American liberals, in a desperate panic after 2016, injected themselves with the toxic brain virus called Critical Theory. It seemed like a smart move at the time: unleash the academic Red Guard on all their opponents, have them attacked with a barrage of bigotry accusations and threatened with loss of jobs and status unless they obeyed,…
American liberals, in a desperate panic after 2016, injected themselves with the toxic brain virus called Critical Theory. It seemed like a smart move at the time: unleash the academic Red Guard on all their opponents, have them attacked with a barrage of bigotry accusations and threatened with loss of jobs and status unless they obeyed, then seed every institution in the country with loyal allies, all to regain even more power than the power that the Orange Usurper stole.
But now we're starting to see the side effects, one of the first being that liberals/Democrats seem to have picked up all the bad habits of the academic Marxists, the worst and ugliest being their style of thought: an obsession with rooting out ideological impurity and suppressing dissent; a worship of sacred dogma; the belief that anyone who disagrees isn't just mistaken but actively evil; an inability to compromise or accept good-faith disagreement (as in believing everyone not on your side suffers from some type of "false consciousness"); a bulletproof belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority; and the idea that every single moment and every single event (from your kids' bday party to a book you read to Thanksgiving at grandma's) is an intensely urgent political battle that must be fought to the death, so that good (THEM) prevails over evil (US).
I don't know what's up ahead on the horizon, but people like this can't be reasoned with, they will not compromise, and they will gladly destroy anything or anyone in their way (including Matt Taibbi).
At some point they will have to be actively, totally opposed, defeated, dislodged and discredited. They really offer no other choice.
I'm not a philosopher, but I think given the dominance of critical theory in academia, we should try to grasp its main points and implications. My take is that it emphasizes 1) the importance of societal structures over individual efforts for understanding human outcomes, 2) that it is unrelentingly focused on the past and reinterpreting history in an effort to explain current social conditions, and 3) the history of human development needs to be understood solely as self-identified groups competing for power, in what appears to be a zero-sum game of resources and their distribution.
I believe the widespread adpoption and messaging of these critical theory tenets are the primary driver of the declining health of young people today. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently had a brilliant summation of this argument on his substack, that is written in non-technical language:
Although his argument focuses primarily on girls, it has much broader application. When you tell young people: 1) if you are white, you don't deserve what you have, and the country you thought you were proud of was actually founded in sin and to exploit people that don't look like you; 2) if you are non-white, that you have little chance of success because white people (especially men) will oppose you to retain their white supremacist power structure, and 3) your parents are complicit in this exploitation --- well you're going to end up with unhappy, hopeless young people. Throw on top the constant messaging that they are all going to fry in adulthood due to global warming and then you can mix in a soup of anxiety on top of the depression.
This philosophy is so destructive to society in so many ways. It also seemingly offers no hope or vision for a better future - we must continually navel gaze about historical injustices that occurred before most of us were born, and that we can't move forward until all that past is resolved (the work of which will never be done, of course).
the philosophy is so destructive to society bc the philosophy was designed to be destructive to society.
all of "Critical Studies" is a lie bc it is entirely a political project disguised as scholarship. in actual scholarship there are many questions and few answers, and the goal is to use reason, logic, research, debate etc to ascertain facts and gain new knowledge; Crit Studies is the reverse, you work backward from the answers which never change (capitalism is evil, nothing exists but power and "structures" etc) and the job of teachers and students is to bolster the preformed narratives and try to find ways to "change the world" ie preach your faith in class and in the larger world. you will never see a radical critique of any movement or idea of the left, bc Crit Studies is biased and one-sided, a machine designed to inflict a "radical critique" on enough sectors of society that they eventually collapse and hand power to the Left and their aspiring philosopher-kings.
The oddest part for me is how America (even the reddest of red states) funded and supported this campaign designed to attack its history, culture, civics etc for decades. Ours may be the first country in recorded history that encouraged and subsidized its own enemies and its own unraveling.
