I've decided to catalog a few ideas swirling about in our postmodern liberal culture these days. You've no doubt seen these ideas in your social media feeds and in the incessant sermonizing of various liberal media sources. Most of it is distilled from the echo chambers of the public schools and universities, and often is transmuted by pop culture and the less academic into widely absorbed sound bits and slogans and images. What I find most interesting about so many of these is that they hold internal contradictions.
1. Capitalist Hellscape: You are told to believe that America is a uniquely wicked and greedy nation and also that this wonderful land of opportunity should be open to all people, but especially people of color.
2. Racist Hellscape: You are told to believe that America is a uniquely racist nation, where people of color will be oppressed and victimized and also that the border should be open to people of color who want to make a better life for themselves in this miserable land that stacks the deck against them.
3. Gender and Race are Obviously not Analogical: You are told that gender is a social construct unanchored to biology and also that race anchored to biological reality is essential to a person's identity and group belonging.
4. Global Warming is Worse Than Universal Cooling: You are told to believe that the human parasite is responsible for the great evil of global warming and also that evolution is an undirected process that for all we know is simply winnowing creatures that can't survive a few more degrees in temperature. And also someday it will be too cold for anything to survive anyway, and anywhere.
5. Moral Geniuses Everywhere: You are to accept as authoritative a new series of moral pronouncements that are intensely affirmed while also believing that all moral pronouncements arise from the unstable epiphenomenal debris of human speculation.
6. Women Create Ex Nihilo: If a woman intends her unborn child to be a member of the human race, then it will be treated thus and even protected by law. If she wills it to end, then it is does not count as human. In other words, the fiat of the woman confers upon the unborn its status as human or strips it of that status. And yet we are also to believe that women continue to be unfairly stripped of power.
7. Objectification is Nuanced: You are scolded for objectifying women while so many women express their feminine freedom and power by intentionally flaunting their own bodies in social media and in various forms of entertainment. Women can occupy the social media space demanding that they be not objectified while posting pictures of themselves that are obviously attempts to draw the eyes of people. Men are clearly not wondering what she thinks about Cartesian dualism when she posts a revealing selfie. And for that reason, men are pigs.
8. Pay Them Back for Your Ancestor's Sins: White people 150 years after slavery should pay back the descendants of black slaves for their ancestor's sins. But what is the stature of limitations on pay backs? Should black people pay for their ancestors sins if they descend from a tribe in Africa that enslaved other tribes in Africa? Do German descendants of Nazi Germany need to pay for what was done to Jews? Should Native Americans pay another tribe that their tribe victimized? We are told to believe that reparations are only upon white people, and only for crimes committed by their ancestors, and only up to a particular time, and this all on the authority of our betters. The concept of reparations is as clear as black and white.
Also, black people and black culture are strong and independent of white capitalistic culture, yet reparations are necessary for the full renaissance of black culture in America.
9. College Should Be Free: You are told that student loans that students voluntarily secure for degrees in gender studies are a way of the rich taking advantage of the poor and should therefore be forgiven, and that college should be free. Now even if teachers agree that college should be free, they are not likely to forfeit their salaries and benefits, and certainly the administrators won't volunteer their salaries, so presumably the "government" should pay for the costs of education. But what exactly is the government if not other people? And what then should college really cost? Who determines this? If there are massive tax increases, then everyone gets to pay, and no doubt the whole show will run into deficit spending as in every other government program. Usury is evil apparently, but naive debt is not. This all means that one day these college grads will pay massive taxes either directly through tax increases or indirectly through inflation. In short, it will not be free and what they are really saying is that they don't want to pay for it.
10. We Are Animals, But You Should Care for The Disadvantaged Animals: You are told that human beings emerged from the godless and mindless struggle for survival, wherein the strongest survive and claim residential advantage, and also that you should care for historically disadvantaged groups.
11. Give or We Will Take It: You are told that you should care enough to give toward the needs of others, which includes college education, food, shelter, medical care, clothing, and good paying jobs with ample benefits for all, and also that it really doesn't matter if you care about these things since government will take your resources to give it to those in "need" anyway. Government will effectively function as your conscience, but you should also give as a matter of conscience. Now that is confusing, unless you believe it.
