The Way of Witchthink
I recently had occasion to take the “White Privilege Test” endorsed by the black Lives Matter movement, and was thunderstruck, but not surprised, to find that none of the questions, not a single one, had anything to do with anything that could honestly be called a privilege.
This leads to a serious conundrum. What is White Privilege?
An even more serious question is this: How can anyone take such a silly question seriously?
Let us explore the answer below. It will lead to a larger answer explaining not merely Critical Race Theory, but also Critical Gender Ideology, Critical Intersectional Feminism, Critical Colonialism and the other Cultural Marxist theories all springing from Hegelian Hermeticism. The same perverse spirit animates all these theoretical frameworks.
PART ONE: WHITE NON-PRIVILEGE
First, let us see that White Privilege is not privilege.
What is privilege? Privilege is a grant of permission denied others, or an excuse from duty binding others, as a special sign of favor, rank, or status. Such grant can be enforced by law, or upheld by custom, or both. But to be a privilege, it has to be granted by someone, by an individual or by a consensus.
A friend of mine in England as an exchange student told me the tale of the times when he stepped into a shop, and, since he was dressed in a school uniform like a high-class boy, clerks waiting on any low-class customer would snub the customer, stop in mid-sentence to turn away and wait on the high-class patron.
This is an example of privilege: one is given priority or preference in service. Note that this is the customary behavior in a class-based society. The general consensus of society, high and low alike, expects and condones such behavior. It is deliberate.
No American would expect such behavior, ever; indeed, every American I know or have ever heard tell of, we all would be offended on behalf of the snubbed customer who was before him in line.
We do have hierarchical divisions in American society — as do all societies, because they must — but these appear in the military, in politics, in the clergy, in the business world, and, to a less degree, among celebrities.
In the military, officers have privileges denied to enlisted men; in politics, the president outranks a mayor; in clerical matters, archbishops outrank bishops; in business, executives outrank workingmen; and in general Americans expect famous celebrities to be given special treatment, motorcades, applause, attention. Within their own world, higher ranks are granted salutes, honorific, special seats, escorts, and have special private areas, officer’s clubs, executive washrooms, and whatnot set aside for them. They are served first. All these grants of favor are deliberate, and all are done with the general approval of society.
We are all willing, for example, to step aide for a famous movie starlet to walk a red carpet from a limo to the door of a premier, without insisting ticket-holders arriving previously be seated first. Scandal produced by her unchastity, by and large, would be underreported by the press, or winked at by fans. Nonetheless, no one is willing that such a starlet should be excused from the income tax all others pay.
The proposal issued from the black Lives Matter mountebanks behind the “White Privilege” theory is that whiteness of skin acts as an innate rank, and grants special privileges denied to minorities.
Here follows what the “White Privilege” hoaxsters lists as the unjust privileges awarded to whites:
(1) A white man will never be told he is a credit to his race. (2) A white can be sure that no matter into what neighborhood he moves, his neighbors will not be unpleasant. (3) If he dresses shabbily, uses foul language, of does not answer a written letter, a white man is sure this will not be blamed on the illiteracy and backwardness of his race. (4) At meetings, he will not feel alone, outnumbered, and no one will fear him. (5) If he asks to speak to “someone in charge” a white is sure to meet a man of his own race. (6) A white has easy access to books and entertainment where the protagonists and heroes of his race, and his children can find dolls in their skin color. (7) A white can find band-aids and make-up in his skin color more easily than a black can, and his wife can easily find a hairdresser not baffled by his hair. And so on.
Note that these alleged privileges are “systemic”, which means that they are non-deliberate, that is, bestowed without the approval of society. In effect, these alleged privileges are invisible and ubiquitous, enjoyed as if by sleepwalkers unaware of their benefit, at the expense of victims unaware of their exploitation.
One who becomes aware of this invisible and ubiquitous crime, either as member of the victim race or victimizer race, is awakened to the injustice, hence the name “Woke.”
