Details on the Cancellation of Michel Bauwens
Context
Michel Bauwens:
This was written six months after a cancellation event, that started with what was considered an insufficient critique of Jordan Peterson. This is the personal narrative of Michel Bauwens, some weeks after the outbreak of the conflict in August 2018.
Bear in mind that this may not reflect my current understandings, as since that period, I have studied the genealogy of identitarian politics much more thoroughly. It does not reflect the multititude of effects of this event, nor my present situation.
I keep track of critiques of this ideology, from a egalitarian and universalist perspective, here at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Identity_Politics
For those new to our work, here is a transcript of my last lecture in 2022: Role of the Commons in Civilizational Transitions, which is a reflection of my worldview on societal evolution and the role of the commons therein.
Bangkok, November 25, 2022
Text
The text, written in Chiang Mai, Thailand, was loaded on a Google Doc document on March 30, 2019
Michel Bauwens:
Last August, in 2018, I discovered Jordan Peterson, and through him, it forced me to a painful collision with identitarian politics, and it sent me on a path of public reputational destruction and character assassination. I have to add that I am privileged to the degree that I have no formal job, and therefore, could not lose it, but that does not mean that reputational damage is not a very painful process. And losing friends is not trivial.
Some personal details
First some background on myself. I am adding this ‘origin story’ to explain my later shock and opposition to identitarianism, which sees working class people as oppressors, and creates a hierarchy of suffering and oppression, purely based on group identity, without recognition of individual realities.
I am a Belgian by birth, an old white male as they now say (62 years old), with a long engagement with the progressive yearning for human emancipation. I was born in a working class family , with two half-orphaned parents, in a house that was leaking due to their poverty, and as a result, suffering with life-threatening asthmatic bronchitis. Because of this condition, I was taken away from my parents, to public institutions for healing sick children, which were, at that time at least, very harsh institutions. I remember scenes of having to eat my vomit, being quarantined in a glass cage, and having very very long nails that weren’t taken care off. The situation became materially better by age six, when we moved to self-owned public housing, through a zero-interest loan by the belgian government. In this way, and rather typical for my generation, I am a child of the welfare state, which was functioning optimally at that time, getting free education and healthcare, with good public transport etc..
Nevertheless, largely due to the early separation from my parents as early as 18 months, I was a deeply unhappy child, and youth, and early adult. Though I now realize my parents did their very best, they were themselves emotionally stunted, and I was a hyper-sensitive, hyper-empathic child, carrying all the suffering of the world, battling with psycho-motor issues.
This led me to a first phase of life with a very strong activist engagement with the radical left, having been mostly a Trotskyist militant until my mid-twenties. By that time, I realized that the revolution wasn’t around the corner, and if I couldn’t change society, then I had to change myself. I still had constant thoughts of suicide between the ages of 17 and 24; when I lived with my parents during secondary school, I was so desperate that I cried every single day.
To counter this fundamental unhappiness, I undertook a long journey of self-discovery, explored different spiritual traditions (my journey is summarized in this two hour video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgI_TLgqdts& ); by my early thirties, I felt ready to move away from a first safe job, and to launch a ‘autonomous career’, launching a magazine on digital culture, two internet start-ups, co-produced a movie, and had knowledge management stints in two big companies During that time, and until approximately 1995, I was probably what Americans call a ‘left liberal’; not very active outwardly, but somehow trying, in the places where I worked, to be a good person and to make a small difference.
The second half of the nineties was a period of deep transformation. I went through a ‘annus horribilis’ in 1996 or so, when several aspects of my life went simultaneously downhill, but it was a blessing in disguise, since, when everything goes wrong at the same time, and you can’t compensate your existential crisis in any way, you are more likely to experience a really deep transformation. I experienced a massive burnout, the loss of the love of my life (I have another one now though <g>), issues with the company I was running; the death of my father and the alzheimer diagnosis of my mother). But I came out of it transformed, experiencing the ‘twice-born’ condition that William James talks about in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience, and realizing that in order to have a happy and meaningful life, I had to return to my prior engagement, but feeling much more moved by an excess of the desire to give, than the rage and resentment at injustice that I had felt in my teens.
Out of this crisis came a new family, which has been a unlimited blessing for my life, and the creation of the P2P Foundation, a organized network that believes that the institution of the commons is one of the key modalities to solve the current systemic crisis of our society, economy and civilizational model. I went back to my early engagement, but based on entirely different premises which I can’t explain here. But definitely, this is entirely in line with the historical traditions for human emancipation, for equity, diversity and inclusion, through cooperation and mutualization of shared resources, freely undertaken by peers who believe in their common projects. I quit my last well-paying job in 2002, took a 90% pay cut, a 2-year sabbatical, and developed, through ten years of research, a P2P Theory of human change, which was based on both historical study and research on the new types of commons-centric communities that are now emerging everywhere.
