Intersectionality: Neo-Christian Collectivism
In the last couple of decades, the concept of intersectionality has been carefully constructed by Western Academics with the idea developed and promoted enough to gain a widespread, mainstream awareness. The idea goes that there are disadvantaged groups in society and that within those groups are even more disadvantaged intersections with other disadvantaged groups. For example, a black woman is a member of two oppressed groups, that of black people and women. She is at the intersection of the two groups and has a different status than either group.
For anybody who grew up with Judeo-Christian morality the concept of a level playing field is natural. However intersectionality with its radical subjectivity dictates a step further than that, it promotes an idea that it is outcomes that are key. The radical subjectivity allows the departure from attempting rational objectivity and opens the door to a belief built on religious architecture.
So barely after the majority had accepted racial essentialism as history — after the election of Barack Obama — this new, rigid and monolithic racial social structure became very important. It is supposed to replace a rigid, monolithic racial social structure that stops black people from achieving things like becoming President. Ok! So qui bono?
There are a few perceptual dichotomies from which intersectionality chooses a side, one of which is the question of Individuality Vs Collectivism. Promoting individuality is also promoting nuance, individual circumstances and preferences, dealing with physical and situational facts, with the disparate core idea that individuals actually exist. Individuality carries the promise of becoming something greater than what is expected, it embodies the American dream and is common in the Western World. Intersectionality white-washes this promised hope, with success for individuals in Western society becoming a reflection of group dynamics (except for oppressed parties, they are the only individuals in intersectionality who can ‘win’ and the only people who will be given respect for their individual achievements to the degree that they are lower (actually higher) within the intersectional structure. In fact any success of a member of an oppressor group becomes oppression. But it is a Faustian bargain for all, individual success of the oppressed must be shared with the group and homage paid to the symbolism it engenders. This must create resentment in the individual who is acutely aware of their own sacrifice towards the group, for themselves, guilt for their achievement and diminish the glory they deserve. A dark and resentful psychic reality begins to brew inside, possibly seen on the face of sporting heroes LeBron James, or Latrell Mitchell.).
We are not suggesting that there is no collective responsibility of individuals, in fact we think that the dichotomy is equally important and that promoting individuality can create a strong collective and vice versa. Of course we are aware of individuals promoting their own agenda at the expense of the group. Perhaps collective action can balance the scales of power, but this is not how intersectionality is developed or implemented.
Intersectionality weights group membership as an absolute factor, as inescapable and for that is extremely reactionary. It has been hundreds of years since western culture became the only one to depart from tribalism as a hard fact of the physical world. It had been written in that physical features were irrelevant, a key proposal used by Martin Luther King Jr. to achieve his success. And for all of that, the ultimate intersectionality is the intersection of the individual, with their unique expereinces, thoughts, path and so on. So what is the utility of the idea at all, and why not arrive straight at this logical conclusion?
Is there something else in operation here?
By comparison, collectivism can reduce individuals to members of a group, embedded into an externally defined reality that dictates their existence. And it is an extremely powerful idea, especially with environmental pressure, American jails are full of people dedicated to racial allegiances against their own will. Individuals in any collective owe the group, they owe sacrifice and they will be forced to do so whether or not they believe it is personally good for them.
So although it was a great symbol that racial prejudice was in the past when Barack Obama was elected first Black President, perhaps a backlash towards collectivism was inevitable. Intersectionality could only come up in the first place after equality was so commonly respected as to be the popularly held, majority view. But when President Obama was elected the symbolism of race as collective identity was strengthened, a non-specific, non-physical metaphysical view. Now that it was a commonly held majority belief, a collective of mostly white middle-class women began rigidly enforcing intersectionality socially and culturally. As a result, history is far more honest regarding race relations. It is hard to imagine Wesley Snipes being Blade, 20 years after the fact. Today he would be black Blade, and have to promote and build a strange, debased and degenerate conception of whatever that could mean.
Because in intersectionality you couldn’t love Wesley Snipes as Blade, or even as Wesley Snipes. You could only do it from your own Gay, Black, White, Female idea of Black Wesley Snipes. Here, everything about you is rigid, known, predictable and governed according to a concrete set of relations of clearly definable groups with clearly defined characteristics and you cannot ever escape from any of it. Yikes.
It is impossible to escape that prejudice is a social cancer, hiding in strange places, metastasizing to strange places, threatening to overwhelm the immune system and possibly kill the host. But intersectionality does not look openly or honestly at the problem. For example, encouraging the idea that race, gender, sex or any immutable feature is a pre-eminent article of perception in ourselves and others, and that ‘opposites’ to those identities exist and are real guarantees hate and violence. This was embodied in the murder of 5 police in 2016 during a Black Lives Matter rally. The shooters only crime was to take intersectional ideas seriously, he acted as a perfectly rational human would if the ideas were true. You must wonder how much other violence has occured in obscure, dark or lonely places as a result of this collective view? N.B.: (Interestingly this violence shut the BLM project down, it took the organisation from being in international news almost every night to not at all)
But the most interesting part of Intersectionality is that the ideas are firmly based in European, Judeo-Christian morality. Intersectionality is an attempt to construct a transcendent moral structure using the highest power available in Academia and Science.
