sexism and racism
© Brentcherry
Identity politics is stupid. It divides humans into various arbitrary "identity groups" and then stops there. All analysis and understanding go no further than the level of the group. But what is identity? It comes from the Latin idem, meaning "the same, in the sense of repeating over and over". In other words, identity implies something about you that carries over from one instant to the next, making you you. Of course, things like your sex, skin color, and orientation do that. Contrary to popular opinion, you can't just decide you're a lesbian Mexican grandmother. But the idea that any or all of those things define you completely is absurd. Identity politics makes all members of a group, Blacks for example, identical. If that sounds racist, it's because it is.

No, identity is more than what biological category you happen to have been born in. It's who you are - singular. The only true identity politics would have to go down to the level of the individual, because no matter how similar two people are, they are never identical. Another definition for identity comes from information technology: "an object that represents a user".[1] This is a good analogy - at least it approaches the level of the individual. But even individuals can change. Given sufficient stress, a person's personality can become warped. Identity should be something more permanent.

Most of the time, we operate in the world based on 'rules' or habits accumulated throughout our lives, shaped from conception by our genes and socialization. Our gift of higher reasoning allows us some measure of control over these habits - to monitor, and if necessary, inhibit the aggressive or fearful knee-jerk responses in order to provide for conscious control during situations to which our personalities may be unadapted - for instance, a severe change in the conditions of our external environment.

Group identity is absurd. Identity as personality is lazy - a cosmic accident. Identity as self-knowledge and self-made character is where it's at. Only that is solid enough to withstand pressure and truly be called one's own. Human beings are an interesting species. We weep, fight, laugh, love, and a great deal of this all happens automatically and repetitively. However, some types of human experience cannot happen automatically. For growth to occur, effort must be made. Truth, understanding, and free will must be applied in order to ensure harmonious, creative outcomes. Mozart's Requiem was not written without copious amounts of 'blood, sweat, and tears', nor did Pythagoras discover that a2 + b2 = c2 without a prodigious amount of study and search. Not all songs are beautiful though, and not all ideas nourish the soul.

Attachment to ideas that are wrong - incorporating lies into our identity - causes chaos. Just as some give their lives to ideas of beauty, harmony, creativity and truth, so do some give their lives to ideas of ugliness, discord, entropy and lies. And most of the time, people are somewhere in-between, drifting one way, then pulled the other. Identity politics has all the stupidity of making an ideal of group identity, and all the chaos of an untrained personality pushed and pulled by emotions over which they have no control.

A video on Twitter provides a visceral example of all this. It shows a young woman in the US at an Antifa protest. She is screaming, not at the 'opposition', but at a fellow protester. The reason? Because he was white, and not being an 'ally' by acting violently enough towards the 'Nazis'. In the video, she yelled:

"You're white, you're inherently racist, it's in your blood, it's in your DNA."

That what she said was immensely racist - indeed, it conveyed the very essence of racism - didn't seem to occur to her at all. All she cared about, in that moment, was her idea that white people were the cause of all problems in the US, therefore they were the enemy, and the enemy needed to be fought. She was unable to even countenance the idea that a white person could be an ally unless they were willing to perpetrate violence against other whites.

This mentality is, obviously, no different to the Nazis she claims to be against. No self-knowledge, no ability to reason, no self-control - all in the service of the basest emotions.

What we have been seeing over the past few years in the United States is an unprecedented polarisation of ideas the like of which we have not seen in the world since the Second World War. And it is not the "far right" that is the problem, as it was during Germany's Weimar Republic. This time it is the "far left". The idea that the same dynamics as played out in 1930s Germany could play out in 21st-century America but on the other side of the 'political spectrum' is something that just doesn't seem to occur to most people. The 'left' are supposed to be the "bleeding-heart good guys".

The minds of the 'left' in the United States (and other majority-anglophone countries) have been progressively radicalized by an education system that champions and celebrates identity politics, in particular minority identity politics. For a long time a person's political affiliation was to a political party, like 'Democrat', 'Republican' or some other moniker that broadly defined a world view. Today however, minority identity politics means that a small group of people look to their own racial, ethnic, genetic or sexual nature and define that as their 'politics'. It's the 'century of the self' on steroids, and moving to Capitol Hill.

Much of the source of modern identity politics is found in the 60s-70s, postmodern philosophical ideas, Trotskyite political theories, behaviourist psychology, and New Age 'spirituality' that have been broadcast from university lecterns (and into the minds of students) across the western world by professors who were and are psychologically more akin to psychotics in a sanitarium than responsible pedagogues.

Whether or not the young people attending these universities became politically active, they no doubt absorbed a great deal of pathological ideology. As the "Baby Boomers" gave birth to "Generation X", who then gave birth to the "Millennials", an ideological battle began to take place in universities, with dissenting or disobedient voices sacked, suspended, or bullied into silence, with once-venerable institutions now little more than 'brainwashing factories' tasked with ensuring the most intelligent of our youth cannot receive the skills that make them suitable for or capable of securing the high-paying productive employment that they ostensibly attended university to secure.

