Saint Or A Sinner?

Over the last two years, I’ve been called a TERF, a racist, a Nazi, and a misogynist. I was also called a right-wing libertarian. Well, the latter is true.

There used to be good arguments and bad arguments, and anyone who held any political identity could have those. Nowadays, the arguments and the reasoning don’t matter anymore. It is more about who you are rather than what you say. It doesn’t matter if you preach world peace and go all over the world to help people, like Mother Theresa. As long as you don’t adopt and buy into the ‘right’ identities and ideologies, you’re a fascist and what you do and what you think doesn’t matter.

Liberal democracies value free speech because proponents of liberty mainly believe the better argument will always win. This is why we also value dialogue and debate. As you know, being a debater is almost a stereotypical feature for pro-liberty folk, and there is a reason for that. We don’t like preconceived notions.

If the good argument doesn’t win, we also have the right to believe in wrong or faulty ideas or have the wrong thoughts and while we can judge each other on an individual basis, we don’t think it is efficient or rational to punish people because of their thoughts. People have the right to be wrong.

Unfortunately, this is not how things work out today and the bizarre thing is this is mostly caused by so-called progressive identity politics.

Twenty or thirty years ago, identity politics were useful. It was a train heading to the right station. Sadly, the train arrived, but the seats were too comfortable for people to leave the train.

This left us a world, where people who had certain identities, whether ethnic or politic, would always have the moral unquestionable high ground. This led to the complete removal of two of the most important components of liberal democracies; debate and dialogue.

Even though most of the content in popular culture and academia is produced in liberal democracies, the ideas tend to come from Marxist schools, especially the Frankfurt school. However, I must note that this predicament changed for the worse with the postmodernist wave. This was the French Revolution in American academia. Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard transformed the discourse in a way that we can’t possibly revert. Personally, I was a big fan of Foucault all through my teenage years, then during my college life I was critical of him and after covid, I now know and understand the work he has done with biopolitics was important, powerful, and quite relevant. Despite him being possibly a rapist and a pedophile, his work is still important for humanity. Now, I feel the urge to explain the problem with this wave of French ideas hitting the shores of Western Academia…

The world had become much more democratic, meaning access to knowledge was easier and cheaper than ever, but this came with a cost. Academia is and always has been and always should be an elitist place. Elitist language, such as the French intellectuals’, and the general public do not really make a good match. In our world, we need a bridge or numerous bridges between intellectuals and the public. Otherwise, things can get out of hand rapidly, as they did with identity politics.

These intellectuals are now the martyrs of the culture war among progressives and conservatives which added another axis to the polarization of social media, civil society, academia, popular culture, media, and finally public life.

Media dominating the world today is for the most part progressive, this has to do with both funding and academia of course, but there are other components. The problem with being progressive or being a leftist is that this label has become unquestionably ‘good’. The same goes for feminism, climate activism, veganism, and the list goes on and on. Basically, we have decided some labels were good and others were bad and the positions we deemed to be favorable now don’t have the responsibility to debate, argue, and prove their points. The debate is dead and activists are spitting on its grave.

Leftists don’t like to hear this often, but you need to accept that you don’t have the moral high ground by virtue of being a leftist. In fact, this acceptance is what is causing the downfall of the left. On the contrary, libertarians constantly have to have better and solid arguments, and they have to calibrate them as much as possible. Thinking that we have the moral high ground and no questions asked sort of acceptance leads to mental and intellectual laziness, which is a recipe for what is happening today. People stopped questioning things coming from already ‘verified’ ideologies such as feminism or environmentalism. Even though as a feminist I know why there was such a thing as feminism and I believe we have solid arguments there, we also have to accept that we have to keep on debating, we have to remain in a dialogue. One other point, once having the better argument doesn’t mean you will keep on having the better argument. Times change, so do circumstances and validity of arguments. Therefore, we don’t have the right to say okay I won this round, so I never have to debate or have to have a solid argument again. NO!

We have to have arguments, we have to have a basis for those arguments, and our arguments can not involve other people being this or that. It is about our argument only, and us being whoever we are shouldn’t play a role in the argument we have. I might be the worst person on the planet. I can be the total opposite of what I’m arguing for, but I can still have solid arguments on something important to say. My identity is not a good enough reason for my ideal or argument to be dismissed. Unless, when I’m making a personal statement or using anecdotal evidence from my personal life. Then who I am would play a role.

To be consistent, I’m going to have to argue why my identity shouldn’t matter. We can say, personality, environment, and the life we have in general have an impact on our thinking, ideas, and philosophy. The most famous examples would be Arthur Schopenhauer and Epicurus. However, this doesn’t have to mean we can’t intercept the universal. By all means, personal can be a means to intercept the universal. If the argument is good and solid, dismissing it would be a disservice to humankind. This is a utilitarian argument as you can see and there can also be a counterargument to it and there can also be other non-utilitarian arguments supporting my argument as well. Nevertheless, arguments and debate are the pinnacles of human civilization, and these are two very valuable things we shouldn’t lose.

Animals and even our close relatives such as primates communicate in various ways, but they can not argue or debate as humans do. They act on their primal instincts as they should be doing. Their actions are derived from the mammalian and the reptilian brain. We, humans, have the capacity to act from the human brain and I think we should use that capacity. If we want to improve our civilization and take humanity one step further, then we must have dialogue, arguments, and debates. This age has, unfortunately, become the age of degeneracy, which means losing the useful products and tools of civilization has been normalized. If we want to progress as humanity as a whole, then we need our civilization and the tools of it. Because at the moment, intellectually we’re not advancing, if anything we are regressing, and it is time to stop the regression for the sake of progression.