#gerfried ambrosch – @religion-is-a-mental-illness on Tumblr

Social constructivists believe that we’ve all been socially manipulated to accept things as “true” - such as that 2+2=4, humans are biologically dimorphic and evolution is true, and the false authority of (the white man’s) science - simply because powerful groups want us to accept them as true - to uphold their power. Rather than because they demonstrably work, bitches.

And that the way we talk to each other is designed to validate and uphold this manipulation, and keep everyone to it and in their place.

That is, 2+2=4 only because there are people who want it to equal four, for their own ends.

Basically, they think reality is a giant conspiracy, that we live in someone’s Matrix, that we're socially programmed sleeper Agents, reinforcing the Matrix without even knowing it, and only they, the Chosen Neos, can tell.

Social constructivists aren’t concerned about whether a claim is true, but rather who benefits from people believing that it is. Their goal is to benefit someone else - ostensibly, “marginalized groups,” but in practice, themselves, by making people accept other “truths.” Again, what those “truths” are is irrelevant. It could be 2+2=5, or it could be 2+2=🥔 or 2+2=🦋, or that biological dimorphism is a lie (because humans don’t sexually reproduce, I guess 🤷‍♀️).

Given they think that objective reality is itself a grand lie and conspiracy, how do you imagine they’ll go about “correcting” the problem so others will accept their parallel universe? By doing what they think has already been done - just, you know, they’re “on the right side of history.” That is, they don’t want to remove the Matrix, they want to put you into a Matrix they control.

[Ironically, social constructivism is itself a social construct, which they believe to be true only because social constructivists want them to believe it’s true.]

Source: twitter.com

#Gerfried Ambrosch #social constructivism #social construct #authoritarianism #reeducation #equity #equal outcomes #religion is a mental illness

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Beware of the Trojan Horse: A Critique of Social Justice - Areo

The public debates of those critical of Social Justice—the idea of correcting for unequal outcomes—tend to focus primarily on the illiberal attitudes and behaviours of today’s so-called Social Justice Warriors.…View Post

areomagazine.com

By: Gerfried Ambrosch

Published: June 19, 2019

The public debates of those critical of Social Justice—the idea of correcting for unequal outcomes—tend to focus primarily on the illiberal attitudes and behaviours of today’s so-called Social Justice Warriors. As justified as that critique may be, it fails to address the problems inherent in the concept of Social Justice itself.

In Law, Legislation and Liberty, F. A. Hayek writes, “It is indeed the concept of ‘social justice’ which has been the Trojan Horse through which totalitarianism has entered.” To quote Thomas Sowell, “if you give the government enough power to create ‘social justice,’ you have given it enough power to create despotism. Millions of people around the world have paid with their lives for overlooking that simple fact.”

In other words, the “moral guise” (Hayek) of Social Justice conceals a threat to liberal democracy—partly because Social Justice is far more concerned with the equal distribution of resources (distributive justice) than the equal treatment of individuals (procedural justice). Its primary objective is, therefore, not to safeguard individual rights and liberties, but to control social and economic outcomes.

Thus, unlike justice tout court, Social Justice is compatible with gender quotas, Affirmative Action and other forms of positive discrimination based on group membership. Justice, however, implies impartiality and non-discrimination, as symbolized by Lady Justice’s blindfold.

Usually, the purpose of positive or reverse discrimination is to compensate for past injustices. We might call this approach corrective injustice. Two wrongs don’t make a right, though. Nor is it self-evident that past injustices explain current disparities. As Sowell notes, “Given the innumerable factors influencing the current well-being and misfortunes of individuals and groups, the presumption of being able to disentangle all these factors and determine how much is due to the injustices of history is truly staggering.” There is also an implicit assumption that—were it not for such injustices—equal outcomes would be the norm. This shifts the burden of proof: inequality is unjust until proven otherwise. However, since people differ in a myriad of ways, we have no reason to expect equal outcomes. Equal opportunity—the absence of arbitrary discrimination—does not imply equal probability. Yet, groups that are, on average, better off than others are routinely accused of being privileged.

The idea of privilege—that certain groups in society benefit from an unfair advantage—is central to Social Justice. The basic premise is that, in order to create a just society, those who have privilege must be stripped of it. However, once a group has been labelled privileged (based on its performance), the distinction between privilege and achievement becomes blurred. If history is any indication, this is a recipe for disaster.

