In the 1970’s, Kate Millett took Mao’s class struggle vernacular and applied it to the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Women became the oppressed minority, and men became oppressors. “Male privilege” and female oppression became the lens through which two generations of educated women would come to view history.
In the 1980’s, another feminist, Peggy McIntosh coined the term “white privilege” which became all the buzz among academics interested in creating cultural revolution.
Applying terms like privilege to men or whites gets to wrap people in a cloak of self-satisfied, pseudo-intellectual, Marxist garbage – but does it make them good people?
A 2019 study out of UC Berkeley suggests that is a hard, “NO.” Rather than make socially liberal people care more for minorities, it actually decreases their sympathy for poor whites. “These shifts in sympathy were associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor White person’s plight.”
In other words, the successes of poor whites were because of their white privilege, and the failures of poor whites were despite their white privilege.
I suspect these results would also apply to social liberals being able to ignore the struggles of poor men, in general.
In short, all indicators show that teaching social liberals about privilege makes them horrible people.
Self Delusion is Dangerous
I’ve written quite a bit on certain Minnesotans regularly ignoring stereotypes, twisting words for power, and having a remarkable power for self delusion.
For example they might use, ”Subsidized access to reproductive health care for Black Indigenous Women of Color,” which is a sanitized version of, “…using Government money to chop up Black babies and suck them out through a tube.”
This type of frank talk causes them to recoil.
A belief system that makes a self-satisfied, smug, asshole able to feel morally and intellectually superior while ignoring others suffering by means of self-delusion, may have other drawbacks.
Several recent large-scale, reputable studies have found that people who hold these views are:
- Much more likely to suffer from mental Illness, especially, progressive women (53%).
- Significantly greater likelihood of having a dark triad personality disorder.
- Trained victims make worse employees and create problems for managers.
There are people in education circles who believe it’s a good idea to use scientifically proven methods to turn K12 kids into shitty, neurotic people, apathetic to the plight of others, who don’t even make good employees.
Maybe it’s just me, but this seems like a bad use of government resources.
