What is a 'Social Justice Warrior'?

The loaded term is a critique of late imperial culture, not a buzzword spouted by boring centrists

Too often, the pejorative ‘SJW’ is used to describe anyone on the intersectional left.

Rather, I think the most intellectually useful interpretation of the phrase is as follows:

A social justice warrior is a middle-class, privileged, person who lectures other privileged middle class people about the narcissistic minutia of daily life in order to attain a false sense of moral superiority and civic duty.

An activist working to establish paid maternity leave for all women is obviously not an SJW, but a conscientious actor.

On the other hand, a middle class journalist lecturing their co-workers about how their critiques of Hillary Clinton are ‘mansplaining’, imagining that they are cleaning up American culture, is an SJW and a buffoon.

‘Fat activism’ is also intensely decadent, a movement of well-fed middle-class people advocating for their right to not be insulted. Can anything get more small-minded and elitist than that?

This is to say nothing of banning all forms of hate speech, or rather, banning ideas ‘we’ don’t like, an imagined ‘we’ that represents, again, an over-educated, selfish, middle-class culture.

‘SJWism’ is the new FCC, the new Christian pearl-clutching about explicit content in videogames, movies, and culture. Their flawed assumption is that explicit content creates explicit thoughts.

If we all accept this backwards anti-intellectual premise, then any conversation about George Carlin has to become a conversation about how fat-shaming and disrespecting others’ faiths is wrong.

Such a sterile world is a sham I don’t wish to live in.

SJWs fundamentally misread human nature. They believe that human beings are perfectible apes, that language matters more than actions, and that people will change their behavior if they are lectured and insulted. The opposite is true – the alt-right largely exists because trolls respond to disingenuous moral lecturing by doubling-down and not backing down.

A culture war has erupted online ever since 2014’s GamerGate controversy, something that has become so blown out of proportion that I don’t understand it, and frankly, I don’t care to understand it.

Since GamerGate, ‘anti-SJW YouTube’ has emerged, with content creators like Sargon of Akkad creating entire careers out of attacking Social Justice Warriors.

Sargon, in his early days, made some good points, and presented an outsider’s common sense running up against a bizarre ideology that sought to bleach Western culture and polish it, pretending that such surface-level actions can fix any of the problems posed by empire.

But circa fall 2016, Sargon has become a monster fighting monsters, and come to represent a worldview united in its unilateral rejection of feminism, Black Lives Matter, ‘cultural Marxism’, and all forms of intersectionality.

Take, for example, the issue of police brutality. Opposing Black Lives Matter due to the fringe ideas of some crazy SJWs is extraordinarily petty and not intellectually sound.

And on the other hand, claiming that ‘everything is problematic’ becomes its own all-consuming religion of mental incarceration.

I should be allowed to support free speech online without being accused of covering for hateful trolls. Because after all, banning people on Twitter and Facebook is an authoritarian power grab that WILL be expanded, not treated reasonably.

In the age of wholesale surveillance, advocating for the censorship of the internet is being a useful idiot.

Using liberal causes to justify illiberal policies will always backfire.

Smearing all conservatives as bigots simply means that there will be a dishonest mud-slinging culture war forever.

As Andrew Breitbart understood, for most people, “Politics is downstream from culture.”

Insults and character judgments will never get people to agree with you. As anyone familiar with the internet knows, if you call someone a bad person, they will only respond with vitriol, and resist your ideas more forcefully.

This is the crux of the problem – SJWs misunderstand human nature, because they naively believe that policing language is policing the depths of the human mind.

It is not. It is only putting forth a polished mask, and claiming that the broken nose is healed.

Furthermore, if human nature is a broken nose, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it can ever be ‘healed’ by political ditto-heads, safe spaces and echo chambers.

I’m afraid that only great art and great open thinkers can do that, and the SJW is a closed fist masquerading as a falling teardrop.

SJWism is the willingness to get people fired over jokes, to bring the law into every interpersonal exchange, to make authoritarianism work in the social sphere.

As such, it is obscenely dangerous, and yes, it is a threat to free speech.

It is also, in my experience, a bourgeoisie phenomenon, a final act of PC decadence in an empire that desperately needs a mirror.

Alexander Blum is the author of 21st Century Slave .

His website on politics, philosophy, religion and art can be found here: www.alexanderblum.net