Guest post: A bet on the long term trends of the social landscape
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Like eating Pringles.
And why should we expect otherwise? Rationalizing consequences away is normal. After all, in the absence of real consequences, you’re free to play the status game, and you really want to play that game. There is status and prestige to be gained (within your tribe) by supporting your team. The more zealous your support, the more status you earn, which necessarily means that you earn less by having any reservations or criticisms. People have to be scared out of playing the status game, because only when repressing a concern obviously costs more status than voicing it do you allow yourself to even become conscious that you have any concerns in the first place. [Nullius in Verba]
That’s so true.
I’m obsessed with finding a way to deprogram the gender zombies. I have a whole imaginary Ted Talk lined up in my head, and it’s aimed squarely at those whose endorsement of gender woo is motivated by social status over moral principles.
It involves getting them — the gender zealots, my imagined audience — to imagine not just their current social status but their future social status, too. To consider whether or not backing gender woo will give them net-positive social credit over the course of their lives, rather than simply right now. To consider their investment in gender woo as a kind of bet on the long term trends of the social landscape, rather than just the immediate conditions. That if they’re wrong, they will face terrible social consequences for having picked the wrong side. And so they better consider the evidence, for the sake of their future social credibility. It’s a bit like Pascal’s Wager, I guess.
The film and play Inherit The Wind serves as the framing device. Inherit the Wind was of course a parable about McCarthyism, despite being superficially about creationism and the Scopes Monkey Trial which had happened a few decades before.
The great trick of it was that, for all the courtroom drama on the screen (or the stage), the real people on trial were you, the viewer: it said to you that, with the luxury of time, you can look back at the rubes who stubbornly refused to accept evolution and cringe, and judge them harshly for having gotten it all so wrong. Then it asks you to look at yourself and imagine the people in the future judging you about your cowardice in the face of the Second Red Scare.
That can be extrapolated to our present era, Gender McCarthyism, or the Great Transphobia Panic, or whatever we want to call it. That if you think you’re getting off scot-free when you ignore the facts and the principles and the truth for easy social cred, you’re wrong. The bill will come due for you, as it does for everyone eventually, when they dare to deny reality.
A favourite line of mine, which I’ve quoted here at B&W before, is, “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themself into.” It’s in the spirit of that (bastardized) Jonathan Swift quote that I’m trying to reason the gender zealots out of their position by the same door through which they walked in. It’s the appeal of gaining social standing that motivates them into genderism, so it is most likely to be the threat of losing social standing that will usher them out.
Now, won’t someone give me a big auditorium full of genderists to try my bit out on?
I know what you mean. I was just recently arguing online with someone about Imane Khelif. He admonished me freely for going out on a limb, with my “bigotry”, arguing that, once the facts of the case were known, I’d be rightly shamed for my position that male athletes shouldn’t box female athletes. I tried, without success, to point out to him that he, too, was out on a limb, and once the facts were known, might not work out for him, calling women bigots and so on. Ditto to those arguing, without evidence, that sex differences could be “managed” in boxing within the female category, “like they are in other sports” (another two limbs many are willingly climbing out on).
Yes I have thought on the Imane Khelif case, that if you cheered Khelif on and his sex was proved, to general acknowledgement, you would be the person who cheered a man hitting a woman in public.
This is exactly why I avoid group affiliations and identities: I have no hunger for status and see right thru the bs. It’s a by-product of a personality disorder which generates potent anxiety in social situations.
I do see one small flaw in this: these people are utterly shameless and would do an immediate volte-face, criticising their former allies with all the zeal they had when criticising us. Look no further than PZ and his horde, diehard feminists all – until they weren’t.
Taylor Swift was in the news recently, in part regarding her comment in her 2020 documentary, “I need to be on the right side of history”. I cringe these days at the phrase “right side of history”, in part because it’s so poorly defined. I think it’s based on the idea that there are things that are Good, and that it is inevitable that people in the future will recognize that these things are Good, and thus remember and praise the people who stood on side of the Good things, even though people previously might not have considered those things Good.
This post and related ones I think help clarify the concept for me; it’s about wanting to be judged by society as on the side of Good, whatever that might mean. It assumes that society figuring out and supporting the Good side is inevitable. It assumes that the Good side is currently obvious. It’s never about weighing complicated issues and trying to figure out a reasonable path forward; it’s never about taking a stance that one feels is just and righteous, even though other people may never see it that way in the future.
I’m certainly no longer as sanguine about society figuring out and supporting the “Good side” of anything. I’m still generally confident in reality winning in the end because it can’t be fooled, browbeaten, or intimidated. It doesn’t need anyone to support it or argue its case; it’s just there. Trying to deny it, or supress it is, in the long run, a losing battle. Not to say it can’t be supressed, and its discussion punished; we’ve all seen and heard of plenty of regimes and movements who’ve expended the effort to do just that. Millions of people have paid the price. Even other species. Regimes and movements come and go. Leaders and followers die. Reality is always there, waiting to be discovered, or remembered.