Rex Kerr
4 min readJul 7, 2023

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Yes, you are talking past me, but because you missed the entire point.

Obliviousness to unintended consequences is why I don't trust anything that aspires to any kind of dismantling, at least not if implemented with the kind of sophistication you've thus far been willing to exemplify. People are going to muck things up (they already are), and then blame oppressors for the problems (they already are) instead of their own boneheaded ideas.

I'll try again, with a very specific example of dismantling that is causing strife and harm.

Prior to the CRT-introduced ideas of intersectionality and the ordinaryness of racism, the ideal in law and in personal actions was equal (neutral) treatment: you treat everyone the same way, regardless of race, gender, etc.; instead, you base your treatment on the actions and needs of the individual. However, post-CRT, the progressive sentiment is that a neutral individual approach is itself racist: instead, you have to be explicitly aware of the intersection of the identity groups into which everyone falls, mostly in order to acknowledge the oppression that some groups have suffered and act with corresponding sensitivity. The principle of group-neutral, individual-focused outlook has been largely dismantled, at least among progressives.

This has been a disaster, and predictably so. Decades of psychological research have shown that almost everyone has a strong in-group bias: actions by "your people" are perceived more favorably and actions by "those people" are perceived less favorably, even if they're the exact same actions. The principle of equal treatment binds everyone into the group of "your people", and yes, people do still notice the differences, but most people get mostly over it. It's all "us". However, intersectionality fractures us into "us" and "them". The instinctive reaction is to notice and play up all the ways in which your group has difficulty, and to fail to notice and downplay all the ways in which other groups have difficulty, causing everyone to feel beset and mistreated, and in cases of actual mistreatment, providing strife and disagreement rather than clear agreement on what is wrong. (The related ideas of favoring narrative over evidence, "lived experience", "speaking my truth", and so on, emphasize and exacerbate this problem.)

If you feel the impact, but aren't really down with the principles, you tend to be in some group where it seems like you're being attacked. That's no good, so you rally around your group, and attack back. Hence the rise in white nationalism and such.

The progressive countermeasure, implemented by those who endorse the principles, is to be "woke": to have a convention that certain types of oppression are really bad and to be extra-aware of that type of mistreatment, sacrificing your in-group preferential bias in favor of a preferential bias in favor of the oppressed group. Unfortunately that too has horrible consequences: people are constantly anxious and afraid to speak their mind because of fear of inadvertently failing to show the required deference to some group's trauma (which they never fully know because they're not part of that group--and this inability is played up with ideas like "I can't imagine your pain" and the CRT-advocated "presumed competence" whereby members of the oppressed group are automatically believed and members of others are not). Meanwhile, the oppressed group now has everyone reminding them all the time that they're oppressed, provoking stereotype threat (another pernicious well-documented psychological phenomenon).

So you stoke hatred and opposition from people who aren't trying to be sensitive, and fragility and anxiety among those who are, all while jeopardizing the psychological well-being of the supposed beneficiaries.

Oh, and you also forget to notice that there's huge diversity within groups, and so you tend to care a lot about affirmative action for comparatively wealthy blacks (because that's a clear group) and not very much about good education for people in poverty (because that's not a clear group) including those who are black.

Meanwhile, the actual legislative and societal consequences have been worse than the liberal individual-focused approach.

It's a well-intentioned idea that interacts horribly with human psychology. It's founded in a real problem: focus on the individual can lead one to fail to notice systematic problems that affect lots of individuals on the basis of some characteristic (immutable or otherwise). But by blundering dumbly towards the most obvious imagined fix, the approach has been actively counterproductive to its own goals and caused substantial negative side-effects.

Instead, what was needed was an awareness at the legal and social-science level that subconscious bias and systemic bias can cause a violation of the "treat individuals equally" principle, and if you're looking for violations you have to remember that it is not always the largest groupings against which the violation occurs (e.g. a violation could be specific to gay black men, not just men, not just blacks, not just gays).

And this is only a small dismantling.

If you go for "the patriarchy" or "enlightenment rationality" successfully, chances are that the unintended (or intended!) consequences will be way worse.

I object to the approach because it causes harm and suffering both directly and through stoking societal instability while being legislatively inept.

I'm all for social change that improves people's lives. I'm just not for social change that makes people's lives worse despite being labeled as an improvement.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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