The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

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“Heterodoxy”

2024-01-25 / / 0 Comments

You are the mean, the median, the mode. You are average. You are not unique or special for being a man who is sexually attracted to women, someone who cannot see the difference between sex and gender, a white person in Europe or a country settled by Europeans. You may as well brag that you got average scores on standardised tests at school, or that you drive a Toyota or an Opel, that you shop at discount stores, and are neither poor nor rich. That you have a pulse. That you speak a language. That you shit, eat, sleep, and will eventually be six feet under.

In short, you are just like (nearly) everyone else.

Averageness as heterodoxy is nothing but a swindle. It is an Orwellian distortion of what it means to tackle the Big Questions. It is a way for dreary old bores to pretend they’re different by ostracising the truly different. You are nothing more than the primary-school bully who picks on the misfit kids—or you’re one of the misfit kids trying to overcompensate.

The rabid defence of social conformity is not and never will be heterodoxy. It is orthodoxy, and you are afraid of having the existing social order challenged. Call yourself a conservative, call yourself a traditionalist. But don’t call yourself heterodox. There’s nothing strange about fitting in.

 

Scams for the clever and gullible

2024-01-19 / / 0 Comments

This is a bit of a niche topic, but I really hate scammers and eugenicists. Paul Cooijmans, a self-appointed expert in human intelligence from the Netherlands, has built a career of designing “high-range” IQ tests.

He insists that “childhood age-peer scores” are invalid, as are classic ratio IQ tests (for example, a score of 100 means that someone’s “mental age” is the same as their chronological age), and only adult standard deviation tests (using an SD of 15) can be used to rank people.

But this is a scam designed to get people to take his tests. (You can apply these arguments to any of the other absurd high-IQ societies on the internet that sell their own bespoke tests.) Here’s why:

  • IQ tests were originally designed for children. Not because individual differences in adult intelligence are irrelevant (and the relative skill level is usually constant), but these tests are designed to identify kids’ skills in school. That’s what Alfred Binet intended when he created these tests. They were made to help kids, not give people bragging rights. Adult tests are especially useless for identifying one’s learning potential, since they are typically used for clinical purposes, such as identifying whether someone has difficulty with executive functioning or short-term memory. Once you’re grown up, it’s much clearer what you can do. David Wechsler was clear that his scales were clinical tests.
  • Also, modern-day tests like the WAIS do not include high-range scores like this on their adult tests. Remember that he considers adult scores with a standard deviation of 15 as the only acceptable ones. But these tests are typically cut off at 160 and are geared towards the middle of the bell curve (roughly 70 to 130).
  • He calls the Stanford-Binet test a “childhood test.” The Stanford-Binet is an all-ages test. Older versions, such as Form L-M, are also known to be better at identifying both highly intelligent children and those with intellectual disabilities. (Full disclosure: I’ve taken both Stanford-Binet and Wechsler tests.)
  • As far as I know, all modern tests use age bands to rank people. If a 20-year-old takes the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), they will be compared with other 20-year-olds, not 18-year-olds or 40-year-olds. The same goes for the modern Stanford-Binet test and the Kaufman tests, and just about any other test you can find on the market. These are age-peer scores, just for adults rather than schoolchildren.
  • Cooijmans’s devaluing of childhood tests may be an artefact of his sexist views. People like Cooijmans believe that girls can be precocious (rather than intelligent or gifted) and plateau or regress to the mean in mid-childhood or adolescence, but boys take longer to mature, so their scores are valid at a later age. This is bullshit. The kinds of girls who show clear signs of high intelligence at a young age (existential concerns at 7, reading at 18 months, going to university at 10) are unlikely to drop to a 100 or 120 level as they get older.
  • Intellectual disability must be diagnosed before the age of 18. An adult test will not suffice for diagnosis. The same should apply to the right tail of the bell curve. Extremes in intelligence are a developmental phenomenon.
  • He is specifically attacking the older Stanford-Binet tests (specifically form L-M), which were the only mainstream psychometric tests to produce scores above 160, using a special formula that combines a ratio and a deviation score. The standard deviation of the L-M  is 16, rather than the 15 used on modern low-ceilinged tests like the dreaded Wechsler scales. If Stanford-Binet results, typically taken in childhood, are invalid predictors of someone’s intelligence, then they’ll fork over for Cooijmans’s homemade IQ tests. His disparagement of these tests is in his financial best interests. When people make claims like this and sell a competing product, follow the money. You’ll rarely be led astray.
  • Cooijmans’s tests can’t be used to join mainstream high-IQ societies like Mensa. You can’t take them to a neuropsychologist to show your intellectual functioning. You can’t do anything with these tests but brag about them online. They’re an intricate puzzle, not a real IQ test.
  • The WAIS and similar tests will probably bore the hell out of someone who has strong logical and pattern-recognition skills, since the subtests tend to be rather basic and a bit dull. Also, they include a lot of subtests that involve motor, visual and other non-intellectual skills. They are inaccessible for a lot of people.