The name is ironic, as in realty, the so-called awakened ones slumber in a self-induced nightmare of misinterpretation, hallucination, falsehood. The injustices of which they complain do not exist, and if they did, would be beyond mortal power to solve.
The conceit of white privilege, in other words, is twofold: First, the conceit is that any majority, merely by being in the majority, enjoys an advantage over the outnumbered, such as when since cosmetics, toys, and entertainment represent their skin color proportionately to their greater numbers; and that this advantage is somehow unjust, and somehow can and should be corrected.
Second, the conceit is that whites have no expectation of encountering prejudice against their race, whereas this expectation is commonplace, if not ubiquitous, among blacks.
The both parts of the conceit is contrary to common fact. Being in the majority in America grants no white any privilege or favor blacks do not enjoy, nor excuses him from any duty imposed on blacks. And Antiwhitism is so commonplace in the modern day, that it has earned its own awkward word for itself.
Having the marketplace proffer race-specific goods in more numbers to the more numerous segment of the buyers is, at best, a convenience. When one is shopping for a Barbie doll, and if one insists Barbie be olive-skinned, slant-eyed, and dressed in a kimono, one may indeed need to spend extra effort when not shopping in Japan.
Likewise, it is easier to find Chinese food in Chinatown. It is easier to find good beer wherever Germans settlers flourish. It is easier to find a Catholic Church in Catholic neighborhoods. And so on.
The marketplace has a natural tendency to proffer for sale what will appeal to the largest number of dollars: so those with specialized needs or tastes will have fewer convenient choices.
It is absurd and dishonest to call this a privilege, as if the demographics of the buyers in the marketplace were awarded as a grant of higher rank: as if the whites in North America had pleased some authority, who then blessed them to be more fruitful and out-multiply any competing races on the continent. One cannot think of any mortal authority with the ability to grant fertility to favored race, and deny it to others.
No, this is at best a convenience, akin to the convenience a suburban housewife seeking a midnight store within driving distance as compared to her cousin living in a remote rural district. It is not even a “privilege” akin to in-state tuition, or to lady’s night at the local bar, or to low-price tickets granted townsfolk living near a theme park who allowed it to be built in their locale.
And even the degree of convenience is doubtful. Anyone eager only to buy superhero toys only of his race for his children can always buy Iron Man or Spider-Man, and tell him it is Rhodey or Miles Morales, and if this will not do, the incredible Hulk or the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, who skins are green or orange.
The question then is what makes such a father eager to buy superhero toys only of his own race for his children. If his concern is that his children will suffer insult or even psychological inferiority because the toys do not look like him, he should perhaps first eliminate talking animals, robots, and extraterrestrials from the toybox. No child looks like his favorite cyborg ninja dinosaur, after all.
But if buying race-appropriate toys is copacetic for blacks, it is also for whites. If Black Dad buys only Kaldur and never Garth as an Aqualad toy, or John Steward never Hal Jordon as a Green Lantern, then by the same token White Dad can throw away Tonto when he buys a Lone Ranger doll so his white son never sees a Redskin brave, never learns to admire one.
Ironically, the racially-appropriate White Dad is greatly aided in his efforts to remove red Indians from the eyesight of his children by the Left, since neither Boy Scouts nor butter packages nor ball teams are allowed to carry Injun images, nor so dress on Halloween.
If Black Dad can indulge in his skin-hue discrimination among toys less easily than White Dad, is this honestly a privilege the marketplace denies him? It sounds, rather, like an uncouth bigotry the marketplace should not take extra steps to encourage.
