"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."
- Aldous Huxley (in "Crome Yellow")
"Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others."
- Gurwinder
Actual fascism and racism can't be fought while shouting down every disagreeable utterance as fascistic and racist. Performative gesturing dulls the blade. We've mostly been commoditizing rage, stoking tribalism, and diluting morality.
The unquestionable good of racial tolerance doesn't make strident anti-racism great. Those yearning for greatness would be better served by creation than evisceration. This is not a video game where points are earned by slaying Baddies.
A useful thought experiment: deem yourself the villain and observe where it leads. This requires courage, but that's unavoidable. Screaming at transgressors on social media isn't courage. It's self-indulgence—and, per the two quotes above, counterproductively draws from our worst impulses.
I remember, with nausea, the "Moral Majority" movement of the 1980s, where an extreme faction tried to impose its narrow, rigid doctrine on a heterogeneous nation. It boggles my mind that Progressives, apparently having seen great value in that approach, became the new sanctimonious enforcers of moral rectitude.
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