Posted: 08 Aug 2012 07:52 PM PDT
Toward the end of Animal
Farm when the formerly revolutionary seven commandments have been
rewritten to "All Animals are Equal... But Some Animals are More Equal
than Others", what began with the promise of equality has reverted to an
authoritarian caste system. America's civil rights revolution similarly began
with, "All Americans are Equal" and ended up with, "All
Americans are Equal... But Some Americans are More Equal than Others."
Liberals have seized
the commanding heights of the moral high ground by presenting themselves as
the protectors of minorities and vowing to replace one racist system with an
equally racist, anti-racist system. But caste systems aren't just black and
white and the rainbow coalition has internal conflicts. What do liberals do
when different groups within the rainbow coalition conflict and how do they
make that determination?
It's not a new question. Black men got the vote before white women did, and
that very issue led to a heated debate over universal suffrage in the
Fourteenth Amendment, which was written to include black men, but exclude
women. Suffragists were told in Fredrick Douglass' words, "This is the
Negro's hour." To explain why that was the hour on the clock, Douglass
brought out what would become the Victim Value Index.
"When women because they are women are dragged from their houses and
hung upon lamp-posts... then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot
equal to our own," Douglass sneered. Women had been dragged out of their
homes and subjected to horrors because they were women for far longer than
the brief few centuries of African slavery in America, but Douglass' real
point was, "My suffering beats your suffering, so my rights beat your
rights." In contemporary progressivism this is expressed in the sneering
"White Women's Tears" meme.
Suffering is the central ideological component of the Victim Value Index.
"He Who Suffers Most Wins." But suffering, as in the Douglass
debate, is relative. Ego means that people feel their own pain first. And
even when they feel someone else's pain more than that of their own group,
this is a personal egotistical identification, a selective empathy that
derives from their own background and psychological makeup.
Historical suffering transmuted into guilt is the gold standard of liberalism,
but suffering is relative. In our wonderful multi-everything society, there
are so many groups with so many claims to pain. Everyone agrees that the
Heteronormative Caucasian Patriarchy of Doom is to blame for all of it, but
that still leaves the question of dividing up the spoils of the system and
all the privileges to be gained from denouncing privilege. A caste system
doesn't work without priority, and calculating the priority of privilege
claims by the perpetually underprivileged is complicated.
Without the Victim Value Index, understanding how these priorities work can
be confusing, even for liberals. It's particularly confusing for
conservatives and libertarians who don't understand the system and dismiss it
as liberal insanity. It is insane, the way all cultural taboos are, but there
is a method to the madness.
The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value
Index. While loud vocal assertions of suffering are very important, the
substance of such suffering is unimportant when moving up the ladder of the
Victim Value Index.
If historical justice for suffering were the barometer, American Indians
would be at the head of the line. While conceptually they are, progressives
respond to praises of America by bringing them up, in practice they are
somewhere near the back end of the middle. The group currently at the head of
the line, Muslims, have the least claim on historical justice, but are at the
center of civil rights activism.
Actual suffering
doesn't matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to
make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the
politically correct line anyway.
The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor:
Disruptiveness. Those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line.
This can be mistaken for a "Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease"
phenomenon, and occasionally in the micro it is, but in the macro it goes to
the question of why progressives value minorities and for what purpose.
To be a progressive is to be committed to perpetual reform in the name of
perpetual grievance for perpetual power. Grievance is to their government
feudalism what the Divine Right of Kings was to feudal rulers. It justifies
their right to agitate and undermine, to seize power by any means necessary
and to implement their programs legally or extra-legally.
Reformers need their bleeding sores, their cries of outrage and their muck to
rake. Those who give them that often go to the head of the line acting as
their secular clergy, blessing their rule and anointing them as the
protectors of their faith in hope and change. But that's just part of it.
Progressivism is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need
revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it's violence. Those
who are willing to attack the system head to overthrow it are the ones who go
to the head of the line and the dais of honor on top. A little murder and
mayhem, and progressives will trot out "moderate" versions of the
murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them
and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands.
