Ralph Waldo Emerson once proclaimed that “One idea lights a thousand candles.” Every magnificent feat, act of atrocity, technological advancement and social movement began with a single idea. The twenty-first century ushered in a period of steadily intensifying societal divisions, group conflict and a decline in individual well-being. This did not happen by chance: it is the result of a socially engineered idea that is more than three generations old. The historical origins of this idea reveal its sinister intent and harmful effect on humanity. The present moment provides an opportunity for reflection on our current ideological practices and exploration of alternative possibilities. By adopting new ideas, we can ignite more than a thousand candles to illuminate the current darkness.
One fundamental reason for the chaos, turmoil and revolutionary violence in the streets is the application of Critical Theory to the individual. Critical Theory is a framework that centralizes meaning-making in cynical criticism and analyses of group power and oppression. It rejects objectivity, essentialism, the scientific method and individualism.
Critical Theory emerged from the writings of Max Horkheimer in 1937, as a philosophy designed to dissolve liberal, capitalist societies. Liberal societies value the moral worth of the individual, private property, and free-market capitalism. In 1919, Horkheimer and others established the Frankfurt School to address the recent failings of Karl Marx’s theories and reconfigure his revolutionary methodology. Karl Marx theorized that societies are destined to go through six stages: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and, finally, stateless global communism. He believed that a revolution was necessary to advance beyond capitalism since individuals are reluctant to surrender their autonomy and self-determination. Marx declared that the oppressed proletariat would overthrow the oppressor capitalists. During the years 1917–1919, the proletariat-led revolution failed multiple times, despite optimal socioeconomic conditions and political attitudes. The Frankfurt School scholars set out to correct the flaws in Marx’s theory and determined that revolution could not occur when there were only two groups in conflict with each other—proletariat and bourgeoisie—and proposed organizing society into multiple oppressed identity groups. In 1937, Max Horkheimer shared his idea that Critical Theory could be an instrument of revolution. He proposed socially engineering liberal a liberal society to devalue the moral worth of the individual and lead people to approach each other critically and cynically: would, over time, dissolve that free/liberal society. Marxism also considers the traditional bonds between individuals and God, their family units, and their nation oppressive, along with morality, law, science, culture, history, and art. Horkheimer believed that socially engineered practices that encourage the constant critique of such bonds, institutions and traditions would dissolve them over time, without violence:
The revolution won’t happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.
We are currently living through the third generation of Critical Theorists and their critical methods have become the hegemonic framework of societal meaning-making. In their 2012 book, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo describe how and why these movements came to supersede liberalism:
[Many of these movements initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace) but quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism. The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger systems of structures of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow.]
Critical Theory interprets the individual as problematic. Its pragmatic application to human experience is the primary cause of the current injustice and turmoil.
Not only is Critical Theory designed to achieve political aims, it does so by cultivating humankind’s most primitive and destructive inherent traits. Diminishing individual value and focusing on group identity enables systemic dehumanization. All human beings are equipped with the capacity for prejudice, aggression and cruelty. Societal conditions and norms impact the frequency and intensity of these behaviours. As Rick Hanson has argued, drawing on the work of Efferson, Lalive and Feh, “As soon as you place anyone outside of the circle of ‘us,’ the mind/brain automatically begins to devalue that person and justify poor treatment of him.” By transferring the moral worth of the individual to group identity, automatic psychological systems that justify dehumanizing other individuals are established and increase the frequency and intensity of acts of prejudice, aggression, and cruelty. A recent study of political and cultural attitudes and their correspondence with the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, detailed elsewhere in this magazine, suggests that Critical Theory is impacting personality and society in harmful ways. Therefore, we must consider future implications of continuing the status quo.
We are faced with a choice, then: we can continue to use Critical Theory as a meaning-making framework or seek an alternative. Restoring moral worth to the individual is imperative, as Soviet exile Joseph Brodsky puts it:
the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin—not even by a minority.
