Cynical Theories Quotes

But this principle is based on a more profound philosophical idea—that no matter how certain you may be that you are in possession of the truth, you have no right to impose your belief on society as a whole.

If we train young people to read insult, hostility, and prejudice into every interaction, they may increasingly see the world as hostile to them and fail to thrive in it.

Activism and education exist in a fundamental tension—activism presumes to know the truth with enough certainty to act upon it, while education is conscious that it does not know for certain what is true and therefore seeks to learn more.

Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism.

No, that’s your ideological belief, and I don’t have to go along with it.

The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion.

It is bad psychology to tell people who do not believe that they are racist—who may even actively despise racism—that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racist—and then ask them to help you. It is even less helpful to tell them that even their own good intentions are proof of their latent racism. Worst of all is to set up double-binds, like telling them that if they notice race it is because they are racist, but if they don’t notice race it’s because their privilege affords them the luxury of not noticing race, which is racist.

But if all maximizing models are really arguing is that “people will always seek to maximize something,” then they obviously can’t predict anything, which means employing them can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called “cynicism.” Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it “science.

There is a problem that begins in our universities, and it comes down to Social Justice. The most immediate aspect of the problem is that Social Justice scholarship gets passed down to students, who then go out into the world. This effect is strongest within Social Justice fields, which teach students to be skeptical of science, reason, and evidence; to regard knowledge as tied to identity; to read oppressive power dynamics into every interaction; to politicize every facet of life; and to apply ethical principles unevenly, in accordance with identity.

by focusing so intently on race and by objecting to “color blindness”—the refusal to attach social significance to race—critical race Theory threatens to undo the social taboo against evaluating people by their race.

Such an obsessive focus on race, combined with a critique of liberal universalism and individuality (which Theory sees as largely a myth that benefits white people and perpetuates the status quo), is not likely to end well—neither for minority groups nor for social cohesion more broadly. Such attitudes tear at the fabric that holds contemporary societies together.

Critical race Theory’s hallmark paranoid mind-set, which assumes racism is everywhere, always, just waiting to be found, is extremely unlikely to be helpful or healthy for those who adopt it. Always believing that one will be or is being discriminated against, and trying to find out how, is unlikely to improve the outcome of any situation. It can also be self-defeating. In The Coddling of the American Mind, attorney Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describe this process as a kind of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which makes its participants less mentally and emotionally healthy than before.60 The main purpose of CBT is to train oneself not to catastrophize and interpret every situation in the most negative light, and the goal is to develop a more positive and resilient attitude towards the world, so that one can engage with it as fully as possible.

Then your wife will.  You don’t seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. Jack.  [Sententiously.]  That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. Algernon.  Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time. Jack.  For heaven’s sake, don’t try to be cynical.  It’s perfectly easy to be cynical. Algernon.  My dear fellow, it isn’t easy to be anything nowadays.  There’s such a lot of beastly competition about. 

In postmodern thought, language is believed to have enormous power to control society and how we think and thus is inherently dangerous.

Nowadays, however, economic class is barely mentioned unless combined “intersectionally” with some other form of marginalized identity. It is therefore no surprise that many working-class and poor people often feel profoundly alienated from today’s left—Marxists rightly identify it as having adopted very bourgeois concerns. It is profoundly ironic that a movement claiming to problematize all sources of privilege is led by highly educated, upper-middle-class scholars and activists who are so oblivious to their status as privileged members of society.

We see radical relativism in the form of double standards, such as assertions that only men can be sexist and only white people can be racist, and in the whole rejection of consistent principles of nondiscrimination.

It is also evident in their [Social Justice] assertions that society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.

resistance often lacks an overt political project and frequently reflects social practices that are informal, disorganised, apolitical, and atheoretical in nature. In some instances it can reduce itself to an unreflective and defeatist refusal to acquiesce to different forms of domination; on some occasions it can be seen as a cynical, arrogant, or even naive rejection of oppressive forms of moral and political regulation

GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we're all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him. Maybe he's sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, 'Shit, I didn't even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly here was this big band and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs...

In theory man is put at the center of everything but in practice he is barely allowed to sit on the sidelines

We hinder the cause of human rights if we chastise anyone who points out humanitarian abuses as imperialist or racist.

In practice, deconstructive approaches to language therefore look very much like nitpicking at words in order to deliberately miss the point.

I wish that Cecil had not turned so cynical about women. He has, for the second time, quite altered. Why will men have theories about women? I haven’t any about men.

Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.

Cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors.

Equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal.

The “increasingly sophisticated” new Theory is actually overly simplistic—everything is problematic somehow, because of power dynamics based on identity.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

Liberalism and science are systems—not just neat little theories—because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain, by design. This is a reasoned—not a radical—skepticism. They put the empirical first, rather than the theoretical. They are self-correcting. Liberal systems like regulated capitalism, republican democracy, and science resolve conflicts by subjecting human economies, societies, and knowledge-production to evolutionary processes that—over time, and with persistent effort—produce reliable societies, governments, and provisionally true statements about the world. The proof is that almost everything has changed over the last five hundred years, especially in the West. As Theory points out, that progress has sometimes been problematic, but it has still been progress. Things are better than they were five hundred years ago, for most people most of the time, and this is undeniable.

There's folly in her stride that's the rumor justified by lies I've seen her up close beneath the sheets and sometime during the summer she was mine for a few sweet months in the fall and parts of December ((( To get to the heart of this unsolvable equation, one must first become familiar with the physical, emotional, and immaterial makeup as to what constitutes both war and peace. ))) I found her looking through a window the same window I'd been looking through She smiled and her eyes never faltered this folly was a crime ((( The very essence of war is destructive, though throughout the years utilized as a means of creating peace, such an equation might seem paradoxical to the untrained eye. Some might say using evil to defeat evil is counterproductive, and gives more meaning to the word “futile”. Others, like Edmund Burke, would argue that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.” ))) She had an identity I could identify with something my fingertips could caress in the night ((( There is such a limitless landscape within the mind, no two minds are alike. And this is why as a race we will forever be at war with each other. What constitutes peace is in the mind of the beholder. ))) Have you heard the argument? This displacement of men and women and women and men the minds we all have the beliefs we all share Slipping inside of us thoughts and religions and bodies all bare ((( “Without darkness, there can be no light,” he once said. To demonstrate this theory, during one of his seminars he held a piece of white chalk and drew a line down the center of a blackboard. Explaining that without the blackness of the board, the white line would be invisible. ))) When she left she kissed with eyes open I knew this because I'd done the same Sometimes we saw eye to eye like that Very briefly, she considered an apotheosis a synthesis a rendering of her folly into solidarity ((( To believe that a world-wide lay down of arms is possible, however, is the delusion of the pacifist; the dream of the optimist; and the joke of the realist. Diplomacy only goes so far, and in spite of our efforts to fight with words- there are times when drawing swords of a very different nature are surely called for. ))) Experiencing the subsequent sunrise inhaling and drinking breaking mirrors and regurgitating just to start again all in all I was just another gash in the bark ((( Plato once said: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Perhaps the death of us all is called for in this time of emotional desperation. War is a product of the mind; only with the death of such will come the end of the bloodshed. Though this may be a fairly realistic view of such an issue, perhaps there is an optimistic outlook on the horizon. Not every sword is double edged, but every coin is double sided. ))) Leaving town and throwing shit out the window drinking boroughs and borrowing spare change I glimpsed the rear view mirror stole a glimpse really I've believed in looking back for a while it helps to have one last view a reminder in case one ever decides to rebel in the event the self regresses and makes the declaration of devastation once more ((( Thus, if we wish to eliminate the threat of war today- complete human annihilation may be called for. )))

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

postmodern approaches to knowledge inflate a small, almost banal kernel of truth—that we are limited in our ability to know and must express knowledge through language, concepts and categories—to insist that all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture.

Throughout even the most recent applications of Theory, then, we see radical skepticism that knowledge can be objectively, universally, or neutrally true. This leads to a belief that rigor and completeness come not from good methodology, skepticism, and evidence, but from identity-based “standpoints” and multiple “ways of knowing.”33 That such an approach doesn’t tend to work is considered unimportant because it is deemed to be more just. That is, this belief proceeds from an ought that is not necessarily concerned about what is.

Many people (especially academics) remain unaware of the depth of this problem, which presents as ideological closedness, unwillingness to accept any disagreement, and an authoritarian will to enforce a Social Justice conception of society and moral imperative on others.35

If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization.

People who have adopted this view may be physically close by, but, intellectually, they are a world away, which makes understanding them and communicating with them incredibly difficult. They are obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationships between them. They interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact—even when they aren’t obvious or real. This is a worldview that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others. To an outsider, this culture feels as though it originated on another planet, whose inhabitants have no knowledge of sexually reproducing species, and who interpret all our human sociological interactions in the most cynical way possible.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.

Generational Patterns Since the beginning of recorded time, certain writers and thinkers have intuited a pattern to human history. It was perhaps the great fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun who first formulated this idea into the theory that history seems to move in four acts, corresponding to four generations. The first generation is that of the revolutionaries who make a radical break with the past, establishing new values but also creating some chaos in the struggle to do so. Often in this generation there are some great leaders or prophets who influence the direction of the revolution and leave their stamp on it. Then along comes a second generation that craves some order. They are still feeling the heat of the revolution itself, having lived through it at a very early age, but they want to stabilize the world, establish some conventions and dogma. Those of the third generation—having little direct connection to the founders of the revolution—feel less passionate about it. They are pragmatists. They want to solve problems and make life as comfortable as possible. They are not so interested in ideas but rather in building things. In the process, they tend to drain out the spirit of the original revolution. Material concerns predominate, and people can become quite individualistic. Along comes the fourth generation, which feels that society has lost its vitality, but they are not sure what should replace it. They begin to question the values they have inherited, some becoming quite cynical. Nobody knows what to believe in anymore. A crisis of sorts emerges. Then comes the revolutionary generation, which, unified around some new belief, finally tears down the old order, and the cycle continues. This revolution can be extreme and violent, or it can be less intense, with simply the emergence of new and different values.

Rare are the leaders of organizations who will tell you that their people don’t matter. However, there is a big difference between understanding the value of the people inside an organization and actually making decisions that consider their needs. It’s like saying, “my kids are my priority,” but always putting work first. What kind of family dynamic or relationship with our kids do we think results? The same is true in business. When we say our people matter but we don’t actually care for them, it can shatter trust and create a culture of paranoia, cynicism, and self-interest. This is not some highfalutin management theory—it’s biology. We are social animals and we respond to the environments we’re in. Good people put in a bad environment are capable of doing bad things. People who may have done bad things, put in a good environment, are capable of becoming remarkable, trustworthy, and valuable members of an organization. This is why leadership matters. Leaders set the culture. Leaders are responsible for overseeing the environment in which people are asked to work . . . and the people will act in accordance with that culture.

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life — snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. — had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this.

There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.

It must be noted that the general philosophical position that we call "liberalism" is compatible with a wide range of positions on political, economic, and social questions, including both what Americans call "liberal" (and Europeans call "social;-democratic") and moderate forms of what people in all countries call "conservative". This Philosophical liberalism is opposed to authoritarian movements of all types, be they left-wing or right-wing, secular or theocratic.

At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles. The seven levels are labelled as follows: (1) Autistic (2) Animistic (3) Awakening and fright (4) Aggressive power seeking (5) Sociocentric (6) Aggressive individualistic (7) Pacifist individualistic. The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose. Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish. Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management. Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).

If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

Critical Social Justice texts—which form a kind of Gospel of Critical Social Justice—express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress without even a single person with racist or sexist intentions, sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.

Finally, the attempt to make all analyses of gender intersectional, to focus relentlessly on a simplistic concept of societal privilege, rooted overwhelmingly in identity (and not in economics) and to incorporate elements of critical race Theory and queer Theory, results in a highly muddled, Theoretical, and abstract analysis that makes it difficult—if not impossible—to reach any conclusions other than the oversimplification that straight white men are unfairly privileged and need to repent and get out of everyone else’s way.

Economics [...] maximizing models are really arguing is that “people will always seek to maximize something,” [...] All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called “cynicism.” Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it “science.

There’s a brutal irony to the fact that many of the features of our built world that are billed as keeping us safe also make us feel unsafe. If one wanted to take a cynical point of view, one might posit that, at times, this is an intended outcome. And that certain individuals or institutions may want us to feel unsafe for their own selfish ends. But why would anybody actively want to make us feel unsafe? The Polyvagal Theory offers a simple explanation: When we feel unsafe, our bodies shut down our ability to critically think or learn in favor of a need for immediate survival.

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

I used to think optimists were naive and pessimists were smart. Pessimism seemed like an essential feature of a scientist: the basis of science is to challenge every result, to pick theories apart to see which one stands up. I thought cynicism was one of its founding principals. Maybe there is some truth in that. But science is inherently optimistic too. How else would we describe the willingness to try experiments over and over, often with slim odds of success? Scientific progress can be frustratingly slow: the best minds can dedicate their entire lives to a single question and come away with nothing. They do so with the hope that a breakthrough is around the corner. The odds drop to zero if they give up.

As the idea of culture has migrated from anthropology to organizational theory, so it has become highly instrumentalized and reified. It is another example of the hubris of managerialism, which claims to be able to analyse, predict and control the intangible, and with the result that it can bring about the opposite of what it intends. In other words, with the intention of ensuring that employees are more committed to their work and are more productive, repeated culture change programmes can have the effect of inducing cynicism or resistance in staff (McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). With an insistence that staff align their values with those of the organization, what may result is gaming strategies on the part of staff to cover over what they really think and feel (Jackall, 2009).

Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about. “Yes,” he agreed with

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts—forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice—that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist or sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms), sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized. That is the reification of the postmodern political principle. This approach distrusts categories and boundaries and seeks to blur them, and is intensely focused on language as a means of creating and perpetuating power imbalances. It exhibits a deep cultural relativism, focuses on marginalized groups, and has little time for universal principles or individual intellectual diversity.

We, everyday citizens who are increasingly befuddled about what has happened to society and how it happened so quickly, regularly hear demands to “decolonize” everything from academic curricula to hairstyles to mathematics. We hear laments about cultural appropriation at the same time we hear complaints about the lack of representation of certain identity groups in the arts. We hear that only white people can be racist and that they always are so, by default. Politicians, actors, and artists pride themselves on being intersectional. Companies flaunt their respect for “diversity,” while making it clear that they are only interested in a superficial diversity of identity (not of opinions). Organizations and activist groups of all kinds announce that they are inclusive, but only of people who agree with them. American engineers have been fired from corporations like Google for saying that gender differences exist,43 and British comedians have been sacked by the BBC for repeating jokes that could be construed as racist by Americans.

The point is, you must show them how to live and not just teach them theory while contradicting yourself in practice, because cynicism, hypocrisy and insincerity are adult character traits that children have no way of appreciating. Children learn by imitating our behavior, and if it contradicts our thinking then at best they learn to simply ignore what we say and at worst become troubled by it. Suppose you teach them about the environmental devastation they will witness during their lives, and explain to them that it is being caused by burning fossil fuels, and that during their lives fossil fuels will disappear altogether with nothing to replace them … while continuing to burn hundreds of gallons of heating oil to heat an oversized house, driving all over creation in an oversized vehicle, jetting off to the tropics on brief winter holidays and going on shopping sprees to buy on a whim things you don’t need. Then what you would be teaching them is that you can’t be trusted. And this doesn’t help them; instead, it damages their spirit. It is better to have an ignorant fool for a parent than a well-informed hypocrite because being a fool is not a moral failing. Fools deserve pity and mercy; hypocrites—neither.

Some studies have already shown that diversity courses, in which members of dominant groups are told that racism is everywhere and that they themselves perpetuate it, have resulted in increased hostility towards marginalized groups.65 It is bad psychology to tell people who do not believe that they are racist—who may even actively despise racism—that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racist—and then ask them to help you. It is even less helpful to tell them that even their own good intentions are proof of their latent racism. Worst of all is to set up double-binds, like telling them that if they notice race it is because they are racist, but if they don’t notice race it’s because their privilege affords them the luxury of not noticing race, which is racist. Finally, by focusing so intently on race and by objecting to “color blindness”—the refusal to attach social significance to race—critical race Theory threatens to undo the social taboo against evaluating people by their race. Such an obsessive focus on race, combined with a critique of liberal universalism and individuality (which Theory sees as largely a myth that benefits white people and perpetuates the status quo), is not likely to end well—neither for minority groups nor for social cohesion more broadly. Such attitudes tear at the fabric that holds contemporary societies together.

Are there American variations of Solomon Slepak, those rendered so rigid by ideas that all reason fails them? Prudence, a cautious awareness of nuances, of complexities, of consequences, a perception of the unity of the American experience, and a saving sense of irony and humor—pervasive in the Founding Fathers and lacking in contemporary ideologues. Can we learn something from these chronicles about iron righteousness and rigid doctrine, about the stony heart, the sealed mind, the capricious use of law, and the tragedies that often result when theories are not adjusted to realities? Do the chronicles seem to reveal a glaring and almost obvious truth: the larger the nation, the more tumultuous its demise? Are we approaching the finale now to the bright possibilities once inherent in this land? Is that old America forever gone? Indeed, did it ever exist? Were we seduced as schoolchildren into a vision of a land green and golden from sea to shining sea, a land as illusory for many Americans as the Motherland of Solomon Slepak was for Volodya and Masha? Perhaps the more sensible question is not about what we once were but about what we intend ourselves to be one day. Things are happening to us today that we don’t seem able to explain. Can we enter the uncertain future without the corrosive cynicism, the clutching greed, the divisive self-interests—the beasts that destroyed the world of Solomon Slepak and rendered it uninhabitable to his family?

I want to share three warnings. First, to stand up for human goodness is to stand up against a hydra–that mythological seven-headed monster that grew back two heads for every one Hercules lopped off. Cynicism works a lot like that. For every misanthropic argument you deflate, two more will pop up in its place. Veneer theory is a zombie that just keeps coming back. Second, to stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we’re not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employees has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians. Third, to stand up for human goodness means weathering a storm of ridicule. You’ll be called naive. Obtuse. Any weakness in your reasoning will be mercilessly exposed. Basically, it’s easier to be a cynic. The pessimistic professor who preaches the doctrine of human depravity can predict anything he wants, for if his prophecies don’t come true now, just wait: failure could always be just around the corner, or else his voice of reason has prevented the worst. The prophets of doom sound oh so profound, whatever they spout. The reasons for hope, by contrast, are always provisional. Nothing has gone wrong–yet. You haven’t been cheated–yet. An idealist can be right her whole life and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic and impossible today can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. The time has come for a new view of human nature. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

THEORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING After the war, Einstein, the towering figure who had unlocked the cosmic relationship between matter and energy and discovered the secret of the stars, found himself lonely and isolated. Almost all recent progress in physics had been made in the quantum theory, not in the unified field theory. In fact, Einstein lamented that he was viewed as a relic by other physicists. His goal of finding a unified field theory was considered too difficult by most physicists, especially when the nuclear force remained a total mystery. Einstein commented, “I am generally regarded as a sort of petrified object, rendered blind and deaf by the years. I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds fairly well with my temperament.” In the past, there was a fundamental principle that guided Einstein’s work. In special relativity, his theory had to remain the same when interchanging X, Y, Z, and T. In general relativity, it was the equivalence principle, that gravity and acceleration could be equivalent. But in his quest for the theory of everything, Einstein failed to find a guiding principle. Even today, when I go through Einstein’s notebooks and calculations, I find plenty of ideas but no guiding principle. He himself realized that this would doom his ultimate quest. He once observed sadly, “I believe that in order to make real progress, one must again ferret out some general principle from nature.” He never found it. Einstein once bravely said that “God is subtle, but not malicious.” In his later years, he became frustrated and concluded, “I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.” Although the quest for a unified field theory was ignored by most physicists, every now and then, someone would try their hand at creating one. Even Erwin Schrödinger tried. He modestly wrote to Einstein, “You are on a lion hunt, while I am speaking of rabbits.” Nevertheless, in 1947 Schrödinger held a press conference to announce his version of the unified field theory. Even Ireland’s prime minister, Éamon de Valera, showed up. Schrödinger said, “I believe I am right. I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong.” Einstein would later tell Schrödinger that he had also considered this theory and found it to be incorrect. In addition, his theory could not explain the nature of electrons and the atom. Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli caught the bug too, and proposed their version of a unified field theory. Pauli was the biggest cynic in physics and a critic of Einstein’s program. He was famous for saying, “What God has torn asunder, let no man put together”—that is, if God had torn apart the forces in the universe, then who were we to try to put them back together?

People needed proof that Utopia was nothing more than a theory, an illusion read in fictional stories.

It must be admitted that sexual intercourse in marriage is not sinful, provided the intention is to beget offspring. Yet even in marriage a virtuous man will wish that he could manage without lust. Even in marriage, as the desire for privacy shows, people are ashamed of sexual intercourse, because 'this lawful act of nature is (from our first parents) accompanied with our penal shame'. The cynics thought that one should be without shame, and Diogenes would have none of it, wishing to be in all things like a dog; yet even he, after one attempt, abandoned, in practice, this extreme of shamelessness. What is shameful about lust is its independence of the will. Adam and Eve, before the fall, could have had sexual intercourse without lust, though in fact they did not. Handicraftsmen, in the pursuit of their trade, move their hands without lust; similarly Adam, if only he had kept away from the apple-tree, could have performed the business of sex without the emotions that it now demands. The sexual members, like the rest of the body, would have obeyed the will. The need of lust in sexual intercourse is a punishment for Adam's sin, but for which sex might have been divorced from pleasure. Omitting some physiological details which the translator has very properly left in the decent obscurity of the original Latin, the above is St Augustine's theory as regards sex. It is evident from the above that what makes the ascetic dislike sex is its independence of the will. Virtue, it is held, demands a complete control of the will over the body, but such control does not suffice to make the sexual act possible. The sexual act, therefore, seems inconsistent with a perfectly virtuous life.

Adam's sin would have brought all mankind to eternal death (i.e. damnation), but that God's grace has freed many from it. Sin came from the soul, not from the flesh. Platonists and Manichæans both err in ascribing sin to the nature of the flesh, though Platonists are not so bad as Manichæans. The punishment of all mankind for Adam's sin was just; for, as a result of this sin, man, that might have been spiritual in body, became carnal in mind.10 This leads to a long and minute discussion of sexual lust, to which we are subject as part of our punishment for Adam's sin. This discussion is very important as revealing the psychology of asceticism; we must therefore go into it, although the Saint confesses that the theme is immodest. The theory advanced is as follows. It must be admitted that sexual intercourse in marriage is not sinful, provided the intention is to beget offspring. Yet even in marriage a virtuous man will wish that he could manage without lust. Even in marriage, as the desire for privacy shows, people are ashamed of sexual intercourse, because 'this lawful act of nature is (from our first parents) accompanied with our penal shame'. The cynics thought that one should be without shame, and Diogenes would have none of it, wishing to be in all things like a dog; yet even he, after one attempt, abandoned, in practice, this extreme of shamelessness. What is shameful about lust is its independence of the will. Adam and Eve, before the fall, could have had sexual intercourse without lust, though in fact they did not. Handicraftsmen, in the pursuit of their trade, move their hands without lust; similarly Adam, if only he had kept away from the apple-tree, could have performed the business of sex without the emotions that it now demands. The sexual members, like the rest of the body, would have obeyed the will. The need of lust in sexual intercourse is a punishment for Adam's sin, but for which sex might have been divorced from pleasure. Omitting some physiological details which the translator has very properly left in the decent obscurity of the original Latin, the above is St Augustine's theory as regards sex. It is evident from the above that what makes the ascetic dislike sex is its independence of the will. Virtue, it is held, demands a complete control of the will over the body, but such control does not suffice to make the sexual act possible. The sexual act, therefore, seems inconsistent with a perfectly virtuous life.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried abut the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.

The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.

We often observe this kind of shift to a more “sophisticated” and nebulous model when people are highly personally and ideologically committed to a theoretical approach that is clearly failing.

It is also functionally impossible, a characteristic that is misinterpreted as extreme complexity.

Liberal systems like regulated capitalism, republican democracy, and science resolve conflicts by subjecting human economies, societies, and knowledge-production to evolutionary processes that—over time, and with persistent effort—produce reliable societies, governments, and provisionally true statements about the world.

Let’s take a broader view for a moment. Visualize a power grid. This is the conception of human society that constitutes the postmodernist worldview. It posits that we are born and positioned by elements of our identity, such that we have different levels of access to power—privilege is like being plugged in to the network—and we learn to perform our position and thus “conduct” the power through ourselves as part of the system, often without ever knowing that the grid is there. This learning is achieved mostly by socialization into “hegemonic” identity roles constructed and accepted by society and is rarely intentional. By performing our roles, we uphold the social and cultural assumptions that grant and deny access to power. Furthermore, access to power has an automatically corrupting influence, which leads us to perform our roles, thus socializing ourselves and others into accepting the inequities of the system, justifying our own access, and rationalizing the exclusion of others. This is all done through discourses—ways we speak about things, including how we represent them in nonverbal media. As this conception of society, which originated in the obscure and complex language of the original postmodernists, has evolved, it has consolidated into a belief system. Thus, we frequently see Theorists state this explanation with the confidence of an objective belief—something that would not have been possible for the first postmodernists.

To be queer allows someone to be simultaneously male, female, or neither, to present as masculine, feminine, neuter, or any mixture of the three, and to adopt any sexuality—and to change any of these identities at any time or to deny that they mean anything in the first place.

All of this comes from activists who have adopted Theory. Their underlying assumption, which is central to Theory, is that bigotry is everywhere, always, hiding just beneath the surface. The job of the Theorist as activist is to scrutinize texts, events, culture, activities, places, spaces, attitudes, mind-sets, phrasing, dress, and every other conceivable cultural artifact for hidden bigotry, then expose it and purge it and its sources from society—or at least access to the means of cultural production.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

But Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are, in fact, unreliable. The postmodernists got that right. What they got disastrously wrong is mistaking effective and adaptive systems for metanarratives. Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives, but liberalism and science are not.

Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachment to methods it calls “critical.” This is no surprise since critical methods have always been explicitly and by design critical of liberalism as a means of social, political, and economic organization.

the illiberal nature of critical race Theory is among the strongest and most enduring criticisms against it.

Liberalism has firm tenets of individual liberty, equality of opportunity, free and open inquiry, free speech and debate, and humanism, and, although these are expansive ideals, they are also strong and consistent. This is why they have slowly but surely won out over the last five hundred years and produced the freest, most equal societies, with the least suffering and oppression, the world has ever known.

This is a good way to understand liberalism—as opposition to illiberalism. While liberalism might be hard to define, illiberalism is easily recognizable in totalitarian, hierarchical, censorious, feudal, patriarchal, colonial, or theocratic states and in people who want to bring about such states, limit freedoms, or justify inequalities. Liberals oppose this, not because they want to establish their own authoritarian regime, but because they are opposed to all such regimes. Therefore, liberalism is expansive, but it is not weak.

Furthermore, liberalism respects people both as individuals and as members of the human race. It does not respect identity groups or collectives per se: it values the individual and the universal; the human and humanity.

This is pluralism, but not relativism;

When Gopnik argues that liberalism is the rational preference, it is hard to disagree with him given the evidence that liberal methods work and—despite their incremental approach—they work remarkably fast. It is no coincidence that liberalism, rationalism, and empiricism go together under the banner of the “Enlightenment” or that, together, they have decreased human suffering so much through technological improvements, effective infrastructure, and medical and other scientific advances, as well as by upholding human rights.

These he summarizes as “no one gets the final say” and “no one has personal authority,”18 respectively, arguing that “these peculiar rules are two of the most successful social conventions the human species has ever evolved.

The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.”26

The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.”22 The fundamentalist principle is the bedrock of theocracies and secular totalitarian regimes; but we also see this fundamentalist impulse in the increasingly authoritarian nature of Social Justice scholarship and activism and in its attempts to shut down criticism. This way lies totalitarianism, if fundamentalists can get themselves in power.

Unlike the other four, this last principle cannot be accepted by postmodern Social Justice thought. Theory insists that it isn’t acceptable to criticize some ideas. It also holds that whether a person is right or wrong cannot be established by evaluating the soundness of her ideas, but is dependent on her identity (“positionality”) and willingness to employ the right discourses. The “checking of each by each” is effectively impossible in Theory, as people from different identity groups can never fully understand each other. This is the essence of the postmodern knowledge principle. It is clear that postmodernism contains a rejection of liberalism at its very core. If

Unlike the other four, this last principle cannot be accepted by postmodern Social Justice thought. Theory insists that it isn’t acceptable to criticize some ideas. It also holds that whether a person is right or wrong cannot be established by evaluating the soundness of her ideas, but is dependent on her identity (“positionality”) and willingness to employ the right discourses. The “checking of each by each” is effectively impossible in Theory, as people from different identity groups can never fully understand each other. This is the essence of the postmodern knowledge principle. It is clear that postmodernism contains a rejection of liberalism at its very core. If we reject the liberal approach to generating knowledge, we are only left with illiberal alternatives, and, as these gain in moral status and their underlying assumptions are increasingly adopted, they become ever more fundamentalist. This is the essence of the postmodern political principle.

People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they’re free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.

Social Justice approaches that focus solely on group identity and neglect individuality and universality are doomed to fail for the simple reasons that people are individuals and share a common human nature. Identity politics is not a path to empowerment. There is no “unique voice of color” or of women or of trans, gay, disabled, or fat people. Even a relatively small random sample drawn from any of those groups will reveal widely varying individual views. This does not negate the likelihood that prejudice still exists and that the people who experience it are the most likely to be aware of it. We still need to “listen and consider,” but we need to listen to and consider a variety of experiences and views from members of oppressed groups, not just a single one that has been arbitrarily labeled “authentic” because it represents the view essentialized by Theory.