On the left-right spectrum, this would definitely be considered to be on the left, but I also believe that we have been working on a deep updating of that tradition for the networked age. But, despite that political engagement, we also know and believe that commons-based cooperation is simply impossible if we cannot cooperate peacefully across political divides, we cannot achieve anything. For example, in open source software communities, we will find people of various political convictions who need to work together on the joint project. I just want to add that this engagement has been a serious one, with at least 7 years with barely any income, but living and surviving through the support of both my family network in Thailand, the unwavering support and acceptance by my wife of my risky choices, and regular appeals to online sympathizers through online crowdfunding which kept us afloat. Things started getting seriously better as of 2014, and we had 13 people full-time before we re-organized in 3 autonomous initiatives. I operate half a dozen forums on facebook, personal and organizational twitter accounts, all of which have been constantly growing at about 30% a year, and one of which , the main P2P forum on Facebook, has 6k+ members. Despite the material difficulties and long hours of work, until August 2017, all went quite smoothly, it was a story of increasing recognition and interest in my work and in our collective work.
Jordan Peterson comes into my life
That’s when Jordan Peterson comes in, and the “Jordan Peterson” effect. My first impressions of JP were initially quite negative, as I heard that he wanted to defund social sciences in US universities. When I first heard his critiques on social justice activists, I honestly thought he was fantasizing about very marginal phenomena. It didn’t help that he seemed to find Trump better than Trudeau (which literally raises the hairs of my neck), and seems to downplay the major issue of our age, i.e. climate change. He was also clearly from a liberal-conservative persuasion, so not on the same side of the political spectrum.
But then I witnessed what happened when he started to speak out about the C16 human rights law in Canada. JP was opposed to oblige professors to use the pronouns as desired by the students, what he calls ‘compelled speech’, always stressing that he is not against using them in his classes, but concerned about the legal implications of state-imposed speech, in the context of his previous critiques of the postmodern turn in Academia, which he sees as a politics of oppression of speech and difference. And then all hell broke loose, i.e. systematic attempts to ‘shut him down’ through deplatforming. This was very disturbing to me since, whether I agree or disagree with his position, I certainly expect people like him to be able to speak about their divergence with a policy. Then came a wave of massive distortions about what he said and how it said it.
That’s the time when we saw the famous Cathy Newman interview, where the left-wing journalist systematically distorted what Peterson had said just a second before. The deplatforming efforts, and this interview are the two pivot moments that propelled him to fame and infamy, in other words, his political opposition actually created his popularity. It is indeed important to realize that JP’s massive popularity has in fact been driven by his opponents and their exaggerations. So my opinion and evaluation of JP became more complex. I continued to disagree with his politics, but came to see his courage to face such massive hostility while urging his sympathizers to react calmly. I came to understand his opposition to C16, since the reasons he gave for it (the dangers of coercive speech by the government, driven by mob demands) were materializing right in front of my own eyes. I came to believe he was a person of integrity, erudite in the fields he had tackled (Jung, biblical narratives, clinical psychology ).. Also his professional practice of caring for patients, and inspiring young people to transform their lives, seemed important in our dislocated times. It is at this time that I learned and discovered about the numerous instances of deplatforming, and a variety of affairs such as the events in Laurier, showing how open inquiry was effectively becoming problematic in some universities. Nevertheless, his knowledge also had in my opinion gaping holes, his understanding of Marxism and postmodernism seemed almost caricatural, until I understood that what he meant with marxism was Soviet totalitarianism, not the theory of Marx, and that his understanding came from reading Solzhenitsyn; similarly, it became clear that he had not read Foucault or Derrida, but seen what happened to the social sciences and humanities in Canada, and was reacting to this concrete state of affairs. However, there is of course a genealogy to be traced between the ‘social justice ideology’ at US and Canadian campuses, which you can find in detail in Michael Rectenwald’s book, Springtime for Snowflakes, which details the experiences and outing of a leftwing but anti-PC professor in New York.
