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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 too would agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". But I would not agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% earnestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil. Because their beliefs are driven in part by corrupt biases.
I think trying to make a distinction between someone genuinely believing that they're making the world a better place, and having corrupt motivations that advance their own interest, is a false dichotomy. Both can be true simultaneously and interlinked. I know Scott wrote a post on this on SSC, but I don't remember which one, if anyone does please let me know. But the point is through something involving or similar to cognitive dissonance, people are biased in favor of beliefs that justify things they already wanted to do. Rich people are more likely to believe in trickle down economics, or that poor people are lazy and deserve to be poor. People who are good at art are more likely to believe that art is beneficial to society. People who are charismatic and politically ambitious are more likely to believe that the old politicians are corrupt and evil but they themselves are incorruptible. Only to gain power and then be corrupt. Scott's conjecture is that this is evolutionary advantageous because lying is hard and possible to see through, but if you convince yourself then you don't have to explicitly lie, and can honestly convince people of your position, gain power, and then your brain switches gears and you reap the benefits of being corrupt and in power.
So the fact that many of their beliefs and practices of Social Justice involving cancellation and being an ally happen to have the property that they remove non-members from positions of power and replace them with members, is highly relevant. Even if the individual members are not consciously corrupt grifters trying to deceive people, those properties affect them subconsciously and shape their practices. You could imagine a more Christian-like SJ movement that believed in forgiveness and redemption, where people in power accused of racism could repent and be forgiven. But then SJ members couldn't create holes above them to advance their own careers, so they are incentivized not to believe in forgiveness for powerful people.
Beliefs are complicated, and not absolute. So I think each individual SJW has a mixture of genuine belief and corrupt motivations. For the majority of SJW people, they probably don't seek direct power, I believe the corrupt motivation is just that they find poor people distasteful, especially rural poor people, and need an excuse to keep hating them instead of feeling guilty about their privilege. Everyone needs an outgroup to channel their negative feelings and blame for the fact that their life isn't as good as they wish it was, so everyone is biased towards exaggerating the flaws of whoever their chosen outgroup is. So they end up believing their movement is true, but corrupt motivation is a key and relevant part of explaining and understanding that belief: they weren't reasoned into the position via facts and logic.
The post you're referring to might be "Does Class-Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?".
I'm skeptical though. It seems like the place that the modern SJW memeplex got going was internet communities like Livejournal/Tumblr/Something Awful and various fan communities, there's not a lot of career advancement happening there. (And being on the internet there's not even a lot of awareness of how wealthy anyone is, except insofar as it is displayed by behavior.) There might be advantages to be found in some early takeovers like academia and sci-fi writers, but in plenty of the proto-SJW communities like within activist circles the beneficial move was to not bother with the community in the first place. It was only later that it got enough power over influential institutions for there to be real benefits. You can say something like "it's incentivized by status-seeking/tearing down leaders/tribalist instincts that people are prone to because it helped obtain resources over evolutionary history" but at that point the connection between the behavior and the benefit is getting pretty tenuous.
No, but there is an awful lot of vicious backstabbing, glorifying in bullying, and petty status games. There was an archive of an article posted over at the Other Place a few months back, detailing how SJ spread like a daemonic taint through the Glee fandom because it was a useful tool for fangirls of one character or ship to attack fangirls of other characters and ships, and rapidly spiraled into a deranged race-to-the-bottom of everyone preemptively trying to brand each other as toxic and problematic for liking certain characters and ship as a First Strike defense against being branded toxic and problematic for liking other ships. SJ is like a Daemon Weapon of Toxic Femininity.
Got a source I can read up on this (on the internet archive or otherwise)?
I tried to google a bit for it, but without remembering something specific like the name of the author, there are too many search confounders.
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