Now, it is important to understand that "systemic racism"/Critical Race Theory is only the most egregious example of a general process that is corrupting all our cultural institutions.
Peer-conformity and grant-extraction are the incentives that drive memetic evolution in academia. And once the Clergy is won, these aberrantly-selected ideas will proceed over decades to reshape the whole of society.
Pathological doctrines emanating from the Clergy are the reason why American cities look like war zones , why fanatical and ignorant mobs are rioting and smashing monuments across the West like ISIS at Palmyra. In Europe, the same ideas from the same source are busy at work recreating all the decay, chaos, and crime of American ghettos, except that the mechanism involves imported religious fanatics, with the potential for a much direr outcome. Even now, thousands upon thousands of girls have been raped by Muslim supremacists (a scandal coyly referred to as "grooming gangs" in the UK); unassimilated minorities are forming nations-within-nations; Christmas markets can’t be held anymore without armed guard. Fences and bollards have sprung up everywhere. The crime rate in London today is 50 times higher than it was in Edwardian England, and the French anti-terrorism directorate foils on average 11 Islamist massacres a year.
We cannot even board a plane without being obliged to strip and shuffle barefoot like as many morons. How insane all this is becomes evident by contrast with the last oasis of sanity: Japan.
Japan, for all its faults (far from a perfect society), has always resisted "educational reforms" after postwar Western models, and being virtually the only advanced country unpolluted by Christianity (not even in popular sensibility), it is immune to victimism.
Behold what a society looks like that still knows how to defend itself:
Peer-conformity and grant-extraction are the incentives that drive memetic evolution in academia. And once the Clergy is won, these aberrantly-selected ideas will proceed over decades to reshape the whole of society.
Pathological doctrines emanating from the Clergy are the reason why American cities look like war zones , why fanatical and ignorant mobs are rioting and smashing monuments across the West like ISIS at Palmyra. In Europe, the same ideas from the same source are busy at work recreating all the decay, chaos, and crime of American ghettos, except that the mechanism involves imported religious fanatics, with the potential for a much direr outcome. Even now, thousands upon thousands of girls have been raped by Muslim supremacists (a scandal coyly referred to as "grooming gangs" in the UK); unassimilated minorities are forming nations-within-nations; Christmas markets can’t be held anymore without armed guard. Fences and bollards have sprung up everywhere. The crime rate in London today is 50 times higher than it was in Edwardian England, and the French anti-terrorism directorate foils on average 11 Islamist massacres a year.
We cannot even board a plane without being obliged to strip and shuffle barefoot like as many morons. How insane all this is becomes evident by contrast with the last oasis of sanity: Japan.
Japan, for all its faults (far from a perfect society), has always resisted "educational reforms" after postwar Western models, and being virtually the only advanced country unpolluted by Christianity (not even in popular sensibility), it is immune to victimism.
Behold what a society looks like that still knows how to defend itself:
This is what the West too used to be. These, ladies and gentlemen, are the fruits of decades of corruption in academia.
If Detroit 1965 vs. Detroit 2015 was not enough to convey the full extent of our decadence, how about London 1920 (left)--a time when any 12 year old girl could walk undisturbed anywhere in the country, during the day or at night (just like Japan today), vs. London 2017 (right), where mobs of Islamists chase the police in the streets?
(I know, progressive friend, I know! You recall the dark days 37 (or was it 41?) years ago when a "PoC" acquaintance of yours was chased down the streets of London by white racists! If the metaphor serves, you are the AIDS patient with an incipient opportunistic infection that laughs off his first bout of pneumonia because he recollects the terrible allergies he suffered as a child. Fatuousness is not an escape, in the long run.)
(I know, progressive friend, I know! You recall the dark days 37 (or was it 41?) years ago when a "PoC" acquaintance of yours was chased down the streets of London by white racists! If the metaphor serves, you are the AIDS patient with an incipient opportunistic infection that laughs off his first bout of pneumonia because he recollects the terrible allergies he suffered as a child. Fatuousness is not an escape, in the long run.)
