The Slow Game & The Fast Game - The attempted take-over of Society

A friend on facebook was decrying the relatively weak response to the virulently anti-Semitic social media output of a Grime artist called Wiley. This is my long-form response.

This is where intersectional (or group versus group) thinking gets you.

For the radicals who think in this way, there is a hierarchy of group oppression. We are not individuals choosing to co-operate to the extent we feel comfortable, we are simply a statistic within groups to which we are allocated, the members of which all think and behave the same way as each other. They have the same needs, desires, views, rights, privileges etc.

It's much easier to formulate and enforce rules and codes of behaviour for a relatively small number of groups than it is billions of independent thinking individuals.

So what's behind this radical group power ideology?

Should any individual within a group disagree with the 'correct' views & behaviours assigned to that group they are bullied into line or thrown out.

For decades after WW2, the Jews were at the top of the ‘oppressed groups’ hierarchy, now they are almost as low as 'whites'. Why? Because they are too successful both as a country (Israel) and more generally around the world to be considered ‘oppressed’ anymore.

And women, particularly, 'white' women, have also dropped down the order a lot in recent years. They have also done ‘too well’ over the past few decades to score highly in the current radical intersectional victim hierarchy. As an example, look at the social media grief J K Rowling took for simply stating biological facts and suggesting that it's OK for women not be comfortable with biological males in their sports and toilet areas.

At the top of the ‘oppressed groups’ currently are two groups: 1. 'Black' people - not Asians as they also do far too well. More specifically, 'Black' people who can trace their lineage back to slaves (this is after all primarily a USA issue exported to the rest of the world as we saw with the George Floyd protests and riots); and 2. Trans-people – mainly trans-women (biological males); we don't seem to hear as much from or about trans-men (biological women) for some reason.

But where does this ‘groups not individuals’ and ‘hierarchies of group oppression’ ideology come from?

Very simply for the sake of brevity, Karl Marx.

Marx believed that the fight was between the ‘oppressed working-class’ group and the privileged 'upper and middle-class’ groups.

Now unfortunately for Marxists, a combination of capitalism, patriotism and democratisation in the ‘West’ has meant that the living standards and general living conditions of the lower classes have improved enormously over the last 150 years or so.

In the mercifully few countries where forms of Marxism did happen, the death toll and economic failure showed that the ideology doesn't work in practice, however many different ways & times you try it.

Thus, the success of democratic capitalism over the last 5 or 6 decades has meant that (neo-)Marxists have abandoned the working-classes as their means to power and have instead formed a two-pronged attack. I think of these as the ‘slow-game’ and the ‘fast-game’.

The ‘slow-game’ was to gradually, and I mean over many decades, infiltrate major institutions such as education, the judiciary, the civil service, the media and management of large corporations. Give them their due, they’ve been highly successful.

The ‘fast-game’ which is to re-structure society along group racial and sex/gender-difference lines as fast as possible and before the majority realise what's happening, has been able to gain ground so fast recently primarily due to the co-operation of universities, large corporations and the media, particularly but not exclusively, social media.

There is a race to the bottom (or should that be the top?) of victimhood groups which is not being challenged and indeed is encouraged by large swathes of the media.

In the UK there is not a single TV channel that doesn't conform to the intersectional group hierarchy ideology.

Why did so many working-class people who have never voted anything but Labour, vote Tory at the last General Election? Because, while they are happy for left of centre ideas on the economy, they are socially conservative.

Sadly, both in the USA and the UK, the Left-of-centre parties have moved so far to the left in their societal views that they need a pair of binoculars to even see the centre ground.

The question we have before us now though is, ‘does it matter?’

The radical intersectional group ideologues and their wealthy elite supporters believe that they have the cultural and economic power to enforce their views.

Trump’s election and the Brexit vote were very aggravating for these elites but it has only made them double-down and push harder and faster for the destruction of society as we know it and the rebuilding of it along neo-Marxist intersectional victim group lines.

Everyone equal before the law?

The law enforced without fear or favour?

Of course, it never worked perfectly in practice but at least the principle was acknowledged and agreed upon.

No longer!

We now see the Police deciding whether or not to act based not on whether the law is being broken but 'who' it is and 'why' they are doing it. So if you are breaking the law for a 'good' reason, e.g. anti-racism, almost no action is taken.

If you're a member of an ethnic minority, the Police seem more concerned about being called 'racist' than doing their job. Just look at the grooming gangs in various UK cities that had been abusing young girls for decades, not because the authorities didn't know, but because they were more concerned with keeping good multi-cultural community relations than protecting the innocent.

So, in summary, intersectional politics is different to classical Marxism but is a definite off-shoot. They are both group power ideologies. And just like all other attempts at implementing group-based political utopias, it is more divisive and will do more harm than the systems they rail against.

Radical, violent change always over-estimates the benefits and under-estimates the problems from their change because wise thoughtful people don’t allow themselves to become radicalised. Only the closed-minded zealots do - and they never know when to stop.

Theory v Practice. Thoughts v Actions when it comes to Racism

We all know that things which may seem great in theory don’t always work in practice.

Let’s look at this 'theory' doing the rounds in certain social media threads that ALL 'white' people are racist by definition; that it’s simply inescapable.

I’ll leave to one side for now the fact that any idea which translates to ‘heads I win, tails you lose’, is not one to which any sensible or reasonable person should subscribe, and make another argument.

First, a definition. Racism is where, given exactly the same circumstances, you treat someone worse if they are not the same skin colour as you.

Again, I’ll put to one side that there are a host of reasons why we might decide to treat someone worse or better in any given situation and that claiming it ‘could only be’ racism or lack of it is not a coherent argument but let’s stick to skin colour for the sake of this discussion.

