If there’s one topic that gives the right conniptions, it’s privilege, Makes sense really. The politics of selfishness and ego seem to appear in practice as varations on the theme of exceptionalist identitarianism: My tribe is special, freaks. Tragic for liberalism that it thinks weaponising this for progressive ends isn’t going to end up with them embodying everything they claim to oppose, as they do. Whoops. Fascism ruling the empire makes it hard to miss how well this strategy has panned out.
A further tragedy for those of us into the idea of egalitarianism seems that diversifying corporate hierarchies does less to challenge systemic class privilege than reinforce it–in the process reinforcing the pretence also that access is the same thing as action. The cause of gender egalitarianism is encumbered as tokenism takes the place of even the limited reforms we know and love as part and parcel of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. So bereft of substance are what pass for the respectable centre of politics that we don’t even do band-aids on cancers so much anymore.
I’m an anglo male. Those two facts alone put me at the top of many a social pecking order. They matter. Like Louis CK pointed out, as a white male you can contemplate science fiction about traveling back in time because you wouldn’t be enslaved as soon as you got there. The funny thing I think is that neither being anglo or male have spared me the destruction of depression and PTSD. That’s not a story we’re really interested in knowing about by and large I suspect.
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