"The first step to solve any problem is to acknowledge that there is a problem. Denying its existence will delay its rectification. Identifying the presence of the problem is critical to solving the problem."
How effective is the manufacturing of consent? Judge for yourself how many have unquestioningly bought a patently absurd conspiracy theory positing that the entire social fabric of the United States of America is designed to create a racial hierarchy for the benefit of white men--as if modern America were apartheid South Africa or ancient Sparta, crypteia and all.
[Yes, yes, I know, "systemic racism is a sophisticated theory of social bias": answer me this, progressive friend: if I told you that Jews had installed themselves in all the key positions of power and wealth in society, and kept down the goyim by their exclusivist values and unconscious bias against non-Jews, how would you characterize this theory?]
The manufacturing of public opinion is not limited to the Clergy, of course. On the other side, see how the Nobility, threatened and defied, easily brainwashed millions of British voters to regard Jeremy Corbyn (of all people) as the terrorist love-child of Hitler and Stalin. The official orthodoxies of Clergy and Nobility percolate down over decades via similar channels of manipulation and by exploiting the same popular frailties. Where the Nobility has Fox News (and all corporate media when it comes to sensitive topics), the Clergy has The New York Times and the California public school system. Do you think that all those blabbering about “structural racism” understand what that expression even means? Do you imagine for a moment that they possess the intellectual curiosity to learn about history for what it is? They just regurgitate what they’ve been fed by bad teachers.
Amathia is how fundamentally decent people end up bashing statues of Columbus, Churchill or Ulysses Grant as memorials to Evil. But the underlying ideology animates the crowd of mindless individuals, and acts in the world through them. Behind the mask of compassion and of truth, it pursues its real object: power.
[Yes, yes, I know, "systemic racism is a sophisticated theory of social bias": answer me this, progressive friend: if I told you that Jews had installed themselves in all the key positions of power and wealth in society, and kept down the goyim by their exclusivist values and unconscious bias against non-Jews, how would you characterize this theory?]
The manufacturing of public opinion is not limited to the Clergy, of course. On the other side, see how the Nobility, threatened and defied, easily brainwashed millions of British voters to regard Jeremy Corbyn (of all people) as the terrorist love-child of Hitler and Stalin. The official orthodoxies of Clergy and Nobility percolate down over decades via similar channels of manipulation and by exploiting the same popular frailties. Where the Nobility has Fox News (and all corporate media when it comes to sensitive topics), the Clergy has The New York Times and the California public school system. Do you think that all those blabbering about “structural racism” understand what that expression even means? Do you imagine for a moment that they possess the intellectual curiosity to learn about history for what it is? They just regurgitate what they’ve been fed by bad teachers.
Amathia is how fundamentally decent people end up bashing statues of Columbus, Churchill or Ulysses Grant as memorials to Evil. But the underlying ideology animates the crowd of mindless individuals, and acts in the world through them. Behind the mask of compassion and of truth, it pursues its real object: power.
Lest any reader should be inclined to disbelieve (and this stuff is incredible), he or she should rest assured that the content of this section is drawn from actual CVs of actual professors at Johns Hopkins personally known to this author. If you knew on the strength of what "scholarship" one of these individuals was appointed to the most prestigious (and best paid) position in the whole university (Bloomberg Distinguished Chair), your disbelief would probably grow--but here it is. Reality surpasses fiction.
The whole system is hopelessly corrupt, to a degree unimagined by outsiders.
The whole system is hopelessly corrupt, to a degree unimagined by outsiders.
These real-world exchanges also illustrate how academic peer-conformity is weaponized for memetic infection (2): Victimism, like all religions, gives comfortable and privileged people a license to bully those around them behind a Mask of Compassion or of self-defense, till everyone bows to your doctrines and falls in line — Will to Power, in other words, with a clear conscience and a socially approved façade.