American liberals, in a desperate panic after 2016, injected themselves with the toxic brain virus called Critical Theory. It seemed like a smart move at the time: unleash the academic Red Guard on all their opponents, have them attacked with a barrage of bigotry accusations and threatened with loss of jobs and status unless they obeyed, then seed every institution in the country with loyal allies, all to regain even more power than the power that the Orange Usurper stole.
But now we're starting to see the side effects, one of the first being that liberals/Democrats seem to have picked up all the bad habits of the academic Marxists, the worst and ugliest being their style of thought: an obsession with rooting out ideological impurity and suppressing dissent; a worship of sacred dogma; the belief that anyone who disagrees isn't just mistaken but actively evil; an inability to compromise or accept good-faith disagreement (as in believing everyone not on your side suffers from some type of "false consciousness"); a bulletproof belief in their own moral and intellectual superiority; and the idea that every single moment and every single event (from your kids' bday party to a book you read to Thanksgiving at grandma's) is an intensely urgent political battle that must be fought to the death, so that good (THEM) prevails over evil (US).
I don't know what's up ahead on the horizon, but people like this can't be reasoned with, they will not compromise, and they will gladly destroy anything or anyone in their way (including Matt Taibbi).
At some point they will have to be actively, totally opposed, defeated, dislodged and discredited. They really offer no other choice.
I'm not a philosopher, but I think given the dominance of critical theory in academia, we should try to grasp its main points and implications. My take is that it emphasizes 1) the importance of societal structures over individual efforts for understanding human outcomes, 2) that it is unrelentingly focused on the past and reinterpreting history in an effort to explain current social conditions, and 3) the history of human development needs to be understood solely as self-identified groups competing for power, in what appears to be a zero-sum game of resources and their distribution.
I believe the widespread adpoption and messaging of these critical theory tenets are the primary driver of the declining health of young people today. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently had a brilliant summation of this argument on his substack, that is written in non-technical language:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls
Although his argument focuses primarily on girls, it has much broader application. When you tell young people: 1) if you are white, you don't deserve what you have, and the country you thought you were proud of was actually founded in sin and to exploit people that don't look like you; 2) if you are non-white, that you have little chance of success because white people (especially men) will oppose you to retain their white supremacist power structure, and 3) your parents are complicit in this exploitation --- well you're going to end up with unhappy, hopeless young people. Throw on top the constant messaging that they are all going to fry in adulthood due to global warming and then you can mix in a soup of anxiety on top of the depression.
This philosophy is so destructive to society in so many ways. It also seemingly offers no hope or vision for a better future - we must continually navel gaze about historical injustices that occurred before most of us were born, and that we can't move forward until all that past is resolved (the work of which will never be done, of course).
the philosophy is so destructive to society bc the philosophy was designed to be destructive to society.
all of "Critical Studies" is a lie bc it is entirely a political project disguised as scholarship. in actual scholarship there are many questions and few answers, and the goal is to use reason, logic, research, debate etc to ascertain facts and gain new knowledge; Crit Studies is the reverse, you work backward from the answers which never change (capitalism is evil, nothing exists but power and "structures" etc) and the job of teachers and students is to bolster the preformed narratives and try to find ways to "change the world" ie preach your faith in class and in the larger world. you will never see a radical critique of any movement or idea of the left, bc Crit Studies is biased and one-sided, a machine designed to inflict a "radical critique" on enough sectors of society that they eventually collapse and hand power to the Left and their aspiring philosopher-kings.
The oddest part for me is how America (even the reddest of red states) funded and supported this campaign designed to attack its history, culture, civics etc for decades. Ours may be the first country in recorded history that encouraged and subsidized its own enemies and its own unraveling.
"Conform or be cast out"
"liberals/Democrats seem to have picked up all the bad habits of the academic Marxists {LIST}"
You seem to have forgotten writing lengthy footnotes/endnotes and later insisting all the truly important knowledge was contained therein.
hey, they picked up all the bad habits, not me ;))
We’ll said. Couldn’t agree more
Well said.....