how to tell if you are the problem

a one question sorting test for restoring civilization

this is one of those videos that works on a great many levels humorous and otherwise because this really is one of the most simultaneously important and slippery questions in humanity:

”are we the baddies?” (and how would we know if we were?)

i suspect that the world would be a much better place if considerably more of us were asking this question of ourselves on the regular and being most fastidious about our answers because we all do it sometimes. we all step too far, act like a jerk when we didn’t need to, respond uncharitably to ambiguity, and project our own views of others onto others out of laziness or frustration. these are matters of small degree, but they build into large structures of antipathy and incompatible semantic and worldviews and i suspect that a great deal of the seemingly high flashpoint hatred and vilification of the moment resides in this: we have stopped talking to one another and increasingly lack any basis or tools to start.

it’s become a subjective morass and the path out tends, to my mind, to lie in objectivism but to walk it, we must first agree about some objective facts and so i’d like to add just one, a single query in service of a single foundational tenet from which we can, from first principles, build.

it’s not every day that a question this complex can be boiled down to one, single, simple question, but i this one case, i think that perhaps it can and that perhaps this may be managed with sufficiently high fidelity so provide a one querry heuristic and so, in the fine and longstanding bad cattitude tradition of “cats out on limbs,” here we go:

that’s it. that’s the whole analysis. if the answer is “yes” you’re probably OK. you can be a part of a polity of reasonable people, people who have ideas as opposed to “people who are their ideas.”

reacting to a difference in views with dismissal, rage, shunning, and projection is a strong marker that your own views are dogmatic and overwrought. it’s the behavior and the inculcation of a cult, a defensive response to avoid inquiry into the indefensible, a rage response to being curled up around a lie that one has made into “my truth.” when ideology becomes identity, all ideological disputation feels like attack and even erasure. and humans respond with their most profound self-defense mechanisms under such conditions.

this can literally function as a diagnostic tool. if you cannot have a discussion about it without exploding into rage and ending friendships and family bonds, that’s the “check engine” light on your personality and psyche. and probably, all is not well.

this becomes especially acute in a place like the US where you’ve seen an unusual sort of rarification and radicalization. the simple fact is that the center of US politics has drifted quite a lot to the left since the 1980’s and 90’s, profoundly so. the positions of typical people on ideas like gay marriage, drugs, sex, explicit lyrics, nudity in movies, welfare systems, and 100 other things have all moved sufficiently far to the left that being a trumpist republican today mostly means you would have been a clintonite in the 90’s and a “deep” democrat radical back in the days of reagan.

what today gets called “hard right” by the left was “center leftism” in times that an awful lot of people seem to pine for as “better.” what currently occupies the role of the “progressive left” is a set of policies and preferences for which there was basically no american analouge 30 or 40 years ago, a wide swing of the pendulum well off the edge of the map, the kind of swing that brings down serious reflexivity.

and again, “can you have a civil conversation with someone who disagrees with you?” starts to become a profound tool for both self-analysis and the analysis of others, a mental state and societal barometer that tells you when storms are coming (or perhaps that they are already here).

a reader challenged me the other day to consider “where the truth might lie in the center” and which of these issues also apply to the right and how they were finding expression. it was a good and honest discussion and a good question. i asked him “so what would you cite as an example?” and he cited those on the right who are so convinced that 2020 was a stolen election as to be impervious to evidence.

i do not find this choice particularly convincing as this seems like a situation with a highly questionable fact pattern and data and inquiry lacking in a fashion as to be prejudicial toward “cover up,” and that when posing my question above, i find that most on the right are capable of still being friends with people who say “the election was the election, accept it” or “i’m not sure anything out of the ordinary happened.” families are not splitting over the 2020 vote because folks on the right cannot bear to hear someone say “biden won.”

but it did set me to thinking, and ranging back through history and looking for a right-wing analogue to the frothing, unreasoning behavior we see from much of the edgelord left factions at present, the one that really popped for me was the anti-abortion movement of the 80’s and 90’s. there was real violence there. bombings, attacks, spitting, frothing hate, and friends and family disavowed. you had protesters standing outside of clinics screaming in the faces of women, spitting, pushing, creating bad situations that were in many cases reminiscent of what we see now with the anti-ICE gang and saw in 2020 around BLM. had social media been a thing then, i suspect it would have been magnitudes worse acting as both accelerant and spread vector.

