We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.
Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is
an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.
Very commendable. In case you weren't aware,
critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer.
And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:
Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."
"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.
Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.
Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.
Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.
And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.
So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.
We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.
Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.
Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?
So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."
Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:
A Critique of Meaning
A Critique of Religion
A Critique of Creativity
A Critique of Morality
A Critique of Revolution
A Critique of Activism
A Critique of Politics
A Critique of Force
A Critique of Responsibility
A Critique of Slavery
I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.
And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"
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