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Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.
Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]
Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]
I do not understand the distinction made in Edge Case 1. What is an earnestly held belief? I believe (haha) beliefs are anticipations, and so true beliefs are by definition the thing that makes people do what they do (caveats for deception). I would say that particular minority of SJer really does think they are making the world a better place. Consider the following thought process:
Conservatives are bad people
It doesn't matter what they think
The world will be a better place once they die out, regardless of what I do
In this thought process, conversion just isn't a terminal value. "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em" sounds like a not-so-well-thought-out response, because it doesn't actually say anything about reality, it is just a "boo outgroup" light. So, you should avoid reading too much into it. I certainly don't think it means, "I agree with your empirical claim that being less hostile will convert more people. And I agree with your value claim that converting more people will make the world a better place. But on the other hand, fuck them."
I won't go into a full recitation of why I think this of these specific people, but I guess what I'm trying to point at is that there's a breed of SJer that's more motivated by fairness/cheating (bad people should be punished) than by care/harm (make a paradise). Fairness/cheating is a conservative value in Haidt's six-foundation scheme, but The Righteous Mind's research predates SJ and I've seen it hypothesized that SJ is a six-foundation ideology (unlike liberalism proper).
I agree it's kind of a technicality that I don't count "punish the evil people" as "trying to make a better world".
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