Anyone who is shocked that the left would make common cause with Islamists
has forgotten the Black Panthers. From the left's point of view they are
doing the same thing by bringing on board a group with some revolutionary
energy and a willingness to overthrow the system. Associating with them gives
the left some revolutionary cred and the supposed ability to turn the
violence on and off.
If you think that's farfetched, what do you think happened in 2008 when a
completely inept hack blew through Hillary Clinton and John McCain on a
pledge to end the wars and repair our relations with the Muslim world? Why
exactly do you think the Democrats chose a man with no experience except a
few books about growing up in a Muslim country and Hussein as his middle
name? Why was that man then awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for no discernible
accomplishment?
September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the
Victim Value Index. The left may swear up and down that they are interested
in Muslim civil rights, but if the Muslims were Sikhs, they would merit a
place somewhere in the back. Before Muslims began prominently blowing things
up in the United States, the left barely paid any attention to them. Once
they did, they began outweighing every other group in the country because
killing 3,000 people is the gold standard of revolutionary mayhem.
The Victim Value Index places the most disruptive groups at the front, the
somewhat disruptive groups in the middle and the least disruptive groups at
the back. The status of groups within the Index can change with their
behavior. Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians, Indians and
Jews. The War on Terror dramatically upgraded their status. The other groups
are stuck there because they are relatively successful and aren't rioting or
blowing things up.
Latinos are still somewhere in the middle. Native Americans are in the back
along with most unclassified minorities. Homosexuals are somewhere near the
front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly
depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or
fall behind Latinos. Not unless some drastic events take place that change
their status. Women are, and have always been, in the back.
The practical value of the Victim Value Index is that it mediates internal
conflicts. For example, a bias attack by a member of a high-value group on a
member of a low-value group is much less likely to be treated as a hate
crime. However, an ordinary attack by a member of a low-value group on a
member of a high-value group is more likely to be treated as a bias attack
even when it isn't.
High VVI status carries with it the caste privilege of assumed persecution. A
high-status VVI can blame a great many things on persecution. This is more
difficult to do for a lower-status VVI. A claim of discrimination by a
low-status VVI is more likely to be mocked than a similar claim by a high-status
VVI, and is less likely to lead to politically correct reprisals. Jokes
relying on bias and stereotypes can be made with greater freedom about
low-status VVI's than about high-status VVI's.
White men have the lowest VVI status imaginable, and are fair game for racist
jokes and bias attacks, but Asians, who have a fairly low VVI status, are
also fair game. VVI status is group based but can be forfeited by an
individual who engages in counterrevolutionary behavior, thereby forfeiting a
status awarded to his group for its revolutionary disruptiveness. Any
minority group member who aligns with conservatives is immediately assigned
the same VVI status as a white male. A low-status VVI who offends a
high-status VVI group may be treated the same way.
Speech codes are an easy way to determine VVI status. As a black
man, Juan Williams was a high-status VVI, allowing him to make otherwise
politically incorrect observations. He was only purged for offending Muslims,
a group with a higher status VVI. But black sportscasters who make
jokes about Asian men are rarely reprimanded because Asians have a lower VVI
status. Jokes and politically incorrect remarks about lower-status VVI's such
as Asians, Jews or women are permitted within liberal circles. Making those
same remarks about middle-status VVI's is dangerous and generally frowned on.
High-status VVI's are completely off limits to anyone who is not a member of
that same group.
This is more than just a guide on how to safely be politically incorrect,
it's a map of the caste system under which we live. The caste system
determines what jobs we get, what things we can say and what is expected of
us in everything from job performance to conspicuous displays of social
justice. It is how we live now, and it is vitally important to understand
that it really is this way in every place that falls under the shadow of
government mandates and the progressive Kulturkampf against equality.
In the grip of the left, we have become a culture that rewards destruction
and disruption, that feeds the worst behaviors and then blames their
repetition on society's failings, rather than their own calculated tactical
assault on the country. We can be a country where all Americans are equal or
we can be a country where all Americans are equal... but some Americans are
more equal than others in the name of remedying inequality.
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