed class. They believe as a religious cult would believe that if only they explain their beliefs hard enough to the unenlightened, the scales will fall from their eyes and goodness will triumph. No amount of victory in achieving their goals would ever be enough for them to end their battles, since new groups of the wicked can always be identified to battle against; the battle itself nourishes their egos and so it must continue. If all their enemies have been vanquished, villainy is defined down to catch a new class of micro-villains whose microagressions and incorrect thoughts must be corrected.

Note that it is no longer enough that “victim” classes be treated equally by government and in employment and public accommodations — theirs is now a push for equal outcomes to overcome private rights of association and contract, so women (or men!) who desire to work less or take out more time for family would not be allowed to bargain for those conditions of employment by asking for less pay for less work. Implicitly all employees with the same job title and duties must be paid the same regardless of their individual contributions or their own desires for a lesser degree of commitment to the business.

Equal treatment does not imply there should be equal outcomes, because diversity of interests and abilities between individuals and the sexes means there will be unequal interest in career options that require 60 hours a week of work, intense focus on mechanical problems, manual labor, or hazardous conditions. Similarly, you will not get or expect equal interest in the highly social, helping professions that on average women appear to prefer. Efforts to force equal employment in every company by race, sex, age, or other class are simply doomed — any company which balanced its workforce to match these desiderata would find themselves forced to hire less productive employees, crippling them against their competition not so constrained. When you talk to a Social Justice Warrior about this, you get an answer remarkably similar to what socialists said in the 1980s when you asked how any country could level outcomes (“to each according to his needs”) without the productive escaping to another country to achieve what they could without the shackles: “well, that’s why they had to build the Berlin wall.” Prevention of the defection of those who want to be free to follow their own preferences requires that this preferred system be extended everywhere or somehow escape must be controlled and punished by, say, walls, machine guns, and Gulags.

So what we have is a small but highly influential group, educated, generally well-off, and embedded in academia, government, and non-profit work throughout the United States. They continually agitate for larger and more intrusive government which would employ more of their kind, the better to regulate away all imperfect thought and behavior. Business and profit-making enterprise is viewed as suspect because it is partly beyond their political control, so efforts to take control of decisions inside businesses continue, and the expanding HR departments, lobbyist payments, and political contributions of businesses reflect the need to pay for protection against this bureaucratic tendency. Similarly, hospitals and schools have responded to the increasing regulation and government funding of their activities by hiring many more high-paid administrators while shorting the low-level staff that actually do the work, because they must do so to get along in an increasingly bureaucratized, legalized, and controlling environment. This employment of large numbers of high-paid staff that don’t directly produce anything of value for customers has hugely increased the cost of domestic services like healthcare and education, and the increasing drag on Western economies has brought economic growth to a halt in many places.

We have seen such bureaucracies before — the Catholic Church, which for centuries held both political and moral authority over weak governments in Europe, attempted to regulate thought and action to increase its own power. The solution to the problem of state interference in private thought and belief was found after centuries of turmoil in the Enlightenment idea of separation of church and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

The early history of the colonies which later became the United States is instructive. Many of the colonies had an established church (the Massachusetts Bay colony notoriously drove out religious dissidents and hanged the Quaker Mary Dyer on Boston Common in 1660) and wished to maintain their government support for a specific religion even as the Enlightenment took hold, but it became clear that any government uniting the colonies would have to take a neutral stance toward religion which enforced a set of negative rights (constraints on government action on individual thought and choice) to allow them all to co-exist peacefully. The great flaw of this compact, its political tolerance of slavery and second-class citizenship for slaves, was only corrected by the upheaval of the Civil War, which cemented the primacy of the federal government and its enforcement of the ideal of individual rights within the states.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer is an eye-opening look at the four founding British cultures of colonial America, and how each of them continues to influence present-day political preferences and power struggles. Other immigrant cultures (German, Irish, Scandinavian…) were also influential, but tended to join with one of the four founding cultures that closely represented their views, resulting in the welter of memes of political belief now contending for influence.

In New England, the Puritans from East Anglia settled between 1629 and 1640, the years immediately preceding the English Civil War in which Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan army defeated and beheaded King Charles I. Their colony started with a rigid established church which was intolerant of free thought.