it’s worth remembering that at that time, the right had been so ascendant for so long in the US that people made jokes about liberals going extinct. but, in the classsic proaxis of greek tragedy and hegelian dialectic alike, the extreme wing of a party gains overmuch control and drags the group’s platform into precincts it ought not occupy and thereby creates a tipping point by which another choice looks increasingly preferable:

groups overly accustomed to being in the majority and wielding power free from critique tend to become blasé and entitled about their position. they speak to fewer and fewer who disagree and are more effective and diligent at silencing dissent.

and this undoes them.

hubris calls down nemesis and nemesis lays pride low.

there was a large scale changing of minds and a shift from the “religious right” of oral roberts and “moral majority” of jerry falwell et al and back more toward something that found consonance with the american mind and sensibilities. the 90’s were a blend of clinton (who tried to take us far too far left in his first two years) and gingrich and the “contract with america” that actually balanced the fricking budget without doing anything crazy. the 90’s were a great time in america, prosperous, largely peaceful at home, culturally fun and expansive and tolerant. it seemed like a sweet spot. but pendulums keep swinging.

i suspect that the collapse of the soviet union is a deeply underrated driver for american society, particularly academia. the cold war was a pervasive societal anchor, a unifying external enemy, and a clear “us/them” binary where “america is for freedom and free markets” and “the other guys are marxist/collectivist tyrants who need walls to keep their people in” and, alas, in no small irony “mr gorbachev, tear down that wall” also tore that unifying pole star from the american sky. (chesterton must be laughing himself to pieces) the fall of communism begat the rise of political correctness which underwent metastization into “woke” and begat all the ideology of offense and aggrievement children of marxist and post modern matings.

the policing of institutions against such ideas fell away. the war was won, why worry? an immune system turned off and went to sleep and our universities and increasingly the whole of the US public school system was colonize by a marxist ideology we had stopped seeing as a problem.

the problem with aggrievement theory and intersectional identity war is not just that it is inherently coercive and divisive, it’s also that it’s inherently subtractive. if i may only gain status by being “more oppressed than thou” then those seeking to stay atop the greased pole of power are set in constant conflict. this is seemingly how all marxist structures wind up tearing themselves to pieces in purges and ideological purity tests and the reason i think that we’re seeing so much of this on the left right now as opposed to the right is not an inherent feature of left or right, both are fully capable of oppression, self-delusion, idiocy, and atrocity, it’s a function of the fact that the left has been, for so long so ascendant. they have been the ones in power and, like the right in the late 80’s, have become the ones who have overreached and become overly ideological in a fashion out of step with most of we the people, our society, and our social contract.

it’s worth discussing the fact that the question above “are you capable of remaining friends with someone with whom you have a significant political disagreement?” is always and must be subject to certain boundary conditions and limitations. it cannot be absolute.

if someone’s political belief is “i support child slavery and men marrying 12 year old girls against their will and a right of husband rape accruing thereto with allowable vigilante justice imposed on any who sin or speak against this” (quite literally going on in afghanistan right now and quite in keeping with the tenets of sharia law) then yeah, you know what, we can’t be friends and i’ll war to stop you from acting in such a fashion or trying to impose it upon me and mine. this is far too far from a western idea of social comity and social contract.

when you hit a set of impositions like this, it’s a sort of civilizational strike point. it causes a rapid and implacable rebound as the civilizational substrate recoils away from something it perceives as evil or anathema. people react viscerally and see those espousing views that have gone too far as “other” and as “enemy” and the imposition of such upon others against their will as a form of conquest.

the right went too far in the 80’s and terms like “the moral majority” became an impositional aristocracy run by some debased people who would no sooner get done denouncing homosexuality to drive donations from the TV audience than get caught having drug fueled sex with a rent boy in a seedy motel a pattern that finds an unpleasant mirror today in the number of gender activists who keep getting caught in child rape and porn.

