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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.]
Everyone believes they are making the world a better place, or at least not make it a worse place, a tiny tiny minority of literally psychotic individuals notwithstanding. No one believes themselves to be the villain of their own story. Progressive actors in this sense are unremarkable. Even those who just like 'dunking' and being hostile to conservatives would have rationalised their own actions. I think many of these people you are talking about truly believe that they are fighting against genuine 'evil'. That doesn't mean they are justified, only terribly mistaken. Unless you're a firm believer in absolute moral relativism I suppose.
What is quite unique about the (Critical) SJ movement is an almost unprecedented degree of black-and-white thinking, which is baked into the ideology. There is no room for compromise or forgiveness, it is totalising. The ideology fosters an extreme lack of self-reflection and introspection (e.g. labelling any one questioning the ideology of 'epistemic pushback'). This has really only been on this scale (not counting cults) by its predecessor ideology, Marxism, and its rival, Fascism. For something like this to emerge from a modern liberal democratic society should be deeply troubling. Even the Crusaders admired Saladin.
The non-SJ people who follow the SJ movement just do so not only because it's the path of least resistance in most cases, but also because the average person thinks very little about why they do the things they do, say the things they say, or believe the things they believe. Most people just take things at face value, something that has been taken advantage of by the SJ movement and fostered by its culture of lack of introspection.
I don't think it's that rare for people to hate themselves. I believe myself to be the villain of my story.
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