"...we don't need no thought control..." - Pink Floyd, The Wall
The Vicious Cycle of Social Justice Indoctrination - Part 2
For Part 1 follow this link: The Vicious Cycle of Social Justice Indoctrination - Part 1
The Lack of Critical Thinking Skills is Being Gifted to the Future
As I have detailed in great lengths in my articles Meritocracy is Dead - Diversity and Privilege in Higher Education, Social Justice is Its Own Worst Enemy, The Dystopian Infantilization of America's Youth 1 and 2, Conformity is Diversity - Thought Police on Campus, Cognitive Privilege - The Event Horizon of Social Justice Stupidity and Frankenstein's Monster, Social Justice & Higher Education, logic and critical thinking skills are tools that are conspicuously absent from the social justice movement's toolbox.
The advocates and acolytes of the social justice belief system (which should perhaps more appropriately be termed a religion or cult - thanks @dwinblood!) not only are - quite obviously - not trained in logic, critical thinking or the scientific method, they appear to be actively opposed to their application. And this perspective is being paid forward by sake of the mere fact they are not capable of teaching skills they do not possess.
The firing of James Damore from the intellectually infantile Goo Goo Ga Ga Land demonstrates this quite clearly. And where did the radically intolerant, anti-science social justice warriors learn the "philosophical" underpinnings of their belief system? It isn't as if the hyper-relativist construction of truth hasn't been propagating itself throughout the educational establishment for decades. The Damore incident merely demonstrates that this socially divisive doublethink ideology has been unleashed in the private economy after having had decades to gestate in the educational establishment. The Google incident, I believe, is just a shot across the bow presaging the barrage of madness we can expect in the future. I hope I am wrong.
There are more than enough people teaching a liberal art or science (History, English, Art, Sociology etc.) in the United States today who were required to earn their teaching certifications in an educational environment similar to that exemplified by Columbia (above). Forgive me for lacking confidence in the objectivity and critical thinking skills that are being bequeathed upon our children today.
The Cyclically Escalating & Self-Edifying Ideology of Social Justice
As Galland argues, Marxist economic thought was never fully defeated. Following setbacks at the beginning of the 20th century, it regrouped and established new beachheads for a long-term cultural conflict, the goal of which was to ensure the Marxist economic model would succeed the next time around, this cultural beachhead is what people today call 'Cultural Marxism'.
In considering how the social justice belief system has infected the educational system, it seems increasingly likely that the west's current woes with this movement is not a wayward evolutionary development. John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt have argued eloquently that it is no mistake, Iserbyt goes so far as to point the finger at the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Education Board as causal factors. Contemporary speculation about who or what institutions are behind the quickening collapse are beyond the scope of this article.
It does seem to make an ominous sort of sense. In the next four paragraphs, I will provide a rough outline of how this may have occurred.
Having made significant inroads into the universities in the 1960s, the continued development of the social justice movement has largely taken place in the liberal arts and sciences departments. These are largely the departments and disciplines where formal logic, mathematical truths and objective biological realities can be safely sidelined without causing an overt crisis of confidence in academic quality. Indeed, I can confirm after spending some 20 years in higher education that rhetorical skill not infrequently trumps logic in the liberal arts and sciences today.
More and more funding has been directed towards programs that promote social justice under the auspices of the rights movements, concurrently relativism has become increasingly accepted as a rational world view on campus. Over time, it became accepted that almost everyone is suited for higher education (1980s), then that higher education is practically mandatory in order to get ahead financially and socially (1990s-present).
Massive entitlement and lending programs were enacted to enable as many people as possible to attend university, where the relativist view in the liberal arts and sciences has firmly established itself as legitimate. Some students stayed on campus and became the next generation of academics, and adherence to social justice goals has become a prerequisite for even being considered for a position at many if not most institutions. Others, equipped with this "empowering" ideology, returned to the lower schools as teachers, raising and educating the next generation of young people and preparing them for college.
The propagation of the social justice ideology, as a result of its focus on championing victims, began expanding the criteria of oppression so that it could raise up ever more people from beneath the tyrannical boot of the "privileged". This increased the emphasis on understanding the dynamic of oppression and privilege within the educational environment, while (almost ironically) creating more victim groups that needed to be lifted up.
This process describes both a financial and ideological escalation over time that has established a cyclically self-edifying dynamic on the part of the social justice belief system. In short, the theoretical underpinnings of the social justice ideology are presented as fact in university teaching programs and returned to the lower schools to be propagated there. When pupils become college students they are financed for adherence to the belief system (as detailed previously in my post Conformity is Diversity and Frankenstein's Monster). This is accompanied by an ever-expanding definition of oppression and privilege which necessitates an increase in related infrastructure and ever more funding. Wash, rinse and repeat for a few decades and we find ourselves where we are today.
The Counterintuitive Conclusion - Fighting Oppression with Oppression.
This has resulted in an almost complete inversion of the rights movement. Whereas in the 1960s the focused on lifting up women and blacks, the social justice iteration of today is focused on tearing down the "white Christian hetero-normative meritocratic capitalist patriarchy", i.e. everyone except white Christian males belong to a victim group that deserves special privileges, indeed, any advocates of white masculinity must be actively disadvantaged.
Without the support of the majority of the white Christian hetero-normative meritocratic capitalist patriarchy of the 1960s, which had largely been raised to respect critical thinking and logic, the rights movement would very likely never have succeeded. It cannot be stated clearly enough, that rights movements weren't successful despite the dominant majority of the time, they were successful because of it. I am sure this is not a popular opinion to hold and it is most certainly not politically correct.
But here is the real irony: The social justice movement has become the oppressive, discriminatory, sexist, racist plague on society that it sought to destroy and has the added benefits of being hyper-relativist, anti-science, untrained in critical thinking or logic and increasingly unwilling to engage in constructive civil dialogue. Isn't that grand?
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Finally a video addressing the hyper-relativist, anti-science, anti-logic authoritarianism we are faced with as society at large wakes up to the fact the lunatics have escaped the asylum.
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Shot with a golden arrow,
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All gifs courtesy of Giphy
tags: society politics education justice logic