by Vox Day
—Joseph Needham, Time: the Refreshing River, 1943
It begins on a day like any other. You drive to work, listen to the radio as the traffic inches along, park the car when you finally arrive at work, and greet the secretary at the front desk as you walk to your office. You go over your morning emails while drinking from the coffee mug a vendor gave you, and as you're in the middle of writing a reply to one of your accounts, your boss knocks on your open door.
“What's up?” you say without turning around to look at him, continuing to type on your keyboard.
“Do you have some time to stop by my office this morning?” he says.
Something in his voice sounds unusual. You stop typing and turn around. Your eyes narrow. Your boss seems uncomfortable; he doesn't seem to want to meet your eyes.
“Sure, let me just send a few more of these emails that can't wait. Fifteen minutes okay?”
“That will be fine.” He's looking strangely cagey. Normally he'll come right in and sit down on the corner of your desk and talk your ear off about the weekend, but now it's as if he can't wait to get out of your office. After ten years at the company, you've got a pretty good sense for when something is taking place behind the scenes among the higher-ups, and now your corporate survival radar is definitely picking up signs of potential trouble on the horizon.
Is it a layoff? Is the company up for sale? Did one of your accounts cancel without telling you? You wrack your brain, but you can't think of any major screwups you might have committed. There was no indication of any disasters looming in your email or on your voice mail this morning. Did Accounting reject your expenses from your last trip to San Francisco? That doesn't seem likely. You didn't even spend your full per-diem!
“So, what's this about, anyway?” You try to make it sound natural, but for some reason, your throat is suddenly dry, and your voice sounds tight.
He looks up and down the hallway before answering. He's hesitant to answer, and when he does, he won't tell you anything. “Well, I'd rather wait until you come to my office to discuss it. I'll see you there in fifteen.”
He leaves, and you stare at the empty doorway for a long while, wondering what on Earth that was all about. You turn back to your computer and go through your emails mechanically, your mind still half-occupied with trying to figure out what this mysterious meeting could possibly be about.
Fifteen minutes later, reinforced with a fresh mug of coffee, you make your way to your boss's office with a vague feeling of trepidation.
“Hey, so what's going on?” you say, your voice artificially bright.
“Would you mind closing the door?” your boss says. He's not smiling.
Oh, this is not going to be good, you think, even as you force a smile and comply before taking the empty chair in front of his desk.
He clears his throat. He folds his hands. He forces himself to look at you; he's wearing his serious face, the one you last saw when he announced the most recent round of layoffs. He clears his throat again; it's obvious that he really doesn't want to talk to you about whatever it is. With some difficulty, you resist the urge to tell him to hurry up and get on with it already.
“I'm afraid we've had a complaint about an incident that appears to concern a violation of the company's Code of Conduct last month,” he says. “By you.”
The Code of Conduct? What the Hell? You're vaguely aware that the company has one; you even read it for laughs one slow afternoon, so you know it's nothing but two pages of meaningless feel-good blather. Equal opportunity, be nice, be respectful, don't discriminate, don't kill anyone, yada yada yada. You're not even sure how anyone in your position could violate the Code of Conduct if he tried, short of stealing something from the company or punching somebody in the face. It's not like you have the power to hire or fire anyone.
And so it begins. Without even realizing it, you have been offered as a sacrifice to that most rational of faiths: social justice.
Six weeks and several meetings with Human Resources later, you're still not entirely sure what happened or exactly what you did to get yourself in trouble. No one will actually tell you anything. You still don't know the name of your accuser (although you've narrowed down the suspects to three likely candidates), and you've been informed that your attendance at an awareness seminar scheduled for this fall will be considered mandatory, but at least you've still got your job. The whispers seem to have stopped and people have largely stopped looking at you funny; it appears you've managed to put the Dead Man Walking stigma behind you.
All in all, everything seems to be back to the way it was before, but with one important exception. You've changed. You're wary now. You walk into work as if entering a minefield. In every conversation, in every meeting, you're careful to watch your every word. Every casual encounter in the hallway becomes a potential confrontation. Every time you meet a co-worker's eyes, you wonder if they are well-disposed or a secret enemy seeking to destroy your job, your career, and your life. You walk on eggshells, and you learn to stop sharing your opinion with anyone about anything, unless it is about something safely innocuous, like sports.
What you don't realize is that you've just survived your first SJW attack. And you're luckier than most. You still have your job, you still have your reputation, and you still have your friends and family. Tens of thousands of people are not so lucky. In the universities, in the churches, in the corporations, in the professional associations, in the editorial offices, in the game studios, and just about everywhere else you can imagine, free speech and free thought are under siege by a group of fanatics as self-righteous as Savonarola, as ruthless as Stalin, as ambitious as Napoleon, and as crazy as Caligula.
