Carrying a Message Further • Part 8: Sacred Victims and Bridging Ideological Divides
From contempt to compassion: rethinking sacred victimhood in progressive discourse
This is the eighth chapter of “Carrying a Message Further,” section III of All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience. This collection of writings explores the problem of ideological rigidity in social theories, the concept of "lived experience" (including my own), and the argument for using empowerment as a basis for education.
These two images are taken from a scene from the sixth episode of season 1 of the television series "La Peste". The scene depicts a realistic public burning of Protestant heretics during the Spanish Inquisition.
This chapter of Carrying a Message Further is the continuation of a series of chapters related to the concept of the Sacred Victim, which forms one of the central critiques of victimhood identity in Dr. Erec S. Smith’s book, A Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition.
I want to begin this chapter by openly acknowledging that this is a more visceral piece of writing than previous chapters, and that I’ve chosen to include video clips at the end of the chapter that cover what I believe to be the full span of the victimization-perpetrator dynamic. The main theme that runs throughout this chapter—and in some ways, the entire All We Are series of essays, is that pain, suffering, group belonging, empathy, perpetration, and victimization are universal experiences for all human beings.
My aim is to contemplate for myself and to hopefully elucidate for others just what animates fervent beliefs in specific ideologies. And why it’s important to understand these beliefs from the standpoint of empathy rather than condemnation. It is likely that I will make revisions to this and other chapters as I receive feedback from readers.
It is my sincere hope that I have not gone too far with this chapter and that it will not offend people. But the writing is sincere so I have to have faith that this is enough to allow some space for forgiveness if indeed I have gone too far.
Revisiting the Concept of Sacred Victimhood
The previous two chapters were related to the Land Acknowledgement ritual, which is carried out in self-identified progressive spaces and events and explored the extremely limited worldview from which this ritual is often carried out. These chapters also explored the attitudes of contempt, blame, scolding, and exclusivity that sometimes run through these Land Acknowledgment rituals depending on who the officiator is and how immature or ideologically entranced the person is. One of the key issues explored in these chapters is the fetishization of indigenous people as peaceful and all-wise as though the ancient occupiers of the land were not themselves prone to violence, competitiveness, torture, power-seeking, and the urge to invade one another’s lands and to conduct warfare on behalf of that urge, as people across the world have done since time immemorial.
Though we cannot deny the historically unfair treatment of indigenous peoples during the colonial era, it does not help to romanticize or demonize any groups, no matter what side of a conflict they are on. It’s also hellpful to consider that a closer examination of any group of people almost always reveals similar patterns of violence, exploitation, and oppression that play out over time on the scale of nations, communities, and interpersonal relationships.
With that understanding in mind, these two previous chapters were an attempt to open up the contemplation of suffering to include all people, including the conquered and the conquerors—the oppressed and the oppressors—so that we can stay connected to our common humanity. The final passage of these two chapters ended with a proposed Grand Acknowledgement ritual that honors what the ancient Chinese Taoists called the “ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows” not only of all people from all walks of life—both friend and foe— but of all living things.
In the next few chapters, I want to zoom back into the world of people, and in particular, the world of suffering individuals, historically oppressed groups, and the advocates who have chosen to represent them; and to explore just what it is that animates the movements that aim to speak on behalf of suffering people—movements that many are variously calling “wokism”, “the new Puritanism”, “the Successor Ideology”, “Cultural Marxism”, “The New Inquisition”, “The New McCarthyism”, and other names.
That is, I want to explore the sincerity of “the woke” and the intelligence, thoughtfulness, and empathy-born yearning that moves people to adopt the principles and practices of this ideology.
The word “Woke” vs. the phrase “Critical Social Justice”
First, I want to briefly address the use of the term “woke”. This term is one that I often prefer to avoid in my writing and conversations because this term comes across to me as cheap, un-nuanced and as representative of a rigidly either/or way of seeing the world and other people—a pattern I expressly do not want to fall into.
There are some corners of the internet that see the word “woke” in the way that I see it. In January 2023 a piece appeared in Quillette called “Don’t Use the W-Word” and argued that the word “woke” is too broad and often slides into unfair oversimplification of peoples’ views. It was written by Angel Eduardo, the Communications Director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). In it, Eduardo argues that the word “woke” can at first glance offer “some shorthand way of identifying one’s ideological adversaries, so that their bad ideas can be easily called out and debunked.” But, Eduardo doesn’t agree that this word is a useful shorthand because it brings us into the territory of what he rightly calls “imprecision.”
