Social justice as social strategy

Norm dominance as status game.

Uta Scholl on Unsplash.

So, the first essay in my Worshipping the Future series is up on Helen Dale’s Substack. It establishes two features of the series. First, the evolutionary lens is fundamental to the analysis: treating us Homo sapiens as evolved living beings. Second, while ideas will be discussed, the general focus is on social dynamics and social strategies. Which fits with applying the evolutionary lens.

Ideas have to resonate in order to replicate. They have to make sense to people in ways that lead them to adopt and transmit them if they are going to spread. The social dynamics matter.

We Homo sapiens are very good at rationalising and moralising our self-interest. That makes it more important, not less, that we are able to discuss things at the level of whether something is true or false and what the actual effects and other implications of claims and actions are.

If doing so is blocked, then not only do disastrously false ideas get propagated much more easily, it turns all disputes into power and dominance disputes, rewarding ever greater levels of social aggression and social imperialism. Creating deeply socially-corrosive dynamics within a society.

One of the patterns I draw attention to in the first essay is the pattern of required affirmations (for example, endorsing diversity-inclusion-equity), of not noticings (not noticing that sex is biological and observed, not social and assigned) and stigmatising wrongful noticing (that the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors is precisely that). All of which has become part of the status strategy of being seen to be of the moral and the good through adopting prestige opinions.

As it happens, I recently experienced an example of that being institutionalised. On Medium, I published a post in support of Josh Slocum. After being up for almost 48 hours, the post got suspended on the grounds of being “hateful content”. Defined as:

Hateful content

We do not allow content that constitutes or promotes violence, harassment, or hatred against people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.

We do not allow posts or accounts that glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialize violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths of individuals or groups. This includes the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims or misleading statistics to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others. We do not allow calls for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, nor do we allow the glorification of groups which do any of the above.

So, I deleted the original post and posted a version without the two paragraphs the suspension was clearly aimed at, as supporting Josh Slocum was the more important matter.

The paragraphs I deleted were:

The Transcult has been particularly vicious generator of the demand to impose social death on others for dissenting. How could it not be? How else can the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors be rendered not merely morally acceptable, but morally required, except by stigmatising dissent? Including stigmatising the purveying of inconvenient facts.

The Transcult is an operation by which folk demand the right to build their lives while destroying other people’s. Not only demand that, but demand you participate, passively or actively, in such destruction of lives.

The Transcult, the claim that self-identification determines whether you are “properly” male or female, has targeted not merely individuals but the spouses of people they mob. They attempt to destroy the careers, the incomes, the businesses of people who disagree with their claims. Which, we need to remind ourselves, are nuts.

No, you are not a woman merely by identifying as one. No, sex is not assigned at birth, it is observed at birth (or even before birth). If you are biologically male and have gone through puberty, it is typically ridiculously unfair for you to compete in women’s sports: that just becomes a way for mediocre biological males to displace extraordinary women on the winner’s podium. Gender affirmation therapy is not good practice based on good evidence. Helping children and adolescents to be more comfortable in their bodies is not a form of “conversion therapy”.

Hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors is precisely that. It is not “revealing” some inner “true” identity. Yes, there are a very small number of people for whom gender transition is the better outcome. That is, however, something that has to be very carefully determined. It is a social transition with physical adjustments, it is not a full biological transition.

The shift from transgender being a tiny minority, and mostly male-to-female, to surging increases in trans identification among teenage girls, and so increasingly dominated by female-to-male transing, is clearly a form of social contagion. Something adolescent girls have a long history of.

That trans is the first “civil rights” campaign that can be monetised (as transition means buying hormones for life and the surgeries can be profitable) has generated significant monetary interests for making “trans” identification ever easier. As has various formerly gay-and-lesbian advocacy non-profits seeking new causes to keep the donations flowing.

But what makes all this toxically effective is so many people buying into the status strategy that you have to affirm all this nonsense, or otherwise you are a bigot, a “transphobe”. The ideas are so utterly specious, that without tapping into the underlying social dynamics, they would have never got anywhere.

Which is why the Worshipping the Future series, while not neglecting ideas, concentrates more on the social dynamics. I hope you enjoy the first essay and find it, and the later essays, enlightening.