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Notes -
This relates to something I've seen referred to as "generational loss of hypocrisy." The first "generation" who put out some bit of hyperbolic, extreme rhetoric may not really believe it, nor live by it. They might quietly carve out unprincipled exceptions for themselves in practice, or acknowledge the performativity of it all in private among themselves.
But if, when "in public," they keep preaching the message consistently, for long enough, then at least some of the next "generation" who absorb it will end up taking it seriously.
There's someone I've interacted with a bit online who, since at least a few years ago, repeatedly raised the issue of the extreme nature and implications of much of academic "decolonization" discourse, especially the bits about being "unconcerned with settler futurity." The common rejoinder to these was always that nobody actually takes any of that stuff literally, or would ever actually follow through to the terrible-yet-logical conclusions implied…
…and yet, now we are seeing that, no, quite a few people do indeed take all that seriously.
A cult leader may have been a conman who made it all up as a grift, but if the group manages to persist long enough after his death, it will probably end up made of true believers.
I see this as greasing the slope while complaining about the slippery slope fallacy. The slippery slope is, of course, a fallacious argument made against people wanting to push forward things like the whole "white privilege" discourse; the fallacy is in that moving away from the status quo to some position X doesn't necessarily imply that we'll go to 2X or 4X or 10X or whatever if given time. We're trying to nail the exact correct height to land at here, and it happens to be lower than where we are right now, and we will engineer society to nail that exact correct height, not an inch lower, and we don't deserve an iota of responsibility for the people who have decided that they want to push it lower the slope. Those are different people, not us.
But it turns out that the method we use to reach that precise lower place on the slope matters, and if that involves pouring grease on the slope so we can more easily go lower, then we don't get to claim innocence (we might be able to claim ignorance, although ignorance would be more damning, not less, in the context of engineering social norms) when people slide down the slope far beneath that precise spot we intended to nail, and in fact we are responsible for that phenomenon. I think this has clearly happened and is clearly happening with the "white privilege" discourse openly attacking things like empirical measurements and logic and discouraging criticism and scrutiny on the basis of "solidarity" and similar concepts.
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