Scott Alexander sees a fearful symmetry between the social justice narrative and the anti-social justice narrative:
The social justice narrative describes a political-economic elite dominated by white males persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like blacks, women, and gays. The anti-social-justice narrative describes an intellectual-cultural elite dominated by social justice activists persecuting anybody who doesn’t fit into their culture, like men, theists, and conservatives. Both are relatively plausible; Congress and millionaires are 80% – 90% white; journalists and the Ivy League are 80% – 90% leftist.
The narratives share a surprising number of other similarities. Both, for example, identify their enemy with the spirit of a discredited mid-twentieth century genocidal philosophy of government; fascists on the one side, communists on the other. Both believe they’re fighting a war for their very right to exist, despite the lack of any plausible path to reinstituting slavery or transitioning to a Stalinist dictatorship. Both operate through explosions of outrage at salient media examples of their out-group persecuting their in-group.
They have even converged on the same excuse for what their enemies call “politicizing” previously neutral territory – that what their enemies call “politicizing” is actually trying to restore balance to a field the other side has already successfully politicized.
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I see minimal awareness from the social justice movement and the anti-social-justice movement that their narratives are similar, and certainly no deliberate intent to copy from one another. That makes me think of this as a case of convergent evolution.
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Although it’s very easy enter this state of hypervigilance yourself no matter how safe you are, it’s very hard to understand why anyone else could possibly be pushed into it despite by-the-numbers safety. As a result, we constantly end up with two sides both shouting “You’re making me live in fear, and also you’re making the obviously false claim that you live in fear yourself! Stop it!” and no one getting anywhere. At worst, it degenerates into people saying “These people are falsely accusing me of persecuting them, and falsely claiming to be persecuted themselves, I’ll get back at them by mocking them relentlessly, doxxing them, and trying to make them miserable!” and then you get the kind of atmosphere you find in places like SRS and Gamergate and FreeThoughtBlogs.
That whole post made me want to roll my eyes until they popped out of my head.
“Hey, it looks like a war is going on, and both sides are shooting bullets at each other, imprisoning enemy soldiers, and bombing enemy supply lines! What a FEARFUL SYMMETRY!”
Yes, when producers battle parasites, suffering results. That doesn’t mean producers and parasites are interchangeable.
Alexander completely ignores the fact that the SJWs want to silence the non-SJWs (perhaps I should say, silence the normal people) whereas the normal people just want to be left alone and not forced to profess the SJW creed. But of course Oranias are unacceptable, even those of the mind.
So we had a large discussion on facebook about this post. Started with this observation by me:
The SJWs can use their own names, but the anti-SJWs dare not. Does Alexander mention this?