David Brooks summarizes it all with his June 25
column, “America is facing 5 epoch crises at once.”
It’s a no brainer that this is maybe the most
dangerous period in the past twenty years.
I wanted to call attention to his characterization of
Social Justice as a “quasi-religion”. It seems history as a struggle between
tribes or groups, some of which are oppressors, and others are oppressed – so you
need a change in power. Viewpoints or content
presentations are not about truth, but about staying in power, so in this view,
individualized speech (like mine) is just violence against oppressed classes that
must be stopped, so that members of these (intersectional) classes can be
better off. Pretty much standard
Marxism.
The end result can be a system where at some point
platforms no longer allow individualized self-publishing but require everyone to
join someone’s tribe.
But this is a very different way of thinking – limiting
people based on which tribe they came from – rather than looking at the social
creditworthiness of their own lives as individuals (“pay your dues”).
On the pandemic itself, we have to wonder why a teenager
understood what would happen as early as before Christmas than the CDC did.
Or why a 23-year-old screenwriter rushed himself to
finish a script on an epidemic in early December based on a dream or insight.
Brooks talks about economic dislocation, which could
affect even stable retired people’s accounts.
Again, when you see smart 20-somethings advocating cryptocurrency you
now pay attention.
We don’t heed the signs of disaster very well.
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