What happens when Cultural Marxism prompts generations to discard individualism and mutual respect, and to, instead, lift the false idol of “group identity” (despite such a term being an oxymoron) to the highest holy position in secularized Western culture?
You get this, out of Portland, Oregon.
Katie Daviscourt writes for The Post Millennial:
A retail store in Portland, Oregon announced on Saturday that they will be closing their store for three weeks to undergo training to cure ‘white supremacy’ after feeling remorse for firing a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People-of-Color) employee.
The store is called Artifact, and might be an artifact in already employment-troubled Portland, after constitution-defying, immoral lockdowns wiped out job opportunities there beginning in 2020.
But, heck, why not make the city even less productive?
Shutting for three weeks in order to project “ woke virtue” and to inculcate employees with the farcical nostrums of the “Capitalism Is White Supremacy” myth ought to help, as well.
The retail store went on to list a series of steps that they will be taking to cure ‘white supremacy’ which include hiring an independent BIPOC investigator that will suggest changes so Artifact can work towards an antiracist future, educate its management team on racial-equity, implicit bias, white supremacy culture, and identifying microaggressions, and will hold company-wide trainings.
This is pure Cultural Marxism: tossing individuals into group-think, group-identity, and group vs. group antagonism, while promoting a lingua-nocturna that feeds into political antagonism and a one-size-fits-all statutory mindset – a world triggered by the slightest difference in “equality” (however that is measured, in whatever facet of life) between people who are generations past institutional slavery and generations into institutional welfare handouts, inspiring them to call for more sanctions against the demonized, and more handouts to the favored “group.”
For Karl Marx, it was the “working class” who “deserved” handouts from the property owners (this, despite him thirsting for family property, himself). For Cultural Marxists, the net was cast wider, setting the David v. Goliath frame around racial groups, genders, religions, generational differences, regions, and more.
The idea is to “make things fair” – fairness defined by whomever runs the taxing, thieving, coercive machine of the state. And it creates an ever-expanding group of “have nots” who want to claim virtue and power, without end.
Related: 10 Thomas Sowell Quotes Liberals Will Not Understand | MRCTV
Meanwhile, as economist Walter Williams and economist/sociologist Thomas Sowell have shown, productivity increases derived through competitive, free markets -- where people are free to decide where to shop, what to buy, where to sell, what to sell, and for how much, and whom to employ, for how much, and for what reasons – see the greater productivity bring better living standards, savings, and generational improvement.
Government handouts?
Not only do they operate on tax-theft, seizing cash from people who could spend or save and invest it as they prefer, but they foster sloth and indolence, the exact opposite of productive activity.
Intellectuals and political hustlers who blame the plight of so many blacks on poverty, racial discrimination, and the ‘legacy of slavery’ are complicit in the socioeconomic and moral decay. Black people must ignore the liberal agenda that suggests that we must await government money before measures can be taken to improve the tragic living conditions in so many of our urban communities. Black and white intellectuals and politicians suggesting that black people await government solutions wouldn’t begin to live in the same high-crime, dangerous communities and send their children to the dangerous schools that so many black children attend.
And as Sowell observes:
Today’s grand fallacy about race and ethnicity is that the statistical ‘representation’ of a group—in jobs, schools, etc.—shows and measures discrimination. This notion is at the center of such controversial policies as affirmative-action hiring, preferential admissions to college, and public-school busing. But despite the fact that far-reaching judicial rulings, political crusades, and bureaucratic empires owe their existence to that belief, it remains an unexamined assumption. Tons of statistics have been collected, but only to be interpreted in the light of that assumption, never to test the assumption itself. Glaring facts to the contrary are routinely ignored. Questioning the ‘representation’ theory is stigmatized as not only inexpedient but immoral. It is the noble lie of our time.
By “noble lie,” Sowell refers to Plato and Socrates’s goofball notion that, in order to run the “just city state,” the totalitarian elite had to promulgate a lie for the good of the people. That lie claimed that the rulers and the lower classes were separated because they had different forms of “metal” in their blood. The Guardians – or rulers – of course, had gold, while the Auxiliaries (fighting men) had silver, and so on, down to the lowest of the low having some form of really cheap stuff in them, like, perhaps, ground-up Bette Midler CDs.
Anyway, Sowell makes an adroit point in noting that this is a contemporary spin on that Plutonic group-think, group-separation mentality.
Collectivists typically split people into groups, then identify as the political saviors of “the little guy,” take over the state, crush other “little guys” and take their stuff or threaten them to conform. Then, inevitably, they fight amongst themselves as the internal squabbling within the “group identity” becomes impossible to resist.
The key is to avoid the big central political power that everyone wants to control.
But at Portland’s Artifact, they seem not to understand how they feed that monster.
At least it’s a private establishment. But with the amorphous, ever-expanding term “microaggression” in play for their “training period,” and their seeming focus on the “group identification” of the person fired, is it just a matter of time before they begin to train people into thinking that even a privately owned STORE represents a form of microaggression unless it is owned by a person with the right skin color or other “group ID” qualification?
And how is it NOT race-based thinking to focus on race when looking at employment and firing? How is it not sexist, or “ageist” or “ableist,” etc., to focus on those group qualities when hiring or firing?
Sure, people are free to do so in private establishments, but they ought to know that to focus on such things is, itself, to engage in the very negative prejudging and chauvinism that “woke folk” supposedly decry.
And it feeds a hungry beast. The beast of the state, which waits with sharp teeth to chew-up the private market where we can show what we value.
Related: New Study: Race-Based College Policies Increase 'Academic Mismatch' | MRCTV