Thought is NOT a crime. This isn’t Orwell’s 1984 and it’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t become that. There is a massive difference between what we THINK and what we DO.

Let’s take driving around in our car. Over the almost 40 years I’ve been driving, I’ve probably racked-up a thousand times where I’ve thought something like, ‘what kind of crap driving do you call that? You need a bloody good slap!’ But out of those thousand times, how many times have I actually chased someone, forced them off the road and given them that slap? ZERO.

So, even if we do have a bad thought flash through our minds (and all of us do, daily), very few people act them out because most of us are aware of the ‘wrongness’ of the thought & the ‘wrongness’ of the consequences if we acted it out.

Indeed, that very awareness of ‘wrong’ makes it far less likely that we would carry the thought into action. Rather, the awareness makes it much more likely that we won’t!

Thinking and doing, are NOT the same thing; not by a long way. So, for the vast majority of us, even if we believe that we may have racially prejudiced tendencies in our thoughts, the knowledge that it is wrong to think like that means we make a special effort NOT to carry them into action. If anything, we are likely to over-compensate.

Here’s another thought. There is always a problem when science (and I mean hard empirical science not easily manipulated social science) can’t help us. Science can only help if we can measure something accurately and consistently so that we get a lot of quality accurate unfalsifiable data. Anecdote is not quality data. Opinion is not quality data. Even personal accounts are not quality data because they can be exaggerated, deliberately skewed, or even falsified.
Quality data is simply not possible when it comes to the amount of racism there is, or who is and who isn’t racist. It cannot be demonstrated in a proper scientific manner. This is why you get some claiming racism is everywhere and others claiming there is no racism at all. We only have personal experience PLUS what we want to believe to go on, and these will be different.

Now, where something cannot be clearly demonstrated (proven), do we assume that people are innocent or guilty? And here’s the rub. 'White' people are being asked to accept guilt that many deny and that certainly cannot be proven. We are, contrary to the basic premise of law, being asked to believe the accuser and convict the accused without question. Why many ‘white’ middle-class liberals are happy to do that is for another discussion. 
You shouldn't feel the need to 'admit' to being a racist to somehow prove you're not a racist; and you don't need to 'admit' you're a racist to be a decent non-racist human being!

So, I ask you to ask yourself this question. ‘In any given situation, am I admitting that I would treat someone differently based purely on the skin colour they have?’

If the honest answer to that is ‘yes’, then that is indeed racist and you do need to change that way of behaving. 

However, most people will be able to say, perfectly honestly, that they wouldn’t behave in that way. And telling them that they would, is not an acceptable argument because you are telling them that, whatever they know about themselves and however they actually behave, they are guilty, whether they believe they are or not. 

That is a very authoritarian, oppressive, controlling and insidious way of thinking, though it’s clearly convenient for those making that argument.

So, for the majority of us who can honestly answer ‘no’ to the question, why would we go along with the idea of ‘automatic 'white' racism’?

Perhaps you know and can actually name people who are definitely racist. You’ve heard them speak and it’s clear and unarguable that they are racist. I would suggest that for the majority of us, that’s simply not true. Or if it is, how many of the people we know come into that category? If the answers more than one or two, you need to do something about the circles you move in.

I know it’s easier to just cast an entire group as guilty or not guilty - it certainly saves having to have a coherent argument but that’s the point. Because, at an individual level, very few (as a percentage of the total) people can be clearly demonstrated to be racist, this 'assumed' group guilt is all there is. 

This is where the idea that it's 'the system' that's racist not necesarily individuals comes from. However, as any system is operated and enforced by individual people, it doesn't take long to come full circle back to - 'and therefore ALL 'white' people are de facto racists'.

But it’s lazy thinking and can only be justified if you accept that social issues can be addressed by ideas that force guilt (or innocence) onto every individual within a (made-up) group, come what may. 

That individuals in a group do not differ in thought, word or deed; which is nonsense of course.

This is how authoritarian dictators think. ALL Jews are bad, for example.

And this is what a lot of 'white' middle-class liberals are coming up against. They’ve decided that they will feel better about themselves if they admit to being racist (why?). But how can they admit to their own racism, and from that accept ‘white group guilt', while at the same time absolving themselves of any personal shame?
(NB They DON'T really feel ashamed. You don't admit to the world something you are genuinely ashamed of. It's abstract/theoretical shame at the most; it's not real).

How do they accept that they are part of a group ('white' people) which MUST ALL be racist devils by definition, but put themselves on the side of the 'anti-racist angels' in the hope that they will get some kind of absolution by doing so? 

Simple, by claiming that we are an overwhelmingly racist society and pointing the finger at all other ‘white’ people, 99.99% of whom they have never met, let alone have any knowledge of the content of their character and attitudes.
This view that a small number of people can speak for, let alone accept guilt on behalf of, a group they have no choice but to belong to, the majority of whom they have never spoken to, is presumptiously arrogant and distinctly authoritarian in tendency.

And all these other people in the ‘white’ group that they throw under the racist bus while performing this self-flagellating faux-absolution? Well, they don’t matter do they? Because if I who have such high moral standards admit to being racist, then they MUST BE racist as well, right?

Job done; absolution achieved - or so they (wrongly) think! To retain power over you, you never get absolved, only tolerated until you put a toe out of line and then...........

But thinking they have cleansed their souls of racist stain, they carry on with their comfortable middle-class life in the knowledge that they won’t be affected in any meaningful way by the societal chaos they have helped unleash. But at least by saying that they and all other ‘white’ people are racist, that the country they live in is systemically racist, they won’t be cancelled or get shouted at on social media by the mob and will still get invited to trendy-lefty parties and can tell themselves how morally superior they are – phew, that’s alright then!

"Never be a spectator of unreasonableness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence." ~ Christopher Hitchens.