Concentrated Fanaticism

Injustices produce movements. Movements produce organizations. Organizations develop structures. Structures endure.

That endurance is a good thing, as long as the injustices persist. People who wish to join a movement find it easier to do so if there's a structure, and founders can retire out after a time with less fear of the movement losing impetus or focus.

What happens when the injustice that prompted the movement resolves, though?

The strength of a movement is tied to the degree of perceived injustice. That perception, while manipulable, will always have at least some connection to reality, and as reality informs the body politic of progress against the injustice, fewer are drawn to the movement. People move on, or retain movement awareness but feel less compelled to be active participants. Organizations lose body count.

The structures persist, though. With the "moving on" by average folk with many interests and finite time, the concentrations of the more singularly minded increase.

Then comes the Santayana moment:

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

Or, achieved your initial goals.

Structures endure, and their occupants will evolve their activism rather than congratulate each other on a job well done and go home. Those most committed to the movement, who are actualized and validated by it, i.e. the fanatics, the last ones left in the building, will be less and less tempered or diluted by the more grounded members of the organization, as the latter diminish in number and influence.

They end up ‘running the asylum,’ so to speak, and then the mischief begins.

This is why feminism has been "hijacked," as Zoe Strimpel noted at Bari Weiss's Common Sense Substack. This is why the gay rights movement has morphed into LGBTQIA2S+++, wherein acceptance has been supplanted by a militancy that has turned against many of its own. This is why trans-activists looking to eradicate the very concept of biological sex have achieved a ‘cultural terrorist' level of control over public dialogue. This is why the civil rights movement has devolved from Martin Luther King's "content of their character" to today's race essentialism.

Co-locating with the fanatics are the self-serving cynics, the people who leverage movements for personal gain, who have greater interest in self-promotion and enrichment than in the movement's goals (original or subsequent), and who want the injustices to continue rather than be resolved. They, ultimately, end up at the top of the structures, calling the shots, running the shows, and setting agendas that usually don’t remedy or even address the injustices that birthed the movements.

This is why Black Lives Matter (the organization) supplanted Black Lives Matter (the movement). This is how we end up with activist leaders buying multi-million dollar homes. This is why we are constantly told how bad things are, as opposed to how much things have improved. And this is why the ‘solutions’ are mostly declarations that the problems are forever.

The worst are those who combine the cynic's desire for perpetual grievance with the fanatic's fabrications. They concoct some cockamamie theories, flesh them out with language and en vogue ideas that resonate in the academic echo chambers, and ride those theories to fame and fortune. This is how we get Critical Race Theory, the aforementioned race essentialism, Modern Monetary Theory, Democratic Socialism, the 'cancel culture' doublethink that declares speech as violence and violence as not, and so on.

In a saner time, much of this garbage would be laughed out of the public square. But, with Big Tech's cultural capture - the combination of the Twitter horde (2% of the US population that produces 80% of Twitter's political content) and the homogeneous mindset within the companies' rank-and-file, the fanatics' excesses are reinforced and amplified, and dissent and mockery create personal peril.

Good ideas and good behavior: the Golden Rule, equal treatment under the law, Enlightenment values, and the like, get rejected and denounced. Good concepts, like inclusivity, tolerance, cultural respect, and so forth, get Bizarroed into diametrically opposite meanings. Bad ideas, being new and hip and the product of the Best-and-Brightest and contrary to what the unwashed masses know, think, or want, get embraced. After all, if some Neanderthal mouth-breather with an oil-stained Cat Power cap, an American gas guzzler, and a non-coastal zip code thinks X, then X must be wrong.

Fortunately, the aforementioned reality intrusion is doing its thing. Fanatics never steady-state. Their way requires constant escalation, and that escalation departs further and further from reality. Trans activists, despite having already alienated some of their natural allies in the gay rights and feminist movements with their efforts to eliminate the concept of biological sex entirely, pushed their agenda into athletic competition and into grade schools, with biological men competing against biological women, and prepubescent children being given not only the autonomy to make life-altering decisions about their "gender identity," but to actually receive chemical and surgical modifications. These are both insanities, and they detach the fanatics ever further from the body politic.

That one political party has given itself over to the fanatics is a tragedy. A short-lived one, we can only hope, with an electoral wipeout looming just a few months away. There is a fear that the pendulum swing might be excessive, with genuine civil rights gains and cultural movement toward equality, tolerance, and inclusivity (the real deal, not the woke-Left's doublethink versions) degraded by overreactions and tribalism. There shouldn't have to be laws limiting the teaching of sexual matters to children above a certain age, but one side's excess prompts the other side's coercion, and liberty loses out.

The correct way, as always, lies in equality and the Golden Rule. When inequality becomes not only acceptable but desired, the door opens for fanatics and cynics to dominate the culture.

---

If you enjoy The Roots of Liberty, please subscribe (if you have already, thank you!), and  please recommend the blog to your friends! While I share it as much as I can on social media, subscribing ensures you won't miss a post.

If you really like The Roots of Liberty and want to help keep it rolling, please consider becoming a paying subscriber here at Substack, or at a lighter level as contributor to the blog via Patreon.

Thank you for your support!

Yours in liberty,

Peter.