The Polarity of Non-Duality

[APeacefulWarrior]

APW, your comments about SJWs ring particularly true to me as I was involved with Occupy and various far-left groups and have seen this kind of "totalitarian humanism" first hand. I wrote [this essay](http://www.socialmemorycomplex.net/leftl...rrectness/) in an attempt to wrestle with these issues; would love your feedback. Sorry to hijack!

You bring up some good points. I especially liked this bit:

The key is not to defend KKK rallies, or bigoted jokes, or offensive behavior of any kind, but to understand that they cannot be combatted through countervailing oppression, as expedient as that may at first seem. Rather, they can only be genuinely addressed through those mechanisms readily available to us that require neither authority nor privilege. As the saying goes, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house".

I had a discussion about this recently with a friend of mine who's (imo) a bit too into identity politics and such, and tends to get lured into arguments over who's oppressing who. The tl;dr is that someone she considered to be among the oppressive was complaining about how he didn't have a 'safe zone' of his own where he can speak without immediately having people jump down his throat.

And she jumped down his throat.

My point was, more or less, increasing the negativity in this situation isn't going to create positive results. It's just going to make the person MORE hostile and paranoid and convinced he lacks a safe place to speak. That isn't going to change his opinions. It's just going to increase his perceived need for a "tribe" of his own. And the more he feels oppressed, the more likely he is to "act out" specifically to repel those he sees as oppressing him.

(I honestly forget the specifics; it was something about him being a bisexual man and feeling like lesbians were the most oppressive towards him, iirc.)

Unfortunately, she was too fixated on thinking he should suffer repercussions from his politically incorrect speech to look at the larger picture, even when I detailed in strictly psychological/behavioral terms how her actions towards him were only reinforcing his negative behaviors, rather than discouraging them. Her desire to create a sense of justice -the ostenisble goal of every SJW- was overriding pragmatic arguments about how to effectively encourage better behavior. And the shame of it is, I know she's had enough classes in development and psychology to understand what I was talking about in the abstract, but she just couldn't get past that impulse to hurt the bad man, so to speak.

In a world where the old societal structures are breaking down, with folks feeling "lost" and without a people/tribe of their own, it's all too easy for these sorts of negative feedback loops to get started. People end up trying to create new tribes through exclusionary methods, which necessarily inspires the outcast to reject them in turn, which just increases the hostility on both sides without any path towards resolution.