#problematic and wrongthink | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 8 months

Text

youtube

'If activists are hiding books from you, the best thing you can do is seek them out and read them!'

One of the strangest developments of the culture war has been the rise of authoritarian librarians. It sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Surely librarians are there to support education and to enable the dissemination of literature and knowledge.

But this week it was reported that the library service in Calderdale Council has been hiding books by feminists such as Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock. The Labor-run council confirmed that although these books would still be in the catalog and they could be requested, they were quote, "not visible on the library shelves." This is very odd.

Now, I've read the books in question by both Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock, and they are rigorous, intelligent and important studies concerning one of the key issues of our time. And yet these librarians are treating them as though they are toxic, as if members of the public who happen upon them while browsing might somehow be instantly corrupted.

And yet we shouldn't really be surprised at all. The rise of Woke Librarians, however ludicrous that sounds, is a real thing. Now, I should say from the outset that I've nothing against librarians. Some of my best friends are librarians. But there is something about the profession that seems to attract the kind of paternalistic pharisee who believes that it's their job to protect others from wrongthink.

Let me give you some other examples. So a few years ago, it was reported that the former poet laureate Ted Hughes was included on a watch list created by the British Library because of a family connection with a slave owner. Turns out the connection was false and the Library issued an apology. But why was the foremost library in the UK creating this kind of watch list in the first place? Well, it was because in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the library had commissioned what they called a "decolonizing working group" which decided that they should review the collections and draw up a list of any authors with problematic pasts. This same group also claimed that the library's main building was a monument to imperialism, because it looked a bit like a battleship. I'm not even joking.

And in 2021 the Waterloo Region District School Board in Canada identified and removed books that were considered quote, "harmful to staff and students."

At the same time, other school libraries in Canada were disposing of copies of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale following complaints about quote, "racist, homophobic or misogynistic language and themes."

And then there was the Ottawa Carlton District School Board which removed copies of William Golding's Lord of the Flies on the grounds that the themes of the book were quote, "outdated and too focused on white male power structures." Had they even read the book? If Lord of the Flies really is a comment on white male power structures, it can hardly be said to be an advertisement.

And then of course there's the whole trigger warning phenomenon. When archivists at Homerton College in Cambridge were engaged in a project to upload their collection of children's literature to the internet, they decided to flag a number of books with trigger warnings. Books such as Little House on the Prairie, and The Water Babies, and various books by Dr Seuss. And the archivists said they wanted to make their digital collection quote, "less harmful in the context of a canonical literary heritage that is shaped by, and continues a history of, oppression."

But books by Dr Seuss aren't oppressive or harmful, even if they do contain outdated racial stereotypes. They were written a long time ago, and readers understand that. Of course, that hasn't stopped the estate of Dr Seuss from withdrawing a number of titles from sale altogether. You can't even buy them anymore.

But the most revealing aspect of this story from Cambridge is a statement that the archivists at Homerton College put out. They said it would be a quote, "dereliction of our duty as gatekeepers to allow such casual racism to go unchecked." Gatekeepers. Now I thought they were meant to be custodians not gatekeepers.

And this is what is known as saying the quiet part out loud. Because really all of this behavior is edging towards censorship. For librarians and archivists to apply warnings to books or to hide them from the public, it's for them to say, "we don't think these books are good for you, we don't trust you to read these books and not to pick up some bad ideas, we must protect you from their influence." In other words, they're treating the public like a parent treats a small child.

And we shouldn't stand for it. Even the application of trigger warnings is a problem in and of itself. True, the books aren't being censored, but a trigger warning buys into the false belief that words and violence are the same thing. It implies that these books are dangerous, and in the wrong hands could cause trouble.

And it's not just libraries. Increasingly we're seeing museum staff attempting to protect the public from artifacts that they're meant to display. So last November, the Wellcome Collection in London shut down its key exhibit, one which dated from the 17th century, because it perpetuated quote, "a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language."

Now we all know that ethical standards change over time and that people from the past held different views from us. Often views that we would consider objectionable. So why don't museum curators understand this too? Why is a museum preventing us from seeing artifacts from the past, when they should be facilitating access? Why is it that so many art galleries now insist on adding little labels next to paintings by great masters to say how much they disapprove of their values, as though the writers of these little sermons would have thought any differently if they had been born hundreds of years ago?