And here’s where Cooijmans comes in. He says that only tests like the WAIS produce valid scores. These scores cut off most people who are drastically different from the norm. People who desperately want to prove themselves then spend money on Cooijmans’s tests. His business preys on people who want to prove their intellectual bona fides. This is nothing but a scam that preys on the relatively intelligent (but gullible), rather than the average person’s multilevel marketing or anti-cancer bracelets.

 

Russia’s not the only source of anti-queer moral panics

2024-01-03 / / 0 Comments

… as anyone who’s watching US news closely should know. A Florida state rep recently filed a bill that could target LGBTQ+ content as “grooming,” reminding one of Russia’s various “gay propaganda” bills filed over the past ten years or so. This isn’t to let Russia off the hook, of course, but this is a worldwide problem led by coordinated “anti-gender” actors, mostly extreme-right politicians (e.g., Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán) and conservative Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Christian groups, as well as their useful idiots: TERFs and members of centre-right parties like the British Conservatives. The anti-gender movement’s role is to enshrine rigid gender roles by pushing anti-LGBTQ+ policies, banning abortion, and encouraging women to stay home and have children.

According to Sonia Corrêa of CREA, a Global South–centric feminist NGO, the Vatican had a huge hand in establishing the anti-gender movement in the 1990s. Corrêa also goes on to say that the anti-gender movement is a reactionary backlash against the increased position of women and gender minorities in various societies. And in modern-day Europe, the biggest financial supporters of anti-gender political activism are European Catholic groups, US right-wing Christian organisations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Putin regime, and a few Russian oligarchs. The rise of Russian funding seems to be recent, but then again, Russia has redoubled its efforts to destabilise Western countries over the past decade.

TERFs are being taken for a ride by these fundamentalist nutjobs, but I don’t feel sympathy for any movement that is focused on restricting others’ rights. Also, the reactionaries behind the anti-gender movement know damn well what they’re doing. They want to disenfranchise women. It’s less about trans people on their own and more about their obsession with the patriarchy. TERFs’ “sex-based rights” bullshit is a one-way ticket to depriving women of the vote by claiming that it is men’s “sex-based right” to make political decisions and women’s “sex-based right” to be protected from predatory men by being excluded from the public sphere.

It is not just Russia and it will never be just Russia. Patriarchal oppression must be defeated, both there and everywhere else.

Passive-aggressive pastels

2024-01-03 / / 0 Comments

(a rare content warning for this blog: brief mention of child abuse)

A graphic on a purple/pink/blue gradient background that says 'Passive-Aggressive Pastels: You are lovely and valid. Except when you piss me off. Then fuck you.' There are disco ball, heart and star decorations.

I talk a lot about social justice assholes, usually the more obvious ones. After all, I was raised by blatant assholes (well, blatant once the doors were closed). Depraved, abusive, cultish, creepy, incestuous, manipulative, cruel, selfish assholes. We’re talking about fathers who leer at their middle-school children’s bodies—and mothers who go a bit further. We’re talking about the kinds of people who yell for hours on end at their hapless nine-year-old because their bedroom was mess or they struggled with long-multiplication drills, until that nine-year-old dissolves into a puddle of self-abasement and misery.

