Comment by psi75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psi75 | Hacker News Reader

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> It’s my belief that this coerced monoculture of identity politics and ideology will significantly degrade the quality of American universities, to say nothing of K-12 education. The long term effects on American economic competitiveness and the ability to attract foreign students will be severe.

I don't disagree with you, but I think one of the understated tragedies is that this shrill weirdo extremism (usually an ideology of privileged mainstream people with white savior complexes; note, for example, that most Latinos consider "Latinx" ridiculous) distracts people from the populist, inclusive platform of legitimate leftists (as opposed to corporate centrists taking virtue-signaling stances while not changing anything they actually do). The staunch but watered-down (from an economic perspective) "leftism" that is becoming mandatory on college campuses is a product deliberately engineered by Kapital to make upper-middle-class liberals and leftists (yes, there's a huge difference, but 85% of the country sees us as the same) look a certain way, and one that doesn't suit our goals.

Thing is, our society is still as racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and classist as ever; it's just that the rich have gotten good at using chatter about these issues (chatter of a kind that will never actually progress toward solving them, because that's not what capital wants) to divide people.

It doesn't advance the objectives of liberals or of leftists to have wankers going on about how "math is racist" (it isn't). It just makes us look like idiots.

This stuff is not the product of advocacy for capitalism or the free-market. It's literally watered-down Maoism, of the kind that would've been common in Europe and elsewhere starting in the 1970s - complete with its promise of a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its resolute getting rid of everything that's old, traditional and therefore privileged, bourgeois or otherwise "counter-revolutionary". The whole ideological stance of so-called social justice is really, really old-hat to those who are familiar with this stuff, but North American populist leftists remained a naïve, susceptible population for rather obvious reasons - ideological conflict was not nearly as salient there in the past decades as it would've been elsewhere in the West.

Yeah, I hate when woke liberals and college administrators go on about their Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and subverting the bourgeois counter-revolution, good grief.

Indeed, Karl Marx himself famously noted how history sometimes repeats itself: First as tragedy, then as farce.

It certainly was annoying in my school days in the early 2000's. Though, oddly enough the one professor I had who was adamantly capital-S Socialist and anti-capitalist was less annoying than many of the students who played at it.

I dread to think of what that school is like now.

> Though, oddly enough the one professor I had who was adamantly capital-S Socialist and anti-capitalist was less annoying than many of the students who played at it.

It's easy to hate capitalism, but it's hard to be a legit leftist. Our ideas are morally correct, but need a lot of work and have been implemented poorly so many times--and, of course, if we grew up in the US, we were trained to be hypersensitive to the negatives of "socialism" and to exaggerate the failings of (in fact, not great) socialist experiments like the USSR.

One of the biggest problems with communism and socialism is not that our ideas are bad, because they're not, but that there's nothing in history or science that prevents a complete thug or scumbag from calling himself a socialist. In fact, lots of thugs and scumbags have: you've got Stalin (psychopath) and Ceausescu (rot in hell) and Chavez (fucking idiot) for evidence of this. There's no admission test to becoming "a socialist" in political theater; you just have to say you care about the poor.

At least in the US, the people like your professor tend to have a lot of experience defending their ideas, and therefore have a more nuanced understanding of their pitfalls and virtues--as well as the benefits of other systems (e.g., the computational power of markets vs. central planning) and the strategic need to replicate them somehow... whereas 19-year-olds in the 4.9% who believed in the system when they were getting top grades and told they had the world by the balls, but have gone socialist after losing an internship or a girlfriend to a Preston von Twattenberg VI and becoming redpilled about how our society actually works, are still arguing from emotion (and who can blame them?) and only time will tell whether they (a) build up intellectually consistent bases for their beliefs, and (b) continue to hold their (correct but, in the US, still unpopular) ideological convictions as they get older.

> the people like your professor tend to have a lot of experience defending their ideas

Eh, I'm not so sure about that. One class (it was a sociology and media course) he had us watch a movie that was basically a bad indie prior art for The Purge.

Rather appearing like finely honed his ideas, it looked more like a very superficial understanding of capitalism (specifically American capitalism, since it was topically focused on American media).

In just 10 years we went from Wall Street being the real problem with America, to rednecks in Ohio being the real problem. It looks deliberate—if you were trying to disempower the working class, what better way to do so than to recenter the conversation around “isms” that are inherently more prevalent among less educated and less cosmopolitan people?

But I don’t think it’s deliberate. Wokeness has become pervasive among highly compensated young professionals who otherwise spend their days turning the gears of capitalism: exporting American jobs to China, automating away people’s livelihoods, or figuring out how to monetize internet addiction.

I think it’s a defense mechanism. These kids go to school and are socialized to demonize the white capitalist system, then go get jobs in that system and need to reconcile those ideas with their personal self interest.

You make a great point (several, in fact) and I don't disagree. This said, I think the ultra-dogmatic "woke" impulse, which on its own is well-intended, starts in college, before these kids have to actually implement any capitalist machinery themselves.

Still, I agree that a lot of it has to do with the fact that college is an age at which people get severely redpilled: they go from being big fishes in small ponds (smart kids at suburban high schools) to guppies in a world where the rules are completely different and parental advantages matter a whole lot more than they were taught (as they learn immediately when coming in contact with mediocre rich kids who got into Ivies, while equivalently middling kids from their hometowns go to community colleges if at all, and who will continue to easily get opportunities they will require hard work and extreme luck to get anywhere near).

What's really interesting to me in the past six years is that we've seen a complete change in what "left" and "right" mean. The left, as you've noted, has been deliberately steered in a direction that is harmless to capital ("the jocks in your high school are why you can't have universal healthcare, so you shouldn't feel bad about outsourcing their jobs"); but the right, now that the pro-establishment conservatives from the 1990s are as anachronistic as the dinosaurs, is now as anti-elitist as we (my "we" meaning true leftists, the 2-4 sigma leftward fringe, the socialists and anarchists and communists and punks) always were. The horrible thing about it, though, is that this "populist" movement, even though these people have become quite aware of how society is rigged against them, has been steered into dangerous conspiracy theories, bizarre revenge fantasies, and the revival of some terrible ideas (e.g., racism, antisemitism) that should have died a long time ago.

Also: I shan't get into details because I'm a banned HN "unperson" who changes his username every couple of months, but we know each other and I've enjoyed your company every time we've met. I hope you're well.

I think you hit the nail on the head

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