just as the bumper of “making kids who do not want to pray in schools” and “screaming at and assaulting young women who do not share your view about life beginning at conception and blowing up abortion clinics” jarred america sharply to the left, today the “pray the gay away” has been replaced with “hormone injections and physical mutilation to change the gender of the prepubescent,” ideologies of hatred and self-hatred for “whiteness,” and an oddly uncritical invitation to islamists whose self-described goal is global caliphate and sharia and, just as the society rebounded left in the 90’s, it now rebounds right in the 2020’s.

there were bridges too far into ideology and it’s interesting how public schools are always such a concentration and flashpoint. in the 90’s it was “teachers should not force children to pray or vilify homosexuality.” today it’s “teachers should not be stirring up racial animosity and self-hatred or leaning on confused kids with sexual and gender topics way past their capacity to deal with and pushing gender change that ‘parents don’t need to know about.’”

indoctrinating the kids into anything always seems like the bumper and i suspect that it’s both a safety valve and a canary in a coal mine.

the simple fact is this: the core american value is that things like religion and sexuality belong in the home and not in the school.

this is the province of the family, not the state. the canary gets ill when schools abandon this. it seems like a marker that one faction or the other has grown overbold in its power. they simply find the public schools too irresistible a temptation through which to proselytize their views and they grab for the commanding heights of education as indoctrination. (i find this a strong argument for funding students, not systems and removing curriculum control from the state. it simply cannot be trusted with this power.)

it’s a mechanism that surges from side to side and that always goes too far in each direction. left, right, they take turns being the boot and the buttock, but both are groups of humans and humans all fall for the same foibles. it’s just who we are.

that said, i think that one can make some claims about some definitive differences between left and right, at least in the modern west, particularly today.

let’s take the always horrendous flashpoint issue of abortion where i like to think of my own views as “moderate.” if i were to say “i support abortion until about 16 weeks or so” many from both sides would disagree with me. from the right, some would say “life begins at conception, it’s murder to abort it.” from the left, others would say “her body, her choice right up to the moment the baby is born.” leaving aside the arguments for and against any of these positions, i just wish to note one thing:

i have never lost a friendship from the right over this issue. not once. not from my most religious friends who really, sincerely as a matter of deep faith disagree with me. some, i suspect, are genuinely saddened that i feel as i do, but not one has ever called me evil, amoral, or a bad person for my belief. i’m sure some exist out there in america somewhere, but it seems to be (at most) some very small pockets and most respond by seeking to go be on their won, not coming to tell others how they must live. honestly, i struggle to name a single friend i have ever lost from “the right” over any issue like this. we can still talk about it and we remain friends who respect one another.

i have lost i have no idea how many friends on the left over this issue and others like it to the point where with some of my friends and business associates, i will not go within a country mile of such conversations because it’s simply not possible. you cannot discuss abortion, global warming, covid, ICE, jan 6, or any of 100 other third rails. the explosions and accusations are instant and, in many cases the ruptures become irreparable.

this is a point worth pondering. interrogate your own experience here. (i ask this in particular of my correspondent of the other day as i’d be very interested in your experience.)

past a certain point, the evidence of greater variance in and tolerance of political view on the right vs the left apppears strong and the “tolerant” left’s increasing intolerance, censorship, hectoring, and hate for ideas that were, not so very long ago, center leftism, become dispositive.

again, this is not some defect exclusive to the left and is more a function of who has been in power and running and surviving the ideological purity purges, but i do think it is a particular blind spot of the left and one it is, at least in the west, less well equipped to understand or correct than the right.

the fundamental reason for this seems to be foundational. conservatives, whose moral and ethical absolutes tend to be rooted in religion, are aware that they are, at core, engaging in faith. the religious know that they are in a religion. the self-styled “progressives” generally cast themselves in opposition to this: non-religious, atheistic, a faction that lays claim to being of “science” and “rationality.”

