Social Matter

The typical social justice warrior is a student or a graduate from a Western liberal arts program. Their beliefs are in no way exceptional. They are repeating what they learned in class, which was reinforced by the university administration, and then further stoked by the media and the culture.

What do they want? Equality. How far are they willing to go to achieve their desires? Well, not far at all. The farthest that they’re willing to go is to write, make videos, write some more, and occasionally go out to an unarmed protest, which will dissipate with an imperceptible impact as quickly as it formed.

What differentiates the younger generation of dissolute philosophers from their parents is that there is less of a healthy society with the wherewithal to buy them off sufficiently to distract them from idealism. The baby boomers sold out because someone had the capacity to buy them out. Few in the US have much of an interest in doing that anymore.

As Generation Social Justice ages, it becomes more disconnected from practicality. Politicians lose importance to them. Instead, they critique comedians, actors, the occasional novelist, advertising graphic design, the rare dissident journalist, and game developers. The fictional world tends to be more compelling to them than the real world is. When the real world comes under discussion, it’s only under layers of heavily produced fictional overlay. What happens in reality is much less important than the narrative, because all they have learned to do is to critique narratives. Work is unthinkable, not because it’s difficult, but because it’s real.

In the last days of the American republic, it’s become eccentric enough to work with non-abstract tools that it has become a hobby with a specialty magazine. Socialists become socialists because they like the graphic design of socialist realism, but despise anyone who actually works with their hands, considering the act of manufacturing to itself be oppressive. The socialists originally hoped that, by directing physical production along rational lines, average people might be liberated to the pursuit of spiritual refinement.

Now, anyone who does not primarily devote themselves to spiritual refinement is seen as morally suspect. It’s considered gauche for even bankers to say that they are in banking to earn a fortune. Now, bankers must be philanthropists first, and moneymakers second, with the moneymaking being an unfortunate, shameful activity that funds their social goals.

People are physical creatures, and we ought to remember that what our bodies do imprints on our minds. When all well-to-do young people are heavily encouraged to become scholars for the first 25 years of their lives, they tend to have trouble adjusting to the rigors of labor. The Western countries have produced more ‘scholars’ than ever, yet scholarship has rarely been less respected.

At some point, countries that spend less time on tweaking abstractions and more effort on exercising power over the physical world will gain power over those that primarily dwell in the world of pixels and paper. We should correct our course before we lose whatever remaining advantages that we possess.