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I haven't read this comment before, but I've had thoughts similar to this rattling around in my head for a while. I think the thought first occurred to me with respect to affirmative action, that the justifications were based around the notion that individuals belonging to demographics deemed as oppressed had been treated unfairly and therefore, at the individual level, deserved benefits to be tilted in their favor in things like school and job applications*. Obviously, the point of these filtering mechanisms is to select for individuals with the skills, ability, wherewithal, motivation, etc. to make the most out of the school and/or perform the job well, which are not dependent on whether or not someone belongs in a demographic group deemed as oppressed. So the benefit that we get better be worth the tradeoff of taking away these educational or employment opportunities from more qualified people to give them to less qualified ones.
But what is the benefit? Ultimately, it's mostly money. There's little benefit people get out of being assigned homework or going into lecture halls to take tests or sitting in front of computers to crunch numbers. People do these things so that, in the long run, they end up making more money. So why not just give these individuals money and let the work be done by people who are qualified?
Well, the problem there then is the "dignity" of the thing or whatever. People don't like to feel like charity cases; they like to believe that they earned the things that they have, through their own hard work, will, resilience, talents, etc. And so we have to get them to play-act the part, to go to classes and offices, to give them the plausible deniability that they actually earned the money that they're getting. This is also why AA is framed as helping people who are disadvantaged, rather than giving people bonus points for happening to belong to particular demographic groups, even though those are literally the exact same things.
And it's this dishonesty that gets me. I wish the left would just say that we should give people free money as a way to make up for injustices we presume they must have suffered due to belonging to certain demographics. We can then discuss and argue about which individuals deserve free money and how much, and there will be plenty to disagree about there, but at least everyone would have an open and honest understanding of what is at stake here. Trying to launder the free money through subverting our ability to put competent people in positions where they can contribute the most to society seems strictly worse than this.
I think this sort of enforced kayfabe is also at play with, say, the whole "transwomen are women" thing. I think it was Scott Alexander who argued that, regardless of how we see things, we should respect transwomen's identities by using their pronouns and such, because it's just the nice thing to do, and we ought not contribute even more to the suffering that they clearly must experience merely for believing that they were born in the wrong sex. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I'm sympathetic to it, at least. But that kind of honesty is unacceptable in the modern left - the only line that's acceptable is that transwomen are women in every way that matters. This necessarily comes with it many implications about things like sports or pregnancy that many/most people aren't willing to accept. Like how AA only makes sense if you believe that competency isn't relevant in school/work, this kayfabe only makes sense if you believe that sex differences are purely socially mediated, and if we just twist society enough, then transwomen could live lives that are indistinguishable from females.
Again, I just wish people would state these honestly so that everyone can, with informed consent, place their votes on how they want society to be run instead of constantly obfuscating with this sort of play-acting fakery. But I suspect that, to some extent, the fakery is an essential component of the whole structure, and perhaps even the entire point.
* There are multiple justifications, of course, one of which is that, due to systemic oppression, our current filtering mechanisms erroneously judge individuals who belong to demographics deemed as oppressed as being less qualified than they actually are. However, assuming this were true, this, in no way, can support affirmative action; rather, what it would support is fixing our filtering mechanisms to make more accurate, more precise assessments of individuals, which is the opposite of the blunt tool of AA.
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