They are the Social Justice Warriors, the SJWs, the self-appointed thought police who have been running amok throughout the West since the dawn of the politically correct era in the 1990s. Their defining characteristics:
a philosophy of activism for activism’s sake
a dedication to rooting out behavior they deem problematic, offensive, or unacceptable in others
a custom of primarily identifying individuals by their sex, race, and sexual orientation
a hierarchy of intrinsic morality based on the identity politics of sex, race, and sexual orientation
a quasi-religious belief in equality, diversity, and the inevitability of progress
an assumption of bad faith on the part of all non-social justice warriors
an opinion that motivation matters more than consequences
a certainty that they are the only true and valid defenders of the oppressed
a habit of demanding that their opinions be enshrined as social customs and law
a tendency to possess a left-wing political identity
a willingness to deny science, history, logic, their past words, or any other aspect of reality that contradicts their current Narrative.
But there is no need to take my word for it when you can simply read how the SJWs describe themselves, in their own words. This is how one proud, self-declared SJW explained what it means to be a social justice warrior.
Being a social justice warrior means taking on a role in this unjust society in which you don’t ask for equality but instead, you demand it—and others see that as the “wrong tone.” People who think they are doing nothing wrong are going to be upset that we are telling them to change. People are not going to think these problems of inequality are significant because they have the privilege of it not affecting them. They will write us off as radical, overdramatic, and insignificant hypocrites. But social justice warriors must not change their “tone” to appease the oppressor. Oppressors must change, not the oppressed. Being an activist for justice—or a “social justice warrior” if they want to call us that—is about standing up to oppressors…The “wrong” tone is our tone. The wrong tone is the social justice warrior’s tone.
—“On Being A 'Social Justice Warrior'”, Austin Bryan, June 10, 2015
You may not realize that yo
u are an oppressor, but as far as the SJWs are concerned, you are. It doesn't matter if you grew up poor, if you're a minority, if you're handicapped, or even if you can check off most of the victim boxes in the SJW bingo game. If you don't unquestioningly accept the SJW Narrative, then you not only cannot be oppressed, but you have taken the side of the privileged, and in doing so, have become an oppressor yourself.
I am, quite rightly, hated by the SJWs due to my relentless opposition to them. And due to that opposition, the fact that I am an American Indian and that my great-grandfather was a Mexican revolutionary who rode with Pancho Villa means absolutely nothing to them. SJWs seldom hesitate to deny my multiracial heritage and declare that I am a Nazi racist white supremacist bigot who hates Mexicans and every other minority from Arabs to Zulus.
Some of them even go so far as to claim that “race is just a social construct”, which explains why SJWs such as the NAACP's Rachel Dolazel and #BlackLivesMatter's Shaun Knight thought they could get away with blithely telling everyone they were black for years. Unfortunately for them, genetic science conclusively demonstrates otherwise.
But if SJWs will go so far as to deny the reality of DNA just to disown a badthinking minority, imagine what they're willing to do to those of you who lack the ancestry to play the Red card, the Brown card, or the Black card to neutralize their spurious accusations. (Unfortunately for those of Asian descent, the Yellow card is essentially worthless, as in SJW eyes, Yellow is nothing but an honorary form of White.) The SJW claim to be champions of the underprivileged and oppressed only applies so long as the underprivileged and oppressed dutifully submit to the ideological perspective of their self-declared champions.
Their social justice ideology can be traced back to John Stuart Mill, who conceived a fifth form of justice that was a factual state of affairs versus the four forms of individual conduct that had previously defined the concept. Mill defined this new idea of justice in a form that is still recognizable in the demands of today's SJWs.
“Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”
—John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1861
As economist F.A. Hayek noted in response nearly 40 years ago, this conception of social justice leads inexorably and invariably towards full-fledged socialism. It is not an accident that the early advocates of social justice were invariably of the political far Left. And while Mill can be excused for his inability to foresee where that highest abstract standard would lead, 26 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the intellectual demise of Marxian economics, the SJWs have absolutely no excuse for failing to grasp the undeniable.
But even in Mill's very early formulation, both the totalitarian nature of social justice as well as its orientation towards entryism were apparent. Note that Mill declares that the efforts of the entire virtuous citizenry “should be made” to converge to that goal and that “all institutions” should be directed toward it as well.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In a time when every church, every elementary school, every Boy Scout troop, every university, every science journal, every corporation, every movie, every television advertisement, and every video game site are preaching the exact same message of diversity, equality, and tolerance, that century-and-a-half-old declaration sounds ominous indeed.
