Oedipus Left
Today we are learning why an ideology without limiting principles is a bad ideology
Let us reflect on inevitability, on fate, and tragedy. Let us consider the story of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, and their son Oedipus. Any story told over and over for thousands of years must have something going for it.
As the story goes, King Laius of Thebes learns of a prophecy that he will have a son, and this son will kill Laius, marry Jocasta, and bring the kingdom low in the process. King Laius, violating rule #13 for villains, decides to do away with his son Oedipus by handing him off to a shepherd with instructions to leave him on a mountainside. The shepherd hands the baby off to another shepherd, who gets King Polybius and Queen Merope to adopt the child1. Oedipus learns the prophecy of his actions, and leaves to avoid killing his (adopted) parents. On the road he meets but can’t recognize his father Laius and kills him in a dispute. Later Oedipus defeats the Sphynx set to guard Thebes and is rewarded with the hand of the widowed queen. Identities are revealed and things go downhill a hellin’ as the fates laugh off stage. Though Oedipus acts out of a desire for good, with the exception perhaps of when he kills his dad because they are both being dicks, he brings tragedy down on them all.
We have the tragic story where the parents are ruined by their child despite knowing the dangers he poses. Indeed, it would seem that their ruin comes precisely because they knew the dangers. The royals had no ideas for how to avoid this catastrophe beyond the disavowal that leads to their destruction. Laius and Jocasta birth a child with no ability to teach him not to destroy his parents and bring ruin to the kingdom in the process. Whoops.
Why subject you to the “I told you that story so that I could tell you this story” rhetorical device? Because I think we are now experiencing the return of Oedipus in the rise of wokeism in the American left.
The child of a political party without the wisdom to limit its foreseen dangers and excesses, Wokedipus has returned, destroying in dispute the parent it is unable to recognize, rising to rule through unholy marriage to those who know not what it is2, and bringing ruin to the greater society. Even with the best intentions, except when they are not the best, tragedy is the outcome, undoing all Wokedipus hoped to achieve.
Perhaps that is a stretch. As much fun as it is to say “Wokedipus”, and as amusing as it is that it doesn’t trigger spell check, maybe this an analogy too far. Let’s see how well it tracks.
How did the left birth Wokedipus?
Wokedipus did not arise ex nihilo, but is the logical progression of the American left’s ideology as expressed through the platforms of the Democratic party over the last 60 odd years. Title IX is perhaps the prime example3, wherein what was a noble goal of ending discrimination by sex in education was codified in legislation. Alas, the form of the legislation means that any apparent discrepancy between the genders’ outcomes was prima facie evidence of wrongdoing, and any complaint of wrongdoing was evidence of gender discrimination.
Of course, it wasn’t just any discrepancy that triggered complaints, but only discrepancies that were seen to disadvantage women. More men in engineering was evidence of sexism, but more women in education was just fine. As simple explanations such as differing average preferences across groups were dismissed out of hand, the only way to avoid charges of discrimination against women was to actively discriminate in favor of women in an attempt to increase their numbers. This might take the form of actively promoting e.g. STEM fields to school age girls, but also lowering or biasing selection criteria towards females, changing course content to exclude topics females dislike, and all else failing, simply admitting fewer males. If an incorrect proportion of X and Y chromosomes is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing, keeping one’s job requires engaging in the type of discrimination that would get you fired in a heart beat if it were reversed.
As time passed, other groups started to notice that Title IX worked out really well for women, and the same could apply to them as well. After all, one can draw a line around any two groups based on any characteristic and find disparate outcomes. Given the history of the USA race was an obvious choice, and became relevant nearly simultaneously with sex, but there was no reason to stop there. What is race? Could it be made to include ethnicities? Maybe simply being foreign born could work. And of course there are those with unpopular sexual proclivities. Homosexuals certainly have not had the easiest time of it, and so they are certainly due for a boost. More recently the transgender and generalized explosion of gender types have all vied for favorable discrimination. After all, just because you are white does not mean you don’t want to benefit from discrimination.
Someone old enough remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr might point out that the goal was to not discriminate for or against anyone, but have an equal playing field. That person would be a racist today, supporting a structurally racist system of white supremacy. So long as we assume any differences in group outcomes are the result of structural racism, sexism, or whatever bias is relevant, we can’t judge individuals but only the groups they identify with.
Instead of Dr. King we are to follow the words of Ibram X Kendi in How to be an Anti-Racist “The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination.” I have to give him credit for honesty, as he comes right out and says the quiet part. Anti-racism is not an attempt to bring racism to zero, but rather to go from 1 to -1. Just as much racism, but in the other direction, forever.
Apply that logic to all groups that claim disadvantage due to discrimination, and we have sown the seeds of endless political strife and privilege, discrimination against any who can’t find an identity group to claim to be discriminated against.
What is the Left’s Answer to the Dangers of Wokedipus?
We have seen how through Title IX4 parents following Dr. King produced a child following Kendi. Why has the left been unable to limit the excesses of the woke movement it birthed? I believe there are two primary causes, though possibly both stem from the same source.
Firstly, ever since the early 20th century, the global left of socialism, Marxism, Communism, etc. has held to the principle of “no enemy to the left”. That is, no matter how excessive the goals and methods of say anarcho-communists may be, centrist socialists should accept them as fellow travelers in the fight against capitalism and the old order. In fact, the phrase goes back at least as far as the French Revolution, where so long as some group was anti-royalist, they were on the same team, and shouldn’t be cast out because they seem to be a bit too quick to apply the torch and guillotine. Besides, sometimes you need a bunch of people happy to loot, burn and kill in order to get your point across.
