On Weaponized Helplessness and the Reactionary Backlash I Saw Coming Long Ago

I should have spoken up more.

Here’s a nice quote from Helen Pluckrose’s recent essay, Can We Please Not Throw LGBT Rights Away?

---

“I fear that we are seeing a rise of people feeling perfectly justified in openly indulging in misogyny, racism and homophobia as a form of reciprocation because the social norms which made them so socially unacceptable have now broken down. Of course, some of them will have always held these abhorrent views and now feel able to let them out, but many, I fear, are developing these attitudes now as a form of revenge after years of being gratuitously abused themselves.”

---

I pretty well called the impending reactionary backlash to intolerant fundamentalist cultural progressivism over a decade ago. For whatever reason - probably because I was frequently bullied by guys in middle school and high school and still had a chip on my shoulder about it, because I was fascinated by the whole critical theory and cultural studies scene, and because I recognized the extent to which women were in fact sometimes mistreated around me - I was paying attention to developments in online feminist discourse in the late aughts and early 2010s, and I could see the degree to which some of these people were developing a cult of weaponized helplessness that frequently demonized men and insisted not on the substantial betterment of conditions for women, but on the importance of their ability to rhetorically top from the proverbial bottom and wield a perpetual state of victimhood like a machine gun.

Unfortunately I was foolish enough to talk about my concerns about this approach leading to a reactionary backlash with the wrong people, members of a philosophy club that I fancied myself a part of, at a local punk café. I made my best effort to be tactful, but I ran afoul of the dogma and ended up getting publicly chewed out and loudly called a misogynist as various crusty patrons looked on at the spectacle bemused, and then later I was falsely accused of making "a credible rape threat" (against a woman I had never met) in a publicly accessible facebook group in response to the incident.

Needless to say, I didn’t end up maintaining friendships with these people, but unfortunately I didn’t exit the proverbial Vampire Castle altogether for years. It’s actually not clear to me that I’ve entirely escaped it now; I continue to encounter its gargoyle phantoms pretty regularly. The nightmares that I experienced inside will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. In a way the damned thing grew around me, as it spread across the country and the anglosphere, before its bastard spawn, DEI, finally became the defining divide-and-conquer strategy of our times.

After the café incident, I had a pretty firm understanding of where trying to honestly express myself on these matters could lead, and realistically I’ve been censoring myself on politics and culture pretty harshly for much of my adult life now, while occasionally making subtle and mostly fruitless conciliatory attempts to redirect the drift into madness. In retrospect, this mostly hands off approach was both a personal and political mistake - sometimes you just need an expressive jackhammer - but self-protection is a strong instinct. There’s a reason most people avoid discussing these matters openly. Most people probably avoid thinking about them altogether and just try to keep their heads down and their lives together. In the short run, any given individual is better off that way.

I have a lot more stories about the social justice people and how they’ve treated others, the ways in which they’ve trampled on people and acted in outright abusive ways, ostensibly in the name of “protecting the marginalized,” or “centering the voices of the oppressed.” Protecting the marginalized and centering the voices of the oppressed can extend as far as putting elderly Ethiopian small businesswomen out of a job if you just focus your attention in the right way and ignore the side effects of your crusades.

I can bring some comedy out of a few of these stories, but ultimately most of them are simply sad. Some of them are genuinely devastating. None of this stuff is any good for anybody who’s at all psychologically vulnerable, and not everyone made it out alive.

Years later, one of the guys involved in the café incident made a feeble attempt to cancel me over it again, but I defended myself. What he was saying didn’t make any sense; he had no ammunition, and, in a turn of events that’s pretty uncommon for these sort of situations, he actually even gave me a half-assed apology about it.

---

I think it took a few years for weaponized helplessness to move beyond infecting feminism and into other spheres of the left wing of the culture war, but the tactic was so effective, especially in the context of a growing attention economy dominated by profit-seeking corporate algorithms, that it was bound to get caught up in racial politics too, and eventually, in an ironic twist, it circled back around and was aimed squarely at the feminists themselves by trans activists. I guess the chickens always come home to roost.

It's important to remember that the new restrictive, moralistic left-of-center cultural norms - especially the more egregious sorts that you'll often come across in academia, liberal media, the arts, and so-called alternative communities - were installed more or less through campaigns of emotional blackmail, slander, unchecked mob justice, and abusive strategies involving real threats to social wellbeing and employment. Maybe you weren't around to see this happen - count yourself lucky if that's the case - but I was.

And now the pendulum is clearly beginning to swing. Identitarian social justice activists have created a semblance of the monster they feared (or maybe secretly perversely desired from the beginning), first with Trump, and now with a large and growing population of people who feel aggrieved and see doubling-down on old prejudices as the only functional antidote to their predicament.

Simulacra of old racist, misogynistic, and anti-lgbt sentiments are in fact on the rise. Possibly more importantly, conservative Christians are taking over The Supreme Court. Social justice liberals have been laying the psychological and emotional groundwork for this turn for at least a decade now.

Young men are turning rightwards. Can you really blame them? They’ve been told they’re toxic. They’ve been told they need to check their privilege, that they should sit their asses down and listen, that their “male tears” will be cherished and sipped like a damn fine cup of coffee. They’ve been falling behind in education for decades and almost nobody gives a damn. Certainly liberals aren’t chomping at the bit to help them with their growing social woes, their discouraging dating lives, or their gloomy economic prospects. Many liberals haven’t even learned how to acknowledge that men can have problems in the first place, and social justice liberals remain intensely hostile to any attempts to discuss the problems men face at all. Whether they simply ignore men’s problems or try to crush any acknowledgement of them under ever-evolving methods of social censure and stigma, liberals have invested themselves in patriarchy theory and the simplistic notion that women are the ones who have problems and men are the ones who cause them so intensely that they’re completely blind to the facts on the ground.

So I guess we’ll see how ugly the pendulum swing gets. I hope most of these reactionaries are just pretending that they think women are useless and belong in the kitchen, that they think all lgbt people are dangerous predators and “groomers,” that they think non-European peoples are inferior; I hope they’re just “LARPing” and blowing off some steam, but of course that’s what everybody hoped about the people who were posting things like #menaretrash and #killallmen on the internet some years back.

When you decide that the aggrieved are under no obligation to conduct themselves with any civility whatsoever, what happens when other people start feeling aggrieved by their behavior and the institutional hegemonies they’ve established through weaponized helplessness?

The correct move was to have some decency and quit shoveling more coal into the reactionary engine years ago, to focus on solidarity and overcoming economic and social ills together with as many people from as many different backgrounds along for the ride as possible, but these people didn’t self reflect or assess their strategies; they didn't learn, they paid no mind whatsoever to collateral damage, and they just kept pushing, like tyrants and weasels often do. Once it was clear there was a route to power, the manipulative narcissists lead the way and the well-meaning rubes followed along. I’m sure some of these people figured the ends justified the means, but what do the ends actually look like?

Educate yourself to this reality.

Can we Please Not Throw LGBT Rights Away?