Moral panic

That is the name given to various episodes where communities get hysterical and hyper-reactive over particular moral issues.Usually sexual stuff. The most recent example was the Satanic Abuse Panic in the 90's. Turned out it was about nothing. But it shows the common archetypal inheritance between supposedly educated and enlightened Westerners and contemporary Africans who burn their neighbors alive for practicing witchcraft. (I have the video.)

Anyway, there is another kind of moral panic in the air, indeed, in the culture for the last 45 plus years, but it is internal and it is focussed on the self: the panicked hyperanxiety that one might be a racist bigot and hater. White people are its primary practitioners and it has made of the once dominant social power an increasingly pathetic and culturally suicidal therapy group. Perhaps --perhaps-- with the exception of pedophilia (which is a mostly individual rather than group issue), nothing so throw white Americans into an internal and external moral panic than the spectre of "bigotry and discrimination".

Race is by far the most powerful field in which this operates, but feminism has so infected our assumptions that men are now routinely marginalized, pathologized, etc. in a wide range of places and no one seems to notice. It has become that normal.

At my workplace years ago, I was cajoled into having the staff watch a film I was subjected to in grad school, a supposedly mind-opening and ground-breaking study of race called The Color of Fear. It is basically about a group of men of color who gang up on a couple of white guys and make them feel bad. When I showed it at work and opined that it seemed to be about little more than racial vengeance, a man of color on the staff replied, "So what?"

There are a lot of people like him in the race and gender struggle. And morally panicked whites and males are pushovers for what is actually not "justice" but "payback."

The Prime Directive for morally panicked whites is "Never Offend A Minority." There is, however, no expectation of reciprocity. How often do we find blacks or Latinos, women, or Muslims apologizing for going overboard? Don't hold your breath.

Racism is universal and a fact of life, whether you call it by that name or some other title. Letting fear of being accused of it rule your moral life is a kind of suicide. It is not by accident that the Jain religion, whose Prime Directive is ahimsa, harmlessness, includes in its monastic tradition a real, even if careful, approval of suicide as a religious act. Best way not to harm is to make yourself disappear. And that's what Westerners, especially of the Caucasian persuasion, are up to.

Count me out.