I don't care whether you disapprove of Hogarth's attitudes towards minorities, I just want to appreciate his work without having these soft-witted puritans breathing down my neck.

What we're seeing here is ideological capture. it's the same reason why the Catholic Church created an index of forbidden books which it had kept updated for 400 years right up until 1948. it's the same reason why Mary Whitehouse wanted certain TV shows banned back in the 1960s. It's the same reason why the BBC has censored scenes of old comedy shows such as Faulty Towers on the BBC streaming service. It's the same reason why staff at publishing houses revolt when there's a new book coming out by Jordan Peterson or JK Rowling or some other problematic author. And when the authors aren't as well known as Peterson or Rowling, the staff often get their way.

And if you don't think any of this is authoritarian, what about the time when the body in charge of elementary and secondary schools in Southwestern Ontario authorized the ritualistic burning of books if they contained outdated stereotypes, in what they described as a "flame purification ceremony." Almost 5000 books, including copies of Tintin and Asterix, were removed from shelves and were destroyed or recycled because of course, only the most [rogressive people in history have ever burned books.

[ Source: The Times, via archive.today ]

It sounds preposterous, but the proliferation of activists in libraries, museums, schools, publishing houses, the arts and the media, makes complete sense when one considers that the devotees of this new woke religion have a vested interest in controlling the limits of acceptable thought. To use their own words, they are the gatekeepers.

But as adults in a civilized and liberal society, we don't need to be coddled, particularly by people whose capacity for critical thinking has been stunted by ideology. They say it's for our own good, but what tyrant in history hasn't made a similar claim?

So enough with the woke librarians. If activists are hiding books from you, the very best thing you can do is seek those books out and read them. These petty little authoritarians will do anything to control your speech and your thoughts. Don't let them get away with it.

We are reliably informed that it's only right-wing conservative Xians who want to ban or burn books. But it isn't true. There is a mirror image of the same Puritan authoritarianism on the woke left.

17 notes · View notes

transhawks · 11 months

Note

craziest thing I've read is that redeeming the LoV will inspire people to become serial killer apologist in real life.

Honestly, this is an issue with our zeitgeist. I mean, two years ago I was arguing with fervor that merely liking Enji made you an abuse and rape apologist. People have called me a supporter of cop brutality and statist violence for continuing to find anything positive/interesting in Keigo. I'm sure people have found my sudden adoring of All For One "gross" too despite me liking him for being a pathetic villain. That's just this tiny corner of this fandom - I essentially abandoned tumblr in 2015-2016 because I saw the Steven Universe fandom get this way and yet, four years later, I dived head first into the same impulse for BNHA. The "redeeming villains is serial killer apologia" is just... of the same sort of brainrot I see in so many current day fandom spaces. I'm really not sure what's gone wrong. Maybe people were always like this and it took the internet to see that. Maybe media literacy has always been rare and this shows it. There's such a lack of tolerance for nuance or just actual "discomfort" that dealing with anything becomes a crusade. My advice is to seriously question when people bring in moralizing into fandoms as to what their motives are. I do think fandom can and should be ethical, but I've also seen how it essentially can create a cult of personality around certain people who then proceed to essentially cast out and punish people for "wrongthink" to solidify their own position. In the broader, non-fandom world, this sort of behavior has become a sort of clout on its own and the people usually caught up in this are isolated, disappointed people who feel disempowered and disenfranchised so in this small area, they clam what power they can. I've had other posts on this recently about my own experiences in spaces like this. Something to remember is an argument on the LoV being "serial killer apologism" is to ask why someone is essentially trying to shame you from wanting to see a redemptive story in tween's fantasy manga, which lives on the trope. By casting you as someone "immoral" and "problematic", whoever says this is essentially saying there's absolutely no conversation to be had about your position with the League. It's not enough to be "wrong" and "not a take I like", people cannot deal with the discomfort of another opinion so they opt to make having it and coexisting in a fandom society impossible. The best way to deal with people like that is to say they're being ridiculous. This is not the viewpoint of someone either truly serious or sound of mind. Engage with matching levels of absurdity.

#asks #fandom discourse

20 notes · View notes

beardedmrbean · 2 years

Note

The only problem with the Shrimp Guy post is that people with terminal Tumblr Brain are like, "But he used a homophobic slur and said autism was bad!" Like, this is 4chan; you're expecting perfection? And the guy even admits at the start that he's not perfect. They just hate to see someone picking himself up, and they'll use any excuse to try to tear them back down again, because Wrongthink.