Submit or be destroyed. That's the real message underlying the superficial one. Conform to their demands or be cast out.
And it is because so many institutions have been made to converge to the social justice cause that sooner or later, no matter what you are or what you do, you will be faced with a choice. Either submit to the SJWs and accept their policing of your every word and thought, or stand against them and endure their attacks.
It's up to you. The choice is yours. As with most such choices, the right choice is not the easy one.
But there is a silver lining. If you make the right choice, if you reject the SJW Narrative and refuse to submit to their demands, you will discover that you are not alone. Not only that, but you will discover that others who have made the same choice have not been destroyed, and have not been cast into outer darkness, but are successfully forging new pathways free of the persistent interference of the SJWs. Men who have been denied platforms have built their own platforms. Women who have removed their children from the SJW propaganda factories are teaching them and raising a new and hardier intellectual elite. Men who have lost their jobs have started their own SJW-free corporations. Women who have lost friends have made new ones and constructed entirely new social circles.
Give a man a platform and he will speak his mind. Deny him a platform, and he will build his own…and you will never silence him again. As one SJW plaintively asked her fellows, “How do you bring the weight of community disapproval on someone who isn't part of the community?”
You don't. Alaric doesn't give a damn that the Romans don't approve.
A broad-spectrum, reality-based resistance to the mirage is now taking shape, a resistance that will eventually undermine and replace all the old institutions that have been invaded and captured by the SJWs. And all it takes to be a part of it is a refusal to accept the religion of social justice, a refusal to bow down before the false gods of Equality, Diversity, Tolerance, Inclusiveness and Progress.
All it takes is the courage to say “non serviam” to the fork-tongued priests of those false gods, the SJWs.
CHAPTER TWO: THE THREE LAWS OF SJW
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
—Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Deutsches Reich
It is very difficult for a normal person to accept the observable realities of SJW behavior. While everyone lies from time to time, the normal individual very seldom makes statements that can easily confirmed to be false. If you are a normal person, with a normal level of intelligence, you are simply not going to tell anyone that the sky is green and the grass is purple if they can look outside the window and see for themselves that your claim is false. You are not going to tell anyone that your wife is Morgan Fairchild, that Japanese women are taller than Dutch men, or that pregnancy is a social construct instead of a biological reality because you know how easy it would be to prove that what you have said is not true. Even if telling a lie is in your self-interest, it would bother you to be caught lying. It would reduce your credibility in the future, so you avoid telling stupid and obvious lies that are bound to be exposed.
But while normal people avoid telling transparent lies, there are certain groups of people who will make assertions that are observably untrue without hesitation. The insane are one such group, as their grasp of reality is simply unreliable. The sociopathic are another, as their lack of empathy encourages them to tell even the most stupidly obvious lies without any fear of being caught out. The professional propagandists are a third group, as whether they are ad writers, newspaper journalists, or ministers of state, they are paid to construct a new reality, and therefore it is their job to shamelessly disregard the existing one.
The Social Justice Warrior is best regarded as a sort of unpaid amateur propagandist. SJWs are clearly not insane, as their observable discomfort with the more troubling and problematic aspects of reality suffices to demonstrate that they are able to distinguish between that which is real and that which is not. They are also not sociopathic because they are herd animals who are often willing to lie in the per
ceived interest of the herd-defined narrative, not only in their own immediate interest. Also unlike sociopaths, they are seldom inclined to deny previous statements when caught out but instead tend to respond by moving the goalposts, abruptly falling silent, or otherwise ending the conversation.
It's always fairly obvious on Twitter when an SJW has been caught out, as his first response is usually to block the individual at whom he has been tweeting. Never mind that nine times out of ten, it is the SJW who instigated the conversation.
The reason SJWs are so inclined to make false assertions stems from a motivation that is very similar to that of the professional propagandist, which is the need to disregard existing reality in order to bring about the preferred alternative. In the case of the SJW-preferred reality, this nonexistent alternative is known as the Narrative. The Narrative is the story that the SJWs want to tell. It is the fiction they want you to believe; it is the reality that they want to create through the denial of the problematic reality that happens to exist at the moment. And there is no one definitive Narrative. Instead, there are many Narratives, all of them subject to change at any time, thereby requiring the SJW who subscribes to them to be able to change his own professed beliefs on demand as well.
It may be useful to think of SJWs as a school of hypersensitive fish, every single one of which is capable of rapid changes of direction based on the most minute signals from the fish on either side of them. This is why large numbers of SJWs can go from declaring black to be white to be blue to be red in rapid succession, all without ever appearing to notice that what they are all saying now is completely different than what they were all saying before. And woe to the SJW who fails to keep up and doesn't change his tune in time with the others!