We come now to the final, and absolute most important condition, (3), i.e. cozening all that sweet, sweet grant money out of the state. Victimism is an unsurpassed grant-extraction machine. One needs to be explicit here: if you set out, as an academic in the Humanities, to study the Mycenaean influences on Homer, or the mating habits of the Ayoreo tribe of Paraguay, your struggle for funding will be nasty, brutish, and long. If you, however, set up an activist "research" program predicated on the assumption that black communities in the US are oppressed by racialized policing in a "frontlash" (sic) against the civil rights movement of the 1960s, — a program that comes naturally with bold policy recommendations (such as defunding the police), you will be showered with grants from foundations and government agencies.
And it doesn't stop there. Through the channels of influence described above, your ideas tend to be eventually implemented by the state. And you, or the next academic generation that studies under you, will be selected to design and administer dysfunctional new public programs. This has happened again and again since the 1950s.
What is the outcome?
Since these policies and ideologies are merely devices serving the internal power struggles of the Clergy (i.e. we repeat: they are not the socially beneficial implementations of truthful doctrines), they tend to have a catastrophic impact on the vulnerable communities on which they are imposed. Black ghettos, in the form we see them today in the US, could not have emerged without them, with people left to rot on welfare, de-proletarized, robbed of a sense of agency and responsibility like as many infants (go back to Chapter III and see what passes for "social work" in the United States today).
The idiot conservatives imagining that minorities benefit from “diversity privilege”, group-identitarianism, and welfare dependency, have already conceded the intellectual ground to their hated enemies. The truth is that nothing short of enslavement could be more degrading than these policies.
The Rosa Lees of America were reduced to a grotesque parody of the human condition, but what better outcome for the ideologues in academia? The social decay, far from being a reality check, gives them more lucrative opportunities to come up, at a later date, with conspiracy theories to explain why the groups they have so lovingly emancipated are doing so badly: this is how “systemic racism” was born. Your pet victim groups will continue to pay the price, eventually even in blood (see below), but you get consulting jobs for the NIJ, more grants (from the Justice Department, the Ford Foundation, etc), endowed Chairs in Sociology.
We come now to the final, and absolute most important condition, (3), i.e. cozening all that sweet, sweet grant money out of the state. Victimism is an unsurpassed grant-extraction machine. One needs to be explicit here: if you set out, as an academic in the Humanities, to study the Mycenaean influences on Homer, or the mating habits of the Ayoreo tribe of Paraguay, your struggle for funding will be nasty, brutish, and long. If you, however, set up an activist "research" program predicated on the assumption that black communities in the US are oppressed by racialized policing in a "frontlash" (sic) against the civil rights movement of the 1960s, — a program that comes naturally with bold policy recommendations (such as defunding the police), you will be showered with grants from foundations and government agencies.
And it doesn't stop there. Through the channels of influence described above, your ideas tend to be eventually implemented by the state. And you, or the next academic generation that studies under you, will be selected to design and administer dysfunctional new public programs. This has happened again and again since the 1950s.
What is the outcome?
Since these policies and ideologies are merely devices serving the internal power struggles of the Clergy (i.e. we repeat: they are not the socially beneficial implementations of truthful doctrines), they tend to have a catastrophic impact on the vulnerable communities on which they are imposed. Black ghettos, in the form we see them today in the US, could not have emerged without them, with people left to rot on welfare, de-proletarized, robbed of a sense of agency and responsibility like as many infants (go back to Chapter III and see what passes for "social work" in the United States today).
The idiot conservatives imagining that minorities benefit from “diversity privilege”, group-identitarianism, and welfare dependency, have already conceded the intellectual ground to their hated enemies. The truth is that nothing short of enslavement could be more degrading than these policies.
The Rosa Lees of America were reduced to a grotesque parody of the human condition, but what better outcome for the ideologues in academia? The social decay, far from being a reality check, gives them more lucrative opportunities to come up, at a later date, with conspiracy theories to explain why the groups they have so lovingly emancipated are doing so badly: this is how “systemic racism” was born. Your pet victim groups will continue to pay the price, eventually even in blood (see below), but you get consulting jobs for the NIJ, more grants (from the Justice Department, the Ford Foundation, etc), endowed Chairs in Sociology.
