Fortunately, for today at least, a word is enough.
In An Experiment In Explanation I mentioned what I refer to as Know-It-Allism. In the next few entries my aim will be to direct attention to the connection between Know-It-Allism and Salvation Systems, and the relation of both to the dysfuncitonal and maladaptive belief in perfect adequacy.
The most obvious example today of a Salvation System, or Utopia, can be found in the whole Woke phenomenon, or Identity Politics, and of course, CRT. I wrote about CRT a couple of years back in what turned out to be a bit of an ebook. For more see here CRT? WTF? But, for today, as promised, just a word, or maybe two, will be enough. So here goes.
In its most popular form today CRT can be, and has been, reduced to the assertion that All Whites Are Racist, or Whiteness = Racism.
To make Whiteness synonymous with Racism is to hypostatize both words and make them refer to an actual living, breathing entity. But words can not do this. Words can only be used - by us - to refer to categories of perception, something we can see in the real world! Otherwise, we’re just talking.
Put bluntly, unless the statement All Whites Are Racist is translated into a theory from which an operational construct can be derived - and then tested in the real world - the sentence All Whites Are Racist is meaningless, inasmuch as it does not correspond, at all, to reality.
Until such statements are tested they are merely examples of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a logical fallacy that confuses words with reality.
For more see CRT? WTF? Part I
The point here is that CRT consists almost entirely of statements like these. Statements that can not be tested in the real world. So it's not a theory.
CRT links statements - not to the world - but to other statements. So it never ends up explaining race, it only explains other statements about race.
The reason for this is that CRT, like Critical Theory itself, emerged from the humanities, not the sciences. The humanities are not required to connect their statements to the world. The humanities are all about connecting statements to other statements, which is fine, but not if you're going to make the sort of truth-claims that those in the humanities often make, especially CRT, and then use those claims to control the behavior of others.
Of course, the question then becomes, Why do some people allow their behavior to be controlled in this way? A question we'll answer below.
Not surprisingly CRT practitioners (I can't bring myself to call them teachers or writers) do not present their statements as theories, and certainly not as part of a general theory on race. Not at all. They simply present their statements as the truth. But, again, the only way to be sure that any discourse is true is to put it to the operational test - by means of behavior.
To this fact the practitioners of CRT shamelessly, but tellingly, avert their insolent gaze. This is why CRT is a bad joke that not only does not deserve any respect, but has actually earned our contempt. What accounts for this?
It is depressingly easy to show that the language of CRT is unquestioned, unexamined, and unanalyzed, to an extraordinary degree, and it is our job and responsibility to do just that, to examine and test our explanations.
Obviously, and unfortunately, CRT practitioners and believers don’t seem to be all that interested in reality and what connects us to it - language and behavior. This accounts for the many incoherencies, fallacies, and absurdities found in their explanation not just of race, but of anything.
Since CRT never questions its own assumptions it is incapable of identifying, let alone correcting, those fallacies and absurdities.
For example, CRT says that race is a construct, without seeming to realize that, one, all of our statements are constructs*, including the statement that race is a construct, and two, that the value of any construct is its ability to direct attention to important problems in such a way that the construct itself can be developed and in part - or wholly - transcended.
*"Race is a construct" is similar to "You have a selective memory." A statement often made by scapegoaters, whether parents, siblings, employers, or co-workers, to their scapegoat. This is a perfect example of grasping the situation while totally missing the point. The point is that all memory is selective. No one remembers everything. It's not that the scapegoat's memory is selective. The point is what are they selecting and why. Nor is this analogy inapt, since, as everyone should know by now, Identity Politics and CRT are entirely scapegoat-dependent.
But, of course, and as everyone knows, CRT does not do this - ever.
What does CRT do? Well, it simply calls its constructs, and the fallacies and absurdities they lead to, truths. Nietzsche called this The Death Leap. The human impudence of calling beliefs truths and forcing them on others.
But, again, a statement can only be true, or more accurately, useful, if it can be recast in an operational form and successfully tested. In other words, a statement can only be true if it has predictive value. And the predictive value can only be verified after one's theory is tested in the real world.
CRT's stubborn and obnoxious refusal to do this exposes its theory as a lie, which also explains why the elite has to impose that lie as truth by force.