You're gonna get dinks that will search for any tiny way they can declare the thing problematic.

Because if they do they can ignore the success of the story and not have to feel like maybe there actually is a way to improve their situation.

Sad really

#anonymous

13 notes · View notes

phoenix-reburned · 3 years

Text

I know this is stupid, but for one of the channels that provided me the biggest comfort growing up as a sheltered, depressed, suicidal ""homeschooled"" trad Christian to turn out to be run by the same type of people who make just enjoying life and being myself a burden really fucking sucks.

#i looked up to them sm #i wanted to be like them #i thought maybe one day me and my siblings could be like them #esp as a christian i loved the idea of being able to make content while still being faithfilled #and while my family never took it to the extreme they did #and weve been able to change and get better over the years #(im now in public school and my parents have loosened up majorly)#it hurts knowing that tgese people who helped me through some of the worst years of my life are abusive ''''Christians'''''#venturiantale #by loosened up majorly i mean we wont get banned from the internet for liking fnaf anymore lmao #debate still isnt allowed and wrongthink is looked down upon #but its still better than it was #and i am able to have internet accounts n shit #so yeah #honestly thats why theres some really problematic shit in the first year or so of this blog #bc i was shelyered for the first 12 uears of my life #tyen i figured out how to get the parental code and access the internet from my kindle #so suddenly i was made aware of the fact that there were other beliefs????#aside from extreme conservatism???#so i wemt from one extreme #and then by the time i made this account at 14 i was back at the other extreme #and now im comfortable in the middle #my parents sure as ahit aint but thats why they don't know that lol

28 notes · View notes

tanadrin · 2 years

Note

that person isn't entirely wrong. I'm a cis woman, on anon for this exact reason, that I'm afraid admitting that I at one point had doubts will get me branded as an asshole and clearly a secret bigot who doesn't support the trans people in my life. I do, and I always knew that supporting trans people was the empathetic and moral thing to do, but sometimes terf talking points and rhetorical questions that would just get shut down in public with "youre a terf eat shit and die" would worm their way into my brain. There are trans people out there who are meaningfully discussing those questions and having that discourse, and I think it's important for cis people to see that, yes, trans people think about these topics too and have a variety of answers, and you can wonder about these things in good faith without becoming a bigot. Because I remember before I found the trans people discussing it, it felt like my only option was to secretly read terf blogs. This didn't last long, since their disgusting clear hatred for "men in dresses" made it obvious /to me/ that these people were just bigots with an agenda, but more gullible or younger people can get sucked in! Telling people who have questions about the transgender experience or what gender means in theory and how it should be executed in practice that they're just secret bigots who must agree with the Wrongthink deep down is actually something that will push people away from the trans movement. Like, Even if someone IS "an asshole" with a predisposition to being influenced by cult tactics, I still think them getting a respectful education on trans issues is so much better than them turning into a raving bigot who will harass trans women online for existing

Like, what does teling people who are susceptible to bigotry/cult tactics as "well youre an asshole" even do? What about people who's parents or loved ones were lost to the Qanon cult? Is telling their loved ones that "oh if you know someone who's been brainwashed, they had to be an asshole in the first place to be capable to be brainwashed into denying people human rights anyways" really the correct take? I feel like your post is falling into the "Well /I'm/ smart enough to not be susceptible to propaganda" trap.

I suspect we're talking past each other to a certain degree here.

In my original post, the thing I was gesturing at with "claims to think trans ppl are a sui generis category" was not "has mixed feelings about the concept of transness because, like all of us, this person was raised in a transphobic society and absorbed that worldview growing up; but remains supportive of human rights in general, and doesn't go out of their way to make strangers feel shitty about themselves," what I will call a Default Ambivalent Stance for clarity. I was talking about people who claim to think that, as a cover for a much shittier worldview--people like Abigail Shrier who start out their book essentially taking that position, but reveal themselves by the end of it to be repeating the talking points of rabid transphobes; people who at one point or another claim a kind of moderation or low-level skepticism on the subject but end spending 95% of their time harassing people on Twitter (cf. Graham Linehan); or people who get quoted in fearmongering, moderately-transphobic articles in news outlets, but then call for the killing of all trans women on their personal blogs (cf. Lily Cade).

