I suspect there's a ton of people who grew up seeing a ton of examples where *anyone* having power was bad for someone else

But they have not reconciled "power is bad" and "power is good", or "power is bad" and "I want power"

Result: [wokeness]

Example: critical race theory

People have *correctly* observed that you can have formal equality and some people will still have more power and other people will have worse lives as the result

People have also correctly observed that it doesn't have to be intentional. Just having power is enough to be hurting people without even noticing it.

(Hence "there is no substitute to listening to minorities' experiences". This is also accurate.)

Another correct observation: you can even explicitly try to be good, "I'm an ally", etc, and still, by virtue of having the power, end up causing damage.

This is a real conundrum with an obvious solution: take the power away.

Those who can say "let's take the power away", do so. Most people can't, so instead they go for "let's keep remembering that power is bad, forever and ever, never lose sight of it".

From this point of view, pleading "but don't you see that whites are suffering too" is useless. As long as there is power, there will be significant and pervasive suffering, so it's *very* important not to lose sight of this idea.

(but the guilt for causing suffering has to be dealt with, somehow. one of the ways to deal with it is to dehumanize those who hold power.)

So the struggle isn't between those who have power and those who don't, but between those who think the world would be fucked up without *someone* having power, and those who think the world will be fucked up *as long as* somebody has power.

(This does not quite correspond to "who has power and who doesn't". A ton of whites are woke, a ton of blacks are anti-woke.)

This is the solution to the whole wokeness problem, up for grabs: a society that provides enough examples both of good use of power, and of power hurting people.

This is, coincidentally, also the solution to racism.

People are empathetic, selfish, scared, and traditional, all at once. I will cover all of these:

EMPATHETIC: all else being equal, people mostly like being good to others. This is why the circle of moral concern is expanding.

SELFISH: people care about themselves a ton. They can't be selfless for a long time without finding a way to cope with it. The fewer available options for coping, the worse.

(This is another reason why Cthulhu swims left: we have more resources now. Less need to be selfish.)

SCARED: Nobody likes the image of a boot stamping on a human face forever.

If somebody sees power as a bad thing, they will not want it to exist in the world, even if it doesn't affect them personally.

Not about caring about minorities, as much as about hating a bad world.

(should find a better word than "scared" for this)

Finally, TRADITIONAL: even if everything is fine, all things equal people do the same things they've done, so slavery, racism, etc can persist even if there's no reason for it from the other three quarters.

Cue many, many, many discussions where all of this gets mixed up into something impossible to untangle.

(This is why technological solutions aimed at "having better discussions" are doomed. You can't have better discussions until you know yourself, you just get a fucking mess.)

So, how do you solve oppression?

EMPATHETIC: nothing to do here (other than give people MDMA?)
SELFISH: have a richer society. You can contribute to this.
SCARED: be a good example to others.
TRADITIONAL: when you see a tradition that is ready to go away, work to change it.

How I feel about left-wing efforts, here (might be very wrong):

EMPATHETIC: no change
SELFISH: improvement (thanks to wealth redistribution, multiple safety nets?)
SCARED: fucking up this one
TRADITIONAL: slight improvement (by chipping away at all traditions at once)

The left wing thinks it aces SELFISH and EMPATHETIC, by shouting at people to be less selfish and more empathetic.

This doesn't work. My post along those lines: https://brick.do/daec0791-89fb-4e7c-a779-0fbce431066b

(A side-note: I suspect that those shouting on Facebook are people with strong bullshit detectors *and* desire/ability to belong. I have a strong bullshit detector but it's hard for me to belong, so I ended up in the gray tribe. There's probably a gray tribe on the right, too.)

(A gray tribesman on the left: Scott Alexander. A gray tribesman on the right: Jordan Peterson.)

(Are gray tribes united by shared loneliness? Or by their shared passion for bullshit-detecting in general, not having any higher cause than "have less bullshit around just for the sake of it"?

Or is it just typical-minding? I don't know.)

(TLP is a gray tribesman somewhere in the center, then. Probably. Also, is it a coincidence that all three examples I could come up with are therapists?)

Another side-note: the left has more appreciation for how following human instincts results in bad things. The right has more appreciation for how *not* following human instincts results in bad things.

(Ish. Not quite.)

This makes the right simultaneously more free than the left — less shame for acting on their own instincts — and less free, because one of those instincts is obedience to tradition, society, etc. (MAYBE? I don't know.)

Oh, and this thread might be the solution for "why does America's right hate everyone, but America's left only hate the right?".

America is powerful. The right wants the power to be used. The left doesn't.

This would be different in a country that isn't powerful. (I GUESS?)

Oh, here we go. USSR was the opposite. The left hated.. that's right, America. And the right hated the left.

(USSR was powerful but the situation was different because the power was being used internally rather than externally. America's right wants to use the power against outsiders, for any definition of outsiders, and USSR's left wanted to use the power against 'bad apple' insiders.)

(I THINK)

(I.e. America's right does not want to exterminate half the Americans, but USSR's left wanted to exterminate kulaks, rich people / 'leeches' inside USSR, and so on)