Social Justice Word Magic I: the Gleichschaltung of our time

Yes, the professional-managerial class will betray freedom and democracy in the name of moral respectability and social leverage

If policing language is a morally urgent project—for such policing can change society—then there is no part of society such a moral project does not reach into, as all involve language.

Source.

One of the conspicuous features of Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”) is that it reaches into all aspects of society. Comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies, private communications, policy (government, corporate, non-profit): everything must conform.

There’s been no relief from it, except for private conversations among trusted folk. Even areas of public dissent are constantly reacting to it. Its policing of language is not merely imperial, it’s totalitarian in its social reach and in its hostility to dissent.

We see this clearly with the quasi-religious attitude to migration—migration never fails, people fail migration. So only ignorant/malicious/bigoted/stupid people complain about migration.

They talk about what they care about and show they care by what they talk about.

What is really important about migration is that narrative control by the correct-minded be maintained. This is because narrative control—control of the legitimacy of discourse—is how:

(1) the professional-managerial class exerts social leverage,

(2) their sense of being a moral and cognitive elite is manifested, and

(3) the totalitarian politics of word magic—changing society by controlling language—is promoted to and across all aspects of society.

Elon Musk using his ownership of X/Twitter to insert himself into the news cycle and highlight—to force into the public narrative—the mass rape and sexual exploitation of young girls over decades in the UK clearly infuriates all those following these social strategies. They do not care about the industrial-level mass rape and sexual exploitation of often under-age girls, as is demonstrated by them patently not wanting to talk about it. What they care about—because that is what they talk about, what they complain about—is losing narrative control.

What they desperately want is to re-capture narrative control. Admitting that MENAPA (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistani, Afghan) Muslim migration has had some horrendous consequences for highly vulnerable young women and girls de-legitimates their entire approach to migration (and social dynamics more generally).

What enables so much of this imperial intrusion into all aspects of life by the politics of word magic and narrative control is the prestige opinion mechanism: opinions that mark one as being of the Good and Smart. If opinion X marks one as being of the Good and Smart then clearly not-X marks one out as the stupid/ignorant/malicious etc. A censorious—indeed abusive—opinion-intolerance is built in to the politics of prestigious people being not only superior speakers but superior deciders: both morally and cognitively.

Luxury beliefs are prestige opinions with added entry costs. This facilitates social sorting. This is why they’re always moving. The “moral cutting edge” shifts to maintain the social sorting. Beliefs only work as status markers if they stay ahead of the curve. To a large degree, it’s not the beliefs themselves which are the issue. It’s the endless language taboos with which one is expected to comply that provide the real sorting mechanism.

This prim sensitivity about language advantages—and is clearly structured to advantage—the wordcel university educated. It’s the progressive identity-politics version of excluding working class voices because they’re too vulgar. Much of the appeal of Donald Trump to working-class voters in the US is precisely his “vulgar” rejection of such norms and taboos.

Much of the hostility of upper-middle class voters to Trump is because of his “vulgar” rejection of such norms and taboos. His ostentatious linguistic “vulgarity” cuts both ways. This is how Trump can be both a relatively weak electoral candidate and an electorally transformative one, with a very loyal base, at the same time.

The prestige opinion/luxury belief/linguistic taboos pattern of ostentatious verbal sensitivity is much better described as piety display than virtue signalling. First, because it lacks the character or effort implied by virtue. Second, it lacks the cost element implied by signal, as biologists or economists use the term. On the contrary, the social cost often comes from not engaging in such display. What we are dealing with is control of the legitimacy of discourse based on a mixture of required affirmations and not noticings.

This not being a costly signal feeds into purity spirals. Precisely because linguistic conformity is such a weak signal, there’s a constant tendency to up the ante and/or updating what operates as correct display, thereby demonstrating fealty to the shared moral-display project. Latinx is an obvious recent example of this.

Using terms such as undocumented, unhoused, marginalised performs piety display through language. It also feeds into the belief that all constraint is oppression, of society as a structure of oppression. So people are not homeless, they are unhoused (by someone, by some structure). They are not illegal—not law-breakers—they are not provided with documents (by someone, by some structure). They are not marginal they are marginalised (by someone, by some structure).

They are not moral agents, they are victims of an oppressive social order. As political scientist

Eric Kaufmann

points out, “wokery” rests on:

making sacred of historically marginalised race gender and sexual minorities.

The mass rapes and grooming—particularly with attached criminal convictions—by Muslim gangs reinscribes a “marginalised”—so sacred—group as moral agents, to be held responsible for their actions.

The worse the behaviour from within a group, the better moral display objects—i.e., moral mascots—they make. The more rationalisations and not-noticing silences required, the stronger moral in-group piety display they provide. Lots of people stand to lose if narrative control collapses in a way that re-asserts the individual agency of inconvenient perpetrators.

