The Stupidity is the Point

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 54 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

This week, it came out that the leading Black Lives Matter charity is in large part a scam. This is two years after the George Floyd protests, which took a huge amount of activism, energy, and funding for police reform, which is desperately needed, and flushed it down the toilet. Some of this took the form of BLM leaders embezzling money and buying frivolous luxuries, but the bigger tragedy was the coalescence around a stupid, unpopular, and polarizing slogan - “defund the police.”

When the protests were first happening, there were actual good demands happening - most notably the 8 Can’t Wait campaign, which demanded sensible reforms like banning strangleholds, requiring warning shots before deadly force is used, and giving officers a duty to intervene when other officers are using excessive force. Even better, there was some energy going toward a repeal of qualified immunity for police officers! But instead what happened was that we got a bunch of people screaming “defund the police,” then a bunch of people claiming that it didn’t actually mean defund the police, then a bunch of people saying yes, it really did mean defunding the police, and the only progress made was that the Blue Tribe got less popular and nothing was done on police reform.

Shit like this is what I’m talking about when I say that woke is the new cool. “Defund the police” didn’t become the slogan because it was politically effective or broadly popular. It became the slogan because you kind of had to be an idiot to believe it.

The immutable law of high status behaviors is that they must be exclusive. If anyone can do it, it can’t be high status. So, for instance, when I was in high school, smoking was cool. At that time, everyone knew it gave you cancer, and that’s what made it cool. You had to kind of be an idiot to do it, so most people wouldn’t. As a result, it was a thing that only a select few people were able and willing to do. Nerds like me would say nerdy things like “smoking gives you cancer” while the cool kids were outside looking like James Dean.  

Wokeness works the same way. Every battle they win pushes the ideology more and more extreme, because it has to be exclusive. If everyone agrees that black lives matter, they have to come up with a different slogan that most people disagree with, because how else will they show that they are better than everyone else? So they end up supporting things that you kind of have to be an idiot to support, because that’s how you make a belief exclusive enough to be high status.

So please, don’t get caught up in this stupidity. If a slogan sounds stupid, that’s because it’s stupid, and no amount of sanewashing will change that. Don’t let anyone convince you that you should be supporting a message that you know to be dumb. It might get you Twitter likes, but it won’t accomplish political goals.