Regarding the usefulness of the word “woke” as shorthand Angel declares:
I don’t agree. The critical difference lies in the fact that words such as “racism,” “violence,” and “trauma” are used to describe specific ideas, whereas terms such as “woke” or “wokeness” are used mainly to describe groups of people or collections of ideas—and this much more easily lends itself to imprecision.
Imprecision doesn’t help which is why I mostly use the word “woke” as a shorthand only when In conversations with close friends because who are well acquainted with my perspectives on social issues, which means that there is little danger in being misunderstood as a person who is caricaturing those who adhere to Critical Social Justice theories (i.e. those who can be reduced the caricature of a “wokist”).
Identity Synthesis and Strategic Essentialism
It will be helpful for this chapter to introduce a recent term applied to the overall movement of “wokeness”: identity synthesis. This term was coined by Yascha Mounk, the founder of Persuasion Magazine. The term identity synthesis deserves an honorable mention as it has a neutral “vibe” to it, which appeals to me as a writer and as a participant in the depolarization movement.
In the Atlantic article Where the New Identity Politics Went Wrong, Mounk introduces the term and provides useful information about the history of the unfolding influence of postmodern philosophers, anti-racist legal scholars, and decolonization activists in the development of this ideology, which, according to Mounk based on his research on postcolonial thinkers (see Gayatri Spivak), relies heavily on the adoption of “strategic essentialism” to achieve a socially just world. Strategic essentialism means that we intentionally adopt a strong and sturdy identity based on our sociocultural characteristics (or demographic makeup) and to assign traits to the inner lives and outer actions of all people based on their membership in a demographic group. Embracing essentialism as somehow real means that we are embracing the idea that there are essential characteristics that can be attributed to all Black people, all white people, all women, all genders, all men, and so forth. It is from the foundation of strategic essentialism that scholars have developed the almost metaphysical categories of Blackness and Whiteness, as though there were something deeply true at the core of each metaphysical category—a kind of spirit or vibe that is said to suffuse the entire existence of those who belong to these groups, including thoughts, beliefs, actions, behaviors, and even assumptions about all of reality in all its dimensions.
As Mounk (and decolonization scholars themselves!) has noted, it doesn’t matter whether or not the “essence” that is spoken of is empirically falsifiable (able to be discovered through objective analysis of facts). What matters is that the strategy of assigning a totalizing essence to entire groups is considered to both effective and somehow moral in winning rights for those groups that have been deemed marginalized or oppressed. To put it in oversimplified cartoonish terms, this strategy involves the design of a heuristic (an intentionally simplistic teaching tool or framework) that depicts one demographic group as essentially bad and another demographic group as essentially good, which means that whatever actions we take against the bad demographic group becomes justifiable.
In 2021, I wrote an essay called “The Problem of Group Identity Essentialism” (the second essay of the All We Are series), in which I explore some of the scholarship around what I’m calling Group Identity Essentialism and the potential dangers inherent in any scenario in which this approach to human relations becomes central on any scale of influence (for example, the classroom, college admissions, medical care, home loans). Adopting the belief in the essential differentness of people from distinct demographic groups and assigning stereotyped characteristics to all or most individuals who belong to those we consider to be members of outgroups runs the risk of creating social hierarchies that actively discriminate against the outgroups. This is something that many of us who remain committed to liberal principles have become worried about, which Mounk deftly expresses in the subtitle of his article:
“Don’t let right-wing culture warriors obscure the fact that some ideas behind this progressive ideology have genuine problems.”
In the following passage, Mounk further expresses dismay over the negative impact on workplace relationships, the primary mission of institutions (mission creep), and the boldness with which adherents of this ideology are willing to outright discriminate against disfavored groups as a kind of correction for historical wrongs.
As the identity synthesis has gained in influence, its flaws have become harder to ignore. A striking number of progressive advocacy groups, for example, have been consumed by internal meltdowns in recent years. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” a leader of one progressive organization complained recently. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.” As institutions such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU have implemented the norms inspired by the identity synthesis, they have had more difficulty serving their primary missions.