To the contrary, blacks enjoy several privileges, both legal and customary, denied others: (1) The Orwellian-named “Affirmative Action” laws actually grant blacks legal preferences on school admissions, as well as preference in government contract work. (2) It is customary for newspapers to underreport crimes committed by blacks, to excuse and justify rioting and looting. (3) It is customary for prosecutors to enforce the laws less rigorously against blacks. (4) It is customary for police to treat black suspects more deferentially and less violently than whites, when compared to criminal population counts. (5) The theory of “representation” in the entertainment industry requires whites be removed and replaced: Few are the married couples in a modern ad who are not mixed race. (6) In newspapers, the standard practice is to capitalize Blacks as a sign of special honor, but not whites. (7) Blacks are allowed and encouraged to utter hateful racism against whites, including speaking the dreaded N-Word forbidden to white men, but not visa versa. And so on.
These are privileges, granted by law or by custom, enjoyed by blacks and denied to whites. Meanwhile there is no corresponding privilege enjoyed by whites and denied to blacks.
Think back and try to remember the last time you and a black friend stepped into a shop, or a restaurant, a bank, or a lawyer’s office, and the reason given as to why you would be served and not he, was that his race was inferior to yours.
Likewise, remember the last time you saw blacks bow and scrape and make way for a white man walking down the sidewalk. Remember the last time you saw the parking spaces or public parks reserved for whites only, or the drinking fountains.
Are you having trouble remembering? If you are my age, over 60, the last “whites only” sign hung above schoolroom, restroom, or restaurant was taken down when you were four years old: and that is only if you lived in an jurisdiction dominated by the Democrat party.
If you are my age, you saw Captain Kirk kiss Lieutenant Uhura in a planet of evil Platonists when you were eight years old, and no one you knew or heard tell of found it unusual or even noteworthy.
These privileges did exist at one time. After considerable pressure, legal action, and the occasional riot or deployment of the National Guard, Republicans forced Democrats to surrender them. The white race forswore the Jim Crow privilege it held over the black race in America.
No other race has ever surrendered its privileges over another voluntary and unilaterally: it is as unique as the white race freeing the blacks from the worldwide slave trade. The legacy of slavery is this: The English, and, later, other nations, restricted, curtailed and abolished not just the Atlantic slave trade, but also in the Middle East and Far East. The whites, in other words, not only gave up their slaves, whites prevented blacks, brown, and yellow man from keeping black slaves. It is perhaps the single unique moral victory in all the sad history of the human race. It is also the one met with unparalleled ingratitude.
I live just down the road from a famed battlefield where the blood of white men was shed to free the black slave, life and limb sacrificed. Instead of gratitude for the recognition of their equality in the eyes of God so painfully won for the blacks, we hear complaints that the equality is insufficiently equal.
According to the “White Privilege” mountebanks, a diversity-hire being granted priority above his qualifications is not a privilege, because he is seen as privileged, hence often suspected not to have earned his place by merit. Being thought unqualified may hurt his fragile feelings. Whereas a white man known to enjoy no such hiring privilege is immune from suspicion that he is unqualified, and this is a privilege.
Got that? Being granted a privilege is not a privilege; instead, being suspected of being privileged is a disprivilege; so being denied a privilege, by alleviating that suspicion, grants a privilege. The elliptical logic is dizzying.
Again, according to the “White Privilege” mountebanks, being able conveniently to find bandages, make-up, children’s toys and superheroes in one’s own hue is a privilege promoting racism.
But if racism against blacks in America is caused by peach-colored band-aids, then it can be cured by mocha-colored band-aids. Erasing Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben from syrup and rice packaging will cure all ill will between races!
A more shallow and trivial conceit is impossible to imagine.
PART TWO: WITCHTHINK
How can anyone take such blatant mountebank antics seriously?
That is a question that haunts me. The lectures of James Lindsay, showing the intellectual heritage leading from Woke to Marx to Hegel to Fichte, and their eerie forebears in Alchemy, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and other esoteric mystic traditions, somewhat clarify the question for me.
The short answer is that the mountebanks do not take such claims seriously, not a word, not a syllable, not even the jot above the smallcase j.
Their words are not meant to convey meaning, but to inflict wounds.
In themselves, they do not mean anything. True, false, half-true, sense or nonsense: none of that matters. The question never comes up whether anything is literally true. It is symbolically true.