Sound familiar?
Although Jesus was the man to suggest that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, it was Judaism that first presented the conception in the story of David and Goliath. For reasons without evidence, it is presented that the weaker, smaller individual such as David, with a humble profession such as ‘shepherd’ should, by the virtue of Gods will, kill the large, strong Goliath, a professional soldier.
The vulnerability of David is magnified and exaggerated as much as possible as is the height and power of Goliath, both tools to make the contrast as extreme as possible. As God manifested the righteousness ofDavid slaying Goliath it is a matter of morality that those perceived as weak destroy those percieved as strong.
So by virtue of nothing more than the perception that he ought to lose, David becomes good as a function of his percieved weakness. By virtue of nothing more than the perception that he ought to win, Goliath becomes bad as a function of his perceived strength. The qualities that improve this perception are maximised and qualities that discourage it are ignored. The perceptions of what constitutes weakness or strength remain an often-damning cultural insight to the group utilising Judeo-Christian morality.
This perceptual lense is hard to overcome as it is a win/win once the morality is accepted. If David loses he evolves into a martyr for good against evil, a symbol to be pitied forever as inherently good and morally superior. If he wins, then it is Gods preferred result and evil has been overcome. Where a David kicks his dog, accumulates council fines or burns down the neighbourhood it will be overlooked, ignored or minimised. He becomes a sacred, divine object from which others derive a sense of identity that they have tied into this crazy, transcendent moral structure.
So what happens when David is a skin colour, a racial group or gender? What happens when Goliath is a skin colour, racial group or gender?
What would God have us do?
Well, God actually gave us the ultimate in pity symbols around 2000 years ago, when his Son Jesus suffered and died for the sins of the world. With the natural human experience inevitably involving sin, and with our superego always watching us, Christianity tied inevitability of guilt into the pity ritual with Jesus as pity object, sending people on a never-ending cycle of guilt, sin and repentance, solving the very real and human problem of existential angst against a divine game-theory with guaranteed results. The highest authority at the time was the concept of Monotheistic God, borrowed from Judaism and used as authority to build the social construction ‘Christianity’.
Karl Marx also thought that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, except that he perceived a material world where Money was the most powerful and significant social concept. So his perception of the meek was ‘the proletariat (being without money)’ and ‘inheriting the earth’ was ‘the means of production’. Marx even attempted to speak to the power of ‘God’ where in Das Kapital, Economics was supposed to provide the transcendental authority to validate this moral structure.
And although Marx ultimately and inevitably failed in his Economics, given what was inherent within it, Intersectionality now attempts to step in and create another Judeo-Christian moral structure, this time with the authority of Academia, Government, Human Resources and Social Conformity. This morality always grasps at the highest power it has access to.
The difference between Classical Liberalism, between Martin Luther King Jr. and progressive atheists is that there are real, non-christian reasons to promote equality of opportunity. In fact Individual liberty is essential to the most efficient functioning of society. Treating people as individuals is the most realistic and practical way in which to deal with them. It is the best way to run a society and to interact with others. Western Civilisation has been an ongoing project of empowering the Individual, all the way back to Moses Law. With an eye for an eye, the man, woman, child, king, black, white e.tc. all had equal eyes. (This was modified after the fact by the Christian notion of forgiveness and repentance that retrospectively found it a law of revenge and not the breakthrough in individual rights that it was.)
Intersectionalists appear to operate with resentment, where perhaps they have been frustrated by collective dynamics, perhaps their individuality project has failed along the line, that they have failed to discover the method to the success they desire, perhaps they gave up before the stress of failures motivated the critical moment before their growth. Perhaps it is just incredibly difficult to be born in the 70’s onwards and figure out how to satisfy our human needs, to avoid existential angst when popular culture is always against it, and relatively high culture is obsessed with materialism, strict rationality and logic. We are in denial that an abstract world exists at all even as we refer to it as individual subjectivity (in fact most people are referring to a material collectivism when they refer to this — intersectionality is). And so people begin to resent the situation, there is no path to connect the individual to their deepest human needs and they revert to Judeo-Christian morality rather than stepping into and embracing the new abyss, they find scapegoats to punish and blame as this bizarre moral structure begins to emerge from academia as if it is a scientific fact.
But for intersectionality there is no connection to physical reality, individuality, of actual events or of there being things, it is purely a metaphysical exercise that occurs above and away from anything one can touch.
The best way of demonstrating the difference between the physical reality and the demands of the neo-Judeo-Christian morality is in allowing transgender women to dominate womens sports, especially in sports where players can suffer permanent physical damage. It would take a complete re-ordering of what we know about sports performance to get away from the fact that transgender women are physically superior athletes to women. People do know this, but they are prioritising a particular way of seeing the world, a metaphysics which their identity is tied into and that is particularly threatening to challenge. With this, it becomes immoral not to let physically superior transgender women smash womens faces in while competing in combat sports.
Given such a real and obvious problem, a problem in your face that numbers are clear on, it is easier to see how people do not understand that equality of opportunity is the highest principle. They are not trying to get the best results, they are not interested in the physical reality that challenges their principles and logic. The goal is to maintain the metaphysical belief structure, a transcendent morality that is tied into their own identity.