The identity synthesis is also starting to remake public policy in ways that are more likely to create a society of warring tribes. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, a key advisory committee to the CDC recommended that states prioritize essential workers in the rollout of scarce vaccines rather than the elderly, in part because “racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented” among seniors. Not only did this policy, according to the CDC’s own models, have the probable outcome of increasing the overall number of Americans who would perish in the pandemic; it also placed different ethnic groups in competition with one another for life saving medications.
Critical Social Justice (CSJ) and its Impact
Although the term “identity synthesis” is useful and easy to remember, I have chosen throughout the All We Are series to call this ideology by the name given to it by both many of its critics and by many of its own adherents: Critical Social Justice (CSJ). I explore this ideology more thoroughly in Beyond Cynicism, which is in large part based on the critiques of applied postmodernism offered by Helen Pluckrose in her book Cynical Theories, so if the reader would like to learn more about my perspectives on CSJ (and Helen’s work in general), I recommend visiting those pages.
Of all modern thinkers and writers who have explored Critical Social Justice theories, I can think of none other who has done more to shed light on the epistemology, origins, intellectual lineage, and practices than Helen Pluckrose (full disclosure, I have come to know Helen personally, though I contend that her stellar work stands for itself).
For a more succinct account of the development of Critical Social Justice theories and how they have impacted our culture at large, I recommend reading the transcript I put together of a June 2020 talk Helen gave called “The Origins of Postmodern Thought”. A YouTube video of the talk itself is linked below.
In June of 2020, Helen Pluckrose gave a talk on the evolution of Postmodernist thought, highlighting three distinct periods of this evolution, ending with the current period, which she has called reified post-modernism.
Invoking Charity and Mercy
In addition to acknowledging and respecting the genuine good faith commitment of CSJ activists to reducing suffering and injustice in the world—the principle of charity, which involves the generous attitude of acknowledging the highest aspirations of others— the overall All We Are series of essays seeks to model the practice of bringing in compassion and humility to the effort to understand what motivates people to follow the oppressor-vs-oppressed theoretical frameworks that have emerged from the larger meta-framework of Critical Social Justice theory (CSJ).
It helps to keep in mind that the sub-theories born under the umbrella of Critical Social Justice (e.g. Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Fat Acceptance Theory, Post-colonialism, and many other theories based on academic programs that end with the word “studies”) have arisen from a desire to set things right on the behalf of people who can reasonably be said to have been either born into (or tossed aside to) the margins of society.
Part of the commitment to compassionate engagement involves not only being fair in the way we engage with the ideas of those we might perceive to be adversaries, but practicing compassion towards the perceived adversaries themselves. This includes the highly challenging practice of compassionately engaging those who use Critical Social Justice theories for self-gain or to inflict harm on others out of the need for what can rightly be called ego triumphalism.
And in the age of social media aggression, reputation destruction, and applause-seeking, it is a tall order for us to practice the principle of mercy, where we resist the magnetic pull towards ego triumphalism when we have effectively “won” an argument.
What if I was right all along, and you, dear reader, dear friend, or dear adversary, have no option other than to concede? Should I do a victory dance upon your ideological corpse? Can I find a way to give you an “out”? Can I forgive you for having had it so wrong and for having hurt so many with ideas that turned out to be based on false premises and/or turned out to have been wrong or immoral?
Or do I step back from the attack and acknowledge that I, too, have had it wrong in so many ways, in so many places, and in so many times throughout my life?
If we are successful in persuading others to see things in the way that we see things—especially those who have opposed us in the past—what is called for is the principle of mercy. The victory always is the victory of the truth. Sometimes it is you who have brought truth to the fore. Sometimes it is me. To maintain productive and harmonious relationships, we need to find our way to the “light touch” way of working the truth out so that when the battle has ceased, there is still some greenery left.
This requires the commitment to Starmanning.
Starmanning: Arguing from a Compassionate Place
This is the image accompanying Angel Eduardo’s 2021 essay, “How to Star-Man: Arguing from Compassion”. He took his inspiration for this word from David Bowie’s song Starman.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending an online event organized by Jennifer Richmond, the Director of the Institute for Liberal Values (ILV) during which Angel Eduardo presented on the practice of Starmanning. As the reader will see, Angel has a gift for presenting ideas in a way that is simultaneously obvious yet somehow new. Sincere, strong, confident, yet humble.
At one crucially important moment, Angel states:
“My goal is to understand this human being. Not just their argument”.
