Critical Wraith Theory

 Dear Blog,

sorry I haven´t really "been here for you" lately. I'll be brutally honest: Twitter is more fun than you, as well as younger and sexier. It's more fun because on Twitter there is a reasonable expectation that anything you write will be read by at least three people, which isn't a lot but it's three more readers than you are likely to get for anything posted here, let´s be frank. Admittedly, Twitter does offer a perverse system of incentives that Blogger doesn't.  While any blog post of mine is destined to get 0 views regardless of whether it is (comparatively) well written or absolute crap, I have long since discovered that on Twitter, likes are inversely proportional to quality, such that anything cogent or profound will inevitably get 0 likes whereas a stupid, frivolous throwaway remark will get 3 likes, and if it's exceptionally poorly expressed the number may even rise to 15 or 20. So, like a nicotine addict, you end up carefully regulating the stupidity of your tweets so as to get just the right hit, the right ratio of fleeting, bored attention to toe-curling embarrassment at your own manifest mediocrity. So it goes.

I only mention Twitter, though, because I wanted to introduce this post with a sort of mini-apologia, along these lines:

  

The key word here seems to be "power". The people who push this bizarre religion apparently want power over others, and project that onto their enemies. It must be hard for them to grok that most people neither possess nor desire any kind of power, except over their own lives.

— Squillory O'Bnawsh (@Cakesniffe1) March 20, 2021

See? a perfect example of what I'm saying. This tweet neatly summarises everything I'm about to say in long-form in this post, and adequately expresses the entirety of what I think is wrong with Critical Race Theory in particular, and Wokeism in general. If someone could somehow talk me out of believing what I wrote in the above tweet, they might have a ready convert to this dominant ideology, and goodness knows what else. You'd think someone would rise to the challenge. But nah. No likes, no angry or contemptuous retorts, nothing to indicate to me whether what I am saying is so blindingly obvious as to be not worth even agreeing with, or so blindingly stupid as to be not worth even rebutting  

Of course, me being me, I tend mostly to the latter explanation. If I am not worth engaging with, it's probably because I am almost unbelievably thick. As a younger man I would have found this discouraging, but at my age, such things matter less. People do get more stupid as they get older: in my case the process is easily quantifiable if you use sentence structure as a proxy for intelligence. When I look at old posts in this blog I am bemused at how my thoughts as recently as ten years ago bristled with subordinate clauses and were so laden with adverbs they could hardly move. Now I'm much more of a simple sentence guy. I still see and believe more or less the same things as I did then, but without the nuance, without the background, without all the hidden connections and associations and qualifications, because my brain has shrivelled. (The glaucoma doesn't help, either: I often find myself deciding against an experimental adverb or subordinate clause simply because the effort of trying to read what I've written on the screen so I can correct it just doesn't seem worth it. Going blind is no fun,)

The point I'm leaning into here is that there are worse things than being stupid. Sure, you wouldn't think so from reading the Shoveaceous Cult on Twitter. They love pointing out an alleged connection between bigotry and stupidity which as far as I'm concerned is a simple Berkson's Fallacy: you notice thicko bigots, but fail to notice the far larger number of thicko nonbigots, among whom I would class myself. Thus, being thick gets an undeserved bad reputation. I think humanity would make quite a lot of progress if we could stop viewing intelligence as a moral virtue and start seeing it as simply a survival advantage. But perhaps I ought to explain what I mean by intelligence.

Intelligence, here, means knowing everything that's going on around you and is relevant to what you're saying or doing. It means being able to take everything into account. This I find I cannot do, or even pretend to do any more. I see little other than what's right in front of me. I don't see round corners. The stuffing has been knocked out of my confident sense of causality. I mostly don't know why things happen: I just see them happening. I was never particularly strong on the laws of physics and fundamental particles at the best of times. What's interesting to me, though, is that the older and stupider you get, the more you end up depending on theory of mind as a tool for getting through the day. By this I mean that the only way you can get some sort of handle on what other people are saying or doing is by assuming that they are acting from motivations you also share, or at some time shared. This is presumably why old people were once thought to be "wise". They'd simply had more time in which to observe themselves being assholes, which in turn equipped them to understand the assholery of others. Mon semblable, mon frere and all that.

