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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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