Looking Back to Understand the Present Ridiculousness
- or what happens when they choose an outcome and then build "the science" around it.
My thanks to The Process for the insight and inspiration, for this post. While it has nothing to do with my current mission on pedophilia and the spring board for it, in the trans-cult…it has everything to do with it - where the junk science and methodology are concerned.
Peter Boghossian does a great thought experiment here on Critical Theory. As you watch, see if the premises also apply to the many current ridiculous woke agendas/movements. He choses a great example, of illustrating the self fulfilling position, based on nothing. There were so many things - from the last 5 years - this simple, short discussion seemed to explain.
What Peter does here, quickly and masterfully, is describe “drinking the Kool-aide, at all levels - to include what happens when the orthodoxy is questioned.
From The Source: (bolding is mine)
The scene highlights Peter, James, and Helen's fundamental critique of the identity studies canon, which is that it gains legitimacy by mimicking scientific forms but doesn’t adhere to the expectations of the scientific method. Allow me to flesh this perspective out by drawing a comparison.
A scientific theory emerges from the observation of facts. It’s a kind of story we tell about how certain groups of facts relate to each other and why they show up in the way they do. There’s an expectation among scientists that you should be able to familiarise yourself with a scientific theory and then use its principles to predict something new and verifiable about the world.
A Critical Theory, however, which is the genre of theory studied in the identity studies departments, doesn’t hold itself to this expectation. Critical theorists claim that the social sciences must integrate philosophy into their methods to make their findings work practically toward a moral cause. Where the purpose of a scientific theory is to understand the world as it is, the purpose of a Critical Theory is to change the world into something it ought to be.
Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Queer Theory, the three heads of the Social Justice hydra, are all different methods of criticising Western social norms from the perceived perspectives of outsider identities. I use the word “perceived” here because critical theorists are self-appointed representatives of the groups they study and they seek to generate a particular kind of “oppressed” perspective among thier subjects rather than exploring their authentic thoughts and feelings.
They critique everything, from the way we form couples, to how buildings are designed, right down to the way white people prepare food. Thier seemingly bottomless body of criticism is now decades old and is actively disseminated with the aim of “liberating” non-normative identities from the bondage of conservative social values and customary expectations.
This could just be me, but I see his explanation of the “quackery” in every one of the radical movements, plaguing societies around the world today.
Please check out these other writers. They are doing important work for all of us and need your support.
There's slightly more to this, at least in the academic context. The thing is that these theories are not all bad. They do have good nuggets of insight that are quite useful, and that's exactly why they didn't go extinct on their own: academics really like novel concepts that are complicated and fun to play with. They don't like ideas that are kind of simple and boring. Academics are also intellectual snobs, though many will outright deny this while blithely saying, "The working class persistently vote against their interests. It's the lack of education, I say!" while nodding sagely and then voting to defund the police and open up a safe injection site riiiiiight where all the working class people live, far away from their ultra-nice suburban half-million to million dollar houses. (Then naturally, they go, "HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE, TOO, YOU BIGOT!" when said working class neighbourhoods reject these policies! What, you don't want your kids to step on infected needles??!? BIGOT!)
So there is a fundamental lack of self-awareness combined with a type of intellectual self-love you'd have to see to believe. It's incredible.
Academia is also pretty small and cutthroat, and a lot of the tenure track positions are based on how discreetly you can take your competitors down while remaining likeable (you get scored on collegiality at most places). Maybe not a nice way to describe it, but I've seen a lot of departments that were clearly out of the pits of hell as run by Mean Girls (but not actual girls; a lot of the deans are, in fact, guys).
Combine the influx of people flooding academia and other smallish job markets, their basic personalities, and the limited tactics you can employ to get ahead, and you'll get what we're seeing today: PhD's pushing snake oil ideologies with clever-sounding, sophistic arguments that make them sound smart and competent and TOTALLY academic job-market material. (Seriously, have you ever spoken to a newly minted humanities Ph.D wokebro? Dear *god*. *Shudders*. Their egos blot out the sun.) They also are highly on alert for any sign of deviation from the party line because that's a tool for getting rid of someone (and guess who replaces that someone?).
Tl;dr: It's not just the theories. It's also the personalities. The egos, mind, and the environment holding them.
Note: This comment is a huge generalization. I know things vary across regions and institutions.
EXCELLENT.
I think this does an EXCELLENT job of explaining the absolute nonsense being passed off as "The Science."