this creates a unique problem for them when their ideologies morph into something akin to jihadi secular religions imposing their will by force. behaviors they would instantly recognize as “oppressive theocracy” from the right are excused, even lauded, because “we cannot be the ones that, we are rationality!” and rationality is presumed to be the opposite of radicalization. after all, it cannot be “extremism” or “oppression” it is truth! and when one starts mistaking dogma for science, this creates the dangerous potential for runaway ideological excursion which has no self-correcting balance because the doctrine keeps shifting and the edge-lord nature of negative sum status seeking to play at being “the most marginal and therefore the most virtuous” pushes ever further to extremes and the extremists tell themselves ever more intense stories about being most rational in order to keep from seeing this.

in short, one side knows that it is a religion and the other side is sure that it cannot be and as such cannot moderate itself. because of this it becomes something altogether radical and fundamentalist winding up in a position on the horseshoe more akin to the taliban or iran than to the largely moderate and pluralist religious positions which prevail in the west.

obviously, this was not always so in the west and religious wars of faction on faction, christian on islam, christian on pagan, protestant vs catholic etc were a dominant feature for centuries, but this seems long gone. i am getting a sense that this moderation (esp in the last 200 years or so) has prevented the truly far-right swings of pendulum into severe theocracy. book and doctrine provides brakes. but marxist and post modern praxis does not.

from mao to stalin to castro to pol pot and chavez, it goes murderously bad. “we can disagree and still be friends and live in comfort together” becomes “i am turning you in to the secret police” a trend we saw really blow up during covid as all manner of censorship and oppressive practice surged in the tattle-ocracy of busybody bullying that masqueraded as “the side of science” surging on every front from health to gender to race.

i have never personally witnessed this sort of behavior from the western-civ right, but it’s a praxis that would be immediately familiar to those running a fundamentalist theocracy. the ayatollahs, the afghans, and anywhere else that team sharia is ascendant are the right wing analogue here, a belief so deep that it cannot be criticized or disagreed with and from which any deviation constitutes prima facie proof of immorality and evil that invites and requires correction or retribution.

i honestly wonder if the seemingly bizarre leftist fashion for coming out as “queers for palestine” and a general championing of a religious and legal mindset that holds the western left (and especially its women) as debased, fallen, and needful of conquest and subjugation for its own good arises because a sort of consonance is felt around these fundamental intolerances for apostasy and impositional desire that is presumed to be benign and just.

the only thing in the world more pernicious and dangerous than a jihadi religion is a jihadi religion that is absolutely convinced that it could never be a jihadi religion.

and again, the acid test for where one resides on this is simple:

left, right, center, or fringe, libertarian or identitarian, we all need to be asking this question of ourselves and (outside of extreme breach of social contract) we all need to get worried if our answers start to become “no.” in general, “no” is the sign you have drifted way down the beach while you were out swimming, perhaps without noticing.

and keep in mind that even if one agrees with me that this issue is currently far more prevalent on the left, this does not make it absent on the right and the very fact that one starts to assume that “it is always them” starts to make you into just the sort of projection prone unselfaware ideolouge that you seek to criticize.

perspective is vital and those without self-knowledge are lost.

i leave you with this letter i found on X. she lays out, with eloquence and honesty, a journey i have seen many make and the reason i make such effort to preserve my friendships with those whose views diverge from mine.

in whatever direction, there is always a way home.

The moment of clarity didn’t arrive dramatically. It crept in through the small, uncomfortable questions I started asking myself. Why was I so certain? Why did I feel such fury toward anyone who hesitated, even slightly, on positions I held? When had I stopped thinking and started simply reacting?

When I tried to share these doubts with friends and family—people I loved, people on my side—I wasn’t met with conversation. I was met with a wall. A similar wall to what I had previously put up for anyone daring to question me and my positions.

“No discussion.” “You’ve gone right-wing.” Lies were constructed about my motives. It didn’t matter that I was asking questions in good faith. The act of questioning was itself the crime.

That is not normal. A political movement that forbids its own members from thinking critically is not a movement for justice. It’s something else entirely. And it worried me then. It worries me more now.