In Virginia, settlers consisted of vanquished supporters of King Charles and the Established (Anglican) Church of England, primarily from the south and west of England. They tended to be more relaxed about religion and more business and trade-oriented.

Quakers then arrived in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia area) from the English midlands (and their religious kin from various German sects) between 1675 and 1715. Their way was strongly religious and pacifist, recognizing as important freedom of conscience.

The good coastal lands having been occupied, the Scotch-Irish, referring collectively to immigrants from the north of England, lowland Scotland, and Ulster, settled the Appalachian hill country from 1717 to 1775. Scrappy and suspicious of any effort to tax and control by hated distant governments, their attitude of automatic resistance is still visible in today’s politics, with Sarah Palin an example of the type.

Only a government which respects and mediates the difference between these founding cultures could work for a larger United States.

As time has gone on, these Enlightenment understandings have been eroded, and “Americanism” (the practice of tolerance and “minding your own business,” belief in progress and rugged independence and freedom of thought and contract for all citizens of sound mind regardless of sex, race, wealth, or heritage) is less practiced. Our Social Justice Warriors value freedom of speech and thought but only for approved speech and thought; heretical ideas are to be stamped out by denying speech and punishing the heretics. It is no longer unusual to hear a college activist suggest that certain kinds of speech be forbidden by law.

There are signs that popular culture has taken note of the tendency toward totalitarianism and government propaganda from the Social Justice Warriors. Dystopian YA novels like The Hunger Games show a population repressed and manipulated by a media-controlling central government. The movie version of the novel The Giver takes some shots at this mindset; a thoughtful review of the movie version in The Atlantic “What Is the Price of Perfect Equality?” gets at its politics:

Engels saw the institutions of family and private property as deeply entwined. Part of Engels’ objection to the institution of the family was that it involved a “progressive narrowing of the circle, originally embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal relation.” Marxism’s benevolent tendencies are swallowed up by concern and preference for one’s immediate family, which becomes the unit of basic inequality.

…

Commerce and trade, it turns out, are just as dependent on the passions as the passions are dependent on commerce and trade in The Giver. The true nightmare of a dystopian world is that all of these things are interconnected, and that by losing one or the other, by engineering it away socially or medically, nightmarish unintended consequences will ensue.

Only intentions matter to Social Justice Warriors. The fact that all of their well-meaning attempts to stamp out incorrect personal preferences and social disparities create damaging unintended side effects is only seen as a reason to stamp harder and control more until the thoughts of the people are perfected. The source of these failures is always pinned to the improper thoughts of the backward citizenry. As a result none of their programs is ever recognized by them as a failure or boondoggle, and evidence to the contrary is flushed down the memory hole.

The solution to this contention over social preferences and culture is analogous to the separation of church and state. To accommodate all religious and social beliefs in a framework of law and justice that respects all such beliefs that can be consistent with universal human rights, a government has to be prohibited from interfering when those beliefs are practiced without harming an individual’s rights. We might call this generalized idea “Separation of Culture and Government.”

While the Social Justice Warriors would wish to eliminate such current cultural communities as Mormonism, ultra-orthodox Judaism, socially conservative evangelical Christians, conservative Catholicism, and unreformed Islam from the scene, the bargain must be struck to prevent further strife: the law will not take a position on any social belief — it will not take sides for or against social conservatives or Social Justice Warriors. Any individual is free to practice their beliefs with other like-minded individuals in voluntary association. Attempts to bring the force of the law to bear on changing social mores and behaviors that are not in violation of individual rights would be prevented. The law of marriage would revert to the law of contract, with social conservatives free to enter into perpetual marriage contracts with features like dowry, alimony, and discriminatory child custody and support arrangements, while others would be free to bind themselves to marriages which maintain individual property and call for equal arrangements for child custody, with no alimony implied unless provided for by contract. No group could punish an individual member for behavior contrary to its beliefs except by private action: social sanctions, excommunication, and shunning. Lobbying the central government to adopt your preferred social arrangements by law would, ideally, occupy far less time and attention in national politics as such efforts were struck down by the courts.

Currently modern feminists have considerable ability to use government support and propaganda to free women of some of the obligations of the patriarchal culture feminists want to replace. Not only to correct injustices in law and employment, but to increase government spending and regulation to provide support that women formerly might have had to negotiate and serve a partner or employer to obtain. Both ever-expanding social welfare states and the failed Communist states reduced individual accountability and replaced allegiance to family and employer with allegiance to the state’s goals, and that is the model modern feminists prefer and are now working toward in the US.

