So, last week someone shot up a gay night club in Colorado Springs, and the usual suspects immediately blamed the racist-sexist-homophobe gun culture. Also consrevative Christians.
Has it occurred to you, dear liberal journalist friends, that making a nine-day wonder out of every mass shooting is not quite sending the message you think? It may be, and I could be wrong, that disaffected loser males, like the accused gunner in the Club Q attack, learn that the way to gain notoriety is to 1) be a mass shooter and 2) shoot up a group of licensed and bonded oppressed people.
I wonder if that is true? More research is needed.
Then I was reading over at my favorite site Quillette a piece about “Gay not Queer.” The writer wants to make it clear that he is a “gay man” that is “same-sex attracted.” “Queer” has nothing to do with the case, says he.
As opposed to all this, I want to make it clear that the only thing that matters where humans are concerned is to put babies on the ground, keep them alive, and raise them up so that they may, in their turn, put babies on the ground. Und so weiter.
If you are not doing that, you do not matter.
In the case of the accused Club Q murderer, he appears to be a lower-class white male from a miserable childhood of whom Charles Murray writes in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, the men don’t work much and the women don’t marry much. He forgot to add: and the children are complete basket cases.
But LGBT rights! But climate change! But systemic racism!
Yes. The most important thing in the world today is Activism. It is, you may have noticed, an educated class thing.
Now, in his Skin in the Game Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a chapter on “The Most Intolerant Wins.”
It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
Of course, the most famous intransigent small minority since the Dawn of Time is “The Jews.” And the history of the Jews seems to indicate that just hiding in obscurity does not work. Because, I’d say, any time the ruling class needs an enemy to conquer, well, there you are.
But our lefty friends have made the Intransigent Small Minority question into a political formula. Notice how it serves their Over-Under political formula, that they are the noble and evolved educated people that stand up for the oppressed of the Earth. Against… oh yeah, I forgot: against the onslaught of the white oppressors of the world.
Yes, and not just a political formula, but a way of life. That is the whole point of Acivism, that noble educated advocates of the oppressed peoples go forth on their streets every morning, with their signs and their chants, to fight the good fight for the rights of the oppressed.
Why is Activism a way of life for our educated ruling class? The answer comes from my reductive Three Peoples theory. The idea is that there are three kinds of people in the world. There are underclass Subordinates; there are middle-class Responsibles. And then there are educated class Creatives.
To be a Creative you have to come up with, to create something new. I suggest it is the hardest thing in the world. You can be a Subordinate serf and get along by being useful to your lord. You can be a Responsible and follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. Hey, no problem!
But being Creative, conjuring up something new out of the ether. That is hard.
Do you see that, for a would-be Creative that maybe isn’t all that smart and all that creative, there might be a temptation to cheat? That a lot of Creatives might want to do their creating on someone else’s dime, instead of risking their own lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, to make the world a better place?
The point about Activism is that the whole thing is worked out for you already: the culture, the tactics, the peaceful protest. All you have to do is come up with some new twist. Like the Stop Oil activists that are invading art museums. Or the Extinction Rebellion acivists gluing themselves to highways.
We wise ones would naturally think: this can’t be the first time in human history that the young scions of the ruling class have indulged in such activity. Of course not.
My favorite parallel is the culture of the medieval romance. Hey, when I was a kid, I loved to read Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. And as an adult I like Wagner’s operas: Lohengrin, Parsifal. But I have come to realize that the medieval romance was the medieval ruling class ginning up a narrative, about how the rough tough feudal lords were not thugs and oppressors, but noble knights on a quest to find the Holy Grail.
The medieval romance of our time is the Activist romance, the idea of ordinary educated people fighting for the oppressed people against the white oppressor.
Only, of course, the educated people are Creatives, second-tier members of the ruling class and the white oppressors are just ordinary Responsible middle class people. with no particular interest in power or politics. And, I argue, the Activists are only Making Things Worse for the Subordinates.
You will notice, however, that many of the supposed oppressed peoples are not really oppressed.
Are gays oppressed? They come, mostly, from the educated class. Also feminists. Also transgenders. Also climate protesters. Some people might say that the whole Activism thing is a scam, ruling class scions putting on a play about helping the downtrodden that is really all about them strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage.
But I give our Activist friends the benefit of the doubt. I am sure that they all think that their Activism is all about fighting for justice.
And I think that the whole Trump phenomenon is an inchoate, organic movement out of the ordinary Responsible middle class against the injustices of the ruling of the educated ruling class, the Creatives.
But I would say this to my liberal friends. Think, once or twice a year, that sometimes your Activism makes things worse, that banging on about gun violence and making a nine-day wonder out of every mass shooting sends the wrong message to young disaffected males. It teaches them that the way to fame, if not to fortune, is to commit a mass shooting and get their name up in lights. For a moment.