Tacherus
8mo ago
DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.
I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it. Can you explain what on earth it means?
Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:
- dividing the world into oppressor and oppressed
- some sort of natural outgrowth of Marx from the Frankfurt school
- Marxist analysis somehow applied to culture?
- centered on critique of capitalism
- use race or sex instead of class
Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.
So I’m left not understanding what people mean by it precisely. It seems to me at this point the phrase is meant to just tar by association, but I’d really like to hear if there’s something more meaningful to it.
Tacherus
9mo ago
My impulse is that the urge to flee is tied into the idea that “their side winning” is equivalent to the system functioning properly. A loss of popular support of this scale can only be interpreted in terms of the whole thing falling apart.
That being said I’m sympathetic to being freaked out. I don’t go looking for it yet pretty consistently find myself sucked down “leave before it’s too late” rabbit holes that are pretty effective at freaking me out when I’m doomscrolling at night.
Tacherus
9mo ago
I’m inclined to give him a little more slack than that. Just the other day I had the experience of reminiscing about a friend I had 10+ years ago who I knew for a fact was an incurable bullshitter. He lied about the most inane things and I knew this at the time.
He ran a store when I met him and it closed after a year or so and it only occurred to me now, more than a decade later, that he probably lied to me about why he had to close.
I think there are two pieces here that I’ve experienced firsthand: one is it’s very difficult to retro-actively scrub for lies. I also experienced this after leaving Mormonism in college. For years after I was uncovering random new things I’d been taught that were easily seen to not be true.
The second is it’s difficult to spot a lie if it is about something it would never occur to you to lie about. It’s like if someone always lies to you about what he had for lunch that day. Then over time lies get built on that. It can be very hard when a major lie is uncovered to realize it goes back to what was for lunch.
Tacherus
11mo ago
I’ve noticed this before too. I’d go further and say it’s not just the dinner party metaphor but a fixation on formal power.
This mainly manifests in my experience when discussing power dynamics between men and women. The idea that a pretty intern could have “power” over her boss simply does not compute. It’s a form of mistaking the map for the territory I think.
I agree with your definition as the ability to get things done, but that doesn’t yield as readily to systematic analyses and also I suspect doesn’t quite align with the story they want to tell.
I think there’s a category of error of reading too much into how things look on paper. Like another example I use is to ask whether or not an infant has power over her parents. To me the answer is obviously yes, but if you’re caught up in systemic analyses and legalism and dealing with formal “power structures” you will struggle to explain why or might even deny it outright.
Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s? That is the most compelling argument I think—that they described themselves this way until it became a liability.
I didn’t mean it as an argument, my point was I haven’t had to chance to ask someone what they mean so I’m eager to seize the opportunity.
If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically? Is the claim that he invented or pioneered it in the form of his class war analysis? It just seems incredibly vague making the tie to Marx specifically tenuous to me.
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