In the final analysis though, I remained worried that his neo-traditional views of liberal responsibility, which ignore structural inequalities, made him a fundamental problem for the progressive tradition, which stresses not just equality of opportunity, but equality of access to the concrete resources that embody this opportunity. Jordan Peterson argues against equality of outcome, which he believes is the program of the left (I disagree). I included that it was important for progressives to critically evaluate his work and ideas, if only in order to counter them. That’s when I posted 2 critical videos in August 2017, and asked my community to be aware of the JP phenomenon, and to be aware of certain dangers it represented for the progressive tradition.
Just to recapitulate my own evaluation then: JP is indeed a classical liberal, who believes the pendulum has swung too much to ‘postmodern’ ideas and practices, and believes that individual responsibility, truth-seeking and telling, articulate speech, and care for self, family and community, are the keys to happiness. For the masculine role, he stresses the crucial importance to ‘take responsibility’ for your life, and those that you live with, extending the circle of care to the degree of your possibilities. He otherwise also recognizes the necessity and successes of what he calls the moderate left, and their social-democratic achievements in Canada and elsewhere. JP’s vision is that both left and right are needed, in an interplay that creates balance. JP, despite his disagreements with certain feminist interpretations, recognizes all the civic rights achieved by minorities and women; in the dozens of hours that I have studied, there is not a single instance of demeaning stances and words based on gender, color, etc… Also in his favour, he bases his opinions on rational discourse, and lots of factual material based on actual research. He has deeply studied matters of hierarchy, gender differentiation, etc… independently from the fact that we agree or not to his conclusions. But his denial on structural issues regarding gender and race (he recognizes them but still believes individual responsibility is key); his support of people like Trump, and his downplaying of the negatives of Trump, remain major issues for me.
Perhaps a word on my interpretation of the relentless hostility he creates, which is in my opinion, his opinion of Academia. For him, the excesses of political correctness, are not an exaggerated form of what is perhaps a legitimate turn towards critiquing objective and modernist forms of knowledge, but a direct descendent of the Soviet Gulag. This drives a hostility towards the situation in universities, whose progressive personnel feels in turn threatened. I believe that it is the incapacity of Jordan Peterson to see at least some legitimacy in the postmodern project, that fuels these multiple understandings.
August 2018: all hell breaks loose
So, when I posted the two critical videos in August 2018, I was totally unprepared for what would come, i.e. literally all hell broke loose. Until then, I had at first ignored the exaggerations of what is sometimes called the ‘Social Justice’ ideology, then recognized that it was happening, but I had no idea that it was becoming so ideologically hegemonic, aggressive, and present in my own public. Until that moment, I had seen the people who follow the P2P Foundation’s work and the digital curation I carry out on Facebook forums, as an interconnected network of networks, consisting of individuals and mini-networks and initiatives. I did not realize that it was also if not a tribe, at least containing a particular tribe.
Here is what shocked me.
Most critiques were based on nearly total ignorance of what JP says and writes. They described some kind of demonic figure which simply does not exist. Worse, the gross distortions, which include non-existing and fake citations , could not be challenged. When you say that you haven’t heard any sexist or racist remarks, you are simply told that ‘he is too clever not to say it openly’. As has been documented several times in the press, he is probably the person whose views are most distorted in contemporary history. In the case of JP, people were critiquing an elaborate fantasy figure that is not corroborated at all by any evidence. At that time, I verified 8 assertions that were easily proved false such as the statement that he wants women to marry at gunpoint. People are triggered by meme’s that are not actually present in reality, and seem to react tribally, without reading or watching the actual sources. I discovered that a number of people interested in my work, were reacting more like the muslim community’s reaction to Salman Rushdie, i.e. being against it , not because they have read it, but because they have been told by others what is in it, and then take it on faith. Most people are very aware of the difficulties on social media, but in our circles, this level of toxicity was really new. Second, and worse, were the calls for free speech suppression, which became incessant and regular. JP needed to be ignored, and even critiquing him was a form of legitimacy that should be denied to him. Doing an honest critical evaluation was itself interpreted as a form of support. Nuance is betrayal as was any factual correction to false systems. This was the core of the conflict that would grow to rather harsh proportions since that time. I was not looking for conflict, but could not understand that I was asked to suppress material, avoid ‘forbidden’ sources (Quillette and Aero most often cited as ‘not done’). Third, and this is the most worrying in my opinion, is the normalisation of a new racism and gender bias in identitarian politics. A word on terminology might be important in this context. Critiquing ‘social justice ideology’ is misinterpreted as being disinterested in social justice; critiquing identity politics is interpreted as not recognizing the struggles of marginalized communities. I am neither opposed to social justice, nor to identity politics, and actually support them (women’s and civil rights movements, gay and transrights, etc..). But I am opposed to what I decide to call now, ‘identitarian’ politics, i.e. political forces and movements that see group identity as the means and ends of politics.
