How weird to define someone in terms of what they aren’t. My dad is a doctor and has been told by his hospital system they’re not supposed to say “women” any more. He also says that his nurses are enraged by it. One obvious problem with this is that it’s going to feed enormous resentment in a large section of the populace. As well as absolute derangement. This is no way to understand or conceptualize yourself.

    Woman and mother are not only foundational psychological concepts, motherhood is perhaps the most fundamental psychological concept we possess. It’s the first that you form, the first relationship, the first light that enters your world as a new being, even before awareness of yourself. And that’s not unique to us, that’s a relationship that is central to the entire kingdom of mammalian. It is the foundation of our very life and being. 

   There is an odd argument being made here that you have a right to remove by force any phenomenon in which all people cannot have an equal share and standing. And the problem with that argument, the reason that it has led to this current absurdity, is that that is f@#&%ing impossible! This argument could be used on literally everything.

    I’m excluded from and marginalized by Chinese and Indian cultures. Does that give me the right to cancel them and tell them they can’t have them and have no right to them, no franchise? They’re a far more massive majority than my little people. And that’s hardly the furthest extreme. There are a thousand cultures and subgroups, big and small, based around athletic ability, sex, artistic ability, personal interest, familial connection, locational history, and physical and psychological distinctiveness, all of which I do not have equal standing in and cannot fully participate in. It’s a big world! Humanity is big and diverse. And we are each limited and distinct, confined to one tiny point in time and space and being. 

    The only thing that could justify me canceling or restricting all of these multitudes is a deep seated belief that I should be the defining limit of the world and that everything can only exist at my license, for my pleasure. Well, if that’s the case, then someone needs to put me in my place and explain to me that I don’t have the right to hold the whole world hostage with my outrage at my own existential insignificance.

    The fact that we are small, individual, and unique–meaning limited, meaning there are some things we are and some we aren’t, some places we are and some we aren’t, some things we have and some we don’t–is an existential fact of our existence. You can’t correct for it without correcting life itself out of existence. And that’s what we’re coming to. We’re trying to correct for the basic facts of human existence. Which we used to do by learning to live with them, accept them, grow strong enough to deal with them, maybe even capable enough to correct them in ourselves if that’s within our power and desire. But we never possessed any innate right to anything but what we are, nor any right to hold others hostage for possessing what we don’t. 
    The only way to carry out this kind of vision is to remove the reality and activity of life itself. It is fundamentally opposed to the basic realities of human existence. And in that way it is opposed to the activity of life itself. It isn’t kind, it isn’t nice, it isn’t helpful. It is rejecting humanity and human nature. It is anti-human. In fact it is rejecting, quite soundly, the entire notion of human diversity. It is denying diversity the right to exist, attempting to hold all life hostage until it will stop being what it is, unless it can be given to me. It is seeking to erase any reminders that others and ourselves as distinct and finite beings exist, anything that might remind us that we are different, variable, limited, localized, inadequate, particular, mortals. Mortals who cannot be everything and so must rely on others to be them and grant them space to be what we cannot. 
    That’s why other movements of this kind have always ended up as completely draconian and murderous. The amount of things you would need to correct for is almost infinite, and they are intrinsically tied to the nature of human life itself. The amount of power you would have to grant someone to be able to make those kinds of corrections is also nearly infinite.

    If what you are trying to correct for is essential to the sweeping tide of human life itself, then in order to stop that tide in its tracks and “fix it” you will need power sufficient to arrest the very life of the species itself and hold it in place. That means siezing control of life itself, from the biggest to the smallest, at every level of being, exercising power and administrative control over every little operation. Engineering and correcting humanity, from the society-wide level down to the level of the smallest, silliest abberations of individuality, like a Halloween parade.

   This isn’t an absurd conclusion or exaggeration. It’s inevitable, if that’s your vision. If you set yourself an impossible and universally antipathetic goal, you will have to do impossible and unbelievable things. Religions set themselves similar goals, but typically have far more humility, wisdom, and experience contained in their premises than the grand political and ideological visions that seek to re-engineer the nature of humanity and existence itself today.

    Also, many religions set the locus of control and burden of correction at a more reasonable point, at the point of the individual and their choices, which are contingent and are within our sphere of reasonable influence and authority, rather than forcible reeingineering of the very essence of the species based on a fashionable theory. Most religions contain a fairly functional understand of what humanity is what what it’s nature and problems are, based in a tradition of immense practical experience and empirical refinement. We aren’t obligated to control or eradicate or restructure the whole nature of being to follow their path, only to direct our own path according to that which is most in harmony with the nature of being itself.

     The ideology of this new school of thought is a true nightmare because no such activity can be sufficient. It obligates you to an assault on the very nature and existence of the world, humanity, society, and other people. And that is a genocidal urge, however kind and prosocial it may pretend to be.