Several days ago I figured out how to hate white people. Not the race — the culture. (Also see: Does Race Exist? Does Culture?).
I spent a few minutes being fascinated by this revelation, and then abandoned it.
This episode gave me a better visceral understanding of how different people can believe and fight for different things. Correspondingly, I will also be unfazed by other people's chosen fights much more easily. This is great.
The argument is simple. Before we go further: it doesn't matter whether the argument is correct. The important thing is that the argument is remotely plausible and has very, very tempting implications.
The argument is: white people seem to be too good at enslaving themselves.
Slavery is a spectrum. School, for instance, isn't as bad as actual slavery — but it's still somewhere on the spectrum. Office jobs are somewhere on the spectrum, and so is medical school. K-pop is definitely on the spectrum, see A Deep Dive into K-pop. Etc.
Here is what comes to mind when I think "white people are enslaving themselves":
"White people can't dance", the meme goes.
Diagnosing children with ADHD en masse and giving them stimulants might be a white thing? "Evidence shows that people of color — black and Latino in particular — are much less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, even though they show symptoms at the same rate as white people. And if they are diagnosed, they aren’t as likely to receive treatment [...]." — from some random article.
Also, NHS and junior doctors' working conditions. (See This Is Going To Hurt.)
But most importantly — The Desire To Pass Tests, which might be race-correlated (or rather, culture-correlated). See The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment, which paints an incredibly bleak picture. I read 1984 with its "boot stamping on a human face — forever" and thought "duh, it can't happen". I read The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment a few years ago and thought "we're fucked".
It’s possible to imagine a world in which nobody is happy.
As robots become more and more widespread, low-skill jobs disappear. Many people give up and accept a life of poverty, others are rendered "unemployable” due to disability, since when a thousand people are applying for a job, any mark against you is enough to rule you out. [...]
The few remaining job openings have such fierce competition that parents start preparing their children from the moment of birth: a whole life calculated to create the perfect resume.
Even so, only a tiny fraction of applicants are successful. Those that are hired find that the job is back-breakingly strenuous—if you don’t work 120 hours a week, someone else will—and, despite their success, they are unhappy, unsatisfied, and fearful.
Dystopia doesn’t require anything as dramatic as “a boot stamping on a human face, forever.” It doesn’t require soma or the samizdat. It doesn’t require robot overlords or the Singularity. All it requires is for you to accept the way the system works and play along.
All it needs is a kid waiting for a marshmallow.
The argument is questionable. The most questionable thing about the argument isn't "can white people dance or not?" — but rather the fact that I don't know shit about other races or cultures.
The questionableness of the argument, however, is counterbalanced by the magnitude of its implications — and when the former is multiplied by the latter, the result could well be "let's roll with it" if I was a different person.
Implications (if you are white, like I am):
Overall, if you judge this argument in terms of its suitability for Solving puzzles and making decisions, it solves a huge puzzle ("why is everyone unhappy") and provides a framework for making almost any decision you want to make. Who to associate with, what to do in life, who is good and who is bad.
Destroying a particular culture is such a shiny, giant goal, that nothing else comes close. 10/10.
Mostly I just feel good about getting a glimpse of the abyss. "This is the abyss into which I could have fallen, years ago, when I was a different person". This is a relaxing thought.