The throughline here isn't people with problematic opinions about trans ppl. It's people who think another class of human being should not exist, and when pressed, admit they think they should be legislated (or murdered) out of existence.

There are different degrees of terfiness, just as there are different degrees of racism, and certainly anti-trans activism as a movement relies on being able screen the most virulent of the transphobia with a cloud of less transphobic people who are attracted by some of their talking points, if not the full package. That's not the phenomenon I'm talking about. People drift in and out of that more diffuse cloud of bigotry around this and other social movements all the time. There are people with racist opinions who never go full white nationalist, people with right-wing opinions who never go full fascist, and so forth.

But to go full white nationalist, to go full fascist, to go full Graham Linehan or Lily Cade, you have to not just find intellectual consonance between your own doubts/thoughts/beliefs and some of those of these more committed bigots, you have to be the sort of person who, when they are told or conclude themselves "there exists a class of people who ought to be alien to human empathy, who ought to be legislated out of existence," does not immediately think, "No, hold on. That's obviously wrong, because that cannot be true." Someone who does not have heuristics like "genocide is bad," or "using the law to oppress people because of their identity is bad."

That's not ordinary level susceptibility to propaganda. That's high-octane cruelty. And if the only thing in someone's personality preventing them from believing that sort of thing is being provided with an acceptable target for that cruelty, I think they're a giant fucking asshole!

24 notes · View notes

just-antithings · 3 years

Note

like you're not allowed to write about any identity you don't have, but also you;re not allowed to write self inserts, but you're not allowed to write any character that's not basically identical to you, but you're not allowed to write about your own experiences, i think the logical end point of the anti cultural shift is that fiction itself will be considered inherently problematic because it could hypothetically inspire someone with wrongthink. have none of these fuckos watched equilibrium.

please stop giving them ideas

#mod erin #just anti things #ask

41 notes · View notes

asettledsky · 2 years

Note

Hello, I've been a follower since I read your quodo fics and I just wanna say that I love your takes on morals vs. fiction. I got into beetle babes bc of you and I've never understood the war. kids like to imagine dating characters, and I know when I was young I wanted to kiss gerard way on the mouth despite him being 20+ years older than me. I guess I just want to know your opinion on why this supposed moral crusade is happening if you have an a take. If not, I love your writing and I hope you keep at it thanks!

I desperately wish I could give a concise, educated answer to this question. But I just don't have that skillset and I've only flitted into the research part of this social/cultural phenomenon. So I don't have anything solid at my fingertips to present.

I feel like kids today have grown up with the internet parenting them a lot like how we grew up with TV parenting us.

And so when they branch out into the internet as a whole and find things that are not completely wholesome/kid friendly....

The difference is that when we saw adult TV that stressed us out as kids we didn't have anyone to scream at about it. Whereas the internet is made of people, so there are a lot of people they can scream at.

That's just the foundation of the problem though.

I'm honestly not sure where the cry for censorship came from though?

The best theory I've heard is that they've got a desire to protect, make the world a better place, etc. But the only model they have to go on is Conservative America. So their idea of protecting people from the 'bad ideas' is to silence them in the same way. Banning books, making mentioning the things illegal, etc.

This is assuming that, for the most part, the anti... 'movement' is rooted in good intention.

The problem is that they're stupid. They weren’t around for the times where exactly what they say they want already happened. The incidences that spawned the creation of AO3 to begin with.

Additionally they haven't bothered to think through all the implications. Who do they think would regulate this, and how? What's to stop the people regulating it from going after them and their brand of 'wrongthink' after they're done with us?

But I feel like maybe I'm attributing way more to this than it warrants.

Most of my interactions with antis suggest that it's just a stupid shipping war thing. The kind of ships they rail against are ones that are generally based in taboo, sure. But the ones they like are usually in direct opposition to the ones they're complaining about. And in the example of Beetlebabes, the opposing ship is Beetlejuice/The Maitlands or selfshippers. Both of which are equally problematic in different ways, so antibeetlebabes who ship either of those are just hypocrits.

Someone in one of the posts I've reblogged said something like 'it's not that they're opposed to seeing explicit stuff. They just don't want to see the stuff they don't like.' And that seems very true.

There are a million other things that I could point out as potential factors, I'm sure. As with any cultural shift, it's brought about by a bunch of tiny factors instead of a couple big ones.