Social Justice has changed over the years. In its original form, it purported to liberate “the exploited majority” from “the privileged hands” of “the exploiting minority” (Stalin’s words). Today, it is more focused on marginalized groups, including women. Influenced by postmodern philosophy, many of today’s Social Justice advocates think of society as a hierarchical structure of power and privilege designed to oppress the Other.

In keeping with this view, racism has come to be defined as systemic white privilege, rather than as an attitude held by individual human beings. This implies that only white people can be racist. In fact, it suggests that white people are, in some sense, inherently racist. Moreover, this means that there is no such thing as anti-white racism. Analogously, the traditional concept of sexism—prejudice, stereotyping or discrimination on the basis of sex—has been replaced by a powerful myth: the patriarchy.

People are thus divided into two categories, based on their immutable characteristics: the oppressed and the oppressors. Inverting Martin Luther King’s vision of a just society, in which people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” identity politics is best defined as a politics of group essentialism.

It is often argued that society’s most marginalized identity groups are impacted by multiple, interlocking systems of oppression: a theory known as intersectionality. A woman of colour, for example, is oppressed by both the patriarchy and by white privilege. From this we can conclude that privilege, too, must be intersectional. For instance, I have white male privilege according to this logic.

However, given that privilege is commonly defined as “a special right, advantage or immunity” (my emphasis), the claim that being white means being privileged is a non-sequitur in a predominantly white society. There is nothing special about being part of the majority population, nor does it imply special treatment. For much the same reason, it makes no sense to define men, who make up half of the world’s population, as a privileged class.

What’s more, my identity group (white male) is highly diverse in almost every other respect. The idea that diversity can only be achieved by mixing and matching people from different groups is based on a fallacy: that all members of a group are alike. Moreover, it assumes, a priori, that between-group differences are greater than within-group differences, which is, at best, a questionable assumption. Worst of all, however, this leads to people being treated as a means to an end rather than as ends in themselves—in direct violation of Immanuel Kant’s dictum that we should never treat people simply as a means.

Social Justice narratives tend to be highly selective in their focus. For example, the narrative of male privilege suppresses a number of relevant facts, such as that over 90% of occupational fatalities in the US involve men or that over 70% of Britain’s homeless are male. Similarly, those who invoke white privilege tend to ignore the existence of white poverty. When pressed on the issue, they often argue that white poverty has nothing to do with race. But that undermines the basic premise of white privilege: that race is all-pervasive.

In fact, this demonstrates that outcomes are determined by a multitude of factors, which can be extremely difficult to disentangle. Often, the only way to sustain a single cause explanation, such as white privilege or patriarchy, is by withholding relevant information.

Take, for example, the so-called gender pay gap. The fact that women, on average, earn less than men is taken as proof of patriarchy, ignoring a whole host of factors that might explain this discrepancy but don’t fit the prevailing narrative. However, according to a recent Harvard study, gender differences in income are mostly due to the different career choices men and women make.

Another example of supposed injustice is racial economic inequality, as measured by median household income. This fails to take into account differences in household demographics. According to the American Enterprise Institute, “Household demographics, including the average number of earners per household and the marital status, age and education of householders, are all very highly correlated with household income.”

For example, when we are told that the median household income of Hispanic Americans is lower than that of whites, we don’t hear about the fifteen-year age gap between the two groups. Given that older people, on average, tend to have a higher income than people at the beginning of their careers, it’s hardly surprising that whites with a median age of forty-three are more likely to be in a higher income bracket than Hispanics with a median age of only twenty-eight.

Moreover, while whites have a higher median household income than Hispanics, Asian Americans have a higher median household (and per capita) income than whites—despite the fact that, in the past, Asians suffered severe discrimination at the hands of whites.

Furthermore, Hispanics have a higher median household income than African Americans, which can, in part, be explained by the latter’s lower rate of marriage and higher rate of single-parent households— social patterns negatively correlated with income, irrespective of race.

None of this means that sexism and racism don’t exist or don’t matter. It just means that it’s unwise to assume a single-cause explanation without considering other possibilities. We can’t solve social issues if we misdiagnose their causes. This is why multivariate analyses are indispensable. Unfortunately, Social Justice has little use for such analyses.