Required affirmations to signal in-group loyalty include various agreed lies that one affirms to display that one is part of the moral in-group. The lie of “sex assigned at birth” clearly fulfils this function.

Sexually-reproducing biological organisms have been evolving the capacity to identify members of the other sex for hundreds of millions of years—hence the issue of “passing” for Trans folk. “Sex assigned at birth” is a ridiculous lie that—precisely because of its ridiculousness—acts as an excellent loyal-member-of-the-moral-in-group social signal.

An even stronger in-group signal is either silence about—or endorsement of—moral horrors. The notion that the hormonal and sterilisation of minors represent “care” and “compassion” operates very powerfully as such a signal. If you want to understand how Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist moral horrors could happen—could have active perpetrators and endorsers—look no further than the broken bodies of the minors and young adults sacrificed to the Transcult.

Similarly, the refusal to identify the pattern of Muslim rape and sexual-exploitation gangs is another powerful marker of moral-in-group status and loyalty. The outrage about Elon Musk breaking progressive-elite narrative control has a double element to it—both the wish to protect and re-assert narrative control and the in-group-membership-signal of not noticing, of refusing to identify patterns of rape and sexual exploitation of vulnerable young women and girls within Muslim migrant communities. The social leverage of being able to declare what is “Islamophobic” is clearly much more important to them than mass sexual exploitation of thousands of vulnerable girls and young women.

Remember, they talk about what they care about and show they care by what they talk about.

There is a great deal of moral narcissism in all this. Britain has had stupid and destructive migration policies foisted on an electorate that never voted for them precisely because a morally narcissistic elite felt entitled systematically to lie to, and mislead, the electorate. The result has been economically, socially, and politically destructive. Democratic accountability has its issues, but it is far better than the lack of it and much, much better than the deliberate subversion of it.

A crucial part of all this is selection for effective moral in-group status strategies. Not random strategies, but strategies based on the presumption that existing society is the problem: strategies that thereby elevate grand moral intentions while debasing the hard yakka of actually making things work. Such as, for example, having effective fire control and response—you blame the grand moral narrative of climate change and completely ignore practical measures required to deal with it.

Selection for emotional dysfunction

There is a long-term pattern of the sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci), physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg), sexually perverse (e.g. Michel Foucault), gender alienated (e.g. Judith Butler), and downwardly socially mobile (e.g. Karl Marx) being drawn into the politics of the transformational future, a politics that most profoundly categorises existing society as the problem. Such people are burdened by aggravating, painful, or frustrating constraints—so drawn to politics defining constraint as oppression and that promise a future liberated from such constraints.

Those who most beat their breasts about compassion and inclusion tend to be the most viciously judgemental, as they rage against constraints they find so burdensome and demand everyone else support their liberation. Sorting people by their opinions is a natural part of this moral project: both emotionally satisfying and, by generating a cohesive moralised in-group, operationally effective.

Of course, being able to indulge one’s emotions is part of the attraction in the first place. The sort of stoic emotional self-discipline that makes for effective social cooperation and coordination is—at least in peaceful, prosperous societies—eschewed in favour of (often weaponised) dis-regulated emotional displays that degrade the performance of people and institutions.

Past societies put effort into the social management of emotions for good reasons: as has been noted recently, psychology is more infectious than the flu. The association of progressive politics and mental disorders, particularly among women, is not accidental. That conservatives are happier than progressives has been a recurring pattern for years, one that has recently accelerated.

The elevation of victimhood that has become such a feature of contemporary progressive politics works thrice over. First, it fits in with constraint-as-oppression and society-as-social prison. Secondly, it awards intersectional brownie points: a strategy for both status and sympathy that provides social leverage. Third, it provides absolution from the burdens of responsibility while legitimising emotional dysregulation.

Such emotional self-indulgence is not good for a sense of personal agency, but it’s great for seeing threat and danger everywhere. This is not good for mental health.

The evolution of such politics into the valorisation of physical unfortunates—and the psychologically distressed or even sexually perverse—is the magnification of constraint-as-oppression in a society obsessed with the photogenic, suffering from increasing metabolic ill-health, and insulated from the reality-tests of subsistence struggle. Increasing social isolation and technological capacity and connections—with the online world’s virtual slivers of interaction—creates endless demand for self-fulfilling autonomy.¹ People want to be splendidly what they imagine themselves to be and so free of all burdensome constraints.

The status strategies of grand intentions that underlie and fuel such politics primarily came out of academe, for academics are generally not responsible for making anything actually work. Their intentions can be more pure than anyone else’s. The more grandiose their intentions, the more morally grand they are.

