Oh no! An essay relating to politics! Run away! What follows was written in response to a friend, who asked me to share my personal experiences with Social Justice. What follows is a sort of autobiographical reflection on my little journey with regard to the social justice movement, how it burned and inspired me over the years. I know the topic is frankly passé (and that this is very different from my usual material, if you can call a post every few months “usual”), so as always, feel free to close the tab if it’s not your thing.
In terms of cultural shifts, the period beginning in 2013-ish and continuing on to 2020, transformed yet leaving a trace beyond the pandemic, left a deep impact on me. The cultural shift I have in mind was the emergence of “social justice” (SJ). On a historical plane, the movement has been traced by others with far more research and time than I have, so my intent is to describe how I personally relate to the SJ movement: what was spoken by others, what ideas I grappled with, and how I reacted and responded along the way.
In The Beginning, There Was...
My initial encounter with SJ in its developed form was in college. Prior to that, I had spent plenty of time online and had encountered feminist ideas, war of the sexes, incels, etc, etc. None of this affected me in a direct or meaningful way, involving people I knew personally, until college.
I studied computer science at a tech-heavy school with significant overlaps in the arts. I liked to engage with art, music, etc as well as with computers and mathematics, so I made friends with students in more art-heavy programs than mine. In particular, many of these friends were women, some of whom I was very interested in. College is, after all, a time to learn about one’s budding sexuality. These women were generally kind-hearted and intelligent, but I noticed that many were engaged in the same sort of speech, both online and in person, which took on a certain form and spanned a certain window of material, which I might roughly describe as “identity politics”. These were the “social justice warriors” (SJWs).
The way I would describe the form of this speech was that it either took the form of a moral declarative (“X is good/bad”), or a moral imperative (“[you] should X”), often evoking a set of depersonalized abstractions within the planes of race, gender, etc. In retrospect, this was the first time I had encountered strong moral statements that didn’t revolve around overtly political lines. My parents were hardcore Democrats, so I was used to the denigration of Republicans, right-wingers, etc. I would nod along, having never even met a hardcore Republican (beside my ex-girlfriend’s grandfather, who struck me as far more reasonable and even-keeled than the statements made by my parents would imply, and my dad’s “Republican doppelganger” from temple, where politics was more of a joke between friends than a morally charged divide). My mom was even a second-wave feminist in her younger days, but her statements surrounding feminism often took a tempered, progressive form, with a sensitivity to others’ experience. She was certainly no Solanas1 while in her mothering age — difficult to be when raising three boys.
The wrinkle in SJW statements, which made them harder to nod along with in sympathetic-yet-ignorant support as I did with politics, was that I felt that in many cases I was implicated by those moral judgments. So, I felt faced with a two-layered quandary: these were women I was often-times interested in or attracted to, who were making statements which implied, in roundabout language, that my mere existence and participation in the world was a moral wrong. I felt that, perhaps in a sort of crossed-wired way, that my own hesitation to prostrate myself and affirm my complicity in moral wronghood would also disqualify me from close relations with them, as, given their statements, how could they ever develop close relations with a white man in STEM, someone who is effectively a villain? I noticed how they would bristle at any attempt I made to argue or question their statements, and I believed them when told it was my problem to figure it out, and not theirs to explain it. Oh, how tragically logical I was!
I had an easy out available: I could simply affirm their statements and give up any pretense of speaking in a way that felt truthful to my own beliefs and understandings of the world. And yet, I would still be in the hated category, even as I parroted the lines, so it felt like a trap: I would have to make what I felt were untrue self-denigrating statements, in order to appease an audience who would see me as evil regardless. But the underlying reason I didn’t acquiesce was that I felt a sort of romantic dedication to “authenticity” in my speech. So I said nothing. The result was that I would bask in a quiet sense of superiority over my “male feminist” friends, while seething with envy about their sexual and romantic exploits.