Do you remember the 1980s and 1990s? I do. We had done real, meaningful work on race relations. Most people in the West genuinely did not care about the colour of your skin. Were things perfect? Of course not. But we were heading somewhere good. We were building something.

And then we pulled it apart. We decided that every small, clumsy human interaction was a “microaggression.” We reframed the past as one hundred percent negative, as though nothing decent had ever been achieved. We became so obsessed with naming every tiny slight that we forgot what real progress looked like. We unstitched the good work and called it enlightenment.

Once I began looking with honest eyes, the contradictions were everywhere. We decided blackface was a mortal sin. But woman face? That was brave and fabulous. We insisted entire societies must be restructured to accommodate the preferences of fractions of a percent of the population, and if you questioned the pace or method, you were a bigot, evil or fascist.

We pursued reckonings for the crimes of Western civilisation—slavery, church child abuse, colonisation—and those reckonings were important. But we stopped there. Only the West was held to account. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a horror, yes. But it was the British who ended it. Meanwhile, the Islamic slave trade ran for centuries, and pockets of it persist to this day. Where is that reckoning? Who is demanding it?

We created a world in which nobody is allowed to simply settle and build a life. Indigenous people must perpetually identify as victims. Everyone of European descent must perpetually identify as perpetrators—for events centuries old. Yet nobody seems interested in acknowledging that white Westerners were not history’s only colonisers, or that colonisation, in softer forms, is happening right now.

Mass immigration into Western countries is a form of soft colonisation. That sentence will make some of you furious. But consider: why is it only European and other Western nations being pressured to “diversify”? No one bags Nigeria or China or Latin American nations for a lack of diversity and not promoting the idea of multiculturalism. Only white-majority countries are told their cultures must be diluted or they are racist. Wanting to preserve the native peoples and cultures of European nations is not xenophobia. It is a right that in the 21st century we wish to grant to every non-white culture on earth. But apparently it’s a sin to want it or expect it for ourselves.

And when it comes specifically to Islamic immigration into Western democracies, there are countless videos—not propaganda, but Muslims speaking plainly—describing a vision in which the world becomes Islamic, in which Sharia law replaces secular governance, in which their growing numbers translate to growing power. These are not conspiracy theories. These are now publicly stated intentions. History tells us what happens when these numbers reach a tipping point: the freedoms we take for granted begin to erode. Some know this because they are ex-Muslims. Some know because they are Westerners who converted to Islam and found it wanting. Frightening, even. Expressing that concern is not Islamophobia. It is pattern recognition.

Being concerned about how trans medicine affects young people is not transphobic. Asking how trans ideology impacts women’s rights and the gay and lesbian community is not bigotry. These are legitimate questions that deserve honest answers, not silencing.

So much of what I had taken for granted on the left collapsed under the lightest touch of common sense. I had to accept something I’d been resisting for years: the world will never be perfect. It won’t. And if you spend your one and only life railing against the world because it refuses to become your utopia, you will lose. Worse, you will drag the rest of us down with you. Constantly tearing society apart because it cannot meet an impossible standard doesn’t make you righteous. It makes you destructive.

What I did instead was start asking a different question: ‘What’s the optimal way to improve this?’ Not achieve perfection (#impossible). Not burn it all down and rebuild a utopia from the ashes (also impossible). Just better. What specifically needs improving, and how do we do it? That shift—from ideological fury to practical problem-solving—changed everything for me.

So those are the things that drove me away from the left. Not toward the right, but away from what the left has become: reactive, unquestioning, hostile to dissent, and increasingly detached from reality. I wasn’t changed by the right, I was changed by the left. My left.

If the West is going to survive—and I think it’s that serious at this point—the left has to start thinking again. Questioning again. Demanding evidence instead of demanding obedience.

So I’m asking you—begging you, really—to think. Consider that an alternate view might not be hatred. Consider that you may have been wrong about some things. I was. That’s not a confession of weakness. Admitting a mistake and choosing a different path is braver than marching further down a road you already suspect is leading somewhere dark.

You are not a bad person for questioning. You are not a traitor for thinking. The people who tell you otherwise are not protecting you. They are controlling you.

That’s all I ask. Just think. Please