Because if the elite didn't do this CRT would be reduced to rubble faster than they can say whiteness. All of this means that Critical Race Theory is a protracted and grotesque logical fallacy that is masquerading as a theory, and so has no intellectual legitimacy, because in fact, it's not a theory, it's a lie.
After nearly a century of Critical Theory in general, and decades of CRT in particular, no theory of race worthy of the name "science" has developed.
Confronted with this embarrassing fact, the elite is now attacking science itself. A more hysterical and desperate hold on power would be impossible to imagine. The elite of the Western world today are to competent social management what The Keystone Cops were to responsible law enforcement.
The hostile elite are proof that power and strength don't always go together.
The other lie of Identity Politics/CRT is found in the obvious and easy to verify fact that, since whites as whites have no institutional power or cultural control, there can be no such thing as systemic racism. That is, there is no such thing as systemic racism as defined by Identity Politics/CRT.
And since the United States was somewhere around 90% white prior to the invasion of the hostile elite and their paid proxies and useful idiots, accusing the United States of systemic racism would have been like accusing the Romans of systemic anti-Gaulism during the Gauls sack of Rome.
So, instead of the lie of systemic racism by whites, we should be talking about the systemic demonization of whites by Identity Politics and CRT.*
*This would have the added benefit of directing attention to exactly who is controlling the system. Spoiler Alert! Though those in power today truly are supremacists, they aren't white. Those in power are always easy to identify. They are the ones with the ability to effectuate their demands. For example, enforcing Hate Speech Laws, the purpose of which is not to fight hate, but to place the powerful above criticism so they can stay in power. The last thing these surpremacists want to do is fight hate, since real hate is obviously the driving force behind everything they say and do.
There is no reason on earth why anyone, anywhere, should use Critical Race Theory to control their behavior and every reason why they shouldn't.
And that includes those who see themselves as beneficiaries, because those beneficiaries are being used by a narcissistic and hostile elite who could care less about them. Obviously! Since no one uses those they care about. After all, what could be more racist than using others races to win a culture war?
The only exception to using CRT to control one's own behavior would be to use one's explanatory behavior to refute CRT by directing attention to it as a protracted logical fallacy, which it is, thereby taking the first step toward restoring intellectual and cultural vitality to our teaching-learning institutions by ridding them of this verbal cancer. But this means that CRT should not be banned, it should be debated. Calling for it to be banned exposes the intellectual weakness of those who want to ban it. And why should CRT be debated? Because debate is a theoretical enterprise!
Be that as it may, the question then becomes this: How was it possible for the practitioners of something as fraudulent as Critical Theory, and its mini-me CRT, to perpetrate the single greatest example of educational malpractice in the history of teaching and learning, and for so long?
The answer is a triviality.
First, most of our verbal behavior - from language to explanation - goes unexamined, and always has. Why? Obviously there are many possible answers that would account for this. One would be that most people use most of their words vauguely, indefinitely, and with the assumption that not only is there something in the mind that corresponds to the word, but even worse, that there is something in the word that corresponds to the world. If this is not an example of immanency of meaning I don't know what is. But meaning is not immanent in words, meanings are ascribed by human beings.
Meaning is not a matter of immanency, it is a matter of human behavior. Meaning is no more in a word than a response is in a stimulus. Otherwise, all words would have one meaning and all responses would be the same.
It is exactly this lust for sameness, this rage for order, that is the driving force behind all Salvation Systems. This systemic uniformity and finality is the dream of all Utopias. And all of those dreams have been nightmares.
Another reason that follows from this is the sentiment expressed in Ecclesiastes which condensed goes something like this, with an increase in knowledge comes an increase in pain, and most people prefer to avoid pain as long as they can, but the pain always comes, especially when you leave your language unexamined. The unexamined life is not worth living would not be a famous dictum if everyone was living the examined life, which is the individual's understanding between what they say and what they do.
In short, most people prefer value statements to analytical ones. This is why most people don't want to know, they want to judge. And they want to judge not because it's fair, just, and ethical, but simply because it's easier, just as it is easier to assume one is fair, just, and ethical, when one is not.
