Don’t fall for the Activist’s Fallacy

The Activist's Fallacy relies on declared intent being the only important motivational feature of whatever theory or policy is being put. With motivation being the dimension that all responses have to be graded on.

As a rhetorical and status strategy, this is highly effective. As long as everything can be construed as being first and foremost about intent, then any opposition becomes opposition to the declared intent, just as support becomes support for the declared intent.

Since the intent is, of course, going to be noble, that elevates the nobility of those pushing the theory or policy and de-legitimises any critics. They become malicious, callous, some sort of -ist or -phobe.

There is a lot of colonising of people's decency going on. As well as people not wishing to have their status as one of the smart and good stripped from them by use of stigmatising labels against them: the submit-or-be-stigmatised choice.

So, by making intent the dimension upon which the controversy turns, motivation becomes the key grading factor. You can't decide you are against Critical Race Theory because it is false, or because you think it has pernicious social implications. No, it is all about the declared intent of Critical Race Theory and whether you are "anti-racist" or not.

If one accepts the theory that society is a structure of oppression and domination, and that social interactions (including discussions) are all about power relations, then the Activist's Fallacy is not merely a rhetorically useful status play, it is a natural implication of your world-view.

Which, of course, implies that there are things deeply wrong with your world-view. For the Activist's Fallacy is still a fallacy. It is still bad reasoning, no matter how rhetorically useful it is. Nor how much of a congenial status play it is.

There are a whole lot of things wrong with Critical Race Theory, starting with it simply not being true that racism is pervasive in contemporary Western societies, or that disparities between groups are primarily the result of current racism, or that persistent disparities demonstrate systemic racism. It is a false analysis of social dynamics. Critical Race Theory's racialisation of everything is also deeply pernicious in its effects on social dynamics and public policy.

Structural roles

Something that is very clear from the history of investing grand social meanings onto race, aided by "race" having visible physical markers, is that elite race talk is always a divide-and-dominate mechanism. And Critical Race Theory is very much elite race talk: it came out of elite universities.

We tend to over-rate the importance of conscious intent in human actions. As Polish psychiatrist Andrzej ÅÂobaczewski (1921–2007) noted:

Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible…

Political Ponerolology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, p.163.