Why are Social Justice Warriors’ Complaints So Bizarre?

ToughWimmin [1]887 words

We’ve seen a lot of weird social justice warrior tricks lately . . . in fact, they seem to have gotten even more aggressively off-putting since Gawker started to tank.

More violent, even: we have privilege-screeching rich girls [2] throwing beer bottles at Roosh V. for exercising what’s left of the right to free speech in Canada. 

And more disgusting: period-blood art used to be confined to awful modern-art museums, but now we’ve got the outdoor attention whore [3] who ran a marathon with no tampon in. Part of me suspects this little stunt started as a laundry detergent commercial that the sponsor backed out of when they saw just how repulsive the brackish bodily fluids looked on television.

But I don’t think she was as tactically retarded as she was socially retarded: that bloodstained narcissist might very well have squished her way out of having to do a real job forever.

And I think that’s the point.

Social justice warriors, in my conspiracy-theory-inflamed mind, do not actually believe they are saving the world or anyone else. They are trying to save themselves—from a life of cubicle-ratting or marginal freelance work. They are getting attention for themselves in a way which they think (some of them rightly, others wrongly, but they might as well try) will get them a cushier career than they would have enjoyed otherwise.

The Left, after all, is big business, or at least big public teat. Becoming a stand-out member of the SJW crowd can get you ahead in the media, or at least the academic, rat race.

And let me play the devil’s advocate: to what extent can you blame them?

In the past couple of decades the U.S. has lost its manufacturing base to the global economy, its service jobs to immigration, and now we’re even losing tech jobs to H-1B visas.

Most people’s jobs, assuming they can get a job, are increasingly low-paid, humiliating, menial, overworked, useless, crazy-making, insecure, and worst of all, fundamentally useless. The likelihood of finding work that is either meaningful or reasonably lucrative—forget about getting both, silly—is slimmer and slimmer.

Who wouldn’t want to escape a lifetime of account management at an ad agency for clients whose corporate bureaucracies are indistinguishable from the government in their cumbersome sloth?

Who wouldn’t want to quit being Kafka?

Granted, the Twitter riots that SJWs spread in order to destroy people’s lives are reprehensible. But like anyone else, they’re rats on a rat pile, fighting for a scrap of another, deader, rat.

Sure, decent people would rather preserve their dignity and moral integrity than make maroons of themselves to get ahead. And many of us survive on peanuts rather than dirty our hands.

For those of us who live this way, the fact that the SJW rewards system is breaking down provides hours and hours of Schadenfreude. Don’t let the door bruise your flanks on the way out, Gawker staff!

But their behavior is not necessarily an evil mystery. There is a pattern; unless they “suffer” from a personality disorder, people don’t do insane things for absolutely no reason. Sure, college kids work themselves into a groupthink froth with ease. People that age always do, and they tell each other they’re being meaningfully rebellious.

But why is the froth so particularly ridiculous these days? Because the market for “real” jobs—the sort of drone work you get if you haven’t called mass attention to yourself by bleeding down your leg in public—is particularly awful.

The available work is as insecure as it is meaningless. Even if your writing is a disgusting string of bull, any sort of public declamation feels like a more existentially satisfying way to make a living than wasting your days as a bank teller—or at least it’s thus for people who don’t mind bloviating.

Folks on the Left might note my hypocrisy, in that the same principle applies to the Right; they would be correct. It very obviously applies to the mainstream Right—like the Democrats, Republican candidates for public office will say anything to keep from falling back into the vicissitudes of the private sector.

But it’s also true in the Alternative Right; there are dozens of articles and, indeed, entire “writers” which present either caricatures of their own views, or views they don’t even hold, in order to make a splash, get a foothold, and duck the day job. People with no vocation for writing are drawn in everywhere by the fact that no other job gives them a feeling of purpose, much less the glamor which they, as lifelong media-fed creatures, crave.

Perhaps if the available jobs for professional SJWs dry up, as the tremors in the Gawker empire’s foundations indicate they might, then the stream of nonsense and viciousness will slow down.

It would make public discourse more civil, and leave more freedom of speech for the rest of us . . . but then what the heck are we going to do with all these English majors?

Cripes, if we keep importing H-1B indentured servants, we won’t know what to do with our STEM graduates, either. Our only recourse will be, once again, Schadenfreude: when they come for the managers who kept shilling for more immigration. The kids who didn’t go to college won’t be too thrilled about handing over their burger spatulas, though. Ah, it’s a wicked world.