Readers here are probably familiar with the intersectional ranking of oppression, which sorts people out according to the number of oppressions they experience, and ranks them inversely in terms of allocating rights and resources, as for example speech rights using the progressive stack. Being an old white male de-legitimizes your voice thrice. I was told, as were others, that because of the colour of my skin, I am not allowed to talk about certain topics and it was earnestly explained to me that the consensus was simply ‘to be white is to be racist’ ; a German post-patriarchal theologian told me that ‘we should stop reading OWM’ (old white males), casually and virtually book-burning thousands of years of cultural history. We have a forum that has relatively more male members and contributions, with a anti-racist clause, and while these types of opinions were originally shared on rare occasions, their use went crescendo. I must stress that I have always been an advocate of inclusion and diversity, and in the events I have organized with colleagues, we always balanced invitations according to gender and geography. It is just the natural thing to do. We also paid a lot of attention in our publication to the female leadership of the P2P and commons movement, featuring many interviews (about 100); moreover, one of our core organisations has probably the most gender-friendly constitution in the world. But all this was to no avail. But the demands and accusations were very explicit: to mention JP was in itself an act of racism, misogyny and white supremacy. To cite sources like Quillette or Spiked, was ‘Verboten’, an act of betrayal. Simply to cite, mention or discuss Jordan Peterson was in itself a sign that ‘we’ were guilty of publishing sexist and racist trash. Since I tolerated this, I was told that my behaviour was to be explained because I wanted to maintain the supremacy of European males.
The style and tone of these exchanges is also important; in the ten years I maintained various forums, most people engaged in friendly exchange, avoided ad hominem, etc.. Three weeks before that ill-fated august, I even had felt a certain pride at realising that for nearly a decade, we had maintained civil exchange on our forums. Of course, we had occasional outbursts, perhaps twice a year, but they seemed manageable and involved individuals rather than groups. For ten years, we had managed to maintain peace between adherents of free software and free hardware, transhumanists, left accelerationism, christian distributists, social credit devotees, and really all kinds of diverse communities. It didn’t mean we agreed politically, but we respected the various perspectives with a common interest in p2p and commons affairs.
The new culture of exchange around identity politics is entirely different in style and tone: it is systematically aggressive, uses ad hominem constantly, and is totally unapologetic when untruths are documented. It is quite simply, hyper-toxic. No cooperation, no commons are possible when people are constantly at war and use external characteristics of race and gender to disquality the speech and feelings of the other. A few dozen people left in anger, and half a dozen were expelled for ad hominem accusations and constantly inflaming these discussions.
What was important for me, despite my natural disposition to avoid conflicts, online and offline, was to defend the integrity of the curation process, to insist that it must be possible to share sources from various political sensibilities. This was not acceptable to this very vocal minority, who saw these insistence as one more sign that I had gone alt-right. (I support wealth distribution, deep ecological transformation, but also free speech rights and issues that were classic left themes until recently). From that moment on, I was having to constantly parry attacks when sharing material with divergent views. The norm was no longer even filter bubbles, but actively protected walled gardens that actively keep out material that challenge the prevailing groupthink.
Suddenly, it became clear to me that I was witnessing a great reversion of what it means to be left and right.
I was familiar with a tradition that was universalist, i.e. proposes and seeks equality for everyone , looking to the common ground of our humanity, and linking various struggles together in greater coalitions; a tradition that was radically for free speech; a tradition which sought to be build inclusive rainbow coalitions, based on common goals and hopes; a tradition that thought social equality promotes individual freedom and free association; a tradition that believes class is the main divide but that recognizes the rights of minorities and believes common struggle is the best guarantee, i.e strength through unity. In my experience as a youth and adult, it was the right that was against universalism, against free speech, protecting the organic diversity of communities, and that pinned down people by their group identities. It was the right, which was most racist, and genderist, judging people and their supposed roles based on these biological markers. The left I knew was opposed against all of that. I was radically shocked by seeing a sizable fraction of members, claiming to be left, but to be opposed to all those characteristics.
By no means do I wish to imply that the ideals of the left of my youth and adult life were always fully present or realized, but it was our pole star, the ideals by which we judged ourselves. Of course, multiple times things went horribly wrong after purported emancipatory events, and our universalisms were euro-centric, etc… But we all agreed these were weaknesses to be worked on. Now of course, I am well aware of the presence of more authoritarian traditions such as Stalinism, but it co-existed with libertarian and social-democratic traditions. While the Soviet system was totalitarian, the left was also an expression of the needs and desires of the laboring classes for more social equity.