That is why the Killian Documents, a forgery of military records meant to libel George W. Bush, was embraced by the Left as “Fake but Accurate.” That is why CNN reporter Omar Jimenez stood before a live image of a raging fire during riots in Kenosha, saying the situation was “not unruly” while the chyron read FIERY BUT MOST PEACEFUL.
The mountebanks live in a world of narratives, not truths. Internal reaction, not reality, is real to them. Their feelings do not care about your facts.
It is not so much that they are deliberately lying. They would not indulge in such obvious unselfaware self-parody where that so. Rather, it is that the categories of truth and falsehood have no meaning to the cult of relative truth, subjective reality, postmodern nihilism. Their claims are based on what they feel, not what they see.
The claims are magical thinking: the actions of the activists are symbolic or, in a hellish fashion, sacramental, where the symbolic gesture or word is meant to create real change in the real world: as when using the word “colored person” inflates racism, whereas “person of color” deflates racism. By magic. One must pronounce the abracadabras just so and exactly right to effectuate the mystic spell.
And this is female magic, not the work of warlocks. It is witchcraft.
Allow me to explain:
I propose that there are fundamentally two spirits in human thought. One is direct, problem-oriented, logical. The other is circuitous, wholistic, poetical. Let us call them masculine and feminine for want of a better terminology.
The people involved are taking seriously the question of White Privilege not because they think there actually is such a thing, or that it is a problem, or that it needs a solution. Those are masculine categories of thought, addressed in the masculine protocol of diagnosis-prognosis-treatment. That is, men diagnose a real problem, foretell a realistic solution, and act:
Identify; strategize; attack; win.
The feminine protocol when faced with emotional upset is to talk about a tangential matter until the emotional complexities can resolve themselves into small hence manageable emotional trifles, to which one can learn to be resigned.
The feminine protocol is to examine one’s feelings, learn the consensus of one’s peers or charges, and gently to urge the group, oneself included, toward a more harmonious compromise.
Introspect; empathize; commune; sacrifice.
Since discussing real-world attack-win solutions curtails the untangling introspection and slows or halts the female communion efforts, women are rightly upset by curt male pragmatism regarding problems. For the female, problems are not to be conquered, but to be understood.
This is why, you young gentleman, your darling does not want you to interrupt her longwinded recitation of her woes and worries. Rarely is she complaining about what is really vexing her. She wants no solution. She wants a sympathetic ear.
I do not mean this to be a universal truth about how any particular male or female approaches a problem. Obviously, there are exceptions. Men use this method also, albeit it is not typical of them. The female approach works for child-rearing problems better than for engineering problems, and better for spiritual questions than material ones.
Priests and poets approach the female spirit in prayer or communion, aided by Madonna or muse, to solve enigmas of the heart; and women in business or battle can adopt a bitchy or bossy approach, which is their mimicry of masculine stoicism.
In this case, the enemy uses a perversion of the female spirit, as a sort of anti-spirit. It is feminist rather than feminine.
Marxism treats material questions of political economics as if they were spiritual questions.
Hence the answers are not merely wrongheaded and counterproductive, they are literally hellish.
The problem is poverty and injustice among the proletarian poor. The spiritual solution is to have all men live like saints and angels, without greed or need, sharing all things in common.
Marx thinks men’s minds are programmed by their material circumstances. Hence, to turn them into saints of unselfishness, angels who lack any craving for property, all that is needed is to deprive them of property: collectivize industry creates instant utopia.
It is the type of sophomoric solution a seventeen year old might think up. From the masculine point of view, it is sub-moronic and absurd.
Perhaps it would work in heaven. On earth, collectivization of industry produces not only poverty and the police state, but gulag and Holodomor.
Likewise, Cultural Marxist seek spiritual answers for materialist questions, and find instead damned nonsense. And I do mean damned: the godless worldview cannot but spur Gehenna growth.