Furthermore, victimism justifies the Clergy's privileged status relative to the peasantry in “flyover states”, who see their way of life destroyed by the elites' pet social policies: the peasants suddenly become entitled white-supremacist “deplorables” — and no compassion for them! May they die of opioid overdose, and good riddance! Ah ah, fewer Trump voters!
Your conscience rests easy, and you can maintain your "humanitarian" social identity despite your privileges and your fundamentally self-seeking behavior. Outgroups, the more distant and amorphous the better, stand in for abstract humanity, receptacle of your love.
Finally, this ideology has enabled the proliferation of a host of lucrative jobs as “diversity officers”. It is true that these function partly as Supreme Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but they also have an important role as a patronage system for the cadres of “critical studies” programs. Dozens of such officers now exist at every major university who draw 6-figure salaries, and I assure you that faith can be bought for hard cash.
However, we must admit that this is still a superficial (paleo-Marxist) level of analysis. If all there was to victimism were grubby class interests, it would have adherents in the Clergy, but we would not see the viciously-enforced hegemony that we are witnessing today.
The real great allure of victimism lies in its religious-moralistic undertones, so overpowering that the ideology should be properly regarded as a form of degenerate Christianity. It is irresistible to anomic academics who have lost their religion but not their religious urges, because it appeals to the diffuse Christian perception of victimhood as divine, it satisfies your longing for penance and purification , and, lastly, it supplies you with a Grand Cause to redeem the world and give purpose to an otherwise meaningless existence. In this sense, it performs the exact same para-religious function that classical Marxism did for an earlier generation.
But in this new incarnation, it does more, and this additional factor may be key to its viral spread in academia, especially, we are sorry to say, among women: If you identify with a victim group, victimism externalizes away any and all hardship you may encounter in life: Do you ever feel alienated or dissatisfied? Difficulties at work? No worries: every little strain in your life is evidence only of a societal conspiracy against you as a [victim group member].
Victimism is, in other words, a maladaptive psychological coping mechanism, especially appealing to academics high in neuroticism who may have sacrificed everything for their career: deracinated (we often emigrate from our homelands), childless (we often can't reconcile work and family), completely lacking in self-awareness (we thought simply ditching our parents' faith meant enlightenment).
By demanding and taking advantage of your colleagues' sympathy (if you're a victim group member), or by virtue-signaling to other true believers, you can concentrate personal power and advance through the ranks of the institutions . In most cases, there is no conscious deception or hypocrisy: Marxism taught us how ideology engenders false consciousness . Indeed, if you work in academia, you know how deadly serious in their persecutory delusions the true believers can be, and how these delusions intensify the higher up they are in the hierarchy. We have all met directors of graduate programs or even department chairs who can't stop pitying themselves for not "having a seat at the real table", or puling about the harshness they endure in their tenured job supervising, for $200k/year, a team of students who do all the actual work.
If gently asked to substantiate their claims of oppression, they 1) rage at the "challenge"(sic)(an implicit admission that victimhood is in fact a power play), 2) explicitly demand "empathy", and 3) finally bring up harrowing experiences such as being asked "Can I help you?" while entering a room, or feeling awkward at post-conference parties — all PTSD-level traumas utterly unknown to white men, with their trouble-free and perfectly fulfilling lives.
[no, dear reader, I'm not making this shit up: This is the outline of actual conversations that took place in the Marbled Halls, and this is the real, intra-academic function of the parataxic delusion known as "microaggressions"]
Your conscience rests easy, and you can maintain your "humanitarian" social identity despite your privileges and your fundamentally self-seeking behavior. Outgroups, the more distant and amorphous the better, stand in for abstract humanity, receptacle of your love.
Finally, this ideology has enabled the proliferation of a host of lucrative jobs as “diversity officers”. It is true that these function partly as Supreme Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but they also have an important role as a patronage system for the cadres of “critical studies” programs. Dozens of such officers now exist at every major university who draw 6-figure salaries, and I assure you that faith can be bought for hard cash.
