Over the past several decades America’s academic and political classes have been obsessed with parsing out everyone’s relative degrees of oppression, which has provided the justification for the many interventions, often in the form of cash or preferential treatment, that are deemed necessary to create a more fair and equitable society. Only by meticulously attaching labels based on race, ethnicity, sexuality (now including gender identification), and cultural background has it been presumed possible that credentialed bigotry experts could craft carefully calibrated societal systems of remediation that, if everyone would just agree to go along, would ensure unending opportunity and happiness for everyone.
None of this, unsurprisingly, has worked out as intended.
First off, and this has proven to be a huge and painful blind spot in these expert injustice calculations, hard work, healthful habits, and personal responsibility turn out to be incredibly important predictors of everyone’s success in life—regardless of who you are. Laying around in bed half the day, feeding addictions to drugs and alcohol, and failing to meet your deadlines at school or work tend to wreck your life no matter the color of your skin or any other external factors that lend themselves to being readily identified by the social justice warriors employed by government, businesses, and academia.
This simple truth is, of course, dismissed by the injustice experts because accounting for grit and motivation is likely to mess up the analyses in someone’s doctoral dissertation or call into question the efficacy of all the lovely money that has been poured into programs that provide so many fat paychecks and lucrative careers for those measuring our melatonin. To even dare to suggest that a lack of effort or discipline will cause a host of life problems whether you are a straight, white, biological male, a gay, black, biological female (or any of the many other variations of our species) is considered “victim blaming” and is sneered at by those who presume only bigots would have such thoughts—which, of course, ends any actual discussion before it can start.
The wide differences in individual circumstances, regardless of one’s background, are also ignored by the bean counters of victimization; if you ever want to engage in a textbook circular argument, try asking why an upper class black child deserves preferential treatment, but a poor white child does not. The blizzard of half-baked justifications and equally half-baked insults directed at anyone who questions the premises of the DEI ideologues has been a staple of media and academia for decades, but these sneering festivals of smug insults are crashing into the Kryptonite of common sense, which is always a drag for those who have found a good grift—but are seeing it disappear.
It also happens to be the case, and this has turned out to be yet another enormous miscalculation by the equity experts, that continually telling so many individuals that their fellow Americans hate them and wish them harm is not conducive to creating societal harmony. In fact, anger and paranoia are the inevitable outcomes of propaganda that teaches people they are despised. Demotivating those who are being convinced at every turn that life success is beyond their reach because every possible obstacle will be put in their path has a particularly pernicious effect on impressionable and insecure young people, and the fact that these ideas have long been accepted and taught as part of our standard school curriculum goes far to explain why so many adolescents and young adults are such a hot mess today. Doctrines that destroy hope ruin lives.
So why have these horrible ideas held such sway in our society for so incredibly long? The sad fact that the bigotry industry provides a seductive excuse for one’s own life failures does not wholly explain their durability.
To be blunt, many clever and unscrupulous people have discovered, as so many have throughout human history, that there is power and money to be found by spreading hatred and fomenting fear. Convincing groups of people they have been treated unfairly—which is sometimes true but is often a product of lies and exaggeration—before setting oneself up as their protector and champion has worked for everyone from the Caesars to the Plantagenets to our modern, televised tyrants.
Demagogues always build their empires by playing on the credulity and insecurity of people who lack life experience or simply have malleable minds. Lacking a secure sense of self and desperate for purpose and meaning in their lives, the weak and confused are always the foot soldiers for the worst leaders and most horrible ideas. Those rallies at Nuremberg were filled with terribly damaged and lustily cheering people who craved to both obey their Fuhrer and silence his opponents; it is both disturbing and dismaying that today’s Big Government Democrats who are screeching for the imprisonment and censorship of those who dissent from the doctrines of their leaders don’t seem all that different in terms of their fervor and frightening vindictiveness. That so much of this hatred is today directed at Jews across our nation’s network of “tolerant” elite universities is not a real shock.
It is no surprise at all that President Trump’s efforts to root out DEI bureaucracies and bureaucrats in our government, schools, colleges, and military have cause an uproar. If you are convinced bigotry is everywhere (and your paycheck depends on others continuing to believe it ) pushing personal initiative and responsibility to the forefront of a national conversation about success and failure will fill you with shaking rage. However, it is obvious the questionable comforts of blaming others for one’s own shortcomings—and receiving preference and cash for doing so—has eroded the trust and accountability necessary for our diverse nation to thrive. Unfortunately, it will likely be many difficult and contentious years before the intellectual and emotional cult of victimization is finally and mercifully quashed.
What makes it, of course, difficult and wearying to refute the unending claims of those who claim victims are everywhere (so they need a government grant or your vote to fix it) is that it is, in fact, true that the world we live in is often unfair. If history teaches us one lesson, it is this: We all have to deal with the existence of cruel and stupid individuals who engage in cruel and stupid behavior. Although systematic oppression has many times in the past been directed at groups because of their race, religion, sex, ethnicity or other factors, the truth is that today, at least here in America, the vast majority of the daily pain we have to deal with is inflicted by people who are “equal opportunity” victimizers—of everyone.
Most everyone in our country has to deal on daily basis with difficult bosses, obdurate teachers, corporate greed heads, snarky bureaucrats, uncaring family members, self-serving supervisors, untrustworthy friends, gossiping classmates, or nosey neighbors. Damaging behavior in America today comes in a rainbow of flavors that have little to do with the rainbow of our appearances, but this matters not to those who see bigotry at the root of every problem in our lives. To even suggest most awful and frustrating interactions are caused by something other than entrenched and systemic hatreds is simply taken as proof positive of entrenched and systemic hate that is hiding its true motivations—which leads to yet more circular arguments.
Most Americans are fully aware there are loads of jerks and morons out there who will often find the least excuse to screw up our lives because it either benefits them to do so or simply entertains them, so the task of those running our nation’s outrage machine is becoming increasingly difficult. Fewer and fewer are willing to buy the lie that requiring us all to take responsibility for our own lives is but one short step from a concentration camp on every street corner. It is clear the pushback against the perpetually aggrieved is now in full swing, so the days of the victims continuing to victimize us all by insisting that we play their stupid games—or suffer the consequences—is finally ending.