[wilsocr88]

This strikes me as an alarming defense of the most destructive parts of our current epoch. The culture in question usually does not take the form of speaking truth to power. More often it is unreasonable people destroying the lives and livelihoods of mostly innocent people because of an abstract and usually imaginary offense. A person can be smart but groups of people are not.

Call-out culture is bullying disguised as benevolence and empathy. It is doing more lasting damage than any of us realize. The bullies from school now believe themselves to be the virtuous ones BECAUSE of the bullying they engage in. And the only way to be moral in their eyes is to hold onto power and exercise the maximum amount of control possible over others.

[andrepd]

Why do you think that people being uninvited from speaking at universities is "one of the most destructive parts of our current epoch"?

[wilsocr88]

Partially, but that's a very low-res version of what I mean. Drilling a resentment-based ideology into the minds of young people, and inundating universities with it, is the most destructive part of our epoch.

Universities are either dead or dying, for all intents and purposes, and they are filled to the brim with extremist-leftist-manufacturing departments that teach students that the entire structure upon which they now stand is immoral, evil, hateful, bigoted, etc.

Look at any grievance studies department's website, and maybe some sociology departments too. Chances are they'll say something about "dismantling systems of oppression". What's a system of oppression? Oh, that's all of Western Civilization.

We're allowing the teaching of literal destructive revolution ("overthrow the state and seize the means of production," basically) in universities. That is NOT sustainable.

[andrepd]

You're overreaching something fierce. Universities dead or dying? Filled to the brim with extremists hell-bent on destroying Western civilization?

People having different opinions than yourself doesn't mean civilization is about to collapse.

EDIT: Perhaps this is your idea of a university nowadays (enable subtitles): https://youtu.be/watch?v=7C_qJnd5fT8

[wilsocr88]

Am I overreaching, or am I trying to warn the West against allowing resentment-based ideology to take hold?

Read about Soviet dekulakization, and ponder how that could've happened. It started with "this whole society, the shoulders of which I now stand upon, is wholly bad and corrupt, irreversably, nose-to-tail, and we must destroy it all (so that nobody else can gain the influence over society that I have achieved)."

When you believe that the only moral position is for "your side" to hold power, and to use it against the other side, you'll justify any atrocity.

[andrepd]

It's a great example that you brought up, dekulakization, because it illustrates exactly my point. Pre-Soviet Russia was indeed an atrociously brutal an unjust place to live. Is it any wonder that resentment and revolt ensued, and that people exploded in a murderous rage? Not good, but very understandable. Maybe if the Czars had actually worked towards a more equal society instead of crushing millions of peasants under their yoke there wouldn't have been a dramatic reaction to the state of affairs, don't you think?

Likewise today: improvements in quality of life have stagnated in huge parts of the world, wages are falling in real terms, inequality rises to Gilded Age levels, democracy is backsliding. Is it any wonder there is "resentment"?