Maybe I'll be compelled to make a full write up of everything I think led to antis being a thing one of these days.

But for now I'll just leave this here.

Thanks for the ask! Glad you like my writing

#discourse #antis #long post

3 notes · View notes

sillywalk30-blog · 4 years

Text

It Began with a Virus

Predicted long before

Written as dark fiction

Unwittingly prophetic

Omen of future woes

For safety and security

Curbing plague’s spread

The new norm was born

Its web carefully woven

Bypassing the people

Claiming to save them

Reducing individuality

Ensuring conformity

Out of fear for their lives

Grasping at straws

Relinquishing liberties

To the media’s tune

Dissenters mocked

Derided as dotards

A menace to society

Mindless fools

In the eye of the storm,

A new power rose

Uniting under one banner,

One doctrine, one thought

Any who disagreed?

Dangers to public health

Deemed pariahs by society

Heretics of wrongthink

With the public lulled to sleep,

The tyrant’s foothold increased

Veiled by benevolent globalism

Its reach spread across the globe

Rounding up the heretics

Whose only crime to speak

Views contrary to the narrative

Foisted on beguiled populace

Whoever the new society spurned,

Hunted, rounded up in the night

Moved in secret to be re-educated

Or disposed of, forgotten

Monuments to history

From which we learn much

Torn down as problematic

Their meaning forgotten

Iron fists cloaked in silk

Pretty, yet unforgiving

Banning all that offends

Their own sacred narrative

These were written before

In far more pleasant times

Meant to entertain, to shock

Not as future blueprints

Yet as these paths are traversed,

The works take on new meaning

Warnings of future catastrophes

We should’ve heeded long ago

-Sebastian Halifax

1 note · View note

arcticdementor · 4 years

Link

Before I got involved in studying Critical Social Justice like I do now, I mostly studied the psychology of religion. I took particular interest in the more authoritarian and cultish elements that can spring up within otherwise more reasonable faith traditions. Cult indoctrinations, in particular, tend to follow very predictable stages. First, there is initiation; then there is indoctrination; and then there is reprogramming. These three phases are distinct and must be understood on their own terms.

…

One thing I learned through all that study is that most fundamentalist religious (in the colloquial, not technical sense) and cult conversions, especially in adults, occur by using doctrine to resolve some core emotional vulnerability. That is, cult doctrine, and I include extreme fundamentalist interpretations of religious doctrines as cultish, exists to resolve a particularly powerful emotional vulnerability in an unhealthy way (this adds another layer of defense for responsible faith, which does so in a healthy way to the degree that it does the same things).

…

Once the doctrine is initially accepted by the cult’s mark, the next step is to make the mark feel (morally) welcome and good. The goal is to give them resolution to the vulnerable and dissonant emotional state that was utilized previously. The mark will be made to feel like they’re now doing the right thing where they were doing the wrong thing before. This can still be done in healthy ways, and almost all genuine interventions proceed in this manner. Cults don’t diverge from religions and other moral systems at the outset, or they’d never get any marks to convert. For examples of the relevant kind of language, however, consider: “You can be one of the saved and be forgiven for your sin” and “You’re on the right side of history.”

Once the person feels morally welcome and the feeling of vulnerability gets its first hit of calming resolution through the doctrine, the cult indoctrinator will start to increase the depth of the doctrine, usually a little at a time. With a cult, this will involve beginning to teach the “quieter” parts of the cult worldview that would scare off potential new recruits. And this is where we can find the first clear sign that we’re dealing with a cult rather than something healthier, though there is still much overlap and some ambiguity. They will deepen the doctrine while informing their mark that they’ll be surrounded by temptation, especially from broader society. This gets us to the surest first sign that a cult initiation is taking place, though. It is when this warning starts being applied to friends and family who will be described as failing to understand the depth and value of the cult’s doctrine and, in fact, the mark themselves.

Another clear sign that one is dealing with a cult indoctrination rather than something healthier is making the mark live up to contradictory demands. You must understand racism and admit that you cannot understand racism. You must admit to your complicity in racism and pledge to do better knowing that it is impossible to do better. You must be an ally but accept that you will always do your allyship wrong. Impossible demands would scare off a potential cult initiate at the beginning, but once a sufficient level of commitment to the cause has taken place, the effect is the opposite. Rather than making the mark reject the cult, these impossible and paradoxical demands dramatically deepen commitment to the cult. They do this by re-invoking and massively inflaming the feeling of vulnerability at the core, making the mark burn with a desire to “do better” to resolve the emotional dissonance and white-hot feeling of inadequacy (as judged against the cult’s impossible standards). Outsiders see through this emotionally abusive tactic immediately. Cult initiates see it as a kind of ritual hazing and demand to prove the faith, very much like an abused child or spouse always trying to do better to live up to the unmet demands of their abuser.