Compassionate Humanism is a framework designed to fortify the individual and increase the overall well-being of humanity. It is based on honouring human dignity and is promoted by practices that build awareness, equanimity, kindness, and compassion for oneself and others and celebrate our common humanity. Honouring human dignity means recognizing the uniqueness, divinity, and consciousness of all human beings. The Compassionate Humanism framework proactively removes the indignity and systemic dehumanization engineered by divisive Critical Theory methods.
The candles ignited by Critical Theory burn for destruction, not illumination. A new set of ideas is needed: ideas that promote self-awareness rather than self-destruction, equanimity rather than chaos, compassion rather than division and commonalities rather than differences. Human beings are wired with capacities for prejudice, aggression and cruelty: primitive tools that keep the physical body safe. We are most likely to behaviourally express these capacities towards those we perceive as other. Critical Theory exacerbates such behaviours. Compassionate Humanism will reverse the harm done by Critical Theory.
Human beings are naturally driven to pursue well-being in their own unique ways, so a framework that strengthens our most positive human capacities, while mitigating the harmful ones, is needed to maintain a healthy, free society. Therefore, a societal framework that advances liberalism by cultivating resilient individuals compassionate about our greater humanity is needed, if we are to emerge from our current state of chaos and disunity. Compassionate Humanism could enhance individual well-being and societal cooperation for generations to come. Over time, we can create a society where we are all acknowledged as the divine, conscious beings we are and return our focus to building systems that enhance the human experience rather than marching towards its destruction.
A complete explanation of the Compassionate Humanism framework is available here.
11 comments
“.The twenty-first century ushered in a period of steadily intensifying societal divisions, group conflict and a decline in individual well-being.” It’s fascinating to me that so much conventional thinking today accepts this on face value, yet by almost every metric it is a dead wrong assessment of the larger world. Even in the U.S., with increasing income inequality and political tribalism, it’s a hard argument that individual well being has on average declined since 2000.
Fair point for sure. “Well-being” is subjective and nuanced in measurement, no doubt. I cut the specifics out as an effort to stay focused. I was referring to mental health and other indicators and the most recent uptick beginning about 2012 rather than a continual increase since 2020. An overall point I’m hoping to make here is that the uptick trend will continue, if we continue utilizing Critical theory as our meaning-making and solution finding instrument.
As a matter of interest I was graced to come into the orbit of a remarkable Buddhist Spiritual Master and scholar who during his life time thoroughly examined at a profound depth-level ever proposition ever made about the nature of humankind and Reality altogether in all times and places.
He was also extremely sensitive at a deep feeling level to the condition of humankind.
He frequently gave Dharma talks on the nature of human politics and culture. During a 1992 Dharma talk he had this to say:
Understand what is happening all over the earth. The now collective human insanity is not only being manifested politically and socially, it is also being manifested in the whole atmosphere of the Earth – the hole in the ozone layer, the possible rising of the tides, storms, destructiveness everywhere
All over the earth people are dying every day, because of the dark politics of separatism, dissociation and ethnic cleansing. Human beings are being murdered casually, suffering intense, extraordinary pain.
You must understand the time you are in. It is not like it was in the eighties, the seventies, sixties, or the fifties. This is a very, very dark and difficult time. and people are being murdered by the thousands every week. You are destroying the environment in which you are entangled at many levels and upon which you depend, even for your next breath. The situation on earth must change or you and future generations will destroy everything.
He repeated the same warning with ever greater urgency every year up until the time of his death
Thirty years later the human situation is much much worse to an almost infinite degree.
Speaking of “cultivating humankind’s most primitive and destructive inherent traits”, isn’t that exactly what the Golden Golem of “Greatness” does.
Even during his first 2015/16 election campaign he was invoking and empowering such culturally destructive traits – and he has done so ever since on a daily basis via his copious tweeting. How many thousands of lies (and counting) as he tweeted so far.
By doing so he has systematically trashed all the positive aspects of American culture and simultaneously destroyed even the possibility of the better angels of human nature from emerging or transforming the current “culture” of death which now patterns and controls American culture (or what remains of it)
And what if the adolescent anti-“culture” of competitive individualism actually systematically works to destroy humankind and the biosphere too?
