Cultural Marxism
Marxism is that idea that the oppressed underclass should rise up and disrupt society until the privileged upper classes are forced to somehow buckle and create a more equal world. This is obviously a stupid idea that nobody ever genuinely believed in, including Karl Marx and his associates. The model never made any sense without the unspoken part, which was that a new leadership of brutal dictators and intellectuals would swoop in to seize power if the unwashed masses were stupid enough to be tricked into destroying their own country. Economic Marxism hoped that underpaid workers would physically demolish the wealth of the upper class and kill the landowners, but the cultural equivalent ignores economic inequality for the most part, creating bizarre instances of spoiled rich people complaining about inequality at expensive universities. Cultural Marxism was invented as a long term, insidious alternative to the overt hostility of Marxism. It frames everything in society as a class conflict between the “oppressed” and the “privileged”, and uses the media and education to accomplish this shift in perception. The actual goal remained the same, however: the total destruction of the pillars which uphold Western civilization, including religion, nationalism, heterosexuality, race, family, and gender. If that sounds hyperbolic, it’s not. Much like calls for total bloody upheaval of capitalist society, the Marxists of the early 20th century wanted every ideological support for the West to collapse, one at a time, until there was nothing left to protect. Once again, there would be a class of highly educated and ruthless experts waiting on hand to swoop in and seize influence each time one of these pillars of culture fell. Eventually, the nation could become destabilized until it was subsumed into a greater collectivist bloc of countries, all managed by a class of Politburo “experts” who supposedly know better than citizens they govern. Organizations like the United Nations, the European Union, and the proposed equivalents elsewhere. Without culture, people have no immune system against internal subversion and conquest, went the theory.
Members of the Frankfurt School, originally called “The Institute for Social Research”
And while you may only have felt the impact of Cultural Marxism in recent years with the explosion of people like Todd on the scene, it’s far from new. It was created way back in the early 1900’s in the Frankfurt School, after they witnessed the failure of economic Marxism in prosperous nations like Britain and America. Despite the excesses and abuses of the system, the working class wanted to reform it, not destroy it so some radical group could take over. The instrument of Cultural Marxism would be so-called “Critical Theory”.
Critical Theory is a rather simple trick of starting controversies and then changing the rhetoric around them to fit a greater narrative — one of how problematic Western society is, and how “progress” needs to be made immediately. Rather than present a cohesive worldview or a holistic ideological “solution” with an identifiable name and goal (which would open it up to criticism and comparison to other worldviews and solutions) Critical Theory prefers to keep all of its tentacles working separately, and thus doesn’t have to deal with the extreme paradoxes it creates. Feminism, civil rights, gender studies, sexual revolution, etc. are all presented as independent movements with their own causes, working to fight back against the monolithic establishment represented by Christian white men and the “traditional lifestyle” especially.
Dialectics
What I’ve said so far is nothing new. There is plenty of official, relatively mainstream information about how this has played out if you want to do more research about how “political correctness” is not what it seems.
There’s also plenty of information about dialectics out there, but much of it is nonsense designed to confuse you. At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s this: causing conflict between ideologies will result in the opportunity for a new solution to be introduced. Regardless of the various interpretations and academic distinctions, the basic reality is that powerful people are able to introduce a provocative new idea into society, manage the opposing force trying to resist it, and ultimately shift the status quo a little closer to their ultimate goal. The initial provocation is not supposed to succeed: it’s an expendable pawn, meant to lure out the resistance so that change of some kind can happen. Remember that stability and tradition are the enemy.
How exactly dialectics has been used in the past is never clear. Much like psychology, there seems to be a stark difference between the insightful and utilitarian version used by the social engineers and think tanks and the muddled, pretentious version available to the masses in schools and books. Through observation, though, we can see how the game works.
Supposedly, there is a distinction between the “Left” and the “Right” in American politics, and supposedly these two “sides” don’t share the same intellectual brain trust working both sides for a shared goal. We sit and stare at the contradiction with mouths agape, unable to reconcile how “Too Big To Fail” corporations with a demonic zeal for irresponsibility are bailed out while, all around us, the individual is constantly in danger of drowning in debt despite working their hardest. “Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” is the resulting adage. Occupy Wall Street, the 1% vs the 99%, and the outrage against capitalism’s “lack of regulation” (actually government complicity) are the predictable reaction. All that noise is not a problem for the social engineers. It’s a part of the dialectical model! The outrage is a necessary part of the process, leading to demand for an extreme “solution”. What solution? That’s not up to the people. The experts handle that.
Meanwhile, the narrative is moved forward a little further, one outrage at a time. The Republicans and the “Right” caused the crisis, so therefore we should expect the pendulum to swing the opposite way toward the Democrats and the “Left”. And so it did, with the result being Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. During those eight years, the media and academia did not portray any important crisis from the government (and especially not the foreign policies that toppled the Middle East) despite the many potential disasters they could have stirred up into historical frenzies. Instead, they focused on the problems of cultural inequality. Black Lives Matter, Slut Walks, gender bending kids, and other “identity politics” movements were all promoted through social media and traditional news cycles as if they were a reaction to systemic cultural problems; “rape culture” and other hoaxes were perpetuated to prop up these movements. The abuses were magnified by the media and intellectuals to outrage the already left-leaning populace, hoping that through dialectics, the result would be a President Hillary Clinton and a call for a more “tolerant”, “progressive”, and “inclusive” society, if not outright socialism. For what it’s worth, Bernie Sanders and his overt socialist message of upheaval probably would have won if he had not been sidelined by the corrupt Clinton machinery. The dialectical model works when social forces are guided with flexibility and plausibility, not clumsily crammed down everyone’s throats.
This is perfectly within the dialectical model
And so we come back to Todd and the SJW’s. Rather than studying obesity in traditional terms of lifestyle choices and healthiness, or studying media as a struggle to appeal to market demands, we are supposed to see this as a conflict between two classes of cultures, with the oppressed obese people needing to fight back against the privileged game design industry and their “pervasive societal ideas”. In Cultural Marxism, oppression does not mean real loss or suffering, it means hurt feelings. In Cultural Marxism, power and privilege don’t mean being rich and affluent, it means being on the side of traditional “prevalent” views. Make sure you understand this. Even if you are one of the biggest international media conglomerates, with distributors around the world and a network of advertising agencies pushing your agenda around the clock, Cultural Marxism does not consider you oppressive unless you also resist the progressive rhetoric and promote traditional wisdom. You can be a dirt-poor indie developer struggling to make a single hit, and be considered part of the privileged culture class if you don’t stand with the “proletariat” minorities who demand revolution. Your willingness to cater to market forces by creating something orthodox and appealing to normal people is not your freedom, but a declaration of animosity to anyone who can drum up an argument against your “problematic” work. Even something as quaint and harmless as Stardew Valley, which was made by one guy, who made sure to allow homosexual marriages and child adoption, has been accused of being “racist” for only having a few colored people — you know, instead of none. If it had been an equal distribution of all races, I’m sure Todd would complain that there were not enough obese characters and that they weren’t portrayed as awesome, and that being healthy enough to dig fields and break rocks in the mineshafts was discriminatory against his own oppressed identity group. If this problem were addressed, perhaps we would see the transgender crowd speak up. And so on, forever. There really is no winning, so the only way to protect yourself is to switch to the hostile side and go after the traditional values yourself. Attack or be attacked. It’s war, and you don’t get to sit on the sideline.
Let’s put this all together on Page 4 and see where it leads.