This is an important cog in the crowd-maddening mechanism: the person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. In an age of shouting for attention on social media the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.
As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true.
Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.
The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.
Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.
Just as Marxism was meant to free the labourer and share the wealth around, so in this new version of an old claim, the power of the patriarchal white males must be taken away and shared around more fairly with the relevant minority groups.
Difficult and contentious issues demand a great amount of thought. And a great amount of thought often necessitates trying things out (including making inevitable errors). Yet to think aloud on the issues which are most controversial has become such a high risk that on a simple risk/reward ratio there is almost no point in anyone taking it.
The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.
The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing thing about them.
The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of ‘intersectionality’. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable.