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Everyone believes they are making the world a better place, or at least not make it a worse place, a tiny tiny minority of literally psychotic individuals notwithstanding. No one believes themselves to be the villain of their own story. Progressive actors in this sense are unremarkable. Even those who just like 'dunking' and being hostile to conservatives would have rationalised their own actions. I think many of these people you are talking about truly believe that they are fighting against genuine 'evil'. That doesn't mean they are justified, only terribly mistaken. Unless you're a firm believer in absolute moral relativism I suppose.
What is quite unique about the (Critical) SJ movement is an almost unprecedented degree of black-and-white thinking, which is baked into the ideology. There is no room for compromise or forgiveness, it is totalising. The ideology fosters an extreme lack of self-reflection and introspection (e.g. labelling any one questioning the ideology of 'epistemic pushback'). This has really only been on this scale (not counting cults) by its predecessor ideology, Marxism, and its rival, Fascism. For something like this to emerge from a modern liberal democratic society should be deeply troubling. Even the Crusaders admired Saladin.
The non-SJ people who follow the SJ movement just do so not only because it's the path of least resistance in most cases, but also because the average person thinks very little about why they do the things they do, say the things they say, or believe the things they believe. Most people just take things at face value, something that has been taken advantage of by the SJ movement and fostered by its culture of lack of introspection.
I don't think it's that rare for people to hate themselves. I believe myself to be the villain of my story.
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