Moral narcissism has become a feature of academe, particularly among those whose scholarship is activist in orientation. Activism readily instantiates the recurring pattern of progressive politics of grand moral purpose liberating adherents from actual moral constraints.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. … To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Introduction (July 24, 1933), Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1934).

Many academics are clearly imparting the same moral narcissism to their students: a systematic contempt for the views and choices of fellow citizens, especially less educated fellow citizens. This devalues democracy: “ordinary” politics becomes complicity in the oppressive social prison of contemporary society and is full of (deplorable) voters who fail to embrace the legitimating moral vision.

The more society is characterised as a structure of oppression, the more morally grand and morally urgent the socially transformative more-pure-than-anyone’s moral projects become. Language-as-moral-project is the simplest, easiest, and most socially pervasive means of engaging in such moral grandeur. Hence the modern politics of word magic—words as harm, words as violence, words as destructive offence, words as things to be marshalled (indeed corralled) for social transformation.

Academe is over-run by toxic zealots pushing such moral grandiosity while exhibiting little or no sense of moral constraint. The less intellectual heft a discipline has—so the less capacity to achieve genuine intellectual prestige—and the weaker its reality-tests, the more attractive this socially-corrosive, morally-narcissistic, word-magic, strategy of toxic propriety becomes. It is, therefore, rife in Education and Media faculties and departments.

In pure Critical Theory versions, social corrosion is the point, so that current identified oppressions can be broken down and the new—unspecified, but morally glorious—society can be born. It is the politics of moral grandiosity at its most ridiculously toxic.

This is the sort of politics which minimises the charging of habitual criminals—as they are presumed to be marginalised folk of inadequate agency—but prosecutes someone for defending others because, as a heterosexual white male, he has all the agency of an “oppressor”.

This is politics far more outraged by folk identifying—by folk wrongly talking about—the pattern of Muslim rapes and sexual exploitation of under-age girls than it is by the behaviour itself. They attempt to change the subject as quickly as possible if talk wanders into the narratively inconvenient.

Academe has shown itself to have insufficient internal protective mechanisms from a toxic zealotry that plays so well to status games. Academe’s lack of selection for character has resulted in conformist cowards—who, nevertheless, are suckers for moral arrogance—becoming the dominant group within the academy. They cannot be relied upon to stand up against the creation—and promulgation by activist scholars—of morally grandiose mountains of bullshit.

There is no reform program for the universities that will work that does not involve a purge of the activists. Academe will only improve if the conformist cowards start taking much more of their cues from the honourable scholars and if habitual moral narcissism is, as much as possible, crushed.

Our institutions are dominated by university graduates, and these same status-and-social-leverage games play into bureaucratic pathologies of hoarding authority, restricting or delegitimising alternative sources of information, spending resources on themselves, frustrating accountability, and protecting themselves from the complexities of competence. Declaring the mass university model to be a toxic failure—and engaging in a thorough purge of all forms of activist scholarship—is necessary to preserve our societies as functioning, free, democratic, technologically-capable societies.

Futurist Samo Burja notes that:

A civilization is an ecosystem of institutions

…

No single institution is self-sufficient. Rather it is a part of an ecosystem, receiving and giving support in complex arrangements. Due to interdependency and the extreme differences in functionality among institutions, functional institutions subsidize all others.

Given we’re experiencing massive evolutionary novelty, we cannot afford to have our institutions systematically degraded through expanding dysfunction drowning shrinking functionality.

The push to “decolonise” everything represents both such degrading and—in its simplistic, self-indulgent contempt for past human striving—is the perfect exemplar of the toxic academic politics of narcissistic moral grandiosity.

Another toxic mess conspicuously not grappled with is the extent to which academic leftists within Western universities imparted ostentatiously not-what-the-West-did-to-become-rich ideas to their non-Western students, who took those disastrous ideas and imposed . . . at best much unnecessary poverty (African socialism, India’s license raj) and at worse mass murder and tyranny (Pol Pot learnt his Marxism in Paris) on various unfortunate countries. It is the non-Western leaders who adapted the strengths of Western commerce, institutions, and law to their own societies—the Sir Seretse Khamas, Lee Kuan Yews and Chiang Ching-kuos of the world—who actually led their societies to mass prosperity.

The characterisation of settler societies—under settler-colonialist Theory—as endemically structures of oppression, because they endlessly “reproduce” the dispossession of indigenous inhabitants, is the perfect luxury belief—i.e. prestige opinion with entry costs. It commits its believers to nothing practical, just grandiose de-legitimisation of everything, and everyone else, around them. Including entire countries.

