“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.”

Terence

Words are ambiguous, vague, and dynamic. They do not have singular meanings. They mean different things to different people. And as a fad is diffusing among people, the meanings of the very same words become a function of time in the sense that they change for the same persons very rapidly, over time. The same word can mean one thing today, and another tomorrow. One word might be appropriate today, and deeply offensive tomorrow. The term ‘sexual preference’ is one example [1,2] of a word that was synonymous with sexual orientation and could be used interchangeably one day, then changed its meaning in a very short time span. The word fair, as another example, used to mean that everyone should be treated equally (a major requirement for the rule of law), but now means that people should be treated unequally so they become equal in outcome. Justice is another such word, as we see it changing in the times of the French philosopher, Frederic Bastiat, where he dedicated his book The Law to explain how philosophers altered the use of the word from meaning preserving people’s lives and property and freedom, to meaning a social justice of equalizing society on the basis of income or any other criteria [3]. To explore this phenomenon we have to look at three concepts: Denotation, Connotation, and Definition. When we talk about the word Green, we can refer to its wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum to delineate it from the other colors. It is impossible to portray to you what the word green is without you experiencing it firsthand. (This is also the argument behind the necessity of God possessing a corporeal body, in Thomistic philosophy.) So the definition gives us the criteria by which we can tell that X is Y. Else, X is not (by necessity) Y. The act of applying the definition to concrete real-world objects, or to abstract imaginary objects is called denotation. The word green is true of all green things, and therefore, all green things denote greenness. As for connotation, it describes everything that I associate with such a word. Let us take an example: The color green is the abstract visual feeling we get when a light particle (photon) with wavelengths between yellow and blue strikes our retina. The definition cannot be completely clear, as it relies on other words as well. It is however helpful and sufficient in starting our quest to understand what is green. We apply Wittgenstein’s Family-Tree scheme: We point at several things that are called green, say, a Granny Smith apple, and tell our friend that this is green, and so is the grass, and the color on the top of the Kuwaiti flag. Eventually, we form a simple understanding that the thing that is true of all of these, we will learn to call green. But when we think of the color green, we do not only think of denotations; all things that exemplify the color green — but rather of connotations as well. We associate with the color green the environmental movement, grasshoppers, pistachio-flavored vanilla ice cream (which appears to be white in color), and so on. Some of these connotations are social; that means that many individual persons in society share that imagining of the term ‘green.’ The imagination exists in the minds of the individuals, and not in a global universal mind by which all people in a given society might extract the notions of greenness— at least, in a realistic sense; that is not necessarily the case in Platonic and Hegelian philosophy.

I will assume (i) that men are rational, that is, when they want to achieve ends, they choose between means, and that they can consciously plan the means to such ends; (ii) that no matter how similar two individuals’ lives are in our perceptions and in our beliefs, their psyches and minds differ and it is increasingly difficult to predict all their actions — in other words, every individual has his own distinct mind; (iii) that all events that are social are ultimately attributable to humans — whatever happens, people have the choice to choose how to react to it, and therefore, they are always responsible for their behavior. These are the principles of Rationality and Individuality (or Monologism), and the third is a linguistic framework called Methodological Individualism. These three principles will all be essential in my analysis.

The word privileged means a person who is in such circumstances in which he has not experienced in full detail what others have experienced, especially if such were harmful or mentally-taxing situations, or often abusive social environments or disenfranchising legal systems. Therefore, to many postmodernist (or Critical) philosophers, the said person does not have sufficient details to make a complete and coherent analysis. That person has experienced such circumstances, where others have not, and so only he has access to the relevant information; be it the amount of dissatisfaction he had when people looked at him strangely because he was a disabled person; the sense of imminent threat and fear when a woman is being tailed in an empty street near midnight; the depressive state in which a young unemployed black man feels due to lack of fruitful productivity; the fat woman who feels like she only envies her peers because she has the perception that other people in her society think that slimmer women are more attractive, etc. Such knowledge is called a lived experience. Such knowledge might be omnipresent, occupying the minds of these persons for a long period of time, and often leaving them in a state of resentment at how the world is ordered. (Why me?, as Billy Pilgrim would ask.) To many philosophers, only these people can understand such suffering. Any man can never understand or appreciate the suffering of a fat woman who feels unaccepted. Any able-bodied woman will never fully be compassionate (to suffer with) towards the disabled man. Any person who is heterosexual would never know how much more longing and yearning a homosexual feels when he knows that the prospect of meeting another homosexual in a small village that appeals to him/her is much slimmer, as they are a small minority of people.