This also explains why most human problems go unsolved, and why most of human behavior, since it ignores problem-solving, is wasted away in silly diversions that make the trivial important and the important trivial.
What do you think Pop Culture is for, and why it's a trillion $ industry?
Second, and certainly connected to the above, the most common response to power is automatic group obedience, not individual conscience. This is why there are so few people in the world deserving of the name individual. Most people are puppets, players of social roles, and don't even know it. This individual self-betrayal often ends in collective insanity. Hence Nietzsche's remark that in individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups it's the norm.
And now we're ready to answer the question Why do some people allow their behavior to be controlled in this way? Again, the answer is a triviality.
Most people do what they are told, especially if they are being told by those in power. The powerful know this. That's why they want to be in power. And by The Powerful I mean those in control of the four sanctions of economic deprivation, imprisonment, torture, and death.
These are the four sanctions found in all power centers throughout all of human history and in all cultures, whether primitive, barbaric, and civilized. And by civilized is meant two things, 1. the concentration of human energies in one place, and 2. the circumnativation of the use of force. In any event, the powerful know that people will do what they tell them to do, and those that don't will be punished and made an example of for the rest. Of course, this insanity explains scapegoating. In fact, it is scapegoating.
Scapegoating is the weapon the powerful use against the powerless, whether the scapeogating is going on in a family, a company, or a country.
This is the reason why no change today, the change that we desperately need, will ever come from those in power. Change today, the kind of change that is needed for survival and growth, will only come from the scapegoats.
Never Again! should apply to Scapegoating! Ironically, that slogan and many others are used today by the powerful for the purpose of placing themselves above criticism so they can stay in power by blaming everything on their interpretation of the past that no one is allowed to question. If anyone does question that interpretation they are automatically scapegoated.
The elite's preferred method of social management today is scapegoating.
That's why they are often, and accurately, referred to as the hostile elite.
But, because all scapegoating is based on a lie, because it is based on an inversion of reality, the result of the hostile elite's weaponization of scapegoating through, in part, its use of things like Critcal Race Theory, is a devastating social incoherence and corresponding culture crisis. And now we're back to why no positive change will ever come from today's elite.
Though it is true that with an increase of knowledge comes an increase of pain, it's also true that with an increase in the ability to overcome that pain comes an increase in cheerfulness. And that cheerfulness is itself the result of an improved competency in, and genuine value of - problem-solving.
The kind of problem-solving associated with learning, change, and growth.
But, as most know only too well, the CRT mob is not interested in knowledge or the pain that comes with it. They are interested in indoctrination and inflicting pain on the unbelievers. That's why the CRT mob asks Why go through all of that pain when you can just believe yourself to be right and call anyone who disagrees with you a racist, and then use that slander - that we'll call the truth - as a means of acquiring power?
Of course, as everyone knows, that’s pretty much how things have worked out. And exactly how have things worked out? Well, badly, of course!
For those who doubt this - just look around.
And what accounts for the fact that things have worked out so badly? To answer that question will take us back to the title of this entry. Because if we were to reduce CRT to a word that word would have to be - insane.
And by insane is simply meant the denial of reality. And CRT’s denial of reality is not just about whites, a word that only qualifies as a general racial descriptor and does not describe a well-organized and highly motivated racial group capable of acting in its own interests, as it does with those groups currently under the Identity Politics umbrella. No. CRT’s reality denial is really about CRT itself. First, and to repeat what I've said in a previous entry, they call their theory the truth when the truth is it isn't even a theory. Worse, by believing their theory to be the truth, even though it isn't a theory, CRT's practitioners and followers believe in the perfect adequacy not just of CRT, but of themselves! And the only word for that is - insane!
A belief is only an explanation and no explanation can ever account for all of reality, let alone be perfectly adequate. And if a belief can never be perfectly adequate, neither can its believers. To put it baldly, CRT is just one explanation more, though admittedly a lot more hard-headed than most.
Once again we see the insanity of the belief in perfect adequacy rearing its ugly head. As everyone knows, this insanity goes way beyond Critical Race Theory and pervades the whole Woke phenomenon. So join us for the next entry where we'll explore The Woke Delusion of Perfect Adequacy.
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