Why do good people ENFORCE bad ideas?
It’s a long thread so I’ll just quote the rest.
It was reported and got me a 12-hour ban from Twitter. I was forced to delete the tweet. Thing is, the people who espouse trans-activist rhetoric are, mostly, people interested in global betterment and social justice. They’re good people, aren’t they? I started thinking. Why do good people believe bad ideas? And from that base, why do ALL people believe bad ideas. And then, why do good people ENFORCE bad ideas? The answer, I think, is that they are not given any choice. There is no discourse, there is only what is permissible and what is not.
There is some choice here though. There is more than there was a few years ago. One isn’t quite so far out on a fragile limb when questioning the bad ideas now.
I am a critical theorist with two master’s degrees and a PhD. I have taught cultural studies at university level. Ironically, my specialism is post-structuralism and postmodern theory – from which much of the trans-gender studies orthodoxy of 2008 onwards emerged.
And that, folks, is literally how old this ideology is. Ten years, give or take. It had earlier antecedents but the slogans and argot with which we are now familiar – the language that is now protected. Ten years old.
How has it taken root so quickly and absolutely? One explanation is that its tenets are *memetic*. Memes, in Dawkins original sense, are transmittable units of culture. Idea-bites – rather than nuanced arguments. Ideology reduced down to slogans.
You see this in much recent ideological communication over social media. Unlike other discourse, memetic slogans are immutable. They are nuggets of dogma that are easy to transmit, replicate rapidly and are difficult to remove once embedded.
The speed of replication is as important as multiplication and simplicity. They spread fast and wide and are difficult to challenge once they become the foundations of discourse.
Does this sound like anything? They are viruses.
This mechanism has firmly entrenched the tenets of trans-activism into the permitted discourse of some institutions so effectively that any attempt to interrogate or examine them at all is now considered hate speech. They have quickly become “protected”.
A curious side-effect of this is that you cannot even ask why. You cannot interrogate the mechanism of transmission, you cannot examine evidence or nuance or meaning.
Indeed you cannot. I tried that back on Freethought Blogs and was told very explicitly that you cannot. You cannot even try to figure out exactly what the claims are, you can only repeat the correct words in the correct order.
And the final irony. Twitter is partially responsible for this cultural shift. Alongside other platforms, it has increased the reach of all ideas and reduced their complexity to a finite number of characters.
The world becomes a place where dogmatic idea-bites stand in for discourse and, once entrenched, become protected. They are protected not by law, but by cancelling, banning and blocking. By amassing a following and ending conversation.
This is not confined to trans-activism. Every extreme benefits from this. Any ideology that is absolute and inflexible. Anything that can be reduced to an idea-bite. “Build the wall”. “Brexit is Brexit”. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the disease”.
Make America Great Again. But her emails. Dirty cops. LIBERATE MICHIGAN!
H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?
TWAW is not evidence based for one thing, let’s start from there. Because you say so is not evidence.
“A curious side-effect of this is that you cannot even ask why. You cannot interrogate the mechanism of transmission, you cannot examine evidence or nuance or meaning.”
Exactly, and this is why it’s akin to religion, it’s impervious to critical examination, it’s elusive. But really? It’s not, and it’s not as paradoxically obtuse as the Holy Trinity, but it is just as absurd.
To question or doubt is blasphemy, and blasphemy unpunished begets more. Like a loose thread on a sweater, it must be cut off, lest it catch and tug more loose, unravelling the garment entirely. Blasphemy must also be characterized as a fringe, minority view, so that the actual weakness and precariousness of those trying to enforce orthodoxy remains hidden. This, I think is the Achiles heel of transi deology. They may have been successful at institutional capture in the short term, but their primary opponent is material reality itself, and the lives and wellbeing of half the human population of the planet. TAs are never going to be able to fool or cow everyone, and will, I believe, in the long term, fail to cow or fool enough people to retain the gains they have made for very long. If it can be made politically costly to support trans ideology in the face of concerted pushback in favour of the health and wellbeing of women and girls, then what support there is for trans “rights” within circles of governmental and institutional power may dry up, as the patent absurdity of trans demands hits home. Unfortunately, in the interim, TAs and their accomplices and enablers will inflict far too much additional damage to the lives of women and girls on top of what they’ve already perpetrated.
I read this the other day and thought it was an interesting analysis, but it seems to leave out the elephant in the room, which is a bit surprising–smart well-paid people have been systematically studying ‘effective messaging’ now for more than a century, and we know, scientifically, how to get people to believe and repeat things. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the most ‘viral’ memes just happen to benefit people with the power and money to perpetuate them.
Evidence based movements will push the cause with arguments based on the evidence. Otherwise, there are memes and the threat of social expulsion for any that waver.
And yet you are doing it here, OB. More power to your arm, and may your example inspire and spread.
See also:
* pluralistic ignorance
* the Abilene paradox
* the spiral of silence
* groupthink
And not just good people, smart people. Philosophers and skeptics; people who are supposed to interrogate and examine ideas, evidence, nuance, meaning.
“Freethinkers” protecting dogma. Whodathunkit.