But if that is so, and if such is the case, then it is impossible to make any value or epistemic judgment based on anything. It is not necessary that I have complete knowledge to make a judgment, as the philosopher John Henry Newman reminds us: We all know [Bahrain] is an island, but no one swims around it to prove that. In fact, all our lively judgments are judgments based on incomplete knowledge. Even the unprivileged downtrodden, and the dispossessed have incomplete knowledge about their condition, though perhaps often such information is relevant to produce a satisfactory judgment in analyzing his state. That, however, does not rule out the case that his ideas might make him less able to satisfactorily understand his situation, as ideas may lead to delusion and not enlightenment.

We use reason to navigate the world. We construct logical arguments, and insofar as they are both valid (the conclusion necessarily follows from the propositions) and sound (exhibiting factually true propositions), we accept the argument. To refute it, we have to prove that the argument is unsound, invalid, or simply suspect the conclusion head-on and infer the unsoundness or invalidity of the propositions and the argument as a whole. We have to present strong arguments. We generally accept the strongest and simplest arguments in favor of an idea or a statement about the world as scientifically true. Any statement is considered a state of affairs until proven true, which will turn it into an existing fact. Otherwise, it is only true given the axioms presented in our minds, which might be reflected in reality or not. And so, what we call the reasonable way of navigating the world is the appeal to reason; which is to base our ideas on logical (valid, sound) arguments, and to appeal to empirical evidence, so long as it is validated and repeated and eventually accepted (and subject to revision and reproduction at any moment of skepticism). In the end, everyone has to agree on the premises, without coercion or emotional manipulation, and only then can we proceed. This is reason. Anything else, we deem as unreasonable.

(Mind you, I do not dictate here what is reasonable and unreasonable out of capriciousness, but I firmly do believe that there is no better way to acquire justified true beliefs than this one.)

The word ‘privilege’ is one such dynamic word. It has changed from meaning a special liberty granted to a minority of individuals to practice some particular actions, like the trade of spices or transportation of goods and services via steam locomotives, (the others who were not granted such privilege would be punished if they participated in such actions). Privilege could even be in the form of a subsidy from tax money to certain individuals, as an aid in their businesses or lifestyles — we generally understand this as money taken from people X (and so, people X have less money to spend on goods and services, or savings, than would have been if such money was not taken from them) to give to people Y (who would now have more money than they would have had to spend or save).

The word ‘privilege’ has evolved, as part of the fad of intersectionality to include an element of Polylogism, (a term coined by the economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises). Polylogism is the belief that similar people think similarly; similar people here means similar in either oppression or disadvantage and similar thought means that their minds (and not brains) are ordered differently; in sociopolitical settings, it generally means that oppressed people of one class of oppression generally take a given side of any divide, unless they have internalized their oppression. The belief in Polylogism often fails to take into account that oppression does not dictate the mind. In an intersectional setting, the intersection of two kinds of oppression (the person belongs simultaneously to two classes of oppression) does not dictate the thoughts of the persons oppressed, and it does not condemn them to certain lines of reasoning, as there will always be a possibility that these persons can think in ways that are very individualistic. In the words of Mises, “the logical structure of mind is different with the members of various [oppression] classes.” [4] This fixation on race and race-based oppression, and the fixation on sex and sex-based oppression as things that would dictate the thought of people of any race or people of any race is essentially racist and sexist in the sense that it discriminates the logical structures of the peoples based on several chosen identities. The claim that they simply reason differently is both wrong and offensive towards them. Showing different characteristics because of their cultures, their histories, their oppression, and any physical or mental dimorphism simply does not mean that their logical structures are. They all reason using logical arguments, exhibit both individuality (and not groupthink) and remove responsibility from them because of any previous oppression is ultimately sub-human treatment of such people. Moreover, blindness to sex, race, gender, and all other characteristics that distinguish certain individuals from others and a focus on their character and behavior is the only fair way to treat people. As Martin Luther King reminds us, people should be judged based on the content of their character. I would add: And their achievements, and their happiness and how they acquired it, not anything else. (I used a trick here: The word fair means equal treatment.) Back to the word privilege: All people have different circumstances, and it is impossible to know the amount of suffering or oppression a person has gone through only based on superficial criteria.