To see Angel’s presentation, you can click on this link on the ILV YouTube page.
In How to Star-Man: Arguing from Compassion, Angel coined the phrase and introduced the practice. The following sentence sums up the practice in a very simple way:
“To star-man is to not only engage with the most charitable version of your opponent’s argument, but also with the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements.”
In the article, he reminds us that when we straw-man our opponent’s argument, we are purposely misrepresenting what our opponent has said and refuting that misrepresented version to make the opponent and the opponent’s argument look bad. A step up from straw-manning is steel-manning, where we seek to represent our opponent’s argument in the fairest, most accurate, and most respectable light before offering our own argument or rebuttal.
Star-manning goes further.
When we star-man, we are getting into the bones of the sincere desire for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful that we share with our opponent as well as the sincere worries, concerns, and fears that animate our opponent’s views and prescriptions for action—even while we may strongly disagree with those prescriptions.
Below are lyrics from David Bowie’s song, Space Oddity that inspired Angel Eduardo’s coinage of the term Starmanning.
There’s a starman waiting in the sky He’d like to come and meet us But he thinks he’d blow our minds -David Bowie
So I am going to explore over the next few chapters some specific stories of oppression and ideas related to the universality of suffering that I believe are worth considering when we are in a conversation with a person who adheres to the worldview of Critical Social Justice theory (or as Helen Pluckrose sometimes calls it, “applied postmodernism”). This will include the sharing of movie clips, stories, and documentaries that are explicit in their descriptions of the horrific oppression that has been meted out on different people throughout human history.
Doing so is not out of the need to be sensationalistic or to indulge in what many in the therapeutic professions have come to call “trauma porn”, which is about ratcheting up intensity and drowning in traumatic memories.
Rather, I want to explore what I believe is the psycho-cultural atmosphere of the ideological frameworks that fall under university “studies” programs, activist communities, hyper-tribal blog sites and fringe partisan journalistic outlets, and that generate seemingly endless new group identity theories that threaten to further balkanize society as each new identity group retreats into its own silo, increasing suspicion and hostility against “the other.” Overall, I want to pay respectful attention to the legitimate reasons that people have to continually gravitate to frameworks and ideologies that promise to solve the suffering and oppression of marginalized people.
First, some housekeeping. There are games played by the less scrupulous activists that must be named, recognized, and addressed.
Bracketing Deceptive Maneuvers
Let me be candid and unambiguous here. As I have made clear in other writings, I am an opponent of the over-application of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories and the abusive practices that some people of influence in CSJ environments have imposed on unsuspecting people.
I want to place on the table my rejection of the idea that anyone who disagrees with a prescribed political program is doing so out of defensiveness or “discomfort” or out of some kind of unconscious need to protect what CSJ adherents call “power and privilege”.
So, I am choosing to bracket (or to lay guardrails around) four manipulative games that are played by many CSJ followers. I learned the two phrases “bracketing” and “laying guardrails” from Corey Davos, the Director of Integral Life, an online resource that explores developmental theories and different models for describing the evolution of individuals and society as a whole.
The idea that disagreement is just about protecting our supposed “privilege”;
The concept of microaggressions;
The tactical maneuver of kafkatrapping; and
The false accusation that anyone who steps out of line of the tightly controlled thought-programming of Critical Social Justice theory is “right wing” or “far right”.
All four of these maneuvers may arise as forms of innocent misunderstanding or lack of access to accurate information or outright sophistry and trickery, depending on who is falling sway to them.
Whatever the motivation, I want to dispense with these manipulative tactics so I can get down to the business of exploring the empathy-oriented substance of what I believe draws most CSJ adherents into the ideology. It is that substance that I believe offers a tie-in, a bridge, an overlap, and a meeting of minds and hearts between and among all people among almost all faiths, creeds, and social/cultural/political world views.
Simply put, I believe that the vast majority of true believers of any ideology are coming from a place of empathy for those they perceive to have been treated unjustly. In comparative philosophy, the recognition of the underlying universal principles or across-the-board human emotions and ideas that are discernable patterns found in seemingly opposing philosophies and belief systems is sometimes called commensurability.
And there is commensurability to be found in the human mob tendency towards heresy-hunting—a phenomenon that spans across all time and culture. I’ve already covered the idea of epistemic privilege-protecting pushback, but I want to say a little more about this concept, as I will outline below the four deceptive maneuvers.
