RE: Peterson's 12 Rules For Life, have you heard of this?
August 20, 2018 at 12:46 pm
(This post was last modified: August 20, 2018 at 1:00 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
(August 20, 2018 at 9:26 am)Kit Wrote:(August 20, 2018 at 9:24 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I went through a McDonald's drive through in central Iowa and was served by a overweight white teenager and the first thing I thought was "white privilege"...not.
One might argue that it is not the color of one's skin that affords privilege in life, but instead the color of one's skin that afford's the absence of discrimination. Her need for lipo, on the other hand....
I would say that is a fair point. Prejudice can take many forms. "Intersectionality" spreads until the dimensions of victimization, like fat shaming, become so numerous that we have to start treating people like individuals again, and not as groups. Intersectionality, trying to determine who has been most victimized, is a self-defeating concept unless it rigidly maintains arbitrary boundaries.
Peterson’s main argument against identity politics and the concept of white privilege is that they are rooted in a neo-Marxist dogma in which all social interactions are viewed as a power-struggle between oppressors and their victims. Historically, this reductive analysis of social interaction only ever leads to catastrophe. For example, after the overthrow and execution of the monarchy, the Jacobins went on to behead Carmelite nuns who, in the eyes of the Jacobins, represented ecclesiastical power. The purges of China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ spread wider and wider in search of vestiges of ‘imperialism’ to include minor intellectuals, artists, and musicians.
The above are classic examples of how claims of institutional guilt, like the so-called “systems of white supremacy and patriarchy” eventually get transferred to relatively powerless individuals. The high degree of variability with respect to who counts as oppressed and who counts as an oppressor allows purity purges to be turned against whatever out-group someone wants to vilify.
Looking at the vitriol directed rural low-income whites, in the rural South and Midwest, it is difficult for me to see how anyone can judge this demographic as a source of oppression. It seems to me that the majority of people demonizing a legitimate underclass are upper-income highly educated urban professionals. IMO those who regularly insult Southerners and Evangelicals are just using them as proxies to justify their own sense of moral and intellectual superiority. The insults against them, the white working class, are motivated by the smug self-righteousness of the upper-class and the contempt is has for the working class. You can hear it every time you here that condescending phrase “they [rural whites] are voting against their best interests” or What's Wrong with Kansas. In other words, your superiors know what’s good for you better than you do. Time for your re-education.
<insert profound quote here>