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Victory and Microscopes

Entry 2289, on 2023-08-30 at 14:00:52 (Rating 4, Politics)

Sometimes it can be very difficult to understand why things are the way they are. In past posts I have offered various convoluted explanations of the state of the world, but recently I heard two short and simple statements which I think explain a lot of what is happening in the world.

Of course, if I just quoted these two statements this would be a short blog post, so I will offer some explanation, expansion, and defence of each one.

The two statements are "no movement ever declares victory", and "everything looks bad under a microscope".

Before I offer my analysis of these, have a think about them yourself and see if you can guess where I'm going here. It might be obvious to past readers of this blog, but maybe not.

So, the first: "no movement ever declares victory" is a concise summary of what I have been saying in the past about political and/or social movements not knowing when to stop. A classic manifestation of this is the "St George in Retirement" effect, which I first discussed in a post with that title from 2019-10-04, but have also quoted several times since.

I will briefly describe this effect yet again. It is basically saying that many political movements start with good intentions, and with a genuine problem to solve, but once they get started, they never want to admit they have succeeded, because the members' whole identity becomes tied up with the movement, and they can't admit the movement is no longer necessary.

To justify the continued existence of the movement they must look for new reasons for it to continue, which become less and less credible. In fact, this search for new issues is an important part of the second quote (see below).

The classic examples here are feminism and racial equality. There is no doubt that in the past both women and racial minorities have not been given fair treatment. Initially this was obvious, because women might not have been allowed to vote, or black people in the US might not have been able to use the same facilities as whites, and organised resistance to these situations was fully justified.

But now it is illegal to disadvantage these groups. Women have the vote and participate in the political system in every "civilised" country, and racial minorities also gain all the same rights as everyone else, and also participate fairly in the political system.

So you might think the feminists and race activists might say "OK, our job here is done, time to move on to something else". But, of course, they don't. Real bias against the groups they support no longer exists, so they have to create new ones. They never declare victory.

Note the use of the word "civilised" in quotes above. I used that to mean mainly western countries, where equality really does exist. If feminists really wanted to improve the situation for women maybe they should be looking at some countries under Islamic rule. But no, as a rule they don't, because that might be seen as "Islamophobic".

Also note that some, especially more modern, movements didn't even start with a rational goal. For example, Black Lives Matter was always fake, dangerous, and hysterical. It's reason for existing never had any basis in fact.

Now let's look at the second quote: "everything looks bad under a microscope".

Microscopes do two things: first (obviously) they make things look bigger; and second (more subtly) they focus on a very small part of the whole.

So the metaphor here should be obvious now: look at anything in sufficient detail, and concentrate on magnifying one small part while ignoring the rest, and you can make anything look bad.

For example, BLM might look at the killing of George Floyd and magnify it to a status far beyond what it really deserves, while ignoring the hugely more significant number of black people murdered by other blacks. Or trans activists might make a huge deal out of the way some trans people feel about being excluded from facilities for the gender they identify as, while ignoring the people who really are naturally of that gender who are disadvantaged by the trans activists' demands.

Look at anything in sufficient detail, and be selective about where you look, and you will always see something bad. This applies to people, institutions, countries, and societies. Look at modern American society and you will find fault, but look at any other and you will also see it. Native American societies often engaged in war, used slaves, and were grossly unequal, but do we hear much about that? No, we hear about far lesser issues with contemporary and historic western societies instead.

Look at the life of any person and you will see they have made mistakes, even icons of the activist causes, like Martin Luther King Junior or Mahatma Gandhi. Do we hear demands to remove statues of them, or remove them from the teaching of history? No, we hear those demands about similarly flawed leaders of the western world instead, such as Churchill.

So there's the cause of many of the problems of the western world today, mostly based around woke-ism (yeah, sorry to bring that up again, but it really is the biggest problem in the modern world). People see a problem, and want to fix it, but when they succeed, they can't stop and continue to demand a fix for something that isn't broken. To justify these demands they carefully select certain issues and blow them out of all proportion. First, they fail to declare victory, then they get out the microscope!

Comment 1 (7484) by Anonymous on 2023-08-30 at 22:10:43:

LOL. Weird title. I was intrigued, but same old stuff.

Comment 2 (7485) by OJB on 2023-08-31 at 09:35:32:

Yes, fair point. I am kind of hung up on my anti-woke crusade at the moment. I'm glad the title grabbed your attention! I will write another "helpful" computer post next.

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