Calvinism is the Seed of Conservativism - Example 2

A little more recently there was a provocateur of less celebrity who responded to a
discussion he wasn’t part of to object to the characterization of members of his hobbyist
group as “offended.” His exact words were “please point me to these mythical offended”
group members. Now, this is a group known not only for being on the whole utterly
unpleasable, but also for spending more time complaining about their hobby than doing it.
And the person making this objection has made an entire career out of being offended--
this is a man who is best known for harassing a widely-known fan out of the hobby entirely
because he didn’t like the way she dressed. The proposition of this hobbyist group not
being offended is on the face of it ridiculous, being offended is the primary
characterization they are known for.

Again, could this be mere cognitive dissonance? I don’t think so. Rather, I think this is a
categorization difference: for this man “offended” is a special category of anger, of which
only the minorities he harasses are capable. He isn’t offended, he’s merely filled with
justified anger so much and so consistently that he can film, edit, and release a video on
a weekly basis about some new part of pop culture that “the SJWs” or “the feminists” or
“the gays” or whoever is using to “ruin something forever”--there’s a gay character in a
card game, or there’s a movie in which a woman is a superhero, or a trans player was
allowed to compete in a game tournament, or a player in a different games tournament
is openly gay. None of these, for him, count as being offended, they’re about how the
existence of people that aren’t in the same category as him in spaces that he regards as
reserved for him, are specific offenses. “Being offended” is what the people whose
presence he’s angry about do when he gets angry at them for being present.

So there’s two classes of people: the Elect who are allowed to be in his hobby, and the
Reprobate who aren’t. When the Elect are angry, it’s always justified per se. When the
Reprobate are angry, it’s “being offended” and is always unwarranted. The Elect are, by
definition, incapable of being offended, because offended is just a quality that the
Reprobate always have, and it’s never a reaction to an injustice because nothing that the
Elect could ever do to the Reprobate would ever be unjustified.

Calvinism is the Seed of Conservativism - Example 1

(TRIGGER WARNING -- HOMOPHOBIC SLUR) Recently there was a controversy, and by “controversy” I mean “a right wing celebrity
provocateur incited a homophobic mass harassment campaign, explicitly and flagrantly
against his platform’s terms of service, but then said platform declined to penalize him in
any way because he’s famous and they don’t actually think that gay people getting
harassment and death threats for multiple years is a big deal.” I won’t name the platform
here, but it was one on which You could post video the internet, which has sometimes
been described as a series of Tubes.

But where the calvanism comes in is that the explicit and undisguised goal of the
years-long harassment campaign was to make the target, a journalist, shut up and stop
criticizing conservative positions. Yet when the journalist, and other LGBTQ people,
objected to the harassment, they were immediately accused of trying to silence
“freedom of speech.” So was this mere cognitive dissonance, that freedom of speech is
bad when person A does it and good when person B does it? I think not. I think it’s too
conscious and self-assured for that, and the terms in which it is asserted and defended
are too tied to the categories to which the persons in question belong: Person B has
freedom of speech, if people ask a video hosting platform to ban him for violating its
rules then his rights are being violated. Person A’s freedom of speech simply doesn’t
count, and if he’s harassed and shouted down then it’s no more than deserves. In both
cases, whether your right to free speech counts is entirely dependent on which category
you belong to, the Elect who are straight and white and conservative, or the Reprobate
who, in this case, is Latino and--they actually unapolagetically used the word--a Fag.

That distinction, in their minds, was why it was ok for them to hit, but not ok for them to
be hit back. The Elect may strike the Reprobate, but if the Reprobate objects he infringes
on the rights of the Elect. Example 2

Calvinism is the Seed of Conservatism - Intro

Calvinism is/was a school of doctrine, in Protestant Christianity, that held that there were
two groups of people, the Elect, who would go to heaven, and the Reprobate, who
would go to hell. The actual beliefs are a little more complicated than that--it involves
conclusions from God’s purported omniscience, and if He knows who is going to hell
then why would He bother wasting any Grace on them, and so really, only the Elect end
up mattering and if you think about it Jesus really would have only bothered dying to save
the Elect--but in terms of practical results it ended up not MUCH more complicated than
“there are two groups of people, the Good Ones and the Bad Ones.”

The effects of this philosophy have made it a very good contender for the worst and most
damaging philosophy in all of human history.

If we’re talking about it just in terms of “cultures and people and morality systems that
would have been influenced by the teachings of the theologian John Calvin” then that
gives us, well, all of European Colonialism and all that follows from it. But I think we can
use “calvinism” not historically, but diagnostically, as a label for tendencies in Human
Morality to sort people into “the ones who matter, who are the moral superiors, who do
good things, and who can be wronged” and “the ones who don’t matter, who are morally
inferior, who do only evil, and against whom anything is justified.” This is a distinction
that morality systems seem to want to make a LOT.

One suspects there may be a reason for that.

But the important thing is that calvinism, in this sense, is the keystone of every current
right wing worldview. Let me show you a few examples.

Example 1
Example 2