It degrades and delegitimises in the service of nothing but its practitioners’ moral narcissism. By characterising every sin as the result of settler oppression, a one-stop-shop for narcissistic moral display is created.

It is such an exercise in moralised narcissism that even the practical politics among actual indigenous folk are too impure to be up to scratch. As Adam Kirsch notes in his study of the ideology:

Mainstream advocacy groups like the National Congress of American Indians and the Native American Rights Fund do not use the language of settler colonialism or name decolonization as one of their aims. Instead, they talk about defending tribal rights, enforcing treaties, and holding government accountable—concrete goals that can be achieved within the framework of American law.

Indeed, theorists of settler colonialism sometimes express impatience at the failure of Native Americans to follow their lead. “How can it be,” demands Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University, a prominent figure in settler colonial studies, “that even Indian activists, tribal governments, human rights tribunals, and scholars of indigeneity fail to see that the colonial relationship endures?” His answer is that the victims of colonialism are also “formed by their embrace of it. To say so is not to blame the victim but to recognize that victims sometimes must go to terrible lengths to survive.” For instance, Mamdani writes that Native Americans who believe in the importance of belonging to a tribe have fallen for a “racist notion . . . introduced by settlers” and embraced by “Indian rights activists claiming to preserve indigenous traditions” (pp 32-3).

Settler colonialist Theory is also nonsense history, as waves of dispossession are a feature of Homo sapien history going back to forager times. Forager populations are at particular risk of full, or near full, replacement as their population numbers are small—it’s easer for populations to drop below the capacity to sustain themselves—and incoming foragers lack the motive or capacity to incorporate newcomers into their societies in any numbers. Meanwhile, forager skills are of limited use to incoming farmers or pastoralists.

The Homo sapien forager population that replaced the Neanderthals in Europe were then replaced in their turn. Even the farmer-builders of Stonehenge—who had replaced the previous foraging population—were almost entirely replaced by agro-pastoralist newcomers. Waves of newcomers to the Americas pushed previous arrivals South long before Europeans arrived.² Brutal wars were a feature of human societies in the Americas both before, and during, European settlement.

Mesoamerican cultures built the only urban civilisations without domesticated herbivores. This meant they were also the only urban civilisations built on mass cannibalism, where war was an exercise in capturing human flesh for the consumption of the elite and its favoured warriors and servants.³

Amerindian peoples at times either sought European protection from local enemies, sought European help in their local conflicts or fought to block other Amerindians from accessing profits by trading with the newcomers. The key difference was that the Europeans had more capable societies, a gap that grew over time.

Settler-colonial Theory represents yet another case of left-progressivism valorising what fails and demonising what succeeds. Existing “social prisons” of scientifically advanced, technologically dynamic, free, democratic, mass prosperity societies become something to overturn. Hence, left-progressive policies and politics actively undermine all these advances.

Having set the scene, my next essay will explore just how much contemporary progressive politics can be understood as an updating of the operational methods of Nazi totalitarian control. Left-progressives are not deliberately following the Nazi playbook. It is not imitation, it is convergent evolution. It is how you do totalitarian—reaching into all aspects of society while del-legitimising dissent—politics in a liberal-democracy without violent revolution or conquest by an occupying army.

——

References

Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History & Human Nature: the Social Origins of Historical Consciousness, University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, [1991] 2014.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice, W.W.Norton, 2024.

Ann Krispenz and Alex Bertrams, ‘Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,’ Current Psychology, 2024, 43, 2714–2730. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369380591_Understanding_left-wing_authoritarianism_Relations_to_the_dark_personality_traits_altruism_and_social_justice_commitment

M. O'Hearn, B.N. Lauren, J.B. Wong, D.D. Kim, & D. Mozaffarian, ‘Trends and Disparities in Cardiometabolic Health Among U.S. Adults, 1999-2018,’ Journal of the American College of Cardiology, (2022), 80(2), 138–151. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10475326/

Stephanie Muravchik, Jon A. Shields, Trump’s Democrats, Brookings Institution Press, 2020.

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

1. The expression “parasocial relationships”, which we first saw Holly MathNerd use, captures this quality.

2. As Adam Kirsch points out: In the discourse of settler colonialism, however, indigeneity has a meaning beyond chronology. It is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom (p 89). They are not people in history, but the blessed people, free from sin. As with all mythic generations of a moral caste system, any strong notion of a shared human nature is anathema to settler colonialist Theory. Economist Thomas Piketty was spot on when he coined the term Brahmin Left.

3. As Inga Clendinnen points out in her seminal study, the only large animal the Mehica (Aztecs) regularly saw butchered for consumption were fellow humans. Hence the need to highly ritualise and theologise such killings, making them very public, and separating them out from the (consuming) community. You cannot run a complex society if people regard each other as potential dinner.