Social Justice defines fairness in terms of outcomes, rather than processes, the implication being that the end justifies the means. Whether the goal is equality (of outcome) or diversity (of identity), the individual is just a pawn in the game of Social Justice: a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In short, Social Justice is not justice. The future of liberal democracy depends on our ability to tell the two apart.

“Goddidit” without the deity.

Source: areomagazine.com

#Gerfried Ambrosch #trojan horse #critical social justice #Social Justice #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #woke activism #woke #wokeism #equity #equity vs equality #equality vs equity #equality #diversity #diversity equity and inclusion #inclusion #religion is a mental illness

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Toxic Infantility and Its Social Consequences - Areo

“There is deep infantilism in the culture,” laments actor and comedian Stephen Fry.

areomagazine.com

By: Gerfried Ambrosch

Published: Nov 20, 2021

“There is deep infantilism in the culture,” laments actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Indeed, the ways in which opinions are formed, framed and expressed today often reflect a troubling lack of cognitive and emotional maturity. This creates a toxic environment in which reasoned discourse becomes increasingly impossible.

One example is the current epistemological emphasis on lived experience at the expense of objective reasoning. The insistence that my truth be treated as though it were the truth suggests a childlike myopic subjectivism. The following experiment comes to mind:

The experimenters invite young children into a lab and hand them a candy box. Expecting to find candy, the children instead find the box contains pencils. Ultimately, the children not only believe that other children entering the lab will expect to find pencils rather than candy in the box, but will say that they themselves knew all along what the box really contained.

There is something quintessentially totalitarian about the way people who think in this way attempt to eradicate the past and impose their view on others. Consider the following passage from George Orwell’s 1984:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Recent efforts to remove statues of historical figures whose views and actions do not align with the moral standards of today can be seen in this light. The defacing and toppling of these statues in the name of anti-racism or anti-fascism may best be understood as juvenile vandalism in pursuit of a utopian fantasy.

It is hardly a coincidence that such a movement should arise at a time when sophomoric tendencies dominate public discourse. Such tendencies are at the heart of today’s outrage and cancel culture. Ideas that challenge preconceived beliefs are perceived as potentially traumatic and therefore suppressed or—as in the case of safe spaces—actively blocked out. This widespread lack of emotional resilience makes rational debate impossible and thus impedes intellectual progress.

Infantilism appears to be especially prevalent in the gender debate. The idea that gender identity has little or nothing to do with biological sex and everything to do with subjective feelings not only flies in the face of science, but also translates into an unreasonable demand on society to deny objective reality. Gender fluidity and nonbinarism, in particular, involve an infantile denial of a developmental inevitability—that we, as a sexually dimorphic species, grow up to become either men or women, depending on our birth sex. Gender dysphoria appears to be a genuine condition, especially among prepubescent children, but evidence suggests that most of them grow out of it.

Yet, when it comes to gender identity, there is a tendency to take children’s claims at face value. This approach not only implicitly sexualizes prepubescents (part of a concerning trend); it also inverts the roles of children and grown-ups. While there is something to be said for taking cues from a child’s curiosity, imagination and creativity, parents would be ill advised to take their kids’ lead when it comes to decisions the consequences of which children clearly lack the mental capacity to understand. After all, we do not even trust our kids to make the right dietary choices. We simply accept that they do not yet know what is best for them.

The line between childhood and adulthood has become increasingly blurred. Take welfare politics, for example. A social safety net can help individuals in need get back on their feet. The prevailing approach to social welfare, however, presumes victimhood, fostering dependency rather than empowerment. Individual agency and responsibility rarely enter into the equation. This is not to reiterate Margret Thatcher’s contention that poverty is “a personality defect.” But if we treat adults like children they will probably behave like children. Paternalism breeds infantilism.

This principle is by no means exclusive to welfare. Take the patronizing tone of voice in which many media outlets address their adult audiences and the advertising industry’s appeal to infantile desires, which promotes impulsive behavior.

There is also a tendency to idealize childhood. However, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was mistaken when he stated, “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” At no point in life are we less free than in infancy, when we are completely dependent on adult care and guidance. Growing up means taking on obligations and responsibilities. This is crucial not only for our personal development but for society as a whole.