Alongside these strongly charged emotions, I also felt a sense of deep confusion. How could all these people willingly speak like this? Why were these issues, which seemed so specific and distant from the individual lives of each of my typically white and well-to-do friends, the ones they seemed to commit themselves to most strongly? Why not commit instead to more classical and clearly reasoned lines of sociological critique, such as economic class? Why were they denouncing themselves, without changing their lives at all? It would take me some time and a rather winding path to figure out the proper answers to these questions. It was, after all, my problem to figure it out, and I decided I might as well put in the work.
Whereof One Cannot Speak...
After college, I began to lose touch with many of these college acquaintances. I was in NYC, they were elsewhere, and I wasn’t particularly committed to maintaining friendships with most of them as I generally felt at a distance from them, with their commitment to these SJ ideas playing no small part in my failure to feel safe and close. What remained was the confusion. Where were these ideas coming from? What did they mean? Now I finally had the time to find out.
My attempts to address my confusion over SJ followed two distinct but intertwined routes: first, I began reading material online that seemed to offer an even-handed but “external” exploration of the SJ movement and associated ideas, and second, I began reading critical theory texts that I associated with the movement in an attempt to understand the “internal” side, how these ideas presented themselves to the consciousness of true believers, as it were.
The latter route bore fruit more quickly. I read Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1, my first ever philosophy text. (I had barely studied the liberal arts at all in college. I took one mandatory writing class about hipsters, I took a few music history classes which did grapple extensively with race, but in a way I felt was very concrete, and I also took a few photography classes. That was my only non-technical education.). I realized at the conclusion of the text that Foucault would have absolutely disagreed with the approach of the SJWs. The entire thesis of the book seemed to repudiate them! He says in no uncertain terms to avoid identity politics, and instead orient oneself to the interplay of “bodies and pleasures”2. This left me with some degree of certainty that these SJWs weren’t acting from some sort of educated, rational basis, and were instead operating on some other plane, perhaps one involving social pressure. I wouldn’t get a deeper understanding until years later.
The former route was more winding. I began my journey by reading SlateStarCodex in particular (with Ribbonfarm following in close succession, although it has little relation to the point of this essay). His “Untitled” post resonated deeply (and in retrospect, embarrassingly) with my own experience at the time. I began to follow his posts and joined the blog’s discord to have conversations and meet other people working along similar lines. This (2017) was also around when I began to use Twitter more seriously, to try and have conversations about these and other topics. I felt that I was broaching some sort of forbidden territory, and I was paranoid that I would get attacked personally for trying to reason about these SJ topics without taking a stance, so I created an anonymous account specifically dedicated to posting in a fashion where I leave emotion out of it and talk solely about ideas. I knew that these constraints would dramatically limit the space of people I engaged with, hence my first tweet: “it’s time to architect a shiny new echo chamber”.
It was on this @simpolism account (and on Discord servers) where I would get into often heated theoretical or political arguments. I would tend to bring in whatever text I was reading at the time, so it served as a sort of crucible for helping my ideas take shape and seeing where others might not agree. I also went to some real-life meetups: I clearly remember attending a few of the early NYC meetups about Quillette, an online magazine that seemed to me to be standing in “neutral” territory. The meetups took place in a curtained-off area in the back of a store near NYU, giving them a secretive feeling. I was shocked to find myself drinking in the company of famed online racist Emil O.W. Kirkegaard, and others of his “biodeterminist”, race-and-IQ heavy milieu3. I found myself having a gut feeling of repulsion to the racist ideas they presented so casually, and I saw my feeling as worthy of analysis rather than something to swallow in the face of “better [empirical] logic”.
In a similar vein, I found myself repeatedly getting into arguments on the SlateStarCodex discord that would take the form of me prying into the psychological reasoning of the arguer. “What motivates your belief? How and why do you feel that way?” I would ask. They would typically respond with rage that I simply didn’t get it, my questions were nonsense, etc. I was left with a deeper sense that I was missing something intellectually which could help me tie up these knots, knowing that both the SJWs and their “reaction” lacked what I felt was a sufficiently deep understanding of what they were saying, such that they could meaningfully articulate and live out what they preached.