The concept of “white fragility” in the antiracist Woke cult is exactly this sort of emotional shakedown. White fragility separates white people and their “adjacencies” into exactly two types: racists (who admit it) and racists (who are too emotionally fragile to admit it). It is obvious which side the cult doctrine favors. In fact, the cult doctrine in this case is that every white (and white adjacent) person is a racist by default, and there are only those with the moral and emotional fortitude to face that (which is good, according to doctrine) and those who lack the necessary moral fiber. Every reaction to a person accused of racism or white fragility itself is proof of this moral failure and a need to “do better” unless it is a full-on assent to the cult doctrine, including a promise to consume more of it, change yourself accordingly, do the work it demands, and to “do better” anyway. White fragility as a concept is explicitly a cult indoctrination technique into the “antiracist” cult.

…

Thus, the next step in cult indoctrination is to get people more fully committed. This is actually rather easy, as we tend to commit to new groups fairly quickly under certain well-known conditions. Usual cult-deepening methods include public pronouncements of faith before the in-group community, which bonds the mark to them socially and emotionally. This will often involve rituals such as group prayers, singing, or outright initiation rituals, which dramatically deepen commitment to a group very quickly. There will also be requests to make costly personal sacrifices to be considered a full part of the new group.

This can also include requests for money, cutting ties with relations, making pledges, doing “the work,” and more (including, in many cults of personality, allowing the cult leader to have sex with the marks of the desired sexes). Making sacrifices and working on behalf of a group, including a cult, creates deep ties of commitment to the group, its mission, and its community, and it evokes the “sunk-cost fallacy” mechanism, which prevents people from leaving. This fallacy is a reasoning error that basically says, “I’ve invested so much already that it must be worth it, so I’ll keep going.” It keeps people committed to failing projects, failing relationships, and, as it happens, cults long after they should have abandoned them.

So we hit a particular and important point here. When people like the “critical whiteness educator” Robin DiAngelo tell us things like that “antiracism is a lifelong commitment to an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-critique, and social activism,” she is providing a mid-level cult indoctrination path. The demand is to change yourself for life in alignment with the cult’s doctrine, including how you think, how you see yourself, and how you operate in the world, and make that change a permanent part of who you are. Notice that it also demands you do the work on behalf of the cult and its objectives, which ties you more tightly to it.

…

At this point, cult indoctrination can begin in earnest, and the mark will be urged to consume more doctrine, possibly in immersive quantities. It will be expected to be consumed uncritically, looking only for areas of agreement and assent, which will be reaffirmed in the mark by other members of the cult and its leadership. With the Woke cult, the immense and widespread push to get people reading “antiracist” and other Woke literature in mass quantities right now is consistent with this step. (These include the following currently bestselling books, among many others: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be Anti-racist by Ibram X. Kendi, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.) When the mark is sufficiently committed to begin uncritically consuming massive quantities of the cult’s doctrine, they are well into the indoctrination phase.

…

Once the mark is properly indoctrinated, the objective becomes to reprogram the mark to get them to think differently. The goal is no longer to indoctrinate on what is “rightthink” and “wrongthink.” It is to make the mark’s thinking be completely in line with the view of the world described by the cult doctrine This will let the mark see the “truth” of the doctrine for themselves everywhere in the world. That’s being “Woke.”

In the case of Woke cult programming, there is an older and more formal name for that view of the world, which is having a “critical consciousness.” Having a critical consciousness occurs when one is able to see the “problematics” in everything, where “problematics” are any deviation or potential for deviation from the cult doctrine anywhere in any aspect of society. This includes in speech, writing, institutions, thoughts, people, systems, knowledge, history, one’s past, and society itself.

…

It’s very important to stress just how difficult it is to break someone free from a cult mindset once they have adopted the relevant cult consciousness. Once reprogrammed, they will think the way the cult doctrine views the world. They will have put on the cult-colored glasses of whatever cult they have joined, and they will see everything in the world through that lens. Everything will be construable as supportive of the cult’s doctrinal claims about the world, including where the cult doctrine gets things right and also where it identifies the evils in the world that would challenge its existence. People who have been reprogrammed into a cult mentality will perceive all attempts to free them from the cult as malicious attempts to drag them away from their community and, crucially, back to the Bad Emotional Place that they have come to strongly associate with that awful feeling of vulnerability that was used to initiate them into the cult in the first place. The doctrine is the opium that dulls their emotional pain, one might say with, given the context of the present discussion, a bit of tongue in one’s cheek.

…

More than that, attempts to remove someone from a cult will also be framed in terms of “not understanding” the cult. This is actually a means of resolving the cognitive dissonance around the cult’s doctrine, and it deepens and solidifies commitment in almost every case. The problem isn’t that the doctrine is bad; it’s that you, outsider, don’t understand why it’s good. You don’t get it, and if you learned to see it the way the cultist sees it (here: with a critical consciousness), you’d understand and agree and wouldn’t threaten them with this pain. This is, of course, tautologically obvious and utterly boring: “if you saw things the way I saw them, you’d agree with them.” The cultist cannot see this, though, because the result of reprogramming is to have only the cult’s lens available for viewing everything in the world. The whole point of cult programming is to make it so one’s inner pain and pathology can only be understood in terms of the cult doctrine. The doctrine is the resolution to the vulnerability and has been very deeply established as such.

More or less all of the Critical Social Justice literature on how we know and understand the world (epistemology) and education over the last decade, including White Fragility, makes this case explicitly. Scholar after scholar makes the case that disagreement with Critical Social Justice (Woke) doctrine is only possible by having failed to engage with it properly. DiAngelo makes this case; Barbara Applebaum insists that the only legitimate disagreement with Woke doctrine is to clarify one’s understanding; Alison Bailey says all disagreement is an attempt to preserve one’s privilege. Scholars of religious fundamentalism call this way of thinking “intratextuality,” for those interested, and they consider it a defining hallmark of religious fundamentalism. In the cult’s sense, it is only being able to interpret everything, including disagreement with the cult’s doctrine, from the perspective of the cult’s doctrine. Of course, one can immediately appreciate how this makes the same demand on the cultist that indoctrinated and reprogrammed them in the first place: keep reading it and read it right; you’ll know you read it right when you agree with it entirely; if you fail, you didn’t understand because you’re not good enough in some way (smart enough, moral enough, humble enough, willing enough to do the work, etc.) and you need to “do better.”

…

I don’t have much to say about cult deprogramming because it is hard and usually so deeply personal and individual that general prescriptions don’t apply. One thing that can be said in general is that cult deprogramming almost always proceeds from an initial doubt that spirals out of control, getting the cultist to start questioning everything they were taught in the cult in something of an avalanche of angry skepticism. The deprogramming ex-cultist (apostate) will then usually become very angry at the cult and vent that anger at it for an extended period of time that I sometimes call “throwing rocks at the cathedral.” These will be the cult’s most vicious and ruthless critics.

…

To summarize, then, Wokeness is a cult. It might even be, in its broadest functions, a proper religion at this point with a describable and fanatic cult element within it and protected by the relative reasonability of the broader faith. Antiracism, in particular, under its auspices is explicitly framed religiously and with clear patterns of cult initiation written all over it. This is what we’re up against.

#new discourse #james lindsay #new progressive orthodoxy #read the whole thing

2 notes · View notes

mswyrr · 4 years

Text

antis: lol reylos pretend to care about KMT but they are the only ones who are guilty of anything we’re PURE and SOFT we never ever said anything bad about her EVER

also antis:

They think it’s perfectly acceptable to engage in -isms as long as it’s against women who have “problematic opinions.” So literally using an effing T//rump rally racist image against a woman of color is totally okay by their books.

If you’re a survivor, an LGBT person, disabled person, a person of color and you disagree with them - they don’t think you deserve any respect. They think it’s okay to dehumanize you using the same old weapons of the rightwing. For daring to have “wrongthink” opinions. It’s sick.

They’ll literally take common cause with T//rumpist language if it means striking out against any marginalized person who has their own opinions and tastes in fiction.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #some anti bs #racism cw #witness - the holy pure perfect social justice people #we should all crawl on our hands and knees to #and submit to their orders #on which ships to ship!!