Failure to grow up makes for a toxic personality. As Jordan Peterson has remarked, “People who don’t grow up don’t find the sort of meaning that sustains them through difficult times … and they’re left bitter and resentful and without purpose and adrift and hostile … and vengeful and arrogant and deceitful and of no use to themselves and of no use to anyone else.” In short, “there is nothing uglier than an old infant.”

Infantilism is pervasive in our culture. So how can we outgrow it?

For starters, it is imperative to emphasize self-control and decency in our public discourse. Since it would be self-defeating to impose these values on other people (thus infantilizing them), the best way is to lead by example. Certain lessons need to be hammered home.

Life Is Not Fair

As Stephen Fry has noted, “It’s so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated.” To expect an equal distribution of anything in life is naïve. It presumes that life would produce roughly equal outcomes for everyone, were it not for unjust treatment. This often manifests as a tendency to blame others for one’s grievances.

Immature people tend to resort to self-pity. In today’s victimhood culture, grievances serve as social currency. However, “self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have, and the most destructive,” says Fry. Self-pity stifles human development on both the individual and the societal level.

Young children tend to display a strong sense of entitlement. They make demands on the adult world—in particular, their parents—without having done anything to earn what they desire. As we grow up, however, most of us learn that we have to earn the things we desire by behaving in ways that benefit others. This is how society functions.

Good Things Are Easily Destroyed, but Not Easily Created

Young people are more prone to radical thinking than those with more life experience, who understand that “good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created,” as Roger Scruton puts it. Revolutionary movements throughout history have had to learn this lesson the hard way, killing millions in the process. Yet, there are still those who seek to dismantle the institutional structure of society, arrogantly or naively thinking themselves capable of constructing a better alternative from scratch.

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, human progress is a matter not of absolute solutions but of incremental trade-offs. Even Friedrich Engels recognized that “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”

Given the complexity of our world, no one group or individual has enough knowledge to devise a perfect plan for society. If we want real, lasting progress, it is imperative that we mature out of such delusions. Some of the most calamitous retrogressions in history—in particular, fascism and communism—were caused by people who, convinced of the absolute righteousness of their plan, felt justified in stubbornly imposing their will on society.

Now such ideologies only exist on the margins of contemporary politics. However, the idea that complex issues can readily be solved with the wave of a political wand still has a surprisingly large number of subscribers. The childlike Greta Thunberg, for example, has been lionized for demanding simplistic solutions to the complicated problem of climate change. It is highly unlikely, however, that she understands the far-reaching social, political and economic implications of her demands. What is most surprising is that world leaders play along with her.

Donald Trump’s impulsive, thin-skinned reactivity and apparent lack of self-reflection make him appear like an overgrown infant. Indeed, “the way he processes information appears qualitatively different from an adult mind,” writes psychologist Noam Shpancer:

The president, if anything, exhibits a characteristic inability to see much beyond his own ego preoccupations. He appears to have no real friendships, habitually belittles those he sees as weak while denying any weakness of his own, and is perennially insecure, desperate to bolster his ratings, numbers and stats by bending the facts to assuage his fears; he has little demonstrated capacity to joyfully laugh at himself (or laugh at all), and has professed to being uninterested in self-reflection and insight; the only problem he seems genuinely interested in (and truly capable of) solving is the chronic threat of his own waning relevance, and his guiding moral principle is that whatever works to make him “win” is the right thing to do.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential elections, Trump has, unsurprisingly, shown himself to be a sore loser. Not only has he tried to bend the rules to his advantage; he has torpedoed the democratic process by spreading disinformation. Arguably the most powerful reaction to Trump’s electoral defeat has come from political commentator Van Jones: “It’s easier to be a parent this morning,” he said, amid tears; “it’s easier to tell your kids that character matters. It matters. Telling the truth matters.”

There Is No Such Thing as Your Truth

To navigate reality, we want the most accurate map available. The recent emphasis on standpoint epistemology obstructs this. Identity politics encourages us to clutch at immutable characteristics and subjective feelings for epistemological orientation, having abandoned the guiding principles of objective reasoning and rational debate. Trumpism is the flip side of the same coin.

Part of the reason infantilism is so widespread in today’s society may be that many of the pressures faced by previous generations—war, deprivation and rigid religio-cultural norms—are absent. Their absence is the result of a long maturation process from infantile superstition to enlightened thinking. However, we appear to have entered a new age of toxic infantility. It is time to change course. But that will take an adult mindset.

Source: areomagazine.com