What was alien to us though, was to have the reverse ideals, such as 1) that we would abandon universalism for group identities that fully define us; 2) that we would oppose the exchange of speech with divergent opinions 3) that we would judge people and disqualify based on their biological characteristics.
The strange result is that we now have a ‘right’ that does just the opposite, i.e. 1) defends universalism and the positive legacy of the Enlightenment 2) fights for free speech and ideological diversity on campus and, 3) refuses judgments based on biological markers.
In summary, the very low quality of the responses, the toxic attacks and interpretations, the pressure against open discussion, and the reversal of the political value space, were a deep shock for me, as was the polarisation/extremization of the discussion.
The mere fact of pointing out clear ‘fake news and citations’, to insist on nuanced evaluation rather than blanket condemnations based on projections, was seen as a ‘defense of Jordan Peterson and his values’, and it didn’t take long to be faced with the same accusations.
After 20 years of enthusiastic engagement for p2p and the commons, including organizing large conferences and deep dive workshops designed for inclusion and diversity, there I was suddenly, the ‘enemy of the people’. This created a cognitive and emotional shock, including about the nature of a part of the audience I was working for, and I decided to quit my work as curator and participant on these Facebook groups. Three weeks of such mini-depression later I returned, trying to maintain peaceful communication, but always with that increasing pressure to conform, and often with that sick feeling in the stomach, anticipating another round of toxic exchanges when posting critical material.
A lot of people have asked me, why are you fighting this, and they also told me: don’t die on that hill.
I completely agree with this sentiment as it pertains to my general life. There are many things we don’t like, and we have to accept that people are different, and that there is only so much we can do as individuals. But when these people come to your house, to tell you to remain silent, and this silence would affect the liberty of a whole community, I felt I had no choice but to make a stand so as to be able to continue pluralist curation and open debates, including about people we may not like. Is it really that unreasonable to insist on these two core values, that have been at the core of our community for ten years? Is it worth ‘dying on that hill’? I think it is.
The aftershock
Now to continue the chronology. After the incidents in August, my recovery of the emotional and cognitive shock due to these attacks, and my surprise at my own lack of knowledge about how the culture was rapidly changing and accepting the premises of new thinking, I decided to take a 9-month learning tour , using Youtube as documentation. The reason is that a lot of the changing culture is happening through that new medium, where activists eagerly film themselves and their actions. It is also the place where deeper conversations take place, such as in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, where center-right and center-left people find each other for long conversations about the state of the world and the meaning of life.
The deepest shock for me was undoubtedly following the events at Evergreen State College, where the identitarian student movement took over the university, with the complicit endorsement of the leadership of the college, and to demand the dismissal of Brett Weinstein, a progressive professor, linked to the civil rights movement, active during the Occupy Movement, a Sanders supporter, and by several accounts, popular with the diverse students of his class. His sin had been to write a very moderate email questioning whether the organising of a ‘no white day’, where whites are asked to remain away from campus, was really such a good idea. I recommend everyone to see the documentaries made by Mike Nayna, or the series by Benjamin Boyce. What emerges as a reality during the Occupation is a thoroughly neo-segregationist reality, in which people are asked to sit separately depending on the colour of their skin, in which people of colour are denied speech rights because they are not ‘dark enough’. It is a frightening vision of a completely racialized, gendered society, where group belonging determines everything, and individuals are demanded to totally respect the views of their groups, or to be considered traitors. Whiteness, maleness are the marks of the enemy. Concepts like being cishetero, having the identity that was ‘assigned by birth’, or being ‘old’ (as in old white male), are considered pejorative. If intersectionality ever had any value, it has here taken on an entirely toxic expression. While the expression is extreme, this identitarian mentality is rapidly growing in US and anglo-saxon campuses, and it is accompanied by deplatforming of divergent views (by no means limited to right wing figures), by attacks on the dignity and livelihoods of those expressing divergent views. It seems condoned and abetted by a large number of university administrations, especially the diversity bureaucracies, supported by a growing apparatus of denunciation, and with occasional support of ‘woke capitalism’. The analysis is that we are not living in a class society , but in a white supremacy, or in a patriarchy, and that the world consists of groups in a hierarchical order of privilege, which needs to be reversed. People from privileged groups can at most be ‘allies’, on the condition of confession, and followership of the more oppressed. I have personally witnessed how these practices undermine and weaken the possibility of common struggle. Political Correctness is cited as an important driver of the victories of the populist right.
