@WorkingItOutAsIGo
I think many of these actions are being brought by woman who are being used as Trojan horses. Women are soft and kind and nice and it’s much easier to say yes to a woman than to a man...how could what she’s doing be threatening? But behind these women are legions of entitled men.
The Jordan Petersen, Heather Heyling clip about toxic femininity as a strategy (part of a Triggernometry interview) is tangentially thought provoking on this topic (
NecessaryScene mentioned it elsewhere) :
Moving beyond that, I think these women are probably so pro-social that they can't intellectually (?) emotionally (?) or democratically (?) accept the idea of the inevitable consequences and harms that will flow from this. It's as if the realisation of the harms of the anomalies of GRA 2004, EqA 2010 and what's happened to women's rights are somehow invisible to them.
If it's none of the above, then I'm back to wondering about themes in Arendt's discussion of the origins of totalitarianism.
"Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.”
The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. When Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall to protect our borders, he is not making a factual statement that an actual wall will actually protect our borders; he is signaling a politically incorrect willingness to put America first. When he says that there was massive voter fraud or boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, he is not speaking about actual facts, but is insisting that his election was legitimate. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
Leaders of these mass totalitarian movements do not need to believe in the truth of their lies and ideological clichés. The point of their fabrications is not to establish facts, but to create a coherent fictional reality. What a movement demands of its leaders is the articulation of a consistent narrative combined with the ability to abolish the capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction."
lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/