A while ago, I was chatting with a friend I’ve known since childhood. He’s black, and I’m Jewish. Despite living in the era of corrosive identity politics, our long-standing familiarity allows us to have conversations that would otherwise be minefields.
During this particular interchange, I told him that I was concerned because my niece had come home from school one day, saying “I hate being white.” He nodded in understanding, and said, “I know what you mean. My son comes home from school saying he hates being black.”
That was what you might call a lightbulb moment.
Once I started looking around, I saw that this was a universal grievance. No matter who you are, you are being told – by school, news platforms, entertainment, and social media – that your innate characteristics are a source of shame.
Much of this is driven by the leftist oppressor/oppressed framework that has become dominant in popular culture. If you fall into an “oppressor” category, you’re told how bad your group is. If you fall into an “oppressed” category, you’re told how bad it is to be a member of your group. Either way, you’re being influenced to hate who you are.
In this environment, is it any wonder that there’s so much anger and confusion?
Women want to become men to escape what they’ve been told will be a life of violence and oppression. Men want to become women to avoid the guilt associated with male perpetration of violence and oppression.
White people are angry because they’re told the system is rigged in their favor. Non-white people are angry because they’re told the system is rigged against them.
This isn’t just some random byproduct of modern society. This is internal subversion driven by narrative warfare.
The Psychology of Self-Loathing
For as long as humans have lived in close proximity to each other, some groups have been more powerful than others. Within less-powerful groups, some individuals in every era have wished to switch to the dominant group.
For example, if you watch Indian television, you’ll notice a large number of commercials for skin-lightening products. That’s because, in India, as in many other cultures, lighter skin is associated with higher social status.
Of course, there are factors other than skin tone to consider. During the Hellenistic period, some Jewish men living under Greek authority tried crude and painful cosmetic surgery procedures to “decircumcise” themselves, so that at the gymnasia and baths, they would not be so easily distinguished from the uncircumcised Greeks.
There are several reasons why people tend want to change who they are, or who they are perceived as being. Socioeconomic considerations are one, but a more deep-seated motivation is the belief that your own group is inferior. Some people may want to lighten their skin or stretch out the skin on their penises to improve their standing in society, but others want to do it because they dislike the group they were born into.
Dr. Seuss brilliantly satirized this tendency in The Sneetches. Intended as an indictment of racism, this children’s book tells the story of two groups of creatures, identical except that some have stars on their bellies (a trait that is considered superior to being plain-bellied). When a mysterious traveler named Sylvester McMonkey McBean arrives with technology that can add and remove stars, the sneetches struggle to maintain both their identity and their social hierarchy.
Sadly, human history is rarely as light-hearted as a Dr. Seuss story. A particularly unfortunate aspect of human culture is that it incentivizes turning on one’s own kind. During the plantation era, slaves who were willing to brutalize other slaves were rewarded by their owners. During the Third Reich, Jews who were willing to help oppress other Jews were rewarded with extra rations and the illusion of authority. Today, Westerners who adopt anti-Western rhetoric, men who demonize men, and Jews who vilify Israel are held up as praiseworthy by the organs of dominant culture.
In the modern First World, we have neither institutionalized slavery nor prison ghettoes and concentration camps. It is not fear or subjugation that drives self-loathing, it is narrative.
Who Benefits?
In The Sneetches, the big winner of the sneetches’ prejudice is Sylvester McMonkey McBean. He collects a fee to add a star or to remove a star. He does this until the sneetches have no more money. At that point, he packs up and moves on. In Dr. Seuss’s world, he is merely an opportunist, exploiting the pre-existing preference for belly-stars within the sneetch community. But in our world, the people who control the technology don’t just profit from our beliefs, they instill those beliefs.
In the sneetches’ storybook ending, they decide that stars really don’t matter, and that one sneetch is as good as another. Nevertheless, McBean walks away with all their money. If we wish to avoid a similar fate, it might be best to make peace with ourselves sooner rather than later.