I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism

You and I are inward beings, creatures of consciousness. Whatever, if anything, is outside, has to pass through our sense organs in order for us to become aware of it. So our awareness of it is never direct; it is always mediated by our perceptions. We know our perceptions of things, not things-in-themselves.

CRT, again, has three legs: Collective grievance. Subjective historiography. And racial essentialism. The glue that holds it together is the postmodernist rejection of rationality as an arbiter of truth.

Believe the accuser, clearly. Unless the accuser is white and the accused black, in which case disbelieve the accuser and believe that the accused is a victim of systemic racism. Or unless the accuser is male and the accused female, in which case take into account the contributions that the accused has made to her field. But if the accuser is a whi

Asian kids, as a matter of fact, are roughly as likely to come from low-income households as are black or Hispanic kids.

If you want to know what a thing is, you’re inquiring about its substance. If you want to know which specific thing you’re referring to, you’re inquiring about its accidents.

(An Asian friend of mine refers to Asians as “Schrodinger’s minority”; they’re white if you test them, but if you don’t test them, they’re still people of color.)

Postmodernism shares with subjectivism the denial that we have access to a reality that exists independently of our perceptions. It shares with Marxism a denial that human nature is fixed; human nature, according to postmodernists, is shaped by socioeconomic and cultural forces.

The keynote, indeed the only note, of the 1619 Project is that racism is the story behind every story.

ask yourself this: In the last several millennia of recorded human endeavor, can you name one writer, one artist, one thinker, one remotely interesting, original, or memorable person who, as a young adult, wanted to know less about the world?

The surest sign of a decadent culture isn’t its readiness to license varieties of personal abuse and degradation, or even its elevation of immediate pleasure over long-term sobriety. The surest sign of cultural decadence is a readiness to reject as hateful what is demonstrably true.