The Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Race And Identity Quotes
"We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like, and simply unpleasant."
"For far beneath these day-to-day events are much greater movements and much bigger events."
"One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular to defend or impossible to sustain."
"People in wealthy Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose."
"The answer that has presented itself in recent years is to engage in new battles, ever fiercer campaigns, and ever more niche demands."
"The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think, and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’."
"It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism."
"The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’, and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology."
"We are asked to believe things that are unbelievable and being told not to object to things which most people feel a strong objection to."
"There is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true and cannot hold to be true."
"But the moral factor that has most clearly shifted attitudes towards homosexuality has been a shift from the idea that homosexuality is a learned behaviour to a belief that it is innate."
"For here we can glimpse one of the most significant building blocks of contemporary morality: the fundamental recognition that it is wrong to punish, demean or look down on people for characteristics over which they have no control."
"Hardware is something that people cannot change and so (the reasoning goes) it is something that they should not be judged on."
"But the single factor which opinion polls showed to have changed public opinion on the matter was people knowing somebody – a family member, friend or work colleague – who is gay."
"The idea that, rather than being a ‘lifestyle choice’, people are ‘born this way’ has certainly received non-scientific boosts in recent years."
"What child would want to be more of a target for bullies by being gay? What developing adult would want to add an extra layer of complexity to an already complex life?"
"If the emotional aim of intercourse is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible."
"Gays can now marry like everybody else can pretend that they have children in exactly the same way as everybody else, and in general prove – as Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley do on their YouTube channel – that gays are unthreatening people who actually spend their lives being cute and making cupcakes."
"Sex between men dissolves otherness into sameness, men into de, in a perfect suspension: there is nothing that either party doesn’t know about the other."
"It is no surprise at all that the academics who spent years tinkering with the ideas that have evolved into this theory of intersecting special-interest groups all have the same historic interests in common."
"Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives."
"For a certain type of person who is intent on finding blame rather than forgiveness in the world, Foucault helps to explain everything."
"The process of taking apart occurred in a number of fields, but nowhere did it happen faster or more comprehensively than in the ever-metastasizing offshoots of the social sciences."
"The work of Judith Butler from the University of Berkeley was particularly popular in this regard. In Butler's view, gender itself is nothing more than a 'reiterated social performance' and definitely not the result of a 'prior reality'."
"This suggests that McIntosh is not against power, just in favour of some redistribution of it along different lines."
"Anybody hoping that intersectionality would dissolve amid its own inherent contradictions cannot have seen the myriad of contradictions a Marxist can hold in their head at any one time."
"In all matters, such contradictions merely have to be got over."
"The true error was in not realizing that some day its fruits would spill out into the rest of the society."
"We have decided to forget or completely edit out things that were recognized to be valid the day before yesterday."
"It is an impossible demand. And not just an unreasonable but a deranging demand to make on men."
"The belief that it is possible to be sexy without being sexualized is just one of the contradictory settlements that we have landed on."
"The same as men, but different where it's useful or flattering."
"The most obvious is this. That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not."
"People who are attractive manage to climb higher in their chosen professions than their less attractive peers."
"It isn't just how people look, how they are dressed or what firmness their handshake does or does not have. It is about a whole set of other signals and impressions that a person gives off."
"The same old male violence towards women is not an accident or a by-product of some other factor. Rather it is the case that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign."
"Everything that is good is female. Everything that is bad is male."
"This concept has become so ingrained that when it is mentioned it now floats by as though the idea that modern Western societies are centred around – and run solely for the comfort of – men is not even something most people would bother to dispute."
"‘For us, the patriarchy is hidden’ according to Grazia, though other visible symptoms were ‘a lack of respect that amounts to a gender pay gap and snatched career opportunities’."
"‘traditional masculinity – marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression, is undermining men’s well-being’."
"Why would the war and the rhetoric become so heated when the standards of equality have so much improved?"
"‘Progress’ will only be achieved when women find men attractive who they don’t think are attractive."