Moreover, privilege is a word that is used nowadays to shun others, to emotionally manipulate them into accepting one’s own viewpoint, to morally size them — you are morally inferior to me or to other people in this group. To appeal to emotion, essentially. And what is brain-washing, but to emotionally coerce (which is not technical coercion) people into accepting premises they wouldn’t have? To make people ashamed of themselves if they do not accept your ideas. To question their morality if they were skeptical or demanded further evidence or another more rigid and rigorous argument. Brain-washing is not injecting other people’s brains with certain chemicals, nor is it irradiating them with radio waves. It is not a scientific term but a cultural and philosophical one. It means, to manipulate people emotionally so as to have them accept your premises on criteria other than reasoning, or mutual acceptance. One has not been seduced, but feels compelled to accept, or would otherwise lose the trust, respect, friendship, or admiration of his society. In such cases, people can still choose to fight back and require a factual and reasonable understanding. But they usually do not, as the short-term benefits far outweigh the costs in their calculation.

Let us explore one form of unreasonable tactics: If it would make people feel better to think that Minimum Wage Laws would increase the wages of the workers without affecting employment, one can choose to believe that. One would think that in a certain factory, the same number of employees would be still working but with higher wages now, and the employers would lower their wages to compensate until an equilibrium is reached where all wages are relatively equal in that factory. This type of analysis would assume that elasticity would not be present to alter the results, and it ignores that the very same laws appear to be different in the eyes of the employers: To them, it is not a command to hire more people at that price (wage is the price of labor), but to outlaw hiring them at any lesser price. And so, with time, the Marginal Revenue Product of the laborer would decide if such people should be hired or not. Often, the people who have the lowest marginal revenue product would not be hired, and the companies would put more money into R&D to replace workers with machinery that will be cheaper [5]. If one would believe that forcing the minimum wage laws would fix his economy and his society, so be it. But one would be deluding himself. No matter how an individual suffers because his wage is too low, that cannot affect the dynamic market as a whole, and the “humanitarian” solutions often result in more people suffering from unemployment. (This also leads us to question a definition of humanitarianism in intent or in result.) This is where a good intention leads to a bad result. This is an appeal to emotion and not to reason. To emotionally manipulate any person is to force them, for example, to accept the necessity of minimum wage laws, or to be called the champion of the rich and the enabler of poverty. You can only speak in such ways because you are privileged. The exact same thing applies to the belief that the Earth is a flat disk because that would be consistent with one’s religious beliefs. It’s not consistent with physics, and empirical tests can be done at any minute to verify the spherical (or oblate, squished sphere) shape of the Earth. Given Newtonian physics as a theory of gravitation, one would understand that with time, massive objects would collapse into shapes that generally are spherical. But to tell a person that not accepting these things would send them to hell is to use manipulation, and not reasoning to convince the other. One also cannot claim that there are other ways of knowing based on a group’s certain suffering, as being propagated nowadays regarding mathematics and physics.

Some words can be used to emotionally manipulate others into accepting premises that they would not have accepted otherwise. The word ‘privilege’ is one such word. It tells us that we do not have the ability to understand other people’s suffering because we have not withstood it or been under it. And therefore, we should accept their description of their condition, and we should accept whatever they tell us about their conditions, and finally we should obey their commands in ways to lessen their sufferings because otherwise, we would only allow such suffering to continue unabated. Not recognizing one’s privilege, is in the final sense, immoral, since we are willfully ignoring the suffering of others as they present it to us. To size up someone morally here is to tell them to check their privilege: Not being poor would not allow you to make any judgments on poor people. We have to obey their commands regardless of whether the results of their commands would increase their sufferings in the future, or cause suffering to other groups who we might not notice immediately but might later on. It is also not important what the trade-offs would be to follow their commands, as they come coupled with a Marxist understanding of the world (almost all intersectionalists blame capitalism, patriarchy, racism, etc. on all the ills of the world, even when irrelevant). Many intellectuals who advocate many of these solutions do not become disillusioned with their solutions when they back-fire, but double down and find other things to blame. In fact, many intellectuals were consistently wrong throughout the years, but their ideas have become even more accepted and held more tightly [6].

