RTÉ News did one of their spotlight pieces with a focus on multiculturalism recently which, though seeming soft, is at core a significant nudge tactic. The American channel Libs of Tiktok reposted the clip and highlighted the phrase from the video “needs to change within the Irish community.”
Foreigner living in Ireland complains about Irish culture. She finds Irish jokes offensive and says Irish humor “needs to change within the Irish community.”
This is multiculturalism. They want you to change to suit them.pic.twitter.com/X7cOClHqkb
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 24, 2024
In this light, the request is portrayed as a small accommodation from the majority to just be considerate, and that this comes at only a small cost.
“It’s no big deal, why would you oppose this,” the argument goes. The same could be said about other woke issues such as pronouns, or allowing “a very small amount” of “trans women” compete in female sports.
But this form of accommodationism invariably meets with resistance, and, it seems; that is part of the agenda – to force an intransigent reaction from the target and make that the issue.
At the root of this is a strategy that was articulated by Saul Alinsky as “your enemy’s reaction is your real action.” The idea is to provoke; wait for the reaction and then advance. The correct response from saner folk to this tactic is to frame the dialogue or event correctly; to identify what is going on and explain the tactic to the watching audience.
In these situations, the accommodations that have to be made require that somebody has always to subvert their preferences. This, in spite of the oft repeated catchphrase that “diversity is strength” is not always an enriching exchange. Sometimes it requires that one culture has to subvert and submit. This does not always lead to gracious accommodation, the vision that vapid liberals assume. Sometimes it leads to a conflict of visions, and subsequently, plain old conflict. In truth, that may be the objective.
James Lindsay provided some interesting commentary on this video in an extended thread on X where he breaks down the motivations and theory behind this seemingly innocent request for a “change within the Irish community”
“The goal of multiculturalism” he says “is to prevent the organic blending of cultures so that you can enforce a conflict and a synthetic resolution (inclusion). Normally, people who share a community with each other will start to share and blend. That’s not what dialecticians want.”
What he calls “dialecticians” here are the practitioners of the tactic that Saul Alinsky described above.
The goal of multiculturalism is to prevent the organic blending of cultures so that you can enforce a conflict and a synthetic resolution (inclusion). Normally, people who share a community with each other will start to share and blend. That's not what dialecticians want. https://t.co/2TiTBeqQPi
— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) January 24, 2024
Lindsay continues: “Integration and the organic blending of cultures therefore becomes taboo under multicultural preservation, but on the other hand, you have to add in the dialectical synthetic understanding, which is “inclusion,” which forces the “dominant” culture to change for accommodation.”
It all goes one way. The accommodations have to be conceded from the dominant (read native) culture. Even some form of mixing of the cultures where ideas are swapped and evolved is critiqued and discouraged as “cultural appropriation”. The result of this is to discourage integration, and to make multiculturalism take the form of ghettoization. This is how it works in reality. These studies establish that Multicultural societies increase distrust both between the distinct ethnic societies, and even within these societies and the dominant culture.
Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: Evidence from the Micro-Context – Peter Thisted Dinesen, Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, 2015 (sagepub.com) Civic Engagement and Community Heterogeneity: An Economist’s Perspective | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core j.1467-9477.2007.00176 Putnam Diversity.pdf (puttingourdifferencestowork.com) The Social Effects of Ethnic Diversity at the Local Level: A Natural Experiment with Exogenous Residential Allocation | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 124, No 3 (uchicago.edu)
And yet, despite this evidence of atomization and isolation as societies increase in multiculturalism, the goal of multicultural activism is to decrease integration through doctrines and taboos such as the blatantly one-sided idea of “cultural appropriation”.
Lindsay explains: “Integration is therefore framed as a form of “cultural chauvinism” and unjust systems of domination. Chauvinism is framed as unjust, bad, hateful, self-serving, and the rest, so the “dominant” group is told to accommodate and transform around the “subordinated,” inverting power.”
“This isn’t possible when integration is allowed, so a doctrine of (dialectical) multiculturalism is upheld as a standard.”
This request for one sided concessions from the native (the dialectical theorists will label native as dominant to frame it in the oppressor-victim narrative) culture is designed to incite resistance, and it is in this reaction that the trap is set.
If the native antagonists respond that chauvinism, maybe even oppression of the Other, is necessary to preserve their own culture, and decide to rebuke multiculturalism and all signs of the minority culture, that becomes the justification for the protected status of the minority culture and the oppression of the majority culture.
It is a mistake to get drawn into this dialectic or to accept the two options – confrontation or concession – offered by its framing. The correct response is to reject the premises of multiculturalism and the dialectical framing.
“What this looks like in practice is exposing and rejecting the demand for accommodation as illegitimate,” says Lindsay. “The challenge is that it has to be thoroughly revealed to be an unreasonable demand for accommodation.”
What Lindsay reveals in his description of this accomodationist process, is a trap. People know instinctively that there is much more to these requests than a simple request for consideration, and that these seemingly easily granted concessions can actually become a high cost. Consider a party where just one guest is a vegetarian and so the cook decides to prepare a vegetarian meal because everyone will eat it and he doesn’t want to prepare two dishes.
Nassim Taleb calls this the Dictatorship of the Small Minority as the wishes and actions of the accommodating majority are dictated by an insistent minority.
When the concession actually implies a clash of values, that “minor concession” can easily escalate into an ethical dilemma. However, if you are used to granting the accommodation to be considerate, what do you do next? We know that when someone asks you to use special “pronouns” when addressing them, they are in essence often requesting you to lie in regad to what you know or believe to be true.
Concessions don’t stop at small cultural accommodations; of airs and mannerisms. Deep into the theory that has emanated out of liberal arts departments of American universities and into the corporate world and primary and secondary education we find such notions as “cultural ways of knowing.” This is a branch of cultural relativism that claims there is no such thing as objective truth, but that every culture has its own truths and ways of “knowing” these truths.
Postmodernists say that the systems of knowing that we (we in the western world) privilege, perpetuate Western “ways of knowing” and marginalize and delegitimize “other ways of knowing”.
So for instance, to demand evidence and reasoning for claims is seen as a demand to participate within a “system of discourse and knowledge production” built to benefit Western cultural norms (Western ways of knowing).
This epistemology bleeds out of the wacky gender/ethnic and critical social justice legal theory classrooms and into the world of legal jurisprudence. It is not uncommon to see this principle taken into consideration in criminal cases where “cultural” unfamiliarity is cited as a mitigating factor in cases of sexual assault and rape by migrants in western countries.
How did such fringe theories gain purchase against all notions of common sense? Strangely enough the interests and goals of globalist and the utopian left’s align perfectly.
The globalists want to exploit labour and growth models to create profits through the growth of global markets and corporations, and the left want to create utopia by pulling down old societies and building a new one based on their ideas.
Radical lefties want to destroy what Mao called the Four Olds, the globalists want to pillage middle class wealth. They both want to destroy nationalism as that is a barrier to both global corporatism and international socialism. The multicultural paradox is that the best friend of “global capitalism” is the “international brotherhood of man”.