I realized that beneath my hesitations and negations, I was starting to gain a sense of my own individual values and beliefs. My emotions seemed to begin from that point, rather than from the ideas’ impact on my social relationships. I began to feel stifled by the communication style of my Twitter account, so I created another anonymous account, this time with what I felt was the opposite intent: of expressing my feelings no matter what. And so began @qorprate.
In a sort of parallel move, I also began realizing that my emotional responses in social situations were often themselves “irrational”, in the sense that I was reacting more strongly than some anonymous person might if they were in my exact situation. This was triggered by my reflections on an embarrassing episode of being backhanded by a Twitter girl I was crushing on, for getting angry at her random several day disappearance. “What if she’s right, and I am somehow fucked up?” I decided I needed some tools to understand how this could be true, if it were indeed true, and what I found was a copy of Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy (precursor to his famous Games People Play) on my mom’s bookshelf (she is a therapist, but the book had my a sticker in it from my grandmother, a social worker). I remember reflecting on its ideas of “Parent, Adult, Child” in the park on an autumn afternoon, attempting to pinpoint where my problem lay. This was how I discovered psychoanalytic theory.
Reconciliation and Truth
I continued my course of study. I began reading core Freud texts (and bashing my head against Lacan), as Berne’s corpus wasn’t sufficiently rigorous for me. I continued reading philosophy, as my project had morphed over time into “give myself a philosophy undergrad degree” (I had been nerd-sniped). Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was a particularly important touch-point for me, which gave me some capacity to enter into classical Greek philosophy, and which introduced me to the idea of the Archimedean point that opened up the notion of phenomenology and offered me a point of entry into critique of the “STEM-brained” reactionary ideas that I continued to grapple with on the back-burner4.
One of the most important points was taking a class on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which finally reopened a direct exploration of the core SJ topics, dealing extensively with race and oppression, and in particular the historical construction of the idea of race itself (NB: it happened in the 19th century, right alongside industrialization and colonialism). I found myself aggressively sympathetic to her viewpoint, and enjoyed seeing the different views people expressed as part of the class discussions (notably, it was a class held through a community study program, rather than directly through a university, so the participants ranged from recent college graduates to curious 70 year olds).
Through Freud’s lineage I also ended up reading a Judith Butler paper, finally. I had been avoiding diving into the heart of what I considered “deep SJW theory”, as a friend’s paper which I spent a lot of time wrapping my head around seemed convoluted, and his citations like Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice seemed to play weird logical tricks rather than expressing themselves clearly. I was already familiar with Nussbaum’s logically straightforward critiques of Butler by the time I finally read Butler’s work. I found myself unimpressed with Butler’s constructions, but I did realize that I had finally found what I considered to be the deepest common root of the SJW ideology in terms of intellectual lineage, in particular her notion of performative identity. By this time I was so thoroughly radicalized by Freud’s texts like 3 Essays on Sexuality, which problematize the notion of identity itself (not to mention Žižek, who argues extensively with Butler), that I didn’t feel a need to pursue it any deeper; I felt like I could adequately reason on my own were I confronted with someone who wanted to converse about the topic.
On the more affective side, I slowly developed confidence through meeting people with reasonable and strongly-held views who were critical of SJ ideas without devolving into reactionary polemics. I was especially shocked to meet many women in particular who held views that went against SJ ideas, often only expressed in secret. Whether this was due to my social circle no longer consisting of aspiring artists, who felt the need to broadcast their political affiliations as part of their unique institutional environment, or whether a shift occurred in cultural consciousness, I cannot be sure. But I no longer found myself threatened by the ideas that had once struck me to my core (and, perhaps more importantly, I no longer felt myself unworthy of closeness with the people expressing these ideas).