So if you seem too nice, my instinct is to bolt, since you’re taught that everyone who cares about you is going to give you tough love, even if that “love” is nothing but unvarnished abuse and cruelty. It’s not that I want to be around jerks. I don’t attract them the way I used to. But I prefer nice people with an edge, a tendency towards sarcasm and self-depreciation. The kinds who will satirise what they’ve gone through, rather than sit in an affirmation circle.

Well-meaning wielders of saccharine platitudes

If you seem too earnest and you are over the age of 21, I’m going to wonder whether you’re trying to sell me something, or if you’re gullible enough to have someone else sell you something. Of course, these people probably are earnest, but the focus on affirmation and supposed antidotes to the 24/7 cycle of bad news that I sometimes find online gives off that too-nice, I-can’t-trust-this feeling. Everything I read makes me think of lying in a bath with strawberry candles around the ledges, bath foam skimming off the top (probably from a Lush bath bomb), chill-out music playing on Spotify on your phone. They’ll say you’re valid, that you deserve to be here, that you are loved and welcomed.

They’ll pull out their Sacred Affirmation Tarot Cards, make hazy graphics on Canva with goopy 1970s-revival fonts and soft purple-and-blue gradients (admittedly, I do like that aesthetic every so often), light Our Lady of Queer Revival candles that riff off the Catholic ones, make Instagram posts that lavish praise on all their followers and fans, write confessional posts about how I Am Multiply Marginalised And You Can Too.

Affirmation is all well and good, of course—but the words often ring hollow when you’re reading yet more news stories about how politicians in Texas or Russia want to ban you from existence, or about doctors who think that your kind should be wiped off the planet once they find enough “biomarkers,” or about how the planet’s going to burn if the world’s governments (mostly the US government) don’t get off their goddamn asses and do something. You get “good news” sites with magazine headlines like “What if everything turned out OK?” It’s not going to be OK if you’re just handing out platitudes and cute puppies, which is all you’re doing. (That’s what happened when I googled sites for good news after I was trying to break out of the Russia/Ukraine/GOP doomscrolling habit. And I was hit with high-fructose-corn-syrup glurge instead.) And no amount of affirmation is going to topple Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orbán, or any other authoritarian dipshit from power (or in the case of Trump, keeping him from regaining it).

If you’re my actual friend, I know you mean it when you affirm me. I know it’s real and not just glurge. And because it’s real, I value it. But it doesn’t feel the same when I’m coming across it on a random Instagram feed, tweet (yes, I’m still calling it Twitter because fuck Elon Musk that’s why), or blog post.

What–or who–the hell are passive-aggressive pastels, anyway?

Methodological faults aside, the well-meaning wielders of saccharine platitudes really do want to do the right thing. Those really aren’t the people I’m pissed off at. Not at all. The ones I’m pissed off at are the kinds who are just as unpleasant and obnoxious as their blatant Social Justice Asshole counterparts, but they cover it all in affirmations about validity and lives that matter. A good friend of mine calls this aesthetic “passive-aggressive pastels.” (I’ll call them PAPs for short, which fits—after all, most of their posts are pap and little more.)

