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I too would agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". But I would not agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% earnestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil. Because their beliefs are driven in part by corrupt biases.
I think trying to make a distinction between someone genuinely believing that they're making the world a better place, and having corrupt motivations that advance their own interest, is a false dichotomy. Both can be true simultaneously and interlinked. I know Scott wrote a post on this on SSC, but I don't remember which one, if anyone does please let me know. But the point is through something involving or similar to cognitive dissonance, people are biased in favor of beliefs that justify things they already wanted to do. Rich people are more likely to believe in trickle down economics, or that poor people are lazy and deserve to be poor. People who are good at art are more likely to believe that art is beneficial to society. People who are charismatic and politically ambitious are more likely to believe that the old politicians are corrupt and evil but they themselves are incorruptible. Only to gain power and then be corrupt. Scott's conjecture is that this is evolutionary advantageous because lying is hard and possible to see through, but if you convince yourself then you don't have to explicitly lie, and can honestly convince people of your position, gain power, and then your brain switches gears and you reap the benefits of being corrupt and in power.
So the fact that many of their beliefs and practices of Social Justice involving cancellation and being an ally happen to have the property that they remove non-members from positions of power and replace them with members, is highly relevant. Even if the individual members are not consciously corrupt grifters trying to deceive people, those properties affect them subconsciously and shape their practices. You could imagine a more Christian-like SJ movement that believed in forgiveness and redemption, where people in power accused of racism could repent and be forgiven. But then SJ members couldn't create holes above them to advance their own careers, so they are incentivized not to believe in forgiveness for powerful people.
Beliefs are complicated, and not absolute. So I think each individual SJW has a mixture of genuine belief and corrupt motivations. For the majority of SJW people, they probably don't seek direct power, I believe the corrupt motivation is just that they find poor people distasteful, especially rural poor people, and need an excuse to keep hating them instead of feeling guilty about their privilege. Everyone needs an outgroup to channel their negative feelings and blame for the fact that their life isn't as good as they wish it was, so everyone is biased towards exaggerating the flaws of whoever their chosen outgroup is. So they end up believing their movement is true, but corrupt motivation is a key and relevant part of explaining and understanding that belief: they weren't reasoned into the position via facts and logic.
The post you're referring to might be "Does Class-Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?".
I'm skeptical though. It seems like the place that the modern SJW memeplex got going was internet communities like Livejournal/Tumblr/Something Awful and various fan communities, there's not a lot of career advancement happening there. (And being on the internet there's not even a lot of awareness of how wealthy anyone is, except insofar as it is displayed by behavior.) There might be advantages to be found in some early takeovers like academia and sci-fi writers, but in plenty of the proto-SJW communities like within activist circles the beneficial move was to not bother with the community in the first place. It was only later that it got enough power over influential institutions for there to be real benefits. You can say something like "it's incentivized by status-seeking/tearing down leaders/tribalist instincts that people are prone to because it helped obtain resources over evolutionary history" but at that point the connection between the behavior and the benefit is getting pretty tenuous.
No, but there is an awful lot of vicious backstabbing, glorifying in bullying, and petty status games. There was an archive of an article posted over at the Other Place a few months back, detailing how SJ spread like a daemonic taint through the Glee fandom because it was a useful tool for fangirls of one character or ship to attack fangirls of other characters and ships, and rapidly spiraled into a deranged race-to-the-bottom of everyone preemptively trying to brand each other as toxic and problematic for liking certain characters and ship as a First Strike defense against being branded toxic and problematic for liking other ships. SJ is like a Daemon Weapon of Toxic Femininity.
Got a source I can read up on this (on the internet archive or otherwise)?
I tried to google a bit for it, but without remembering something specific like the name of the author, there are too many search confounders.
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(I don't think that's the exact article I'm thinking of, but it contains some of the same concept.)
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For the thought leaders and developers of this idealogy, it is largely about career advancement or just status/prestige/respect from the masses. For the majority of people, the status/prestige/respect is more about being associated with the movement and in the good graces of the leaders and each other. That is, Joe Schmoe doesn't need to personally become the Diversity and Inclusion Officer in order to benefit. If their friend becomes the Diversity and Inclusion Officer and then starts suppressing other people then Joe Schmoe benefits by having a high status friend.
In the context of internet discussions (in the days before cancel culture), the benefits are marginal, but so are the costs. It's not like it's a huge investment of resources and effort to yell at people on the internet that they're stupid and wrong. And I don't think it's inaccurate to describe as, at least in part, status seeking. People want to feel smart and morally superior and convince their peers that they're right and their opponent is wrong. And hijacking the definition of racism or sexism in order to tarnish your opponent with that label is an easy way to do that. This doesn't officially put you in power, but it does give social power/respect/esteem to the conqueror and potentially ostracize the victim, so it is, on a micro scale, a similar effect.
More importantly, the ideology has changed over time. Maybe the old original incarnation of SJW was less about power than it is now and just happened to be coincidentally good at acquiring it because of how powerful the label "racist" is, but the original adherents were true and honest believers (I'm not convinced of this, I think this philosophy has been brewing in the universities for decades, but I guess the modern incarnation took off online). And then as soon as it started to gain power it started to acquire power-seekers. Again, not necessarily people with the explicit psychopathic desire to lie in order to gain power, but the kind of people who instinctively like and imitate winners and high status people, and despise low status people, so end up adopting the behaviors and beliefs of the new high status group that they see. So even if the early movement contained mostly pure believers, more and more impure believers are drawn to it as it gains power.
"Imitate and flatter high status people/groups" is absolutely an instinct most people have, which is driven in large part evolutionarily by the ability to share status and privilege, or just avoid punishment, by the high status people. Again, it doesn't mean that their beliefs aren't as literal as any other belief, but there is an extent to which it lacks genuinity. That is, if the exact same person had been born 30 years earlier they would be a devout Christian condemning Pokemon for being demonic and trying to cancel people who like rock music, because that's what the consensus was at the time. And maybe they would have literally believed in Jesus and that they were making the world a better place. But they still believe it more because it's what they've been told and what the people around them respect and less because it's something they reasoned themselves into. There's a lack of genuinity to it.
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