So this showed up in my campus newspaper today

This is one of those things that seems extreme and ridiculous, but which has at least a shadow of a basis in reality.

I wrote a really long essay on this, but I'll try to cut it down for Reddit.

First, suppose that you've built a narrative where a certain group is always wrong and always powerful, and "punching up" by another group is always right. The first group owes the second group a lot.

(One point five, make sure that you always see things in terms of groups. Individuals don't matter; they're defined by their group.)

Second, suppose that you're super invested in equality of outcome. You keep seeing that the Right Group is under-represented in some places (and ignore if it's ever over-represented). In order to redress any inequality of outcome in the one direction, you must give social power and preferential treatment to the Right Group.

Third, realize that there's no end game. There's no clearly-defined goal that says "now it's no longer punching up, because we're equal." No one defined just how much the first group owes the second group, so it can never be done with as long as someone has an incentive to keep asking, or taking, like "my career is based on this" or "I keep getting money from this".

It would be even worse if there was something that someone could point to as evidence that balance hasn't been reached...

Fourth, and perhaps more worrisome, hypothesize -- just for sake of thought experiment -- that equality of outcome in every arena is almost impossible to achieve.

Uh oh.

Even moreso, giving a group social power just doesn't directly translate into equality of outcome in a material sense; you can keep building a narrative about how Group 1 is worse and worse, and Group 2 is better and better, and as long as Group 1 still has more money and connections they will -- as an aggregate -- still be on top. So you keep going, and keep going...

Let's think about the Jews in Olde Europe. A lot of these dynamics weren't in play, but the Narrative certainly was, and so was the Group Guilt. Zechariah there might be okay, but he's still a Jew.

The Jews had a lot of money, but you couldn't just take it from them. Money buys power, and there's a law about that anyway. But hey, they're pretty sneaky, aren't they? I heard a Jew killed old Stephan the other day. Another Jew ruined Pietr with exorbitant interest. Jews killed Christ, didn't they? And what's this about baby blood...

Yeah, these Jews are sounding worse and worse, until one day everyone realizes hey, you actually can just take anything from a Jew. Who's going to defend them? The law? If anyone can even be bothered, they all know what the law will find anyway.

The Jews ended up paying a lot of money to local authorities just so these authorities would tolerate them. Depending on the place, this was irritating to disastrous; but even in the former case, they knew they lived on a knife edge.

That situation is just an illustration. (For example, the Jews were outnumbered, which doesn't help.) Coming back to our supposition, though, aren't there a disturbing number of elements coming together here?

A narrative is being crafted that certain people are just plain bad, and their actions as individuals matter a lot less than the group they belong to. Redemption is undefined, maybe impossible... and a lot of people profit from the dynamic. The driving inequality behind all this is largely unfixable by the methods they're trying to use, but those methods are piling on another type of inequality that can only affect the first type through really, really unhealthy means.

It doesn't seem good.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is a great conspiracy, or that straight white males are in danger of facing mass pogroms. I am saying that I think this is one reason people are so leery of the confluence of factors at play in the social justice movement -- they see that the tactics and results so far are aimed, if largely unintentionally, at creating a kind of permanent underclass than finally achieving equality.

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