1. Microaggressions Theory = Spectral Evidence
In 2017, CSJ adherent Alison Bailey went into more depth into the concept she designed in her paper, “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes”. The basic idea in this theory is that people who choose to push back against [the abusive aspects of] privilege theory are doing so to preserve the privilege that they are pre-supposed to have because of the identity group they have been categorized as belonging to. The reason why Bailey calls it epistemic pushback is because she believes, in accordance with the umbrella CSJ theory, that how we know what we know (epistemology) is dictated by how much privilege we are purported to have, which in turn is determined by our skin color, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, body type and other identity markers. This means we can never fully trust what we think we know because that knowledge is pre-supposed to be entirely—or almost entirely—structured by our socio-cultural identity.
In other words, if you are categorized as belonging to a group identity deemed privileged, you are pre-supposed to be essentially delusional about truth and justice and cannot possibly understand what is happening or why you believe what you believe. In modern parlance, you are said to be “swimming in your privilege”. Because you are a fish in the water, you don’t notice the water. Therefore you must accept the instruction, expertise, lived experience, and wisdom from the person who is pre-supposed to not be swimming in the water of privilege (the oppressed or marginalized) so that you can awaken to a level of consciousness that the Sacred Victim from an oppressed group is claimed to have awakened to.
In Marxism and its branch ideologies, including Critical Social Justice, this awakened consciousness is called “Critical Consciousness”, a term coined by Marxist Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. The claim that some groups automatically have this consciousness and that others don’t is a classic mind trick that gives all the power to the person who has made all the presuppositions about who has critical consciousness and who doesn’t—that is, if we allow that person to have such power.
The idea of epistemic privilege-protecting pushback is akin to a practice advanced during the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, where spectral evidence was admitted as evidence in court. Spectral evidence is the idea that if a person claiming to be “afflicted by specters'' (or evil spirits) accused you of sending out your evil spirit to afflict them, then the person claiming to be afflicted must be telling the truth because you are under the spell of the specters (evil spirits) and because:
a) you might simply not know what you’re doing because you are under an evil spell, or;
b) you’re simply denying the “truth” of the accusation, which is evidence of your guilt.
In 1692, two hundred innocent people—mostly women—were falsely accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, a British colony led by a religious Christian sect called the Puritans. By the end of the year, 19 were hanged and one person, Giles Corey, was crushed to death by stones and boulders for not entering a plea. Corey knew that if he had submitted a plea of either guilty or not guilty, he would have forfeited his land, which meant that his sons could not inherit his property upon his death, even if the court were to eventually find him guilty.
Without question, the idea that comes closest to spectral evidence in the current era is microaggressions theory, which claims that if a person who belongs to a group deemed oppressed feels that you have said something that can be interpreted as bigoted, “harmful”, or dehumanizing in some way, then this person’s feelings and interpretations must be true. Microaggressions theory is the modern era’s equivalent of spectral evidence, and while there are reasonable views about learning to be sensitive enough not to dehumanize people who belong to groups deemed oppressed, it’s important to bear in mind that the constant search for evidence that we are being dehumanized, or that we are being harmed in some way, will almost certainly cause us to find that evidence around every corner.
And if you are accused of committing a microaggression—for example, asking a person whose outer features and accent appear to indicate that the person is from another country—you are not allowed to deny that you have committed any level of aggression due to your act of simple curiosity because, by doing so, you are now accused not only of refusing to “sit with your discomfort” while being corrected by the supposedly micro-aggressed (and all-wise) victim, but you are then also accused of actively denying your self-evident guilt (which is taken as evidence that you are in fact guilty).
And there’s a modern name that captures these maneuvers, which I find helpful in further bracketing these maneuvers to clear the path for honest engagement between and among people from all groups.
2. Kafkatrapping
A phrase I learned a few years back is “kafkatrapping”. This phrase was coined by software developer Eric Raymond in the early 2010’s around the time when cancel culture was just beginning to brew. In a 2014 article called “Beware of Kafkatrapping” written by libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy, kafkatrapping is defined at the very beginning in a succinct way:
“The term “kafkatrapping” describes a logical fallacy that is popular within gender feminism, racial politics and other ideologies of victimhood. It occurs when you are accused of a thought crime such as sexism, racism or homophobia. You respond with an honest denial, which is then used as further confirmation of your guilt. You are now trapped in a circular and unfalsifiable argument; no one who is accused can be innocent because the structure of kafkatrapping precludes that possibility.”