Consider this list of courses that are taught at Universities across the USA today:
  • MCL 135: Vampires: Evolution of a Sexy Monster (University of Kentucky)
  • HIST 336: Saints, Witches, and Madwomen (University of Nebraska)
  • WOMGEN 1225: Leaning In, Hooking Up (Harvard University)
  • SOAN 261: Campus Sex in the Digital Age (Washington & Lee University)
  • GSWS 434: The Politics of Ugly (University of Pennsylvania)
  • AMS 398: FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body (Princeton University)
  • GWS 462: Hip Hop Feminism (University of Illinois)
  • GWS 255: Queer Lives, Queer Politics (University of Illinois)
  • SOC 388: Marriage in the Age of Trump (Davidson College)
  • HISTORY 330-0: Medieval Sexuality (Northwestern University)
  • AI 318: Zombies: Modern Myths, Race, and Capitalism (DePaul University)
  • SOCI 332: Alternative Genders (Texas A&M University)
  • AMCULT 103: Drag in America (University of Michigan)
  • AMCULT 334: Race, Gender, Sexuality and U.S. Culture in Video Games (University of Michigan)
  • AMCULT 411: Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of Michigan)
  • WGS 255: Deconstructing the Diva (DePaul University)
  • GLBT 3404: Transnational Sexualities (University of Minnesota)
  • GSFS 0208: Unruly Bodies: Black Womanhood in Popular Culture(Middlebury College)
  • MC 2002: Media, Sport and Culture: Amplifying the Sporting-Ism(Louisiana State University)
  • THEO 025: The Bible and Horror (Georgetown University)
  • SOAS 3500: Queerness in South Asian Literature and Cinema(University of Iowa)
  • AADS 2204: Black Women and the Politics of Blackness and Beauty (Vanderbilt University)
  • AFR 334: Radical Theories of Political Struggle: Anti-Black Racism and the Obama Administration (Williams College)
  • COLT 0510F: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, The Men and the Myths (Brown University)
  • HIST 379: Queering Colonialism (Washington & Lee University)
  • AMST 274: Rainbow Cowboys (and Girls): Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality in Westerns (Wellesley College)
  • AFA 4430: Black Lives Matter (University of Florida)
  • RELI GU 4355: The African American Prophetic Political Tradition from David Walker to Barack Obama (Columbia University)
  • RELG 032: Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology(Swarthmore College)
  • RELG 033: Queering the Bible (Swarthmore College)
  • ENVS 042: Ecofeminism (Swarthmore College)
  • FRSEMR 61D: Trying Socrates in the Age of Trump (Harvard University)
  • GSWS 2219: Deconstructing Masculinities (Bowdoin College)
  • GSFS 0325: American Misogyny (Middlebury College)
  • BLSTU 3850: Gender, Hip Hop, and the Politics of Representation(University of Missouri)
  • AAS 301: Black to the Future: Science, Fiction, and Society(Princeton University)
  • SOC 105: Race, Religion, & Donald Trump (Davidson College)
As Andrew Lobaczewski describes in his book Political Ponerology, the consequences of all this attempted social engineering by the talentless and/or character-disturbed 'elite' - which is taking place alongside an imperial agenda of foreign colonization and conquest - is the production of a hysterical population where polarisation of opinions and intolerance toward opposition is a symptom of that social hystericisation. If left unremedied, such conditions are suitable for some form of violent revolution in the United States that will inevitably lead to totalitarianism, i.e. pathocracy.

One of the key reasons that such social hystericisation occurs, as Lobaczewski describes, is the lack of psychological knowledge among the majority of the population. During years of 'good times' - people seem to lose the ability to discern evil from good; they start to treat everyone the same, when the biological reality of this planet is this: not all human beings are born the same, nor do they all have the same 'basically good' intentions. To treat a psychopath as if they were a normal human being is a mistake that the psychopath will take advantage of, to the misfortune of the non-psychopath.

Interactions with psychopaths need to be considered in the same way as an interaction with a dangerous, wild, predatory animal, i.e. avoidance if possible, but absolute commitment to self-defence if required. And they most certainly shouldn't be put into positions of responsibility over others - especially representative political office! If, for some reason, circumstances place you in confrontation with a psychopath, ultimately the only thing that will protect you is psychological knowledge - understanding how they act and think, and how you act and think. Sharing your observations with others and getting their feedback also helps. There are many good books available on the subject of psychopaths.[2]

Identity politics isn't just stupid; it's dangerous. By only seeing people in terms of their identity groups, all individual differences get wiped out. That means the people under the spell of identity politics are blind to the variations within their own group: the highs and lows, the good and the evil. More importantly, they can't see it in themselves. If all that matters is "my group", and the enemy of my group is your group, the problem is obviously not any individuals in my group or your group, it is your group. Full stop. And if your group is my group's enemy, the only solution is to neutralize or destroy your group. That's what the Nazis did to their "identity-group" enemies. That's what the Bolsheviks did to their class enemies. The results were not "social justice"; they were blood, gore, and mass murder.

"My group good, your group evil" is the political equivalent of mental retardation. All it does is make it open season for the psychopaths in the "good group" to run the show while the naive SJWs let out the worst aspects of their personalities without any insight or self-control. If that sounds like your ideal vision of the future, by all means, go full SJW.

References:
  1. Curry & Laws (2016), From IT Pro to Cloud Pro, p. 62.
  2. Cleckley (1988), The Mask Of Sanity; Hare (1999), Without Conscience; Salter (2004), Predators, Pedophiles & Rapists; Stout (2006), The Sociopath Next Door; Babiak & Hare (2007), Snakes In Suits.