I don’t want to be woke, depressed, manic, or consumed by cognitive dissonance anymore.
Watch me try
I first stumbled into online social justice in 2012 after taking a sociology course in college. Almost immediately I sensed there was something wrong with the dynamics and ideological refrains. But, given that I had also been resistant to believing sexism still existed in 2012, I chose to dismiss my concerns as another form of personal resistance to being confronted with the realities of injustice in this world. I chose, again and again, to stay in my lane, do the work, listen to marginalized voices, the whole song and dance. I saw the call outs. I saw the cancellations.
After so much time watching this, seeing it devastate people, and reaching a breaking point with my bipolar disorder, I finally was forced to face hard facts. This shit just is not working. This is upholding and reliant on the same abuses of power that it says it seeks to undue, but it does so on a relational and intrapersonal level. I admitted that the social justice industry is indeed real. I saw the overlap with the self-help industry. I saw it for what it is, which is a fundamentally incoherent worldview that upholds the injustices and power imbalances of capitalism.
Speaking out about it is something I always wanted, and something I started doing on my Instagram account. But I am a writer first and foremost, and frankly Instagram isn’t a good platform to share writing. And it was fucking frightening to put myself at risk of call out, especially while self-employed.
And primarily, I was afraid of being misunderstood to be right-wing. I’m over that fear now. Pretty sure it’s not a right-wing stance to want to redistribute wealth from billionaires and provide everyone housing and healthcare.
So, if you want left-wing critiques of “leftist” identity politics, here is HDOX, my platform to publish essays and reflections on this ideology and how to get out of it and build something new.
Sometimes there will be free posts, but these thoughts are in process. I’m reading and watching a lot of videos to immerse myself in existing leftist critiques of this ideology / paradigm. Also right-wing, since we’ve got to learn from our adversaries.
I know these thoughts are also in process for many of us. And right now, in process unorthodox thoughts are not easy to share publicly. So, I’m putting them behind a paywall for the benefit of me as the writer and you as the reader & commenter. Maybe this (and other things like it) can be the mythical safe space we always dreamed of, except instead of enabling our dysfunction, we can work out our doubts and disagreements.
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