Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the ideological incoherence (and, as always, psychological projection) of the left:
All I was doing was pointing out he had no proof of his statement and in fact, there was plenty of proof to the contrary. Where it got interesting was his tactic in the argument. He started by calling me a snowflake and saying I was obviously hurt by what he said. I told him I wasn’t in the least hurt, just amused at his lack of reasoning, and furnished him with another half dozen names of great/rich writers. He tried to call me snowflake again, and then told me to go copulate with myself but in more common words. When that failed, he said he was deleting the thread because he’d obviously hurt people. Note that in none of this had he hurt me, not even with the profanity, nor had I or any of the people who agreed with me on that thread implied we were hurt. Somewhere between amused and appalled is not hurt.
I was discussing this argument with a friend later, and he said I was making the mistake of interpreting the words as words. Or of thinking any kind of thought was behind first calling me snowflake, and then saying he’d hurt people’s feelings.
He said that the whole thing was more a reaction on the level of “when I’m called snowflake it hurts me, so I’ll call her snowflake and that will hurt her” and when we didn’t cave to his argument, he couldn’t figure out how to get out of it other than apologizing for hurting our feelings.
He – he’s an academic – pointed out this is the whole point of post-modern analysis, be it of literature or society: words have no meaning and can be assigned arbitrary meanings according to the emotions they elicit.
He says that’s why the left is more and more resorting to shouting random slogans and words until it gets them the reaction they want. Not because they don’t know the meanings of words, but because they reject the idea that words have inherent meanings.
Almost a decade ago, I wrote a post on my long-standing theory about why Hollywood depicts businesspeople as evil:
…it only makes sense that if your only employment experience with business, big or otherwise, is working for the entertainment industry or the ad business, you’re not going to have much appreciation for how a real business, where you have to actually develop and manufacture things that people go out and willingly buy, and has to be run by people with a talent for business (not murder and skullduggery), actually works. It’s actually quite similar to the reason that life in the military is rarely depicted accurately. They have no real-life experience.
There has always been a malicious, vengeful streak in sections of the compassionate new left. Consider how they have always boasted about ‘hating the Tories’, as if hatred is an emotion to be proud of. The far left always talk of ‘smashing’ or ‘fighting’ things, whether it be capitalism, racism or the system. The rhetoric of caring and combat paradoxically go hand-in-hand. As Albert Camus observed in his attack on Sartre in his 1951 L’Homme révolté, the more someone professes to care about humanity, the more they tend to dislike people as human beings.
It’s not even the “new” Left. It’s the way the Left has always been. Including their purloining of the word “liberal” to attempt to fool people into thinking they actually are. And I don’t “hate” Leftists, because I’ve never found hate to be a productive emotion. I simply oppose them and their works with every fiber of my being.
If I ever get around to writing my book about the projection of the Left, this would be a chapter in it.
That half of a generation would prefer to live under socialism or communism to a free-market economy is an appalling failure of our educational system. Though, from the point of view of those who have been running it (into the ground), perhaps they consider it a success.
One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”
Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.
Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.
Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).
Related to this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.
The Wright brothers weren’t alone. The Beatles fought over instruments and lyrics and melodies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony clashed over the right way to win the right to vote. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak argued incessantly while designing the first Apple computer. None of these people succeeded in spite of the drama — they flourished because of it. Brainstorming groups generate 16 percent more ideas when the members are encouraged to criticize one another. The most creative ideas in Chinese technology companies and the best decisions in American hospitals come from teams that have real disagreements early on. Breakthrough labs in microbiology aren’t full of enthusiastic collaborators cheering one another on but of skeptical scientists challenging one another’s interpretations.
If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take it.
Beyond the danger to free expression, this is a large part of the danger of political correctness and groupthink on campus.