I wanted to share Wendy McElroy’s article because it is pretty straightforward, but there are other writings as well, including a piece that I recently put out on Ground Experience (to read this post, please click here). What matters is that we name the rabbit in the hat so that we can dispense with deceptions and trickery and get back down to the business of engaging one another on the basis of truth rather than the zero sum game that is being played out by those who believe this zero sum game is the right thing to do to punish people who belong to identity groups they disfavor as a “correction for history” (ideology) and those who possess Cluster B Dark Triad traits who see this zero sum game as an opportunity to buttress their own political and economic power and social status (sociopathy).
3. The Tactic of Branding Free Thought as “Right Wing”
In a Substack piece called Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement, political and cultural commentator Freddie DaBoer describes clearly the tactic of labeling dissenting thinkers as “conservative” or “right wing”—which in the progressive worldview almost always means racist, backwards, and unintelligent, which means, therefore, that these labels are outright smears.
He writes:
“What’s unfortunate, but utterly predictable, is that resistance to the therapeutic and affirmational ideology is currently coded as right-wing. Among contemporary liberalism’s most powerful tools is its ability to assert that any deviation from the most narrow reading of its current dogmas is necessarily an expression of conservatism. But, in fact, there is no reason whatsoever to look at therapeutic/affirmational culture and see it as inherently left-wing, and as I’ve long argued I think that culture is very damaging to the marginalized groups that contemporary liberalism sees as the only legitimate recipients of society’s concern. And I think that we’re starting to see some dawning resistance to this ideology that comes from sources that can’t remotely be called right-wing.”
In 2022, Greg Lukianoff, the founder and President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (F.I.R.E.) collaborated with New York Law School Professor Emerita Nadine Strossen, past national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008), on a series of writings defending the freedom of speech and expression. In the middle of the 14-part series, the authors speak candidly to the tactical maneuver of labeling advocates for freedom of thought, speech, and expression as conservative “right wing”.
In part 8, titled “Is Free Speech Just a Conservative Talking Point?” Nadine Strossen makes the following point about all sides across the political spectrum must protect free speech [and therefore, why this important freedom should not be confused with the content and advocacy of right wing ideas]:
“...FIRE’s consistent advocacy of free speech rights on campus, for students and faculty members all across the ideological spectrum, has earned it well-deserved respect as a principled free speech champion, lending weight to its arguments. The same has been true of the ACLU, which has controversially defended free speech even for racist speakers whose views are antithetical to the ACLU’s own championship of racial justice. While many critics object to such work, many supporters of it — including leading African American civil rights champions — are convinced that the ACLU’s racial justice advocacy is strengthened by its support for robust free speech rights, extending even to opponents of racial justice.”
So there it is.
Championing freedom of thought, speech, and conscience is to provide a safeguard for all people and for all time. Outside of situational incitement to violence and unlawful forms of speech that advocate violence in a general sense, as a kind of long-term strategy, we must all, regardless of our political, social, religious, and cultural leanings, be free to express what is inside of us. As I have noted in several other pieces of writing, including an essay that connects the ‘freedom to air” to the “freedom to err”, by openly expressing what is inside of us, we risk being openly wrong in front of others and therefore open ourselves not only to criticism and condemnation, but to being corrected, and therefore, further enlightened.
This is an image I created modeled after a similar adaptation of the political compass image that became popular in the mid 2010’s. The idea I am conveying here is that the 8% of political radicals on the progressive identitarian left often consider all other viewpoints and positions on social issues as “far right”, which is not only ridiculous but actively dangerous as this way of seeing the world —and the bullying culture and reputation destruction that comes with it—can create a profoundly cold climate of fear. And within such a climate, dialogue, good-faith collaboration, and truth-seeking are all thrown under the bus, which should be a concern for us all regardless of our political leanings.
I will explore the actual right wing hemisphere of thought a few chapters from now, using Erec S. Smith’s conception of the Rightful King, and I will also continue to explore the distorted aspects of left wing adherents of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory. In addition—and this is not at all a small addition but almost central to the thesis of the All We Are series—I will explore the commensurability (overlapping universal values) between and among ideologies and cultures, which comes down to the basic human element of pretty much all of us looking out for people we care about.