Instead of asking the pragmatic question of how legal equality between the races can be achieved, the Cultural Marxists ask the unanswerable spiritual question of how to alleviate the curse of ancestral sins, or what sacrifice will propitiate the subjective Furies of an unadmitted racial inferiority complex.
The subjective perception of racism where there is no racism exists is taken as a given, since the emotional upset, and not any real problem in the real world, is the sole concern of the Cultural Marxists. A mother will soothe a child fearful of monsters in the closet: that there is no monster really there will dry no toddler’s tears, and is irrelevant to this approach. Likewise, the race-grifter must promote and provoke the appearance of racial injustice even when there is none.
Faking hate crimes is a cottage industry, since the demand so far outstrips the supply.
The female approach, among other things, deals with childish fears with sympathy and maternal indulgence. To the male spirit, this approach is merely illogical and absurd.
For example, in 2020 the FBI sent fifteen special agents to investigate a rope-pull on a Talladega Superspeedway garage-door when an racecar driver in reported it to have appearance of the symbol of a lynching noose. How the driver was able to divine that the noose-shape represented a noose used for the mob-murdering helpless Negros, not a noose used for the lawful execution of condemned convicts, is left as an exercise for the reader. To the male spirit, a rope-pull too small to fit around any neck, and not tied in a noose that can tighten, but obviously meant to close a garage door, as with all the other garage doors adjacent, has no hidden magical meaning, and can do no harm.
Contrariwise, to the female spirit, the mere fact that the racecar driver (otherwise a man of superb athletic prowess willing to face the fiery risks of fierce competition on the raceway) was frightened like a little girl by the symbolism of the rope-loop is sufficient to demand prompt and overt action.
To the female spirit, the harm would be real, because it is the harm of emotional upset. To a witch, symbols are as real as sigil or magic runes inscribed on an amulet. The rope-loop was a magical sign, like a hex or a curse, which only a dozen-plus special agents sent by Daddy could alleviate.
The FBI need not do anything in the real world, but once the gestures of somber investigation are done, in the spirit world, the spell is broken, the harm is averted, and the fear ebbs.
The male spirit would have told the racecar driver to man up, snap out of it, and if he actually thought the Democrat KKK was coming for him, get a firearm and train in its use.
Lest anyone think I am mocking the female spirit, let me use a counter-example, one I find profoundly moving. Death-camp survivor Viktor Frankl was counselling a widower overcome by grief. He asked the man whether, had he died first instead of the wife, she would have suffered pain equal to his. The man said yes. Frenkel next asked whether the man was willing to shoulder the burden of this pain in order that his wife be spared it. The man immediately stood taller. The pain was not less, but now it was a sacrifice of love for him to bear it: For his thought turned from his own suffering to the suffering from which his beloved wife had been saved.
This is profoundly in the female spirit. It speaks through grief to unwind it into manageable form. It finds salvation in self-sacrifice. It puts self aside for others. The female spirit does not say “snap out of it” when facing such tragedy, as this would be pointless and cruel.
So there are times and places for this spirit and this approach. There are also gross abuses of it.
Now, obviously, treating a mystical and spiritual questions as if it has an engineering answer is wrongheaded in the extreme, and cannot but end in absurdity or tragedy. Imagine treating our grief-stricken widower as if he were a malingering footsoldier. Likewise, treating a question of political economics as if it were open to a spiritual answer is nonsensical.
I call it a perversion of the female spirit, because, in this case, no propitiation will be accepted, and the sacrifices demanded will never be sufficient. This is not some fair-minded idol of Carthage or Tenochtitlan whom the sacrifice of one’s children can quiet. No one has children enough to glut this brass idol’s maw.
Rather, the Cultural Marxists, whether they know it or not, base their conclusions on mystic axioms of a cult belief indistinguishable from Gnosticism of old. These beliefs require their demands be insatiable, because none of them are honestly meant.