Which brings me to the desire for power.

I was a teenager once. I was a kid once. I can grok that it feels good to fly around in a cape and a mask beating up everyone you come across in the name of Truth and Justice and the American Way. I get why someone might want to cavort on a stage with a guitar and have bras and knickers flung their way, and inspire all sorts of screaming and tears and lordotic reflexes. However, I also remember being an adult (before I became stupid) and seem to remember that the experience of being an adult, broadly speaking, involves accepting that you cannot go around impinging on people (let alone beating them up), since no one likes you or is ever likely to, and no one wants to have anything to do with you unless they think you might be giving away money, which is something you generally don't have especially if you are a chalkface TEFL teacher, and that your lot is basically just to do as you're told at work and then go home and get ratfaced on cheap gin and maybe have a wank and then go to bed and listen to the rain dripping through the hole in the ceiling into a saucepan. And that what makes all this bearable is the world you create in your imagination, which in my case is pretty much a collage of whatever randomly made it past the rudimentary perceptual filters of childhood. (Which in turn underlines the importance of actually having a childhood: once the perceptual portcullis descends in your teens, the only way you can open it a crack after that is with drugs. If you don't use drugs it's because you had a childhood.)

Blogger is acting up so I'll keep this brief.

What I'm saying is that I can get that some people might want "power", but it seems to me this is not only a disgustingly immoral but also a very infantile desire - unless it's power over your own life we're talking about, in which case, you go girl. Of course, there are still people living under various sorts of tyranny (including probably myself after the forthcoming Ecuadorian election, when the Correistas are likely to get back in) but where this is the case, the way forward is to denounce the individuals actually holding this power - the tyrants - and the mechanisms through which they exercise it - the unjust laws, the bought judges, the military police kicking down the door. The solution is definitely not to resurrect an obsolete superstition such as "race", use it to classify people into "them" and "us", and then go around imagining the "them" people (currently "whites") as beneficiaries of a "power" which turns out to be not only metaphysical and unfalsifiable, but the expression of a diffuse, misplaced hostility and resentment. Of course some "whites" may have power, but most do not, and some, such as myself, are the most hilariously powerless, ineffectual, stony broke, utterly puny specimens you're ever likely to encounter. 

"No, but we're talking about collectives, not individuals". Yes, and you're generalizing about them. Didn't you know? That's what bigots do. That's the definition of a bigot.

Collectives don't matter. Never have. A collective can't think (let alone feel), can't make a decision, can't remember or learn anything, can't have "power". Only individuals can do those things, whether they claim to "represent" the collective or - if they are honest - do no such thing. Some people may be advantaged or disadvantaged through their membership of a recognised collective, true - but outside of evil regimes like Nazi Germany or contemporary China, such advantages or disadvantages will be minimal in scope compared to those derived from attributes which are seldom if ever "collectivised" in the same way, and are simply part of the genetic lottery. If you're a pathetic failure, like me, don´t blame "systemic inequity", blame yourself and your crap genes. I do, every day of my life.

The saddest thing about Critical Race Theory is that it fails to be critical of race. We all know - or should do by now - that there is no empirical basis for any of the standard "racial" classifications: they have no descriptive validity, and relate only tangentially to genetically differentiated human populations. They mostly reflect a fairly arbitrary, culturally constructed set of subjective criteria, including subjective notions of "identity". If you were surprised to see Obama described as "America's first Black President", when he didn't look black at all, or to learn that Meghan Markle's marriage is considered in some circles (hers) to be "interracial", it's probably not because you need better glasses, but because it is easier to have crazy notions about such things if you live in the States. Anyone who came here to Ecuador from the States would probably look down a typical street and see twenty "black" people and five "whites"... and then be nonplussed to learn that not one of the twenty-five identified as either "black" or "white", but all as "mestizo". Further, that someone like me is not considered "white" here either, but "gringo", an entirely separate classification in which skin colour is regarded as functionally irrelevant. If you believe the local stereotypes, gringos are naive, stupid and easily taken for a ride. I'm afraid I can't dispute any of this with regard to myself, but that's by the by.

I'd write more, but Blogger has become unusable. Next stop, Wordpress.