Privilege is a loaded word, as we have explored before. It is not only a statement of ‘facts,’ but another method to call another person immoral. It ultimately means that we cannot communicate with logical arguments. Because certain people, by virtue of not having the same circumstances, cannot understand them. Not only does this contradict monologism, but it also is infinitely problematic. Since it tells us in the end that it is impossible to understand any other man, and so how can some arbitrary person stand up and be a spokesman for his brothers? Can we only appeal to the words of the man who feigns revelation into the minds of his brothers? How could he gain access to the minds of his brothers? That can only be correct if their minds are linked in some way, not necessarily in a way that they can extrasensorily portray information to each other. That is, in my estimation, false, and any argument based on this is sunk. Language is vague, but we can form helpful understandings of each other when we form logical arguments that we both agree on their validity and soundness, and this is how we build up knowledge.

We each have distinct minds that are somewhat similar to the minds of others. How can we know that? By inferring it from the actions of others. By often predicting the actions of others. But that does not give us access to other people’s minds, or how they rationalize the world and how they act upon it. Such understanding is not available to any psychologist, sociologist, neuroscientist, cognitive scientist, or neurologist, and it is definitely not available to any mystic. If each person has a mind that only he can explore, and others can explore only through the behavior of that person, we can only know of other people what they show us, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. We cannot say that they understand things as such and such but say that we claim that they understand things as such and such through arguing with them, hearing them, reasoning with them, and witnessing their actions. People choose how to act. We may say that not in a literal sense, but in a responsibility-attribution sense; that’s how we interpret people’s actions. We can abandon that language by saying that there is a spirit somewhere that forces people to act in other ways. That spirit is not necessarily a spook, as Max Stirner [7] would put it. It might take the form of physical determinism, or any other way. But we still hold people responsible for all their behavior. We might punish them or forgive them, but through methodological individualism, we attribute the actions to them and never to a spirit or collective or to their bodies or brains [8] but to themselves.

We also have to shed light on the authoritarianism of this approach in thinking, to claim that only certain interpretations are true, so long as they empower the disempowered, or so long as it agrees with a global or local agenda. It is a transition from reason to ignorance, arrogance, and tribalism. A classical feminist would be ashamed of using such a word so relaxedly and in such an accusatory way, especially knowing that it is a loaded term, often signifying socially that such a person is inconsiderate (unless he uses the term privileged in a politically correct sense; a white woman checking her privilege for being white, or a straight, or able-bodied, or neuro-typical, or slim, etc.). Instead of winning over people, accusing them of impurity, punishing them for not being saints is bound to make people dislike feminism. That was not the character of classical feminism, based on individual liberty and the rule of law (extending to women as well, without giving men special privileges). This is a character of post-modern feminism and the later waves which bases its moral foundations on equality, as if any two persons are equal, or as if equality among any two group is necessarily meaningful. Privilege is thrown as a pejorative since it’s an attack on the other: It is telling him, you do not have access to such knowledge, and therefore you should not be speaking! Who may speak about this, pray tell? The persons who I deem to be fit for understanding such things. It is a surrender to irrationality. It is telling us that we cannot choose what to know, what to think, what to decide. It is a surrender of reasonability since it tells us that we cannot communicate with logical argument unless we have access to certain types of knowledge (often called lived experiences) and calling such things into question is often thought of as a practice of epistemic violence. And with that, some people can talk about universal issues while others do not. Those who do not side with this type of thinking are indoctrinated; that is, not subscribing to the same teachings of those enlightened by postmodernist philosophies. This is brain-washing, pure and simple. Either they accept the whole thing being forced down on them, or they are bigoted. And slowly, but surely, we have adopted a language that chooses beforehand the victors and the losers. All men are sexists, all white people are racists, and all straight people are homophobic or transphobic. Men who are not ashamed of their masculinity, a term that is not always well-defined, are exhibiting toxic masculinity. Anyone who says he’s not a racist is exhibiting fragile whiteness. These are all in their books and papers, for all those who would read. Generalizing negative traits to whole genders and skin colors, and regressing on all the progress that we have been through in trying to treat all people with dignity and respect. An obsession with skin color, class, and sexuality, as if people do not have any defining features but these shallow attributes.