PART THREE: THE MAZE OF THE DEMIURGE
These Gnostic cult axioms hold that life itself is a prison, a maze of deception, meant to demean and entrap the benighted. Neither reason nor experience can penetrate the deception of the maze, as the deception is too complete, and too cunning: enlightenment only comes from inner mystic revelation — being “Woke” i.e. achieving proper Socialist Consciousness.
In the Gnosticism of old, the architect of the world-maze was an evil creator-god, a demiurge. In the modern version, the architect is the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, more commonly called “the Establishment” or “The System.”
This is why modern Gnostics attribute natural things beyond human control, such as one’s sex or the demographics of one’s race, to be social construction. The benighted, according to Gnostic theory, take for granted, as natural, what the enlightened know to be artificial and arbitrary social constructions that create systemic inequities.
Those lacking this inner awakening do not know they are part of the system of deception, contributing and collaborating with unspeakable evil, and benefitting unawares, or being exploited unawares. To the benighted, all is invisible.
Every institution, practice, law, norm and custom in society is part of the deception of the world-maze, which is why racial privilege and racial oppression are ubiquitous and invisible. The only solution is the utter destruction of every institution, practice, law, norm and custom. All are corrupt from root to fruit. All must be put to the ax, consigned to the flame.
From these Gnostic axioms, comes the conclusion that since every norm and custom is part of the deception, and all must be burned to the ground, the transgression and disruption of any norm or custom aids in the crusade to overthrow the world-maze, and undermine the world-prison.
This is why madmen glue themselves to museum treasures or roadways allegedly to halt oil drilling. This is why mad arsonists burn black neighborhoods allegedly to protest police brutality. This is why Leftist are vulgarians, and shout filth, four-letter-words, and nonsense, demeaning speech itself. This is why their womenfolk are ugly and ungainly, face-pierced, fat, and purple-haired. This is why transvestites groom children, or feminists wear vagina-hats. It all all meant to offend. This is why their artworks are jarring disgusting rather than fair and sublime. It all all meant to desecrate. This is why they kill cattle in the name of global climate change or abort Negro babies in genocidal numbers. It is all meant to impoverish, demean, and kill. Theirs is a death-cult. Theirs is the culture of death.
Neither Marxist nor Neo-Marxist has any plan, proposal, or idea how a new civilization will arise from the ashes of the old, since they have no idea how the current civilization arose, or what it is or how it works. It is to happen like the resurrection of the phoenix, by magic.
Utopia will arise by the evolutionary process of historical dialectic, creating perfection out of nothing. Godless, this is perhaps their emptyheaded theory as to how the current state of being arose.
It is a mystic concept, but they insist it is scientific, for they used words not because words mean things to them, but because words have mojo, mana, and magical power.
Be that as it may, this blind faith that Utopia can arise from ruin by spontaneous self-creation means the “activists” (as the agents of apocalypse name themselves) need never take care to preserve anything through the destruction. There is no Lif nor Lifthrasir to be squirreled away and hidden during the Twilight of the Gods. Hence they are heedless and reckless as any mad jihadist suicide-bomber.
Such is the self-destructive theory forming the foundation of Wokesterism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Intersectionalism, Anticolonialism, and so on.
Even those not themselves suicidal act on conclusions formed from suicidal assumptions. Even those not eager for world cataclysm act on assumptions certain to bring about cataclysm. Such are the dull-eyed brain-dead slogan-chanting zombies clogging all modern discourse who call themselves Woke, and fancy themselves our moral and mental superiors.
By Gnostic theory, any disruption of any norm in any part of the system aids in the downfall of the whole. To the Gnostic, asking why clean-earth protestors cavort in London rather than Peking is a meaningless question. The whole world-system pollutes the world, not Chinese smokestacks.
To the Gnostic, asking any questions is pointless, as reasoning is pointless. Indeed, reason itself is part of the deception of the world-prison maze.
And if reason is pointless, all things are pointless.
CONCLUSION
Which returns us to the question: No one actually takes the claims of the White Privilege mountebanks seriously.
