If you claim that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you’re committed to working your ass off not to be one—which is really the best that any of us can promise), then you must believe that people are fundamentally born equal. So if that’s true, then in a vacuum, factors like skin color should have no effect on anyone’s success. Right? And therefore, if you really believe that all people are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in the real world, the only thing that you could possibly conclude is that some external force is holding certain people back. Like…racism. Right? So congratulations! You believe in racism! Unless you don’t actually think that people are born equal. And if you don’t believe that people are born equal, then you’re a fucking racist.
– Lindy West, “A Complete Guide to Hister Racism”
This is beyond magical thinking. This is a system of belief that requires you to disregard the evidence of human multiplicity that you observe every minute of every day. Believing in the Tooth Fairy is less nuts than this because not every interaction with another human being offers decisive evidence that there is no Tooth Fairy. Yet absolutely any form of engagement with humans or any part of human culture does definitively and exhaustively demonstrate that we are not born equal in a way that conditions our “success.” Nick Land calls the state in which Lindy West placed herself to write the quoted article “sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances.”
That there is some poor, deluded Lindy West somewhere wouldn’t be important or interesting to discuss. But the quoted belief is now the foundation of a massive quantity of legislation defining much of our lives. People lose their jobs, are hounded out of productive existence, demonetized and demonized for doubting that Lindy’s Gnostic delirium is absolutely, undeniably true.
But that’s not enough. We are dismantling the biggest achievements of our civilization to keep alive the fantasy that anybody can be anything they want. Land wrote before gender theory became enshrined next to disparate impact but we are now seeing how the next stage of the delirium – men can be women can be men can be both – has become not only normalized but shrilly, aggressively dominant.
Falsifying the present, looting the future, sacralizing grievances – be they of the dominant Left or the dissident Right – this is what democracy does. Says Land, because I’m still retelling his book The Dark Enlightenment and will continue to do so in the next post.
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