Exploring Oppression and Suffering
In honor of that shared human experience, I would like to close this chapter on my free-flowing musings around the Sacred Victim identity, by sharing several videos that get to the heart of what I believe motivates those who follow Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories.
As I hope the reader will see, there are very real and horrifying atrocities that CSJ adherents understandably bear in mind as they advocate for strict programs of speech and thought control and their urge to militantly purge society of those they believe might be perpetuating ideas and advancing policies that could lead to more horrifying atrocities.
But, in the rush to push out the “bad”, CSJ adherents often fall into the trap of being selective about who should be protected from the “bad”.
Selective Empathy: Playing Favorites in the Name of Social Justice
As I mentioned earlier in this essay, I am not interested in turning up the emotional heat to excite people’s moral sensibilities or in indulging in “trauma porn”. But I do think it’s helpful to think about the mindset of people whose minds are frozen in traumatic memories, whether they are personal or representative of an historical narrative of oppression. I don't have the qualifications to offer insight into the psychology of those who have adopted extreme forms of the CSJ mindset, but I do feel a good deal of resonance with the preoccupation with suffering, injustice, and oppression, which is something I share with those who have this mindset. What I think separates people who have natural empathy from many ideologically motivated people who experience this preoccupation is that people who have natural empathy—as opposed to ideologically motivated selective empathy— don’t play favorites.
This means that the statistics around the suicide rate of middle aged whites (especially men) concerns us. It also concerns us that young white pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds in the United Kingdom are the lowest performing group in primary school education and the smallest percentage of the student population in universities. It alarms us that young Black boys are behind most other demographic groups in the United States when it comes to reading and writing and math. And it worries us that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, experience confusion and disempowerment in countries that have not taken up the task of accommodating their linguistic needs as English Language Learners (ELLs). It also troubles us that the Muslim minority population of Uyghurs are being persecuted in China.
To summarize the difference, those who experience natural empathy that is not limited to people on “our side” genuinely care about anyone who is suffering. That is the key difference between natural empathy and ideologically-induced selective empathy.
Reality Bites: A Hit Parade of Suffering
Much of what I’ve written up to this point in this chapter on the Sacred Victim has been a kind of primer for the video links I am sharing below. I want to share these video clips because I think it’s important to keep in mind that suffering, exploitation, oppression, cruelty, terror, and fear are very real things and that most of those who follow Critical Social Justice (CSJ) are inhabiting either consciously or subconsciously an inner atmosphere in which these painful realities and fears are all-encompassing.
Beneath each video clip below, I provide a brief summary of how I think the images and stories in these clips relate to the inner worlds of CSJ adherents, with the exception of the final video clip, which I believe depicts in a baroque and horrifying way the fear that many critics of CSJ have of being attacked, otherized, vilified, and even persecuted outright by those who would do them great harm to protect the ideology that CSJ adherents have chosen to follow or at the very least the lengths that some might go to protect themselves from persecution from fellow CSJ adherents.
I want to begin with two clips related to the “Elephant Man” because I believe people from all walks of life and ideologies can relate to the experience of being dehumanized, which is the same as feeling victimized.
The Elephant Man -Train Station Scene
In this scene from the film Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch, the main character John Merrick (played by John Hurt) is accosted by a mob and eventually is cornered in the public restroom where he tearfully declares, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Merrick is considered by medical experts to have suffered from two rare diseases: Type 1 neurofibromatosis (NF1) and Proteus syndrome, both of which combined to create severe and quite painful physical deformities.
The True Story Of Joseph Merrick -The Elephant Man Documentary
This documentary explores the life of Joseph Merrick and reveals the pain of being “the other” and the dehumanization that often comes to those who are “otherized.”
Hotel Rwanda: ”There’s Always Room” Scene
This film, based on a true story, covers the plight of a Hutu hotel manager who must find novel ways to protect and ultimately save the lives of Tutsi refugees during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Though this film is set in a specific locality in a specific time frame, the experience of genocide and terror will be recognized by survivors of enslavement, genocide, terror campaigns, and other atrocities across time and across all continents.
The Rwandan Genocide - 100 Days of Terror.
