What's Our Problem? by Tim Urban

Author:Tim Urban
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798987722602

The extent to which universities have lived up to the promise of a “truth” telos is more complicated. Many universities, including Harvard, have grappled with competing values like religion or political ideology.

Most scholars actually call it “factitious disorder”—but Munchausen syndrome is the better-known term.

Quick refresher: The Force is my term for the guiding principle of Social Justice Fundamentalism—the idea that American and other Western societies are embedded at every level by identity-based oppression. The oppression always goes in the same direction, downward on the Intersectional Stack, with cisheterosexual, white, able men at the top and women, people of color, and LGBTQ people down below. According to the SJF narrative, every interaction, every assumption, every social norm is an expression of the Force, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

We’re using this diagram to categorize people on a college campus, but the same diagram applies to how any human environment relates to any set of ideas.

The scarier it gets to speak out, the more that line between the Timid Skeptics and Vocal Skeptics moves to the right. If it gets bad enough, all skeptics go timid, leaving no vocal skeptics on campus.

One telling trend: In 2014 the website FiveThirtyEight published statistics about commencement speeches across the top 60 national and liberal arts universities, specifically looking at instances in which the address was given by a political figure. In 2003 and 2004, 30 commencement addresses at these 60 top schools were given by political figures: 16 progressive, 14 conservative. Ten years later, at the same 60 schools, there were 25 commencement speeches by political figures in 2013 and 2014: 25 progressive, zero conservative. (Enten 2014)

In Chapter 3, we saw this phenomenon play out in the feedback loop that led to the ideological purification of America’s two political parties.

We can think of this like a courtroom. When both sides of a case are properly represented, neither attorney can get away with too much BS because one attorney yells out “objection!” when the other tries something sneaky. Politically homogeneous universities are like courtrooms with only one attorney. Not only is the other side not properly represented, but the dominant side can get away with more bias, more straw man arguments, and more motte-and-bailey defenses when there’s no opposition there to yell “objection!”

FIRE has been incorrectly called a conservative organization by its critics. In fact, FIRE is politically neutral and regularly criticizes illiberal behavior by the Right as well as the Left. The organization more often criticizes illiberalism from the left because its primary focus has been on higher education, where the left variety is more prominent.

In her book The War on Cops, Mac Donald argues against the widespread narrative that racist cops pose the greatest threat to young Black men and maintains that the prevalence of that narrative has had negative effects for Black people.

FIRE’s official metric is not whether protests were “by the Left” or “by the Right” but rather by people “to the left” or “to the right” of the speaker. FIRE notes that many of the blocked speakers would consider themselves progressive.

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