No one seriously thinks being unable conveniently to find a mocha-colored band-aid is a sign of race oppression, any more he seriously thinks using the male pronoun as the default for either gender harms women or perpetuates stereotypes.
These accusations are seriously meant to accuse, to criticize, to mock, to undermine.
The matter of the accusation is indifferent and irrelevant. The point is to accuse, and accuse, and accuse, to demand sacrifice after sacrifice. This is done in order to weaken the social fabric, plant and water the seeds of distrust and discontent, and encourage vulgarity and riot and arson.
The Gnostic thinks he is overthrowing the world-system, toppling the world, and hurling God Himself from a heavenly throne. Any means are meet for such ends.
The Gnostic of old promised ascent to the Pleroma, a heaven better than God’s heaven, as reward for successful rebellion. The modern Gnostic, the Woke Neo-Marxist promises utopia, which will spring up of its own power like Topsy, by an alleged natural historical evolution called materialist dialectic which only the Gnostic perceives. Paradise on Earth shall leap into being out of nothing, once all trace of current civilization is burned to the foundations.
More to the point, the Gnostic will accuse, and accuse, and accuse, knowing full well the accusations are false. He will complain only of problems that do not exist or cannot be solved. Soluble problems, after all, if solved, would only perpetuate the world system. This is why the Woke never thank the white man for abolishing slavery, nor the America Way for outlawing Jim Crow laws.
For the Woke, solving problems is counterproductive. It lets a crisis go to waste.
Rushing to do expensive, foolish, and counterproductive things, such as flooding Norse nations with Middle-Eastern rape-gangs, butchering half the cattle in Holland, or defunding the police, allegedly in response to non-existent calamities, such as global climate panic or systemic police brutality, is meant to destabilize the world-system.
Encouraging looting of department stores to drive businesses out of cities, defrauding ballots, censoring social media, promoting a two-tiered court system, and, indeed, every form of disruption and deception and discontent, is meant to create division and chaos. Chaos is the goal.
Nor will the Gnostic of old, nor his modern Woke counterpart, debate these things, admit them, or talk at all, except to lie and libel and perjure and accuse and accuse and perjure and libel and lie.
First, most of the people brainwashed by the cult are stupid, and lack the curiosity to find the theory and the axioms of the conclusions they parrot, promote, and paste on as bumper stickers. Second, reason is alien to their worldview, and forbidden by their cult.
Allow me to end with an extensive quote from James Lindsay quoting Audre Lorde. (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/)
This view is then echoed and amplified, for example, in a lesser-read 2017 paper by the Theorist Alison Bailey. Therein she invokes explicitly that in the neo-Marxist “critical” tradition, which is not to be mistaken for the “critical thinking” tradition of the Western canon, critical thinking itself and that which is seen to produce and legitimize it are part of the “master’s tools” that black feminist Audre Lorde wrote “will never dismantle the master’s house.” Since nobody ever believes me that she really writes this, here’s the quote:
The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life… the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living.” In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.
Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neo-Marxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices. By interrogating the politics of knowledge-production, this tradition also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical-thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy. To extend Audre Lorde’s classic metaphor, the tools of the critical-thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house: they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change. They fail because the critical thinker’s toolkit is commonly invoked in particular settings, at particular times to reassert power: those adept with the tools often use them to restore an order that assures their comfort. They can be habitually invoked to defend our epistemic home terrains. (pp. 881–882)
Here, the “master’s tools” are explicitly named by Bailey as including soundness and validity of argument, conceptual clarity, and epistemic adequacy (i.e., knowing what you’re talking about) and can easily be extended to science, reason, and rationality, and thus also to conversation and debate. The “master’s house” is the “organizational schemata” laid out … as the prevailing knowing system.
Her claim is that these tools—essentially all of the liberal ones—cannot dismantle liberal societies from within, which is their goal, because they are the very tools that build and keep building it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