7 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 4 years

Photo

“Dogmatists the world over believe that although the truth is known to them, others will be led into false beliefs provided they are allowed to hear the arguments on both sides.”

-- Bertrand Russell

The current moment.

“The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—'the Party says the Earth is flat', 'the Party says that ice is heavier than water'—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.”

-- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

#Bertrand Russell #censorship #dogma #dogmatism #dogmatic #truth #problematic #wrongthink #cancel culture #religion is a mental illness #freedom of speech

47 notes · View notes

frumfrumfroo · 5 years

Note

I'm sorry if this isn't a topic you want to respond to, you're free to ignore me, but why do you think there are so many takes insisting Kylo Ren is an allegory for different societal ills (like the alt-right or school shooters) and who aggressively assert this while belitting the people who sympathize with him, are so popular? I try not to let it get to me, but it seems so ubiquitous sometimes and it makes me feel irrationally terrible about my preferences. It just seems all over the place.

It’s just that SW is a nearly global phenomenon, it’s very accessible, and it’s this authoritative part of the zeitgeist. People want it to agree with them, they want it to preach their gospel, they want to use it as a tool to soapbox or to hustle for social currency. It’s a platform. This isn’t unique to SW or to Ben, it’s just magnified by both the increasing popularity of ultra-literalist, shallow, topical one-to-one applicability as the Only Way to interact with art and by the nigh-universal appeal of SW. It’s a trendy take and it gets plugged in everywhere regardless of whether it fits.

Besides which, this exact character archetype has always been a favourite target for attack and really bothers some people because it makes them uncomfortable. It’s a romantic fantasy we’ve been being told we’re not allowed to have for centuries now. And if fandom provides those that hate this with endless ammo to call the thing they don’t like objectively morally wrong and attack fangirls as degenerates, they’re going to use it. Ship wars have always been absurdly vicious, but now you can dismiss someone’s entire worth as a human being because of their ship and be cheered for it. You can dehumanise anyone for their taste in fiction and this website considers that praiseworthy. The morality antis apply to media (utilitarianism, relativism, ends justify the means, acceptable targets, born good or born bad, tainted forever by any misstep, no redemption, etc.) is exactly how they justify their bullying of real people. They see themselves as righteous heroes standing against darkness and therefore they can treat those fans who commit wrongthink however they want.

These garbage takes have no literary merit. They don’t address the actual text, they aren’t good faith attempts to understand or contextualise a story or a cultural mood. They are bad literary criticism supported by ethically bankrupt philosophical positions from people who have spent zero seconds seriously considering the implications of their beliefs. I mean, maybe someone somewhere has written one that contains critical thinking, but the vast majority don’t.

But leaving aside the fact that reylo is a beautiful wholesome ship setting up a sound moral lesson 100% appropriate for kids and stuffy old ladies, even if it were the most fucked up and unhealthy thing ever you still shouldn’t feel bad for liking it. Fictional crimes have no victims. Fantasy is not reality. Art is a safe place to explore complex and dangerous emotions, to enter situations which would be terrifying in real life and experience them without fear. Liking a character or finding them moving and interesting is not, in any way shape or form, a statement that you condone their actions or would want to be their friend in real life. Fictional characters are not people, they do not need to be held accountable by the reader. They have been created to arouse an emotional response in an audience and you had one. That’s what they’re for.

Readers have more empathy than non-readers because reading allows you to experience vastly different points of view and extremes of behaviour. Asking about the motivations of characters and trying to understand them stretches the sympathy muscles, it helps us practice compassion. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are all Very Problematic by tumblr standards, if they were in a modern pg blockbuster or a cartoon adventure show, we’d all be quickly informed it’s Wrong to sympathise with them- but the entire point of those characters is to sympathise with their downfall. To understand it. This black and white thinking that only Bad People do bad things, trying to understand why is apologism, etc., leads to othering and othering people allows for dehumanisation. When you can dehumanise a real person for something as trivial as a ship, you are on a very very dangerous road.

Notice the ZERO antis shaming anyone for liking Palpatine, whose motive is ‘because I’m evil’ and who has no vulnerability or nuance. No one who does would give a fuck anyway, but they don’t even try because it’s not about ‘you can’t like a character who does bad things’ or ‘you can’t like a character that reminds me of [x] real bad thing’, it’s about policing empathy and romanticism.

#fandom

109 notes · View notes