I’ve talked about “social justice” being a cult before, but this Jonathan Kay piece in Quillette explicates the idea in detail.
The words “cult” and “cultish” often are used loosely to describe not only literal cults such as the one created by Jones, but also militant political movements, and even the fanatical followers of entertainers and sports teams. Yet I do think that the cult concept is precise enough to serve as a useful framework for modern forms of ideological tribalism.
In this regard, I would define a cultish movement as one that (1) purports to offer adherents a complete system of judging human worth on the basis of stated beliefs whose meaning is unstable, and which cannot be explained coherently outside the movement’s own self-reinforcing linguistic subculture; and (2) maintains both internally applied disciplinary mechanisms and externally applied rhetorical strategies as a means to categorize any critique of the cult as a manifestation of the critic’s own personal defects. Prominent examples include Scientologists’ efforts to brand critics as “Suppressive Persons” who must be silenced or punished, and social-justice extremists’ description of pushback against claims of racism as “white fragility.”
Cult doctrines are, by their nature, unfalsifiable. And so a milieu that becomes infected with cult-think always will be hostile to rational discourse. As the United States shows, multiple cult-like movements can dominate different sectors simultaneously. In the realm of politics, it is now seen as normal everyday news for Donald Trump and his minions to utter obvious lies about everything from Ukraine to the predicted path of a hurricane, and to expect followers and sympathetic media to parrot those claims. In the realm of academia, meanwhile, many students are expected to accede to the claim that sexual dimorphism is a myth, and that biology itself is a colonial construct.
Snip.
Cults can never be organized in any kind of democratic way because there is always some anointed class (often consisting of just one person) that monopolizes access to a critical body of revealed truths. And in this aspect, intersectionality is well-suited to a cult paradigm because its adherents presume that the “lived experience” that typifies every sub-group is fundamentally unknowable except to members of that sub-group. The conceit of secret knowledge confers an aura of mysticism on followers, especially in regard to the issue of gender identity, which is cast as an internally experienced secular rapture.
On one hand, this means that discussions within social-justice circles tend to be tortured and unproductive, as no one is allowed to presume a truth-telling power that extends beyond the narrow confines of one’s own intersectional constituency. On the other hand, this system of balkanized information monopolies helps protect intersectional dogmas from outside criticism, as no argument may contradict the internally experienced pain, trauma or perception of bigotry expressed by an acolyte who identifies as a member of an oppressed group. In this regard, social-justice cults diverge significantly from the interwar ideological cults that formed around various interpretations of Marxism (with which social-justice cultism is sometimes compared), as these older movements tended toward universalism in their underlying epistemological approach.
Read the whole thing.
Tags: Democrats, Social Justice Warriors