These are the Smol Beans™ on Tumblr (or TikTok nowadays, but I wouldn’t touch TikTok with a bargepole) who will pat you on the back as long as you perform wokeness the way they do. But once you step out of line, they’ll bite you in the back with passive-aggressive posts about how you’re being negative, how you’re being oppressive, violent, abusive, destructive. People like this tend to aim their passive aggression at members of their own community—for example, queer people, feminists, or disabled people. Often PAPs get away with this behaviour because they’re operating in small subcultures that are frequently marginalised or isolated in mainstream culture. This was often the case for queer and trans people in the early 2000s and 2010s, and that continues to be the case today for queer people who also belong to other minority groups (e.g., Black queer people in majority-white countries, or queer disabled people). And it’s absolutely the case in mental health/Mad/mental illness/psychiatric disability support groups, since it’s hard to find support when any mental health condition or perceived mental health condition is heavily stigmatised—unless it’s anxiety and minor clinical depression, that is. But try talking to your average person about bipolar, schizophrenia, DID/multiplicity/plurality, any personality disorder… people will look at you as though you’ve grown two heads. And this is where the PAPs come in. They know you’re a captive audience. They’ll shower you with love and attention. And no matter how much they turn on you and claim that you’re suddenly the Worst Person Ever, you keep coming back because there’s nowhere else to turn.

At least the normal Social Justice Assholes are honest. You know they’re jerks. They’ll rant and rave about how Hamas should kill Israeli citizens to right historic wrongs, call for the decapitation of every white cis man in sight, claim that trans women are all secret rapists there to violate women’s “sex-based rights.” PAPs will make the same claims, but under a haze of cutesy graphics and cryptic Instagram posts. They use use the same kinds of social policing methods as the Nice Southern Ladies I grew up around, the kinds who say “bless her heart,” but you know they’re silently hurling dark imprecations at the one who is supposedly being blessed. Like the Nice Southern Ladies, PAPs have authoritarian ideas and political stances, but they tend to use concern trolling and rhetorical sleight of hand rather than open claims. Nice Southern Ladies have “Live, Laugh, Love,” “#Blessed,” or “John 3:16” posters from Etsy on their walls. PAPs, on the other hand, will have “Protect Trans Lives” or “Black Lives Matter.”

The upshot is that PAPs, Nice Southern Ladies, Social Justice Assholes, and fire-and-brimstone right-wingers are all authoritarian jerks who value social conformity over human dignity, pluralism, or real equity. It’s just a different coat of paint.

I hate hip-hop

2024-01-02 / / 0 Comments

(To be fair, not all of it. But I hate most of it.)

But when I say that, people look at me as though I’ve grown two heads. Some assume that it’s about the lyrics and recommend more “conscious” rappers like Kendrick Lamar. Some think it’s some kind of racial self-hatred “because that’s our folks’ music.” Nope. (And I really don’t mean to throw shade at Kendrick; he seems like a decent guy.)

It’s more that I don’t like being talked at when I’m trying to listen to music. It’s like being accosted in a bar and having a guy ramble. I know rapping takes skills, especially freestyle. I know there are artists with great lyrics. But I process hip-hop as speech, not music.

I’m more likely to enjoy parody raps because it’s more like listening to a play or podcast. But Drake, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Ja Rule, or whoever? Turn it off now! (I’m clearly showing my age—does anyone still listen to 50 Cent and Ja Rule? *sighs* I sound like somebody’s dad, clearly out of the loop. Though I did hear Nelly’s “Country Grammar” on the radio a few weeks ago. Shades of ninth grade!)

The “Kyiv, not Kiev” thing is performative bullshit

2023-12-31 / / 1 Comment

In case you haven’t noticed, I habitually refer to the capital of Ukraine as “Kiev,” despite the general turn towards “Kyiv” over the past four years in the Anglophone media. Why do I refuse to use “Kyiv”? Because the entire thing was a dumb campaign run by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the ultranationalist president Petro Poroshenko back in 2018 or so, targeted at airports and English-speaking news sites (apparently nobody cared much about Spanish, French or German media, which mostly use Kiev or Kiew). I suspect the reason why “Kyiv” caught on was that (a) the media were discussing it more because of Ukraine’s involvement in Trump’s impeachment, (b) everyone was salty at Russia for the electoral interference back in 2016, and (c) Trump was being investigated for Russian ties in 2018. And since there was so much pre-existing anti-Russian sentiment, it was easy for Ukrainian nationalists and the compliant media to double down in early 2022. And in doing so, they turned “Kiev” into a shibboleth: anyone, especially news sites, who uses the traditional name is open to criticism for “opposing Ukraine’s sovereignty” or “supporting Russian imperialism.” (No, I oppose Ukrainian nationalism. There’s a difference.)

