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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something? Is the idea that organizations like the ADL have internal emails and fundraising plans where people write "Here's what we're doing to make people more anti-semitic so that our fundraising goes up"? But if there was such communication it would be leaked. Is the idea that this is instead a plan kept entirely secret within the minds of key leaders? But not only would that make it difficult for the plan to perpetuate itself across generations of leadership (as those in on it are replaced by true-believers), why would those leaders have such a goal? You mention that it benefits ADL fundraising, but the ADL doesn't have a mind and doesn't want things. People act in the interest of organizations insofar as they want it to succeed or are incentivized by the organizational policies/structure, but if nobody is writing "Fundraising by creating anti-semites" fundraising plans and promoting/firing people based on adherence to them it's hard for that sort of coordination to function. Meanwhile there are people who want the ADL to succeed independently of organizational incentives, but mostly as a subgoal of promoting their ideological goals.

Now, it's more plausible that individuals might hit on a strategy like "troll the Nazis to show how much we're needed" because they think this helps their ideology. But they aren't going to do it to "increase ADL funding by increasing the general level of anti-semitism" because that's not a goal of the individual people who are inclined to join the ADL. At most some fraction might believe that increasing anti-semitism encourages Jews to move to Israel and thus ultimately makes Jews safer. And while it's possible for evolutionary forces on organizations to shape them in ways that their individual members aren't aware of, the ADL is old and one of a handful of prominent Jewish groups, that doesn't sound like very strong evolutionary pressure.

Similarly I am always skeptical about claims like "[Company] is cynically doing [controversial culture-war thing] as a secret profit-maximizing strategy, nobody involved really cares." Even when they openly claim it is a profit-maximizing strategy this is often bullshit reasoning backward from ideological demands, like companies citing dubious "Diversity improves decision-making" research as an excuse for affirmative-action policies. Culture war is strongly driven by true-believers, not cynics weaving intricate plans to maximize corporate profits or non-profit fundraising. When subversion happens it is almost always members of a formal organization subverting it on behalf of their memeplex, not the other way around.

You make a good point. But it's almost inconceivable to me that intelligent people would do things that provoke anti-Semitism when the anti-Semites literally say "You are making us anti-Semitic by doing this." Maybe they are as unwilling to believe that anti-Semites tell the truth about their own motivations as I am that the ADL tells the truth about theirs. Maybe their internal monologue is "Don't believe the anti-Semites, for they are using Jewish goyish trickery!"

Look at that, I'm still speaking of the ADL as though it's a single mind and not a bunch of minds working together.

The logic of the anti-Semitic strongman ("we dislike you because you are censorious and hypocritical") is just so much more reasonable to me than that of the ADL activist weakmen ("they dislike us Just Because, and any explanation they give is a lie, Just Because") that I have to assume the latter is aware of the discrepancy on some level. Maybe I'm being insufficiently charitable to the latter, but that is how I perceive them.

As for the point you and others have made about how these people couldn't have cynical motivations without being caught, they could just be using coded language that only they understand, and refuse to let in anyone who says the quiet part out loud. Nobody ever says "get rid of cishet white men" they say "increase diversity". Nobody ever says "be racist", they say "be anti-racist". That sort of thing.

You make a good point. But it's almost inconceivable to me that intelligent people would do things that provoke anti-Semitism when the anti-Semites literally say "You are making us anti-Semitic by doing this." Maybe they are as unwilling to believe that anti-Semites tell the truth about their own motivations as I am that the ADL tells the truth about theirs. Maybe their internal monologue is "Don't believe the anti-Semites, for they are using Jewish goyish trickery!"

Along with what hydro said about how the ADL interacts with neonazis, "You are making us anti-Semitic by doing this." generally gets a response of "How dare you, we're just defending ourselves, this is victim blaming, this is abusive behaviour." And if you say "Ok well I'm not a neonazi, but it looks to me like you're a bit too gung ho about it, and you're getting false positives that make you look bad" they say "well of course, we're fucking terrified another 6 million of us will get thrown in the ovens."

And then you are trapped. You can empathise with them - because regardless of what facts you've heard, they have been brought up being told the nazis killed 6 million Jews and turned them into lamps and shit, which is a good reason to be defensive. Or you can try to dispute them and go the 'single issue' route - where no matter what you dispute or how, the very fact that you would dispute it serves as proof you shouldn't be trusted. It's like an organisational version of borderline personality disorder.

I think you’re overlooking something- the ADL is not listening to antisemites unless they need an example for a slideshow on why the problem they exist to solve is totally still a thing that they need more resources to address. People the ADL actually does listen to are busy assuring them that, whatever the stated reasons might be, antisemitism is rooted in historical prejudices and is apparently the one remaining holdover from medieval catholic attitudes.

Yes, I think this is broadly correct. The ADL as an organisation can't know anything, because it doesn't have a mind. People who work for the ADL can know things, and there I would very doubtful that anyone working for the ADL is explicitly thinking about increasing anti-semitism in order to increase their relevance and thus power. If nothing else, the cognitive dissonance required to believe that while also believing in the ADL's mission would be painful enough that I would expect anybody doing that to self-delude their way out of it. It is possible that some people working for the ADL believe that anti-semitism is already covertly present and that making it more visible is important to fighting it, but that is relevantly different to deliberately trying to produce it in order to still have a job fighting it.

More generally I think that, as a heuristic, you should usually believe people when they tell you what they're trying to achieve. Outside of the few, relatively rare cases of direct deception, most of the time when people tell you what they want and why, they believe it themselves on some level. It may not be the only reason for their actions, and there may be levels of hypocrisy and self-delusion because those are just endemic to the human condition, but outright conspiratorial deception is extraordinarily rare.

If nothing else, the cognitive dissonance required to believe that while also believing in the ADL's mission would be painful enough

Stated mission.

Much like with anti-racism groups, I suspect the actual mission is closer to "acquire money, status and power for the favoured in-group". I don't know that this is explicitly told to members, but rather it's obvious that those things can be gained by spuriously linking things to your cause and it's natural to want those things.

What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something?

I'll take a crack at that one.

"We are righteous, so what we do is justified."
"If we do things that aren't justified, we were forced to do them because those other people are so much worse, so they're still justified."
"If you criticize us or the things we've done, you're either a bad person, or you're aiding the bad people which makes you a bad person unless you immediately apologize and work to earn our forgiveness."

...Someone who adopts a train of thought like this should honestly know better. If they don't know better, it's because they don't want to know better. They're lying to themselves. When a whole organization adopts this attitude, it's because it's made up of such people. They are lying to each other also.

They still should know better.

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