This harrowing documentary is not for the faint of heart. It brings forth an unflinching look into the architecture of genocide, which—as all genocides do—begins with a campaign of dehumanization and cruelty (note the term “Tutsi cockroaches”, which was regularly broadcast on Hutu-controlled radio stations during the months leading up to the massacre of Tutsi people and some of their allies).
Story of Nicholas Winton BBC That's life - Short version
This piece is moving because it shows in a tender way the impact on real life people when we take up the courage to intervene when injustice occurs. Sir Nicholas George Winton was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped to rescue 699 Jewish children who were at risk of being murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. In this clip, we see not only many of the now-grown children he saved, but generations of descendants who were born from those children.
The Psychology of Racism in Jim Crow America
This powerful documentary examines the psychology behind racism and institutionalized bigotry by examining the specific manifestations of institutionalized racism in Jim Crow America. As viewers will see, there are patterns to be seen in how these patterns play out.
The Ochota Massacre -World War II Nazi War Crimes in Warsaw, Poland
In this brief scene, we see the familiar experience of Nazi roundups of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. In one small moment, we see a young boy shot in the head without any fanfare—a typical occurrence during the Nazi occupation of Poland and other countries and territories conquered by Germany during World War II.
The Psychology of Genocide: How the Holocaust Happened
In this documentary, we learn the power of dehumanizing language and other aspects of coordinated, highly organized genocide against entire peoples. One question raised is how these atrocities could possibly have been justified or even passively accepted by the general population.
History, Empathy, and Morality: Would You Have Been a Nazi?
This documentary challenges us to consider what it might have been like to have lived in Nazi Germany in the early, mid, and late 1930’s as the anti-Jewish propaganda and public displays of systematic disenfranchisement and violence gradually intensified. Though some may argue that the general populace didn’t know about the large scale murder of Jews, gays, gypsies, and political prisoners in concentration camps and death camps, it is interesting to note that many events that were publicly known and even broadcast by Hitler’s Nazi party were indeed accepted or at least tolerated by the general populace. So, the question is: would we ourselves have been Nazis during that time and in that place?
Witch Trials Simpsons: “Sounds Like Witch Talk, Lisa!”
This is a humorous take on the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. In it, Homer Simpson, the goofy patriarch of the Simpsons cartoon family warns Lisa (who dared to utter something thoughtful and in defense of the unjustly accused), “That sounds like Witch Talk!” The chilling atmosphere of accusation-ism and the looming threat of opportunistic bad actors who might take advantage of the pandemonium and fear that spread throughout the land was enough to bring most townsfolk to their knees, with the widespread exercise of self-censorship. This, combined with the self-protective urge to falsely accuse others of witchcraft created an atmosphere of terror that we have seen time and again through the ages on all continents.
Public Burning at the Stake: A Harrowing Scene from “La Peste”
This is a scene from the sixth episode of season 1 of the television series "La Peste". This is by far one of the most brutal, realistic, and truly horrifying scenes of someone being burned at the stake in television history. For this essay’s contemplation of the Sacred Victim identity, which has examined how easy it can be to identify selectively with some groups and not others, this scene—while obviously extreme—can serve as a reminder of why some are deeply concerned about “cancel culture” and the ultimate consequences when an ideology has been embraced in such a totalistic way. In this scene, a man is being burned alive for holding Protestant beliefs inside a stronghold of Catholic domination. It serves as a reminder that people of all stripes are more than willing to commit acts of systematic dehumanization and eventually acts of justified cruelty against a group deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” or simply as a group on the wrong side of our prejudices.
Concluding Thoughts
The last video clip above can serve as a useful transition into the next chapter, in which I explore further dimensions of the Sacred Victim identity, including the ways in which this identity is reinforced in the minds and hearts of sincere CSJ adherents. Though the current chapter has hopefully shed some light on the sincerity, empathy, and compassion of those who have taken on the ideology of Critical Social Justice, we will be moving in a different direction, exploring the ways in which this identity becomes a trap in extreme solipsism and narcissism and the ways in which the Sacred Victim stance can be intentionally exploited by the more self-serving opportunistic types who cloak themselves in this identity and in the general CSJ ideology for power and self-gain.
As we will see, there are reasons for worry and concern when a growing number of people have adopted wholesale ideologies that target specific identity groups for dehumanization. And it always begins with the sense that the perpetrators of this targeting experience themselves as victims.
History has shown us that this pattern almost always plays out in a way that is not for the good of all.