This notion became a key strategic philosophy of the left, or what might be better described as the revolutionary left. Yet enshrining “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has obvious downsides. Legitimizing any behavior so long as it is in service of ideology more extreme than your own incentivizes both anti-social behavior in those who would like to engage in a little justice enhancing looting, as well as the creation of ever more extreme ideology in order to justify ever more destructive behavior.
If no one is willing to say “Ok, stop it. That’s quite far enough,” it never will stop.
Why the more moderate left cannot call a halt to ever more extreme marches leftwards is the other problem seemingly unique to the left. Consider that the American right wing has had little problem marginalizing the more extreme members of is coalition. Why can Republicans disavow the excesses of the KKK yet Democrats not disavow the race rioters of 2020?
I think that the matter is one of principle, specifically that the Democrats and American left in general does not have the right one5. The left has fully accepted the principle that group level differences are what matter, not the individual. Whether this is a legacy of Marxist class conflict, racial or sex based thinking, or simply the availability of easy to study group level data but not individual level data for social scientists to work on, or dozens of other aspects, I don’t know. What is clear, however, is that the group is the level of analysis for the identification of wrongs, not the individual.
Group level analysis inherently drives one towards discrimination in the name of justice. The tacit assumption that all the members of the group are more similar to each other than those outside the group means that individual level traits and behaviors cannot explain any differences. This holds no matter how arbitrary the definition of the group so long as oppression or discrimination by an outgroup against the victim group is the least bit plausible. There is no logical stopping point where one can say “Well… ok look, I don’t think this counts.”
To put it another way, Wokedipus is the logical progression of standard leftist group analysis. Not the logical conclusion, but merely the next logical step, as there can be no conclusion but only an endless spiral of group victimhood to gain privileges. Woke progressivism is more logically consistent with leftism’s core assumptions than the centrist left. When the left gave up on the individual level of analysis in favor of a Marxism style group analysis it gave up entirely on fairness, equality and justice for humans.
How Wokedipus is Murder-Sexing its Parents, and Society at Large.
One often finds that being a fellow traveler to those without moral pegging leads to poor results. No enemies to the left allows for plenty of enemies to the right, and there is always someone rightmost in any group. Thus we have seen the children of the moderate left turn on their progenitors and burn them at the stake along with other heretics. Ryan Grimm describes how the woke are destroying left institutions after getting all up inside them, and many individuals have been outright attacked and destroyed. Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, Ellen Degeneres… the list of leftist celebrities, politicians, professors and business leaders cancelled and hounded by the progressive woke mob for opinions that were mainstream Democratic party positions just a decade or two ago is far too much to keep track of.
As one who fell afoul of the woke madness engine I am tempted to wallow in schadenfreude, but I must highlight the injustice enacted here. The enemy of my enemy, or at least the enemy of people with whom I have ideological differences, is not my friend, but destroying all the world in its madness. What the progressive woke left represents is not a move from status quo A to status quo B, but an endless spiral of accusations of oppression and mistreatment of ever smaller and more nebulous groups for ever more microaggressions, only ending when the last crying snowflake has ended the life of the last DEI administrator.
There will always be differences in group outcomes, there will always be one arbitrary group with more appealing outcomes than some other arbitrary group, which means there will always be “injustice” as defined by the identitarians, and thus always be another target for destruction. There is no principle inherent in the ideological system that say “Ok, that’s far enough. Time to stop.”
There is no happy ending for Wokedipus, only blinding agony and the destruction of all held dear before the final silence of death.
The only remaining question is whether the rest of us let the madness engine continue, or stand on principles of individualism and say “Stop.”
Did they know he was a prince? Did they just adopt any kid brought by? Did they desperately want to adopt a child, but no local peasants wanted to give a kid to be raised by royalty? I am often surprised how many questions like that survive in old stories.
You know, I was going to start putting in links to demonstrate all this stuff, but it was beginning to feel like “Let me Google that for You: The Essay”. Do I need to link to stories of Woke/Progressive vs Centrist Democrats, or left liberals being ousted from campus, journalism and other jobs on the basis of vague accusations of heresy?
Wesley Yang’s series of columns on the matter are probably the best place to start to get an idea of the history here.
And possibly civil rights laws, although I am less sure on that one.
There are probably lots of contributing issues as well, from how socially corrosive Marxism is in general to leftism replacing religion as a source of moral status. I am not claiming that this is the only issue, but I think it is a critical one.
Leftist autophagy is nothing all that new; they've been notorious for that from the beginning. Monty Python was poking fun at it in Life of Brian back in the 70s. Despite that inherent fractiousness, they've continued rolling over everyone in their path, so it's clearly not that much of a handicap.
A lot of balance could be restored if the right simply adopted a reciprocal principle of not automatically denouncing right-wing radicals. "If you send Antifa we'll send the Proud Boys" would calm things down a lot in the long run. Arguments along the lines of "You can talk to us moderates or to those nice lunatics with the rifles" tend to be very effective; that was basically MLK Jr's schtick.
A lot of it comes down to moral confidence. Not only does the left not have a limiting moral principle, it also denounces the right as immoral; worse, conservatives tend to accept this frame. "We want the same thing you do, just by different methods." Regaining balance requires the right to have the moral confidence to denounce the left as immoral when its behavior is, in fact, immoral ... which is usually. And naturally, to enforce moral standards on the right, as well ... but that is much less frequently a problem.
Until the majority of the right is able to move back to a based position that one man sucking another man's dick is not something to be proud of, and individualism is more important than group identity, we will continue our descent into madness.
Woke Inc. is full of toddler minded adult children and society has been acting like a mother who can't bring herself to enact a modicum of discipline on the child. It won't limit itself, only become an uncontrollable monster.
The only thing that will check this monster is widespread economic hardship or a hostile takeover from a nation that doesn't fly the rainbow flag over their barracks. Spoiled children don't exist during famine or war.