Jason you write very well, and I find what you say compelling.
THE ORIGIN OF ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’ & ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’: Not Consideration for Minorities but Hatred Towards the Mass of Ordinary People; Specifically ‘the Workers’ — Tracing the Roots of Why and How it Arose and Developed Reveals the Greatest Political Fraud in History.
SUMMARY
‘Identity politics’ — often or even usually dubbed ‘political correctness’, though it’s not the same thing, having a different, parallel origin; PC is the mode of enforcement of ‘identity politics’, as in speech codes and cancel culture — is the result of a political-Left major backlash against the mass of ordinary people (in Europe and ‘the West’), beginning in the 1920s, in the wake of the persistent failure of Marxist theory to be realised in European ‘revolution’ or any real change through democracy. In shifting the blame away from Marxist theory and its adherents, and on to those the theory had prescribed and predicted would have been the beneficiaries — the workers (if only they had responded accordingly) — then the cognitive-dissonance within the political-left mindset caused by this crisis to an extent was salved.
The intellectual rationalisation was to build on false notions of Engels (co-author with Marx of The Communist Manifesto) that ‘capitalism’ created the family and ‘false consciousness’, by theorising mechanisms of how ‘the workers’ were somehow prevented from revolting. This was by invoking Freud’s now comprehensively discredited notion of ‘repression’, first to attempt to explain a supposed impact on ‘the workers’ of ‘capitalism’ acting within the context of the family. With most workers (the group considered the principal ‘agents of social change’ in a ‘revolution’) being male, then the theoreticians had in mind the male as ‘head’ of the family. It was a simple extension in political-Left imagination for ‘the worker’ to change from being the putative conduit of the impact of ‘capitalism’ to its embodiment, leaving by default women to be deemed a replacement supposed ‘oppressed’ and ‘disadvantaged’ ‘group’. The false notion of ‘repression’ was also considered in a wider sense to produce ‘false consciousness’ in the ‘proletariat’, supposedly obscuring what was in their own best interests.
This implausible and unfalsifiable non-scientific nonsense mainly festered within academia until circa 1968 the New Left in the USA, spurred by, indeed aping the Chinese ‘cultural revolution’, co-opted a movement which, though having nothing do do with the Left, appeared to be akin to the revolutionary activity predicted by Marxism: US ‘civil rights’. This added to the ‘new oppressed’ another category, which like that of women could be envisaged as an inversion of a retrospective stereotype of ‘the worker’. In the wake of the similarly seeming revolutionary Stonewall riots of 1969, the ‘gay rights’ lobby also was co-opted (again, despite having had nothing to do with the Left) to further add by inversion to the abstract demonised aspects of ‘the worker’, thereafter retrospectively stereotyped as male plus ‘white’ plus heterosexual.
This prizing into the role of being emblematic of Marxist struggle naturally rendered the specific conflicts more generalisable, allowing expansion into more widely encompassing categories. US Afro-Americans, in being championed as the ‘ethnic minority’ supposed warriors of the Left thereby meant anyone generically of an ‘ethnic minority’ was deemed to belong to the club. Likewise, ‘gays’ became generic ‘homosexuals’. The problem thereby arose of false identification. The category non-white / ethnic minority includes such as migrant Indians and Chinese, who by no criteria are ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘oppressed’. Likewise lesbians drawn into the category homosexual. As for women, by objective, non-ideological analysis, women are privileged, as they are bound to be with the female being the limiting factor in reproduction. As has been regularly pointed out, Western middle-class women are the most privileged large ‘group’ in history. The ‘groups’ are far too heterogeneous to be in reality ‘oppressed’ or ‘disadvantaged’, providing a window on the sophistry and origin of this politics as other than it purports.