Under such a controlling regime there is far less reward for striving. Hard work is replaced by contentious committee meetings and political struggles for pieces of a shrinking pie. The increasing numbers of academics, government workers, and nonprofit workers operate detached from practical considerations of serving customers. It becomes easier to slack off, and so more people slack off. The endpoint occurs when the productive have fled or chosen more leisure over work, and the economy collapses after years of stagnation.

Men and women who don’t want to take the role offered them in a culture have the choice of not doing so, or bucking their culture to find a partner who more closely reflects their values. But under a government that micromanages social arrangements and decides family custody and support decisions based on “victim feminism,” men are never safe from rape accusations, your children can be taken away from you easily, and the population of women one might productively partner with has been programmed to see themselves as victims entitled to use government to win any disputes that might come up. If you are hardworking and successful on your own, you are taxed heavily to support other men’s children and fund the politically correct bureaucrats who harass your business. This thumb on the scale of justice makes marriage a negative-sum game for many (especially poor and disadvantaged) men, and the elevation of bureaucrats and academics above workers in the private sphere damages men’s career prospects, unless of course they adopt the conformist ideology.

The small-government crowd doesn’t want no government. It is generally recognized that externalities and free-rider problems can only be handled by a government; defense, civil justice and policing, pollution regulations, and public health regulation (quarantines, vaccination requirements, etc.) are areas that can only be directed by a monopoly state. But political decision making is a blunt and inefficient mechanism, and those matters which can be handled by private business and voluntary social organizations should be, both for efficiency and freedom of choice. The libertarian and smaller government crowd wants a government that is less parasitic and concentrates on effectively and efficiently handling matters only it can handle well. The expansion of the government sphere at the expense of the private sphere is analogous to Microsoft’s destruction of most competitive software applications companies in the 1980s: using its near-monopoly in operating systems and the enormous profits to enter the applications market, marketing its mediocre applications and funding them when any normal company would have given up. Eventually competitors were worn out and stopped funding new development; Office products took over, ending most of the progress in the field for a decade. Using the power to tax and the lack of any mechanism to disband failed government programs, mediocre government-funded services (like monopoly elementary and secondary education) crowded out the privately-funded community schools, and after a century of increasingly centralized control, local parental control of schools and their curricula has almost vanished.

So it will be “interesting” to see how all this ferment and turmoil comes out in the only mechanism the people have to control their government: elections. People attracted to office tend to favor Doing Something as opposed to a hands-off approach, though the American people once had the wisdom to elect as President an examplar of the type: Calvin Coolidge, who noted “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” Minding our own business, while respecting the freedom of thought and action of everyone, ought to be our goal.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

The Latest from Jeb Kinnison:

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, In Kindle and trade paperback.] The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of Death by HR

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat. For it is now fairly impossible for any company not to erect an HR wall as a legal requirement of business with the sole purpose of keeping government diversity compliance enforcers as well as unethical lawyers from pillaging their operating capital through baseless lawsuits… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… to craft counter-revolutionary tactics for dealing with the HR parasites our government has empowered to destroy us. All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

The Curriculum of Freedom

The Library

I’ve put up a permanent page with suggested readings on how to think about economic and political questions. Just a start so far:

While I went to some great schools like MIT, I was primarily self-educated. Anyone can pick up the ability to think through problems independently and do the research needed on the Internet, but it helps to have a base of organized knowledge to give yourself a head start on your individual contribution to the world’s knowledge. A great book on a subject area will allow you to quickly reach the level of understanding needed to start your own research; then a bit of reading on the more recent research results available online will catch you up to the current edge of the field and where you can contribute.

If you or someone you love want to have a deeper understanding of how the world works, these books are a great way to start. I’ve read all of them and guarantee that reading them will boost your understanding of what you may have learned in school, where textbooks are watered-down, homogenized committee efforts and subject to political bias.

Many of these authors are prolific and have written more than one book amplifying their thoughts. If one turns you on to a topic, you may want to go on and read others they’ve written. I’ll be filling in my take on each book later, but for now you can read the Amazon description to get an idea.

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Memetics and Evolution

Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech

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The Curriculum of Freedom

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