Hey guys, r/kotakuinaction and r/Conservative have just gone private. What is going on?
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It's still early days and the gridlock is going to be making more than a few headlines in the future. I see the stance of unity dissolving the closer we get to intersectional collectivism being shown for what it is - a mafia exploiting idiots who think that they are well intentioned and making the world a better place for all.
What the trans movement represents to the left is not just another identitarian group that they can use to push authoritarianism. It's much more than that. It's as close as anyone has ever come to overriding people's biology and asserting control over individual identities.
Authoritarians have always resented evolutionary psychology because it means that there will always be some aspects of individual behaviour, and therefore of society, that they cannot fully control. The revolution can never be completely secure until they have control of that as well.
There are three types of revolution. The first and most superficial is the political revolution: the transformation of the way the individual interacts with the state. There American Revolution is an example of this, and it was successful because nothing else changed: the country was still Christian, English speaking and all of the building blocks that comprised communities and the broader society remained the same. All that changed was the way in which those communities interacted with the institutions that governed them.
The second is the social revolution, or the transformation of the way people interact with each other. Authoritarians will always attempt this in order to consolidate their control and try to suppress dissent: eliminating traditional religion and trying to replace it with Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being, or with worship of the State, or more recently the worship of The Science. Editing the language by forbidding certain words or introducing new ones, or by changing what words mean.
The problem with this phase of the revolution is that it's never successful in the long term, because it inevitably involves trying to force people to behave in ways that don't cohere with their natural, biological programming. It's never going to be possible to supplant the nuclear family with the State, for example, even though every totalitarian tries it, because otherwise the society you govern is built on a fundamental power structure that you don't control.
But the third type of revolution is the personal, or the transformation of the way the individual interacts with himself. This is obviously the hardest to achieve, but the trans movement represents a concerted effort to do just that.
It's impossible to overstate how important gender is to our sense of identity: it informs almost every aspect of how we think, how we behave, how we interact with other people. If they can convince an entire generation of young people to abandon gender, to deny something they know instinctively, fundamentally to be true about themselves, then what's left is a generation of alienated, hormonally-unbalanced blank slates with no core sense of their own identity and no emotional capacity to resist further conditioning.
Most of the footsoldiers championing the trans cause may not understand this on an intellectual level, but instinctively, I think they do. They realize the implications this could have for their social project, and that's why they will always prioritize it over every other one of their pet causes. In the UK schools debate between Muslim parents and the trans lobby, it was the trans lobby who won. The reason for that is that as much as the left fetishize Islam for the destabilizing effect it has on our society, the trans movement will always be more important to them, whether it ends up being successful or not.
Thanks for that wonderfully written and insightful approach to revolutions Dag.
I think that you are on the money with the personal, or transformative, revolution being the current strategy of the authoritarian left but I think, or rather hope, that the inner chimp in each of us will always step up to protect us when we are in danger.
The dominance that the left seeks is them feeding their strength by numbers approach which will eventually discard individuals when they are no longer as useful as the newer and younger members of said collective.
I'm hoping at that point individuals will see the importance of self and perhaps bring about an epiphany for minds in the developed West.
I have no problems with trans people, but it is important for members of those communities to open to being exploited by bad actors and they have a responsibility to themselves and the community as a whole to police it properly and stay safe.
Just like all of the current closed community subs on Reddit just now.
Thanks. I have to give credit to Huxley. He didn't articulate it exactly like I did, but most of what I said about the nature of revolutions comes from Brave New World.
It was still very well written Dag :)
Props on your teaching style.
I really don't see this to be the breaking point.
They would wait for the whole matter to blow over as usual, smother & gaslight the tribals with sweet nothings & falsehoods, distract them with inconsequential outrage bait and the whole affair would be memory holed in 1~2 years.
The users on the other hand would whine about reddit's staff and it's battalion of jannies but they would never move on from the site. They'd complain about it... but they're far too comfortable & addicted to the kind of validation that reddit provides with it's "safe spaces".
Just look at the retarded juxtaposition of people using reddit's award system to validate a post about protesting reddit.
You make a fine point there.
I was talking about the social justice movement a a whole though, not just those within the confines of Reddit. I don't think that it is sustainable.