"Something caused this massive upsurge of rage and denial just at the point the issue should have reached a consensus and settlement."
"It comes down to this... the drive to make it so was obvious."
"The claim put a bomb under the feminist cause with completely predictable consequences."
"It is at the foundation of the current madness."
"He spoke not only after centuries in which black Americans had been first slaves and then second-class citizens, but in an era during which racist laws were still on the statute books in American states."
"Racial segregation laws including anti-miscegenation laws were still in place, able to punish couples from different racial backgrounds who had fallen in love."
"It was Dr King’s great central moral insight that in the future about which he dreamed his children should ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’."
"Yet the greatest backsliding on Dr King’s dream has not come from there."
"For ‘whiteness’ to be ‘problematized’ white people must be shown to be a problem."
"Catastrophizing has become one of the distinctive attitudes of the era."
"One's right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin color."
"Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true."
"I am talking about terms that serve the truth."
"This is not a discussion, you have lost that one."
"Free speech is not more important than the lives of, like, black, trans, femmes and students on this campus."
"The answer to speech we do not like is more speech."
"Empathy is not necessary for you to understand that you are wrong."
"The truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples."
"The idea that there is a single truth – 'the Truth' – is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment."
"If people got things so wrong in the past, how can you be sure you are acting appropriately today?"
"There is an ideological civil war happening. Black people that are focused on their past and shouting about slavery. And black people focused on their futures."
"People expect that if you're black you have to be Democrat."
"Freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant."
"You are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you."
"Intellectual drive-by shootings often happen at a more leisurely pace than in the rest of society."
"What matters is the speech they utter and the ideas and sentiments that they give voice to."
"The fear now engulfs almost all public figures, for even when they think that they are treading deftly – or heroically – they can come off air and discover that the sound ringing in their ears was not applause but career explosion."
"Equality in the eyes of God is a core tenet of the Christian tradition."
"In the age of social media, we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in."
"Every human being’s life is able to be told as a story because it has a beginning and an end."
"The actions between those two fixed points – what we do when we are ‘acting’ in the world – have consequences that are unbounded and limitless."
"Every action touches off not only a reaction but a chain reaction, meaning every process is the cause of unpredictable new processes."
"Though we don’t know what we are doing when we are acting, we have no possibility ever to undo what we have done."
"The only tool to protect against unpredictability is some ability to make and keep promises."
"The faculty of forgiving is the tool that exists to ameliorate the irreversibility of our actions."
"Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover."
"Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying."
"What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps?"
"The world's awareness of some blurring between the sexes exists in almost every culture and ranges from transvestitism to transsexualism."
"It's like a knee jerk. We're terrified of being on the wrong side of history."
"Listening to James's story – which resembles those of many others – one of the things that stands out is how much we pretend to know, but how little we know."
"Why do so much so drastically for the sake of changing myself?"
"If God doesn't exist then my body isn't designed."
"I don't have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women."
"They're not my issue. I haven't published anything about transgender for years."
"You can either have grandchildren or not have a kid any more, either because they’ve ended the relationship with you or in some cases because they have chosen a more dangerous path for themselves."
"What we do know is that adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned logical decision."
"Are people like blocks of Lego onto which new pieces can be stuck, taken off and replaced again at will?"
"It requires a specific level of mendacity to describe all this as an absolute doozy."
"The overwhelming feeling from watching the young people in the film, and others who make the same claims, is that what they are actually saying is 'Look at me!'"
"The advocates of social justice, identity politics, and intersectionality suggest that we live in societies which are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic."
"To raise the plight of women, gays, people of different racial backgrounds, and those who are trans has become not just a way to demonstrate compassion but a demonstration of a form of morality."
"Only a very free society would permit – and even encourage – such endless claims about its own iniquities."
"The products of rights are now presented as the bases of rights even though these bases form such unstable entities."
"If you cannot rule a society... then you can do something else."
"Make them doubt whether the society they live in is good at all."