The strands of the ‘new oppressed’ naturally combined as a new (neo-Marxist) conceptualisation to account for these political shifts after the fact, which came to be termed identity politics (or more pejoratively though actually more accurately, cultural Marxism). The deemed ‘groups’ replacing ‘the workers’ subsequently were not only expanded in their scope but added to — by the disabled, the elderly, trans-sexuals, the obese … . Again, all are abstractions rather than groups per se. This relentless expansion and then the use and abuse of these mis-identifications of under-privilege by educated individuals belonging to one or more of the categories, has been dubbed ‘the oppression olympics’, making ‘identity politics’ a gravy train for the already privileged, serving actually to substantially increase inequality. Worse still, it is an instrument of oppression against the very ‘group’ perennially disadvantaged and the victim of prejudice, which formerly had been identified as worthy of the liberation Marxism promised: the vast majority of (necessarily lower-status) men — ‘the workers’. This was the whole point of the political development, of course.
The pretence to egalitarianism is perfect cover for what actually is ‘identity politics’: the very perennial and ubiquitous elitist-separatism (status-grabbing) the political-Left ethos (supposedly) is to attack, and which Left zealots vehemently deny exists in themselves. Leftist bigotry betrays either unusually high status-seeking motivation or particularly deep frustration in the quest for status, which is ‘projected’ on to everyone else, who actually have normal levels of motivation to achieve status and manage to ride the ups and downs of life without requiring such dysfunctional ideation. The Left’s egalitarianism is a feint for selfishly pursuing the very opposite. If everyone else is held at a uniformly low status, Leftists thereby become ‘the chosen few’. Transparently, this is an ideology in the wake — a residue — of Christianity. A quasi-religion of supposed inevitable progress towards ‘the promised land’, rendered a utopia of equality-of-outcome. The high priests of this faith — the social justice warriors — are the ‘saved’ striving to convert the rest of us on the promise of entry to ‘heaven’. This represents a continuation of secularisation: a shift in religiosity from envisaging a ‘god’ as being in man’s image, through the humanist deification of mankind, to worship of a supposed dynamic of teleological social change (Marxism). ‘Identity politics’, in being profoundly not what it pretends to be and so deeply entrenched across the whole and every facet of the establishment in Anglophone nations especially and to a large extent in ‘the West’ generally, can properly be regarded as the greatest political fraud in history.
In his opening paragraph, Jason Little states that “The twenty-first century ushered in a period of steadily intensifying societal divisions, group conflict and a decline in individual well-being. This did not happen by chance: it is the result of a socially engineered idea that is more than three generations old.” I’m sure that Mr. Little did not in fact mean it this way, but his phrasing of “This did not happen by chance” but “is the result of a socially engineered idea” unfortunately sounds like a typical far-right conspiracy theory, as if everything in contemporary society or politics the writer dislikes or disapproves of were a Jewish International Bankers’, Elders of Zion, Soros Foundation, Masonic, Illuminati, Bilderbergers, Eastern Establishment, Vatican, or space-aliens’ plot.
Thank you for the comment. While it’s easy to go down the “conspiratorial road” with this subject matter, it’s important to focus on historical facts. The Frankfurt School was established to identify the failings of a unified proletariat rebellion with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the lack of Revolution in post WWI Germany since it was in economically, socially and psychologically primed for Revolution, but it did not come. The Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School formed to address these failings and the way modern society is organized in 2020 is how they proposed would be the best way to erode our Liberal society. Therefore, our current state of chaos and division is not by accident.
Well maybe read up rather than assume ‘what it sounds like’ is all it might be?
Criticising totalitarian ideology hardly requires a ‘conspiracy theory’.
‘Critical theory’ / ‘identity politics’ is no conspiracy: it’s ‘projection’ of the Left’s hate-mongering on to everyone else, in lowest common denominator ideation appealing to base human psychology, disseminating generally.
The Left is more into ‘conspiracy theories’ than anybody.
Thanks for an excellent and enlightening article! Pity though that the Compassionate Humanism website is such light gray text on an off-white background and therefore very hard to read.
“it does so by cultivating humankind’s most primitive and destructive inherent traits.”
Yes. and, given the staggering belligerence which CT routinely advocates bring, toward anyone who dares to scrutinize CT, we must assume this cultivation to be *deliberate*, until the CT crowd *emphatically* renounces their prior belligerence.
Until that happens, these CT types must be treated as RadioActive.