People who have read thus far, will probably guess that a stance which defends pluralist curation, and demands the right to critically evaluate people with different and divergent persuasions, is not taken in stride in such a context, and so, thanks to Jordan Peterson, I have been demonized in turn. I have lost many friends, people I knew and visited as an activist for the peer to peer movement, who believe I have turned alt-right. I have been publicly denounced, often citing wrong information with spurious accusations. And yet, I still have the same positions as five or fifteen years ago, when I was considered a bona fide progressive activist. The problem of course, is not that I have turned or gone rogue, but that a fraction of the left has changed its values to the point of being unrecognizable. The other part of the left is unable to see these new elements as something fundamentally alien to its tradition, it is not able to police its fringes, and very fast, the toxic memes of the identarians are spreading and seen as the new normal.
What is to be done ? One thing for people like me is of course to seek new family and allies. Brett Weinstein, whose fate was ignored by the progressive and mainstream press, had to go to Tucker Carlson of Fox News, in order to be heard, and was integrated in the Intellectual Dark Web movement. I fully understand that this is necessary, and the people who are targeted need support. But as progressives, even if we find allies to defend the necessity of free speech and open inquiry, we still have major political differences. We still need to defend the continuation of the ark of the emancipatory tradition. The left needs to reconnect with the working class, which has been chased away, not just by neoliberal policies, but also crucially by elitist identitarian stances. In many ways, the left now represents the cognitive class, while the merchant class has allied with the working class in order, as they see it, ‘to save the Nation from the Empire’. This is what has been feeding the populism of the right. They have played a clever game, exploiting identitarianism for their strategic realignment. But the decent right and center, and the decent left, are weakened, but not dead, and new alignments may be possible.
Indeed strategically, we have a serious problem. With our planet in danger, the forces of the right are certainly not up to the task of proposing what is necessary in terms of ecological survival and social justice (in the traditional meaning of the concept here). Only the left is proposing solutions that go in the right direction, such as the Green New Deal. But to the degree they are contaminated by identitarian fragmentation, they tend to lose elections. Thus, having a healthy left is still paramount for societal change. And this means that we cannot only seek new allies in defense of free speech, but that we also need to find allies on our own side, i.e. people in the left who combine environmental and redistributive proposals, with a sense of unity of people around common concerns, and to not abdicate to the neo-segregationist tendencies of the identitarians.
Because let’s not forget. What the identitarians are doing and proposing is very very dangerous. Deplatforming was a key tactic of fascism in the 1930s; calls for book burning (‘we should stop reading old white males’, ‘I’m offended by the whiteness of the books in the library’, ‘we should remove all these sexist fairy tales’) are eerily reminiscent of the same period. Dismissal of scientific findings on the grounds that ‘biology is patriarchal’, are not that different from the denunciations of Jewish Science, and mirrors climate denial. In other words, we are not just faced with the value reversal described above, but with a social force that sometimes openly argues for ranking social groups. The response to this cannot just come from the right, it has to come from the left as well. We need to heed the call of Mark Fisher in his landmark essay, the Vampire Castle, in which he calls for a progressive resistance to this encroachment by an alien tendency. I will risk sounding alarmist, but like Brett Weinstein, I believe this movement represents a clear and present danger for human civilization. We need to get back to fighting racism and sexism, not people based on their skin colour and genitalia. We need a healthy opposition to those that speed up the destruction of our physical world. Destroying the world is the primary sin, but destroying and weakening the opposition to this destruction, ranks a very unhealthy second.
Even as we pay a heavy reputational cost by opposing identitarianism, it is an issue that goes beyond our personal difficulties, as the planet needs this type of Dissent, in order to re-establish a healthy opposition to the forces destroying our planet.
I have to thank Jordan Peterson for showing courage in the face of an enormous wave of disinformation and demonization, and for waking me and many others up to the emerging danger of identitarianism. Let’s agree to disagree on different issues, while agreeing that we need free speech and a healthy left. I really don’t know if this is possible of course, as for the moment, it is mostly the right and center of the political spectrum which seems actively concerned with the growth of identitarianism and political correctness, and the threats to academic pluralism and freedom. Being a resistor of the left is still a very lonely space. I have lost my tribe, and a huge part of my lifelong identification with a broad social movement.
Am I the last pagan before the triumph of a new religion that will sweep everything away, or can we recover from this deep threat ?