I’ve noticed that some antinationalist Ukrainians, as well as government critics, frequently use “Kiev,” rather than “Kyiv.” This doesn’t seem to be limited to native Russian-speakers or people from Eastern Ukraine, because I’ve seen it from antinationalist Western Ukrainians as well. (These Ukrainians seem to use geography and history as a guide to how they refer to places in English, so places in the west like Lviv, Vinnytsia, and Rivne get Ukrainian names, whereas Kiev and other heavily Russian-speaking areas like Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev, and Odessa get Russian ones.) Admittedly, this is anecdotal, not scientific.

On top of that, Kiev is historically Russian-speaking. Even nowadays, very few preschoolers in Kiev speak Ukrainian regularly—and this was nine years after nationalist administrations took over and banned the use of Russian in education.

(And if you really want to get into the weeds, “Kiev” resembles the historic name much more than “Kyiv” does. But I’m not going to do that.)

The #KyivNotKiev thing is 100% performative bullshit. Seriously, I blame Donald Trump for this. (It’s always a good idea to blame Trump.) I hate Vladimir Putin and oppose the invasion, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to defend the nationalist bullshit emanating from some parts of the Ukrainian government and its supporters.

I am sick to death of genteel transphobia.

2023-12-21 / / 0 Comments

As much as I despise the cultish Christian-nationalist evangelical movement, at least they don’t claim to be feminists. They’re patriarchal and proud of it. The same goes for right-wing bloviators (or outright dictators) like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Rhonda Santis Ron DeSantis, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin.

The genteel transphobes, on the other hand, cloak their authoritarian gender normativity in rhetoric about feminism and “fair play for women.” They’re often in their forties or fifties, typically younger than the fulminating family-values crowd, but still old enough to have grown up in a society where gay sex was often illegal and trans people were nowhere to be seen outside parodic figures. And this is why they get so much traction, especially in the UK, where sticking out too much is Not The Done Thing, unless you’re doing it in a vaguely ironic way like a panto character. Even lefty, ostensibly progressive and socialist publications like The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Morning Star have a history of publishing transphobic content. The BBC constantly tries to play both sides, publishing both pro- and anti-trans content, as though opposition to a minority group’s rights is as valid as that minority group’s right to exist. (This also happens with homophobes and anti-abortion conservatives. Would they do this with antiracist activists and white nationalists? Sexism, including homophobia and transphobia, seems to slip through in ways that racism does not, at least in the respectable press.)

As bad as “TERF Island” is, it’s not the only source of virulent transphobia masquerading as concern for children or right-on feminism. The UK is arguably the birthplace of genteel transphobia, but it has become much more widespread in American discourse, too, especially in upmarket publications like the New York Times (home of the obsessive transphobe Pamela Paul) and The Atlantic (which often publishes Helen Lewis’s TERFy screeds). Anti-trans activists in red states aren’t pulling out the Jesus card any more, since they know it won’t work in 2023 the way it did twenty years ago. Instead, they’re referring to fairness in sports, equal chances for women, women’s safety, irreversible damage. Of course, many of those activists are evangelical conservatives. But they’ve honed their playbook over the years to try to pull moderates onto their side. And since trans people are a small and marginalised minority, it’s hard for them to fight back when they’re being portrayed as freaks and predators rather than normal people. (It probably doesn’t help that transphobic laws are being passed in the kinds of places that trans people leave after they come of age because they’re isolated and homogeneous. There are few or no people left who can push back, so the DeSantis types can push through all kinds of regressive legislation.)

