The gun to our heads is the threat of public social and moral criticism. And in our society, with the power of social media and technology that can spread your shame across the world in an instant and make it stand, unerasable, for all time, that’s a pretty big gun. And the person holding it is taking pains to explain to you that you don’t deserve what you have, that you got it unfairly, and that they need it and deserve it. Fair enough. Everyone has their justifications.

Regardless of whether someone might have grounds to argue the point, the fundamental message of critical race theory is pretty simple. It’s not an argument, it’s a command. Shut up, step aside, and give me what you’ve got.

From an ethical perspective, that’s a problematic axiom. Most ethical theories recognize that there is a negative effect (on you and on others) of committing certain acts, whatever your justification. And it’s also generally accepted by most cultures that all humans are capable of wrongdoing, and also that demanding things by force from other people is a dangerous precedent. Most people would say that that’s a dangerous road to start walking down, whatever your reasons. It’s not the path most cultures think you should take to try to make things better.

I don’t even think it’s worth arguing the details of whether it’s true that the people being given the privilege need it. Everyone wants privilege (whatever we actually mean by that; wealth, opportunity, respect). All humans want those things. I do think one question that really needs to be asked, and hasn’t, is whether you can really get those things by this sort of means? Can you aquire privilege by taking it? I mean really aquire it. Can you integrate it into yourself and make it something you, as a person, permanently possess? Can you steal privilege?

In the short term, when you’re holding a gun on someone, the answer seems to be yes. That’s why guns are so tempting. It’s a short cut to wealth, opportunity, respect. It’s instant privilege in any situation. But the amount you can take is limited to that situation and keeping the gun on people. It allows you to redistribute privilege by force. But what if the real problem of privilege is not how it is distributed, but how it is produced? Does taking it by force grant you privilege in a way so that it integrated into you, so you can produce it? Or will you always need the gun?

Postmodern theories are among the number that believe, yes, you can aquire privilege with a gun, in large part because they don’t believe there is any other way that it is acquired. So of course your strategy should be to take it. That’s how you get it. People are, according to postmodern theories, fundamentally indistinguishable. All courses of action are relative, all value systems are socially constructed and of equal essential value. All value hierarchies are arbitrary. There is no special mode of being that is fundamentally better or acrrues or produces more value or privilege by nature. So all advantage must be acquired by manipulation and by force.

And you fix that essential inequality by correcting it and redesitributing it in a moral natural (uniform, because there are no essential differences), also by force. That is why all social dynamics can be understood as power dynamics. Race, gender, sex, politics, art, even science; it’s all about power. These are fundamental axioms of postmodern theory. And they explain much about the philosophical assumptions and justifications behind their practical political theory. For the postmodern, there isn’t really a divide between the two. All speech is political, all words are about force. It isn’t the job of a postmodernism simply to think about issues, but to act on them and act with force upon the world and shift the scales of power. Largely because nothing else is possible. There is no thought or speech or action independent of political action, independent of power. So you may as well embrace it and seek to use that power to make the world reflect, as best you can, the natural state of uniformity that your underlying theory tells you it should.

Or, alternatively, there isn’t really a good reason why, if life and speech and thought and action are all fundamentally a struggle to secure power from ourselves at the expense of others, you shouldn’t seek to push that process as far as you can for whatever group you happen to prefer. Not only to the point of equality but to the point of advantage. And it’s not clear that that isn’t what postmodernists are already doing. I’m reminded of a line from Animal Farm. All animals are equal, some are just a bit more equal than others.

There seems to be a temptation to say, not only that black and white are equal, but that black is a bit better and white is a bit worse. There’s a temptation to say that men and women are the same, and also women are a bit better and men are a bit worse. I don’t think anyone is really looking for the point at which the shift in power needs to stop because the status of the falling side needs to be protected from falling too low, or the status of the rising side is going too high, because there’s really no difference nce between them and it wouldn’t be any better really if their positions were reversed. I think the sentiment seems to be that it would be actively better if their fortunes were reversed.

The argument advanced to justify such prejudices (and I deem them prejudices because they’re axiomatic, the result of a calculus that takes place before any individual moral consideration) is the same, if they could see it, as that of past ages and ideologies: well, yes, but we’re actually right about our judgements. White people and men deserve to be seen as inferior because they really are inferior. And black people and women deserve to be seen as superior because they really are superior (according to the moral calculus of our age). It doesn’t seem to occur to them that that’s what absolutely everyone has always said throughout all of history. They haven’t invented a new, better way of viewing people or calculating value. They are, in fact, exactly like everyone else in their arithmetic. They’re just working with different variables (which is hardly new).

So in may ways the strangest thing about postmodern theory is the proclamation that it is doing anything new or that’s its demands are anything new. Give me what you’ve got, I deserve it more than you, is hardly a revolutionary, enlightened philosophical innovation.

But I still think the greatest objection to this approach is practical. And it cuts to the heart of the postmodern theory that all power inequities are acquired by theft. Can you take privilege? Can really possess privilege, truly possess it, if you gain it by taking it? Taking wealth, respect, and opportunity? In a limited way, yes, certainly. The gun proves that. History proves that. But there are a whole lot of cultures and prophets and gurus and philosophers who would argue that, no, you can’t. Because taking isn’t the same as possessing, when it comes to things like that.

Possessing is, in a way, being possessed, inhabited. Having those things be part of you, having the means of producing them within yourself. If you try to get them by taking them, you will always feel the lack of them, because you will always need to keep taking them. They won’t belong to you, they won’t inhabit you in turn. They won’t be integrated into your being. And you’ll always feel inadequate and needy.

Socrates, on facing his death, argued that no one could steal away the greatest wealth a person possessed, because their greatest priviledge was in their character, which no one could take from a man but himself. Conversely, those were riches that no one could grant a man (or woman) but himself. True wealth can’t be taken, nor can it be given. It’s something that lived inside you, that you earn by your mode of being. And trying to take it won’t enrich you, it will only inpoverish your own capacity to produce wealth and respect, make you dependent on taking it from others.

This was an argument that many of the wise advanced to try to counter the belief systems and sentiments of the time, which often tended toward the belief that life was about people taking what they could for themselves. Theft and the acquisition of power at the expense of others is, after all, a universal temptation, and it’s not even an innovation of our culture to find a way to make it a virtue. It might be an innovation to argue for and against it simultaneously, as our culture does, but schizophrenia can hardly be considered an advance (although, I suppose if your theory is that the world is mad, then aligning yourself to it is itself a kind of brilliance).

Solving the problem of how wealth can truly be acquired, and what true wealth is, has been one of the great projects of mankind. Whole scriptures are devoted to it. Saints and martyrs have built and lost their lives on it. There’s a terrible, backward, tribalistic vulgarity to the postmodern assertion that all speech, all thought, is political, that all social dynamics are dynamics of power. That all privilege is only the product of theft, all disadvantage only the product of abuse. It stripes us of our complexity, our agency, our autonomy, our identity. It makes us such small, mean creatures, with so little we can call our own and little recourse in life to hold onto it except the animalistic wrestling of one against another.