What is, perhaps, most frustrating about Theory is that it tends to get literally every issue it’s primarily concerned with backwards, largely due to its rejection of human nature, science, and liberalism. It allots social significance to racial categories, which inflames racism. It attempts to depict categories of sex, gender, and sexuality as mere social constructions, which undermines the fact that people often accept sexual minorities because they recognize that sexual expression varies naturally. It depicts the East as the opposite of the West and thus perpetuates the very Orientalism it seeks to unmake. Theory is highly likely to spontaneously combust at some point, but it could cause a lot of human suffering and societal damage before it does. The institutions it attacks before it collapses will lose much of their prestige and influence, and they may not survive.

Secondly, the critical approach to Social Justice encourages tribalism and hostility by its aggressively divisive approach. Whereas the Civil Rights Movements worked so well because they used a universalist approach—everybody should have equal rights—that appealed to human intuitions of fairness and empathy, Social Justice uses a simplistic identity politics approach which ascribes collective blame to dominant groups—white people are racist, men are sexist, and straight people are homophobic. This explicitly goes against the established liberal value of not judging people by their race, gender, or sexuality, and it is incredibly naive to expect it not to produce a counter-revival of old right-wing identity politics. Arguments that it is acceptable to be prejudiced against white people, men, straight, or cisgender people because of historical power imbalances do not work well with human intuitions of reciprocity.

this means that you can hold whatever moral beliefs you want and require people to follow them (within legal bounds) within a voluntary community, whose members adopt those beliefs as matters of private conscience, but you cannot enforce them on outsiders. Believe what you will, but, in exchange, you must allow others to believe what they will—or won’t, as the case may be.

This is accompanied by the inalienable right to reject the moral injunctions and prescriptions of any particular ideology without blame. In a secular society, for example, no one is legally or morally compelled to feel guilty for rejecting the tenets of any faith, including those of the majority religion. That is up to each individual, and no ideological or moral group can decide for that person. No one is subject to the oughts of any particular moral group, no matter how strong the conviction of its members.

the perfect is the enemy of the good

It is simply astonishing that over the same twenty year period (1960–1980) during which women gained access to contraception and equal pay for equal work, racial and sexual discrimination in employment and other areas became illegal, and homosexuality was decriminalized, the postmodernists emerged and declared that it was time to stop believing in liberalism, science, reason, and the myth of progress.

Despite the relatively minor cultural differences between different countries and sects, we all share a single human culture, grounded in a universal human nature.

We must object to any requirement of an orthodox Social Justice statement of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or mandatory diversity or equity training, just as we would object to public institutions that required a statement of Christian or Muslim belief or attendance of church or mosque.

Critical race Theory and intersectionality are centrally concerned with ending racism, through the unlikely means of making everyone more aware of race at all times and places.

The “increasingly sophisticated” new Theory is actually overly simplistic—everything is problematic somehow, because of power dynamics based on identity. It is also functionally impossible, a characteristic that is misinterpreted as extreme complexity. The needle Collins expects (white) feminists to thread involves including—but not appropriating—the experiences of women of color, providing space for them to be heard, and amplifying their voices—without exploiting them or becoming voyeuristic consumers of their oppression. These kinds of impossible, contradictory, double-binding demands are a persistent feature of applied postmodern Theory

The gradual formation of liberal, secular democracy over the Enlightenment and the Modern periods was characterized by struggles against oppressive forces and the search for freedom. The battle against the hegemony of the Catholic Church was primarily an ethical and political conflict. The French Revolution opposed both church and monarchy. The American Revolution opposed British colonial rule and nonrepresentative government. Throughout these earlier periods, institutions like, first, monarchical rule and slavery, then patriarchy and class systems, and finally enforced heterosexuality, colonialism, and racial segregation were challenged by liberalism—and overcome. Progress occurred fastest of all in the 1960s and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all occurred before postmodernism became influential. Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies—in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress occurred during the preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism.

Ultimately, the Enlightenment that postmodernists rejected is defined by a belief in objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism. They also rejected the belief that the West has experienced significant progress due to the Enlightenment and will continue to do so if it upholds these values.

Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback