Comment by UncleOxidant
5 days ago
"Prig" is in the eye of the beholder. What about when the "prigs" were right? I'm sure the Quakers were seen as "prigs" by the southern slaveholders/traders. The Quakers were early to the abolition party and their opposition to slavery was based on religious zeal which made them seem like "prigs" to the people in the South who's whole society and economy was built on slavery. But we now consider the Quakers were right and the slaveholders wrong. MLK was viewed as a "prig" by many southern whites for interfering in their racism. But MLK was right.
> What about when the "prigs" were right?
I think the big take away is that being right via a lecture doesn't do anything.
If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Instead, go out and do something. For example, defer typing up that long comment about how [x] is right and [y] is wrong, volunteer for some community service. Build shelters for people who need it. Offer pro bono services to marginalized groups.
If nothing else, simply live your way of life and out compete the people who were wrong.
But that 1000th internet comment you posted, even if it was "right", it didn't make a single lick of difference. So ask yourself why you really put it up.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
Actually it's through Internet conversations and mostly online education that my mind was changed, my whole worldview in fact.
Quietly doing good is admirable. So is speaking up where people are talking. Both is even better still.
This is why the idea of wokeness was attacked. PG even describes it as a mind virus.
The very idea that your opinion would change over time terrifies people like PG. If you are useful, you must stay predictable. If you are not useful, you are a convenient target.
Stoking the classic 'us vs them' is the oldest trick in the book. Pay no attention to the man on the podium.
Quietly being your best self doesn't give us substantial change, though. Consider that all of the big gains in civil rights for various groups came from people being loud about their belief in equality, and insisting that people who felt otherwise were wrong.
> If you are morally right, and your aim is social justice, you should stop lecturing people, because it doesn't actually achieve what you are aiming for or really even advance the cause (in fact it may run backwards).
i'm basically a professional social justice warrior in tech and nobody is lecturing each other. everybody just does the work.
"stop lecturing... instead, go out and do something" is a dangerous train of thought. I agree that building houses for the homeless is a good idea (imagine if you could actually just do that, though...) but most of the issues people are talking about can't be directly confronted in cozy ways like going to the soup kitchen or building a house. A lot of the issues people are "woke" over are societal ills and the "action" available to them is stuff we don't want people doing. We should be advocating for reasoned discourse instead of - to paraphrase a popular tweet I didn't like enough to screenshot - telling people to shut up and go firebomb a Wal-mart.
Or take the abortion debate. We don't want anti-abortionists "taking action" against clinics and doctors any more than we want pro-choice advocates doing back-alley abortions if we can avoid it. It's all very dangerous!
I think the basis of his arguement is a prig is incentivized by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Where perhaps the quakers or MLK were doing it out of moral outrage.
> by calling out the moral failures of others to make themselves feel more virtuous.
Isn't it impossible to determine the internal motivations of others? And even if they were doing it to make themselves feel more virtuous they can still be turn out to be right on the issue, can't they? Or it's possible that there's a combination of both moral outrage and ending up feeling virtuous.
As pointed out by Uncle oxidant, this is hard to determine.
I would suggest instead that a prig deems a person to be bad/evil based on them having a different view/behavior that society is generally divided on.
Conservatives will readily confound moral outrage with virtue signaling in order to neutralize it.
Doesn’t matter ultimately. If you’re at the point of requiring loyalty oaths to get hired, you’ve already lost the plot. Way past counterproductive.
There’s a great sttng episode, the drumhead, which explores witchhunts.
I would say a lot of what drives wokeism is not priggery but ignorance and just going along with the crowd, sometimes in forms that are well meaning.
e.g. sometimes white people have some experience where they realize how much crap black people get; they might actually meet some black people or learn about history (e.g. black people have been complaining about the police in America as long as there is America, why are we supposed to remember one person's name but forget Rodney King or the Watts Riots, that people like Booker T. Washington had trouble w/ the police) but instead they chant thought-stopping slogans like "defund the police" (tell that to the black people who have gunshots in their neighborhood every night) and instead of saying something like "Black people are beautiful" they have to say "Black lives are beautiful".
The trouble is that people today are looking back 15 minutes and looking ahead 15 minutes and are up against the likes of Xi, Putin and Netanyahu who are thinking in terms of hundreds of years if not thousands. They're like children in the hands of gods.
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There is an undercurrent of priggery in attitudes about sexuality that's a different and much more complex theme that starts w/ Baudrillard's essay at the beginning of
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
and continues with experiences such as discovering that when squicky rumours are flying around it is is the former BDSM professional several steps removed from the event who goes the the police with a garbled, confused and hysterical story or that the transgenderist gatekeepers of Tildes don't know that there are 549 paraphilias (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia) and that pedophilia is just one of them in their mad rush to cancel anyone they can. In contrast the people who pray a few times a day, homeschool their kids, and volunteer on deadly cold nights at the homeless shelter, while people who hate them are sharing hateful memes online, who "seek first to understand" the way Steven Covey says you should)