Genteel transphobes’ prattle about “sex-based rights” is a smokescreen for the same regressive agenda that evangelicals promote. Unfortunately, many self-styled feminists believe it because they have been conditioned to see trans people as a threat for a variety of reasons—it could be because they simply don’t understand gender dysphoria and are susceptible to conservative arguments, they’ve had the fallacious “groomer” argument drummed into them (even if they know it’s bullshit for gay people, they’ve fallen for the same warmed-over propaganda about trans people), they have underlying patriarchal ideas that remain unquestioned, they have authoritarian-follower personality traits, or they are simply bigoted bullies. Or many other reasons, all of which are wrong because they rest on the idea that there are some people who aren’t real people worth listening to through no fault of their own.

Genteel transphobes are sneaky and dangerous. And I’ve had enough of them.

Playground bullies don’t go away; they just support authoritarian politics instead

2023-12-18 / / 0 Comments

The bullies in middle school who pick on the poor kids for having unfashionable hand-me-downs don’t go away. The ten-year-olds who mock the gender-non-conforming kids don’t suddenly become enlightened without intervention. The high schoolers who snub the Syrian refugee for not speaking English well enough or knowing all their cultural references will not magically lose their prejudices just by reaching the age of 18, 21 or even 50. The snooty Mean Girls who got away with bullying the weird kids because they earned straight A’s, sucked up to the teacher, and maintained their popularity with the “normal” kids continue to get away with it in the workplace. The 12-year-old who made fun of the disabled kids on the short bus isn’t going to abandon ableism, though he may “reform” and become a behaviour analyst. The kids flinging around racial slurs on the playground may grow up to join Atomwaffen Division or the Rise Above Movement. Grown-up bullies may have learned to stop beating up queer, poor, disabled, immigrant, Black, brown, or otherwise different kids on the playground, but they continue to attack them with their social media posts, votes, and policies.

Time alone will not heal bullies. If their xenophobia, racism, and other prejudices are allowed to fester, they will become abusive parents, vindictive bosses, radicalised crusaders against minorities’ civil rights, or at the worst, totalitarian dictators. People like this are taught to value social conformity over individual or collective well-being—and they will use any method available, including bullying and ostracism, to ensure that anyone who sticks out is punished. If you follow the rules, nothing will happen to you; if you don’t, you’ll pay for it.

Whenever you see a politician, commentator, writer, or random Twitter gadfly rail over and over and over again about some disliked minority, it is time to wonder whether they were a bully in school.

Right-wing politics tends to attract this kind of bully, since the right tends to favour arbitrary social conformity over diversity1. (Yes, regardless of what right-wing commentators say. “Viewpoint diversity” frequently means “I want to get away with opposing pluralism in a pluralistic society,” which isn’t far off from “War is peace.”)

I want to emphasise, though, that your average conservative is not a bully. The problem with your typical right-leaning voter is that their unfamiliarity with or discomfort around minorities or nonconformists (which usually comes from living in homogeneous and highly conformist communities) makes them easy pickings for reactionary leaders who turn discomfort and unfamiliarity into hate. These Trump or Putin voters’ primary goal is not to inflict harm on anyone else, but they are afraid of what their bullying leaders may do to them if they dare step out of line. These are the archetypal authoritarian followers. They want to be loved by the Mean Girls—they’re too normal to be terrorised by them, but they don’t have the charisma to join the clique. They’re more scared than scary. I used to be this flavour of conservative as a teenager, and the conservatives I currently know are like this as well.

The right-wing authoritarian followers to fear are the petty bullies, the office tyrants, the social media trolls who go out of their way to bully awkward autistic trans women who are just coming into themselves, the people who kick and piss on homeless Latino immigrants in Boston and use Trump as a motivator. They are the police officers who wantonly shoot Black people who are just minding their own business. They are the ones who record their autistic kids having meltdowns and post the entire affair on YouTube to shame them into not having any more embarrassing meltdowns. They are the parents who kill their disabled children, citing how burdensome they are. It is those people, the ones who have made social conformity into a fetish and have lost their ability to see the Other as a person, who are the ones who will enthusiastically follow the next Hitler or Mussolini off a cliff. And these are the people I fear the most, even more than the Hitlers and Mussolinis themselves. Hitler cannot be Hitler if there is no throng of eager Nazis to march behind him.