However, we must admit that this is still a superficial (paleo-Marxist) level of analysis. If all there was to victimism were grubby class interests, it would have adherents in the Clergy, but we would not see the viciously-enforced hegemony that we are witnessing today.
The real great allure of victimism lies in its religious-moralistic undertones, so overpowering that the ideology should be properly regarded as a form of degenerate Christianity. It is irresistible to anomic academics who have lost their religion but not their religious urges, because it appeals to the diffuse Christian perception of victimhood as divine, it satisfies your longing for penance and purification , and, lastly, it supplies you with a Grand Cause to redeem the world and give purpose to an otherwise meaningless existence. In this sense, it performs the exact same para-religious function that classical Marxism did for an earlier generation.
But in this new incarnation, it does more, and this additional factor may be key to its viral spread in academia, especially, we are sorry to say, among women: If you identify with a victim group, victimism externalizes away any and all hardship you may encounter in life: Do you ever feel alienated or dissatisfied? Difficulties at work? No worries: every little strain in your life is evidence only of a societal conspiracy against you as a [victim group member].
Victimism is, in other words, a maladaptive psychological coping mechanism, especially appealing to academics high in neuroticism who may have sacrificed everything for their career: deracinated (we often emigrate from our homelands), childless (we often can't reconcile work and family), completely lacking in self-awareness (we thought simply ditching our parents' faith meant enlightenment).
By demanding and taking advantage of your colleagues' sympathy (if you're a victim group member), or by virtue-signaling to other true believers, you can concentrate personal power and advance through the ranks of the institutions . In most cases, there is no conscious deception or hypocrisy: Marxism taught us how ideology engenders false consciousness . Indeed, if you work in academia, you know how deadly serious in their persecutory delusions the true believers can be, and how these delusions intensify the higher up they are in the hierarchy. We have all met directors of graduate programs or even department chairs who can't stop pitying themselves for not "having a seat at the real table", or puling about the harshness they endure in their tenured job supervising, for $200k/year, a team of students who do all the actual work.
If gently asked to substantiate their claims of oppression, they 1) rage at the "challenge"(sic)(an implicit admission that victimhood is in fact a power play), 2) explicitly demand "empathy", and 3) finally bring up harrowing experiences such as being asked "Can I help you?" while entering a room, or feeling awkward at post-conference parties — all PTSD-level traumas utterly unknown to white men, with their trouble-free and perfectly fulfilling lives.
[no, dear reader, I'm not making this shit up: This is the outline of actual conversations that took place in the Marbled Halls, and this is the real, intra-academic function of the parataxic delusion known as "microaggressions"]
Their actual function is to benefit their creators in the power contests within universities.
______
(1). it is psychologically appealing to at least some academics, so as to form a sizable reservoir of carriers (the "true believers");
(2). it legitimizes intolerance and suppression of competing ideas, while allowing its carriers to concentrate personal power or prestige, so as to exploit peer-conformity for the carriers' rise within the institutions, and
(3). it increases its carriers' chances of winning grants.
We will now proceed to show that victimism (as we like to call the now-dominant ideology derived from Critical Studies and based on race/gender victim groups) is the Meme-Supreme, the viral accident that was waiting to happen in the corrupt milieu of modern universities.
At first blush, victimism materially benefits the Clergy by advancing their class interests. The typical member of this grey elite makes $200'000 a year and falls squarely in the top 5% of earners. Victimism shifts "progressive" discourse away from wealth inequality: Justice is no longer a decent economic order, it is to make sure that the neo-feudal elites, Nobility and Clergy, are ‘diverse’ enough. ‘Diverse’, needless to say, doesn’t refer to your station in life. If your parents are West Virginia coal miners you don’t count for shit. All my American colleagues — as kaleidoscopically different as they are in terms of the holy demographic groups— are invariably the offspring of lawyers, physicians, computer programmers, and the like, usually from the coasts.