Andy Ngo at The City Journal-‘Inventing Victimhood‘
Some radical professors, some loud students, and many parasitic administrators are quite like true-believing cultists, spilling particularly bad ideas into our public discourse. These ideas tend to get human nature, institutional authority, and the pursuit of truth dangerously wrong.
Ngo:
‘With their preoccupation with identity, privilege, and oppression, our institutions of higher education increasingly promote a paranoid climate of perpetual crisis. Is it surprising, then, that participants in this hothouse environment would respond to an incentive structure that rewards victimhood by manufacturing it?’
Well, I wouldn’t say ALL institutions of higher education, nor all departments, nor all people, but education is certainly getting a bad rap, much of it deserved.
This blog is still operating as though the only way to win the identity game is by not playing. The loaded terms ‘privilege,’ ‘narratives,’ and ‘(H)istory, ‘ might indicate a person is playing such games, and I generally leave them be, avoiding the game, and if necessary, the player.
The best defense against becoming the master to someone else’s slave, oppressor to someone else’s oppressed, is by treating others as you’d want to be treated. Don’t assume that your grouping of ‘women’ accounts for the woman in front of you, even if some women are playing the ‘all women are victims,’ game. She’s her own person and has thoughts about you, too. Some of [those] thoughts are likely quite true, and maybe not so flattering.
Aim for win/win situations and solutions.
On the right, I suspect the warmer welcome for the Brothers Weinstein (still of the Left) is due to a common enemy. Also, it’s probably due to their thoughtfulness, and the more recent minority status of conservatism in the mainstream.
Strange bedfellows these days as human nature hasn’t changed much, and there will be institutional authority.
There is increasing pressure for the rules of that institutional authority to become more open, if those rules be routed through algorithms:
There are many disgruntled tech workers who have been sharing uncomfortable practices for years now that involve the algorithmic corruption of sense-making for social engineering objectives.
These folks had nothing to do w/ O’Keefe so far as I know.
Let’s ALL watch this space.
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) June 22, 2019
There are also going to be ‘low-resolution’ ideas uniting people within institutions, and it’s important to get these more right than we’re doing now:
“Those teach who can’t do” runs the dictum,
But for some even that’s out of reach:
They can’t even teach—so they’ve picked ’em
To teach other people to teach.
Then alas for the next generation,
For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.
Where psychology meets education
A terrible bullshit is born.’