Racism (n). Hostile attitude or behavior to members of other races, based on a belief in the innate superiority of one’s own race. This is exactly the attitude the intersectionalists take towards groups they do not consider disenfranchised; and of course, they treat groups as a whole, instead of treating individuals individually. If a member of a group is deemed privileged by the intersectionalists, he is a villain to which all criticism is applicable and okay. Everything can be problematized ad nauseam. On the 15th of February, 2021, the @UN_Women account on Twitter [Now X] posted a photo with a man hugging a woman, an old man holding the hands of an old man, a woman dancing with a woman, and a woman alone hugging herself. I immediately assumed that they meant to represent straight, gay, and lesbian couples, and a person hugging (loving) herself, as a simple message, although I know that the UN is a corrupt organization at its core, rife with post-modernistic thinking. They wrote: Love is equality, love is respect, love is love. Ilhan Omar quoted the tweet with: “Black women have self-love, are loved, and are worthy of love. Do better and delete this.” [9] The @UN_Women account immediately deleted the post and replaced it with something without humans. In the photo, the first couple had a brown man and a white blond woman. A white elderly man, and a black elderly man. An Indian woman, and a woman with the same skin color as mine, light brown. And finally, a black woman hugging herself. Anything could have been interpreted from that picture. Literary theory tells us that many interpretations are viable. But intersectionality forces us to be cynical and problematize everything. She projected bad thoughts on the picture and then denigrated the account. Of course, @UN_Women would emphasize skin color, because it is everything to them. It defines the person to them. Ilhan Omar too. A sick mind that sees in persons nothing but shallow things, that creates hatred out of thin air. A language of problem-finding and problem-making. A mind preoccupied with race and gender and sex and all it sees are heroes and villains, good people and bad people. And all people agreeing with their mindsets are allies, and all else are enablers of patriarchy and systemic racism. This is the language they have diffused among us. A language in which we cannot object without being called racist or sexist. They are always the victors. Everyone else is a loser. And it seems that the whole world is adopting that worldview. I know that we will soon export it in full.

And such a language, as the thinkers of the 20th century told us, whether in Orwell’s 1984 or Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago will change the way we think into accepting moral statements we wouldn’t have accepted otherwise. Moral statements may differ completely from the classical ones we have adapted in the past. In fact, to be moral in such a language, we have to be immoral in the classical sense. To curse all those who do not accept our worldviews. To dictate to the world what is acceptable and what isn’t. To aim at humiliating all those who do not wish to agree. To be immoral, and to stand with other people who are immoral, lest we be immoral ourselves, according to this crooked philosophy. And that rapid change of language and morality has never spared a society, as the benevolence of the people is the boon of civilizations.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne.

Notes:

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/15/amy-coney-barrett-merriam-webster-tweaks-sexual-preference-entry/3662507001/
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sexual%20preference
[3] The Law can be found for free on either Mises.org or FEE.org, with different prefaces and introductions. You might also want to check out Thomas Sowell’s book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice.
[4] Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises. (p. 75)
[5] https://mises.org/library/outlawing-jobs-minimum-wage
[6] For many examples, check out Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies, and also his Intellectuals and Society.
[7] The Unique and its Property, by Max Stirner.
[8] This is called the Homunculus Fallacy in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, to say that my brain made me do it, or my body made me do it, instead of considering your brain and your body and your mind as the complete active agent that performs these actions. For reference, check out Anthony Kenny’s Philosophy in the Modern World.
[9] https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1361165731908513792?s=20

Surra,
April, 2021.