Are there left-wing bullies and jerks? Of course. Are there Black, Brown, gay, trans, disabled bullies? Absolutely. We’re all human, and unfortunately, some human beings are assholes, no matter what they fill out on a census form. I am the last person to claim that because someone is marginalised, he cannot be a bully or harasser. But authoritarian leftism has comparatively little draw in North America or Europe compared with its right-wing counterpart, and the stories the authoritarian left tells are different.

Hitler and Mussolini tell you that the dominant culture should stay dominant, and anyone who doesn’t fit should be exterminated or severely marginalised. Stalin and Kim Il Sung, on the other hand, tell you that marginalised people will be liberated from colonial or royal oppression, that the outcasts will now gain control. But instead, they set up a new authoritarian dictatorship instead, just with new guys on top. The school analogues for left authoritarians are the autistic-adjacent geeks who got made fun of in school, go into Big Tech, and start becoming bullying assholes themselves. (I have known autistic people like this, mostly young white guys. They are deeply unpleasant and a pain in the ass in disability activism.) They are more sympathetic than the Mean Girls, but they are still repugnant and unworthy of support.

To sum it up: Right-wing authoritarians favour the current hierarchy. Left-wing authoritarians want to get rid of it and bring in a new hierarchy instead. Neither is particularly concerned about social justice, human rights, or basic decency.

  1. (as opposed to the good kind of conformity, like “don’t be a sociopathic asshole”) ↩

About freedom

2023-12-11 / / 0 Comments

We talk a lot about freedom, but what kinds of freedom matter?

Freedom of speech. Freedom of association. Freedom from poverty. Freedom from unemployment. Freedom to hire and fire as one wishes. Freedom to be an entrepreneur. Freedom from homelessness. Freedom of assembly. Freedom to set the definitions of one’s labour.

There are two kinds of freedom: positive freedoms and negative freedoms. Positive freedoms are the “freedoms to”: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association. Liberals, centrists, right-libertarians, and moderate conservatives focus on positive freedoms, often disdaining negative freedoms as an unwanted constraint on individual (or corporate) liberties. The rhetoric of Marxists, some progressives, and other leftists focuses on negative freedoms, or the “freedoms from”: freedom from hunger, freedom from poverty, freedom from homelessness, freedom from illness. Traditionalist conservatives and fascists care neither about positive freedoms nor negative freedoms, except for the ruling class.

Both positive and negative freedoms are necessary for a functioning society. They are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are synergistic (and I use this word advisedly; it’s not just business jargon if you use the term to say “these things work together and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Without negative freedoms, you have a lot of rights that won’t put food in your belly, keep a roof over your head, protect you from preventable diseases, or keep you safe from domestic violence—and others may have the right to exploit your labour, refuse to serve you because of your race, rip you off because there are no regulations on the books. Wage slavery deprives people’s lives of meaning. Without positive freedoms, you can’t speak truth to power. You can’t make your own choices about how you live. Everything you do is tightly regimented. With no choice, you may see life as futile.

Lopsided freedoms make people’s lives miserable.

If you’re homeless, starving, and hungry, is that really freedom? Even if you are not constrained by the law—after all, under “at-will” employment, you are just as free to quit as your company is to fire you—you are constrained by your material conditions. Free speech matters—after all, leaders need to be held accountable—but you can’t eat free speech. But under a dictator, you are under both the constraints of an authoritarian regime AND your material circumstances. If the state assigns you a job and you end up hating it, how do you find fulfilment when you’re occupied with tedium eight hours a day, even when there is no risk of being fired? Instead of these nightmarish scenarios, it’s better to give companies some discretion, but ban workplace discrimination and provide a generous social safety net for those who can’t find fulfilling work or simply can’t work at all. This way there is freedom from want and freedom of association.

This is why I vehemently disagree with both tankies and libertarians about their idea of freedom: their utopias are dystopias for everyone… including them.

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