Guest post: Everything has one cause rather than many
Originally a comment by SAWells on A collective of intellectuals and academics.
I think at root it’s a failure to grasp that there are more than two sides. Some people really do seem to think that every conflict or opposition or disagreement has two sides, a right one and a wrong one; and, critically, that the moment they can identify somebody as being in the wrong, any and all opposition to the Wrong Person makes you right, and any and all agreement with the Wrong Person makes you wrong.
So here, the “collective” have noticed – how perceptive of them! – that racists who hate immigrants for being foreign are wrong. Therefore, absolutely anyone who suggests that anything about immigrants or the countries they come from might not be 100% peachy – is also wrong! How simple life must be.
You can see this kind of thinking all over the place if you look for it. You’ll notice that the “collective” fail to address a single one of the substantive points about the current social politics in Islamic countries; they skip directly to saying the article must be bad, because it suggests that there might be problems, and racists have also said that there are problems, so any suggestion there are problems means you’re siding with racists.
It seems like a rejection of complexity. Everything has two sides rather than many; everything has one cause rather than many; you are either with us or against us.
Has anyone studied left wing authoritarianism?
Staline ordered such a study, and it demonstrated that left wing authoritarianism did not exist. It was merely a bourgeois plot to derail people from communism.
Sounds familiar. One cause for this is, I think, that people tend to support or oppose persons instead of ideas. So when are talking about muslims in general we support them because generally they are discriminated against or we fight them because islam really has some awful ideas.
That we at the same time can support muslims when we observer they are discriminated and fight them when they e.g. try to promote gender segregation, seems difficult to grasp for a lot of people.
It’s impressive, really. Atheists supporting de facto blasphemy bans, women supporting misogyny…
I figure there’s maybe a complex of things happening, here. A horror of anyone even being able to claim, however tendentiously, that you’re a closet racist of some kind. Maybe a slightly more well-intentioned and considered wish not to contribute to marginalization (while effectively contributing to the stifling and sidelining of other groups and views that hardly even had a second to breathe themselves, yet, but never mind that… we’re so virtuous and self-denying, that we do that, see)…
The hell of it is about this latter thing: these are impulses trained and conditioned since time immemorial. Unbelievers shall be silent, lying, sleazeball ‘prophets’ and ‘messiahs’ shall be protected from critical examination, and women’s needs, above all, come last, after all else; ‘culture’ and religions long miles ahead.
Considering this, I find nothing virtuous about it. Just the same old knuckling under to _other_ well-established chauvinisms. But yay. You’re not a racist, at least. Well _done_. You got one thing kinda right, with all the skill and subtlety of a gorilla waving a sledgehammer. And everything else–and much that matters desperately–horribly wrong. Pity you never learned to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Same basic purblind idiocy as in the support of hopelessly clueless gender-policing trans activists, with utterly neanderthal views of gender norms, save for the notion they allow people to elect which of the two boxes they accept as valid they feel best suits them…
Yes, they’re oppressed… So apparently the remedy is to give them their _own_ dictatorship. Problem solved.