In particular, I began to realize that while I personally invested a lot of my social energy online, many of the SJWs I had known were rather casual users of the internet. What had to me seemed like an existential threat within the social spaces I treated as a sort of home, was to them a mostly thoughtless action that had no real impact on their day to day social existence. This difference didn’t become fully clear to me until right before the pandemic, where I finally had a social life that felt much more rooted in physical proximity vs the preceding years of (what I experienced as) relative isolation. It felt like an inversion, to a degree, where the internet recedes to an entertaining sideshow while the real fun and games take place “irl”.
What I had recognized as an authentic expression of belief worth fighting for was actually rooted in a very different idea of “doing your part” by “amplifying” ideas online, where the expression itself served to absolve the speaker of their sense of social pressure and guilt by implication, and thus the necessity to grapple with the ideas declared ended in the statement itself. I am struck in retrospect by the massive gulf this represented in terms of my own concept of ethics, which is more local: I am concerned more with what concrete results I’m capable of achieving given my means at hand, or even which actions are worthwhile regardless of results, vs which abstract system I find myself participating in and how I speak with regard to it. I feel like “do your part” is a sort of persistent error of reasoning that results in this hypothetical sadness about “if only we could all just do the right thing”, as opposed to acting to directly in accordance with your beliefs about what is good.
The college SJ culture came to seem like an expression of felt powerlessness, with institutional critique resulting from a lack of institutional means, which is why it was always institutions in which the speaker could not act meaningfully within that came under the heaviest fire (this, of course, does not apply to the bureaucrats who wield these ideas toward expanding their own power). These statements, which I once saw as a demand or a judgment, were really wishes for a better world, as well as attempts to assuage a certain sense of guilt from seeing far more of the world than one can act on (is it any wonder that television heralded the cultural upheavals of the 1960s?), although of course they do carry within them the potentialities of tribalism that come with any sort of ideological movement. I now feel no issue agreeing to whatever critiques are raised from a position of good will, and I don’t feel stifled in my own speech, as I have the language to express myself without others feeling like they must defend their own beliefs. I also have the good luck to find myself regularly meeting individuals who express beliefs that might be described as aligned with social justice, but who hold a nuanced view of the matter, taking into account their own subjective position in relation to their critiques.
As my saga draws to its own sort of conclusion, I find myself paradoxically aligned more with the SJWs than with their opposition. I get the sense that the emergent reactionaries were driven more by resentment and cruelty than by a sense of social pressure (although of course cruelty is not the exclusive purview of any side in particular), and that the reactionaries were also institutionally positioned to produce far more material impact than the SJWs I knew were. Trump’s election was perhaps the most visible example of the reacted-against being outdone by the reaction, even though it’s reductive to pin it all on reactionary attitudes rather than on a convergence of many different forces (and, to be sure, the material implications of his election were quite different than the symbolic implications). It’s from this vantage point that I continue to do what I can, which for me is always an attempt to tie my intellectual work to my life practices, so that I can live out the values I claim to hold, which is ultimately the same task as coming to know the values I already try to live out.
Author of the SCUM Manifesto, which advocates for the killing of all men.
p. 157
The typical banner of this ideological group is “HBD” (“Human Bio-Diversity”), which takes a hard-line position on genetics as the sole key factor in human development. They’re typically most concerned with the connection between genetics and IQ, which acts as a stand-in for the “worthiness” of a human being. They also grapple with evolutionary theory, in a way that verges on satire, including ideas such as the “gay germ theory” (“group selection isn’t real, all evolution is individual selection; so why would humans become gay if it doesn’t increase reproductive fitness? Clearly it’s an external factor”), which were explained to me with much giggling by an individual who went by JayMans.
In particular, the “rationalist” communities online fetishize empiricism as the fundamental basis of all knowledge, without interrogating the basis of empiricism itself. There have been many many critiques of this idea, which falls within the “logical positivist” milieu and dates back to Karl Popper calling everything and anything a “pseudoscience”, but the most recent and entertaining of these critiques is a book by Harmless AI called “Anti-Yudkowsky”.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out. Excellent post.