What do Social Justice Warriors and Nazi’s Have In Common?
To have knowledge is to have a correct perception and understanding of reality. Psychosis is defined as a loss of contact with reality. When a significant portion of our knowledge is flawed we begin to flirt with, or even enter into the psychotic. How to produce knowledge? Or rather: How do you produce an accurate perception of reality?
Most would suggest that we produce knowledge via our intuitive perception. Complex knowledge is produced via a set of procedures such as the rules of logic, the scientific method or formal mathematics. These procedures are pathways leading to a greater understanding of reality itself.
Codifying procedures for knowledge production makes it easier to determine wether or not an idea has any basis in reality. These procedures have evolved and been built slowly over the course of centuries. No singular group owns exclusive rights to the application of these procedures.
Not everyone thinks this way. German National Socialist believed that knowledge was not bound by a strict set of rules and that the ability to obtain knowledge was only possible by Aryan peoples. Nazi ideology is a benchmark for bad ideas, comparing an ideology with Nazism can act as a Canary In The Coal Mine per se. It is time to see how Social Justice looks alongside humanities worst political ideology.
German Nazi’s and modern Social Justice “Warriors’s” view everything through a lens of Conflict Theory. This theory seeks to explain the word by suggesting that everlasting and omnipresent strife between groups is the cause everything negative. For the Nazi’s the Jews were responsible for all evil, whilst for the radicalized Social Justice “Warrior” the heteronormative (straight) cis-gendered (chose to leave their penis intact) white (white) privileged (parents raised him properly) is the scape goat for everything.
Note, that the designation of theory in the “Social” Sciences does not hold the same epistemological weight as the designation of theory in the Actual Sciences. Scientific Theories are refutable and based on data whereas theories in the “Social” Sciences are irrefutable and their popularity is simply governed by a contest of status and virtue signaling.
Ludwig Von Mises was an Austrian Jew who fled Europe for America during the Second World War. He is considered the founder of Austrian Economics which advocates for individuals right of economic freedom. Mises consistently and elegantly fought against Nazi and Communist ideologies.
In The Omnipotent Government: The Rise of The Total State and Total War Mises chronicles the defeat of a free societies in Europe and dissects the prejudices and innate totalitarianism of socialist ideologies. Although Communist and Nazi’s claimed to be different systems of governance Mises observes that they are extremely similar, if not identical. The core of both of these ideologies is that the state, meaning the bureaucrats whom attempt to engineer society, are entitled to have absolute control over every aspect of every individuals life.
Additionally both Communist and Nazi ideologies, which as I probably don’t need to remind you resulted in the deaths and enslavement of millions of people, shared identical views in regards to epistemology (knowledge production). Writing of the Communist and the Nazi’s Mises in 1944 writes:
“ The logical structure of mind, they say, is different with different nations and races. Every race or nation has its own logic and therefore its own economics, mathematics, physics, and so on.”
Mises, The Omnipotent Government, Page 145
The Nazi’s saw knowledge or lack thereof as being produced by a persons race, whilst the Communist believed knowledge to be contingent on a persons class. Nazism dubbed Jewish Logic to be inferior to Aryan Logic. Whilst the Communist felt as though Proletariat Logic was superior to Bourgeois Logic.
Mises also remarks that neither camp explicitly demonstrated just how Aryan or Proletariat knowledge were different from Jewish or Bourgeois. Claims of differing logics are merely cheap propaganda tools to dismiss dissenting opinions. He continues:
“ Polylogism has a peculiar method of dealing with dissenting views. If its supporters fail to unmask the background of an opponent, they simply brand him a traitor. Both Marxians and Nazis know only two categories of adversaries. The aliens — whether members of a non-proletarian class or of a non-Aryan race — are wrong because they are aliens; the opponents of proletarian or Aryan origin are wrong because they are traitors. Thus they lightly dispose of the unpleasant fact that there is dissension among the members of what they call their own class or race.”
Mises, The Omnipotent Government, Page 146
The first concern for Nazi and Communist fanatics was not wether or not a theory or conjecture was empirically valid, but rather what race or class created such things. All knowledge production running counter to the established narrative was deemed to be illegitimate on the basis that it was either invalided because it was either formulated by a faulty form of logic ie. polylogism or was merely conjured up to service Jewish or Bourgeois interest ie. conflict theory.
In practical application this tactic served to bolster the ranks of these ideologies with fanatics, who could not be convinced that their ideas were wrong because in their minds anyone trying to persuade them was using an “illegitimate” form of knowledge production or was simply an enemy of “the people”.
One would have hoped that so-called civilized people in the year 2020 would be able to recognize such obviously faulty premises and abandon the same ideas which were foundational to the Holocaust and slave camps of the Archipelago. Sadly this is not the case, polylogism is a widely held mainstream belief held by leading “intellectuals” of American universities, it is even taught (at the very high price of college tuition) at campuses across the country.
Writing in 2012 Social Justice scholar Robin DiAngelo (who is white), Author of White Fragility writes:
“ Transformative academic knowledge is knowledge that challenges the traditional canon. This form of knowledge recognizes that social groups we belong to (such as race, class, and gender) necessarily shape our frame of reference and give us a particular — not universal — perspective. Therefore, each of us has some insight into some dimensions of social life but has limited understanding in others.”
Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, p. 10.
As explicitly demonstrated by Ms. DiAngelo and her co-author polylogism is fundamental concept for leading Social Justice “Scholars”. The only difference between the Polylogism of Social Justice and that of the Nazi’s is that it is more inclusive and given a fancy name. Social Justice polylogism is contingent on both race and class whilst being extended to include gender as another division.
