Grievance and Victimhood

The Illiberalism of the Aboriginal Industry

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” - Thomas Sowell

For readers who have gone down the rabbit hole and taken in the work of independent researchers who write objectively on Canadian indigenous issues, it can seem like an insurmountable gulf that separates them from those who have not yet considered, or are not yet aware, of fact-based perspectives.

The radical left’s illiberal colonization of the cultural industries, including the organs most responsible for knowledge production and public sense-making, has the unfortunate effect of leaving legions of Canadians bereft, unable to appreciate or understand the world through the facts that exist in it. 

What is surprising about this situation, is the effectiveness of victim-centric narratives at shutting down critical thinking and inspiring blind faith acceptance of statements and behaviors which would be seen as inauthentic, if not cloaked in the false virtue of victimhood. The aura of a victim, as Janice Fiamengo has observed, has the power to silence a room. In my view, this power that “victims” have been afforded, is the essential component to everything illiberal and wrong with modern day society.

This year my research and writing will go deep into many aspects of what Mr. M and I are studying in our work on The Great Illiberal Subversion. Illiberalism in western democracies is what we are exposing and analyzing. Our approach so far has been two-pronged, on one side we are offering an exploration of the principles and philosophy of liberalism, on the other side we are chronicling the patterns of illiberalism that have their origins in the 1960s counter-culture. The Great Illiberal Subversion was, and is, a radical far-left movement, a cultural revolution which many writers have called “the long march through the institutions.” 

As a research and writing project, The Great Illiberal Subversion is a massive undertaking that ties together many disparate elements of my work. Indigenous issues, being the focus of my published writings, will continue to be the main source of the illiberalism I explore.  The countless layers of illiberalism infused in Canadian indigenous-non-indigenous relations provides an illustrative on-going catastrophe in great need of study. The phenomenon goes beyond Canada, and involves things like a general will, among the activists in those western democracies with aboriginal populations, to invite international bodies, like the United Nations, into their countries to judge them on “past wrongs” related to “racism,” “sexism,” “transphobia” and more - all by cleverly scouring history digging up anything even remotely construable as a past trespass. As will be discussed in the essay that follows, presentism is deployed in this aim, by shrewd and disingenuous grievance activists and lawyers.

In my view, more study of the nature of greed and corruption, and how they intersect with rent-seeking grievance activism, is greatly needed. However, Frances Widdowson’s Political Economy of Neotribal Rentierism offers an exceptional theoretical framework examining the mechanisms of the Aboriginal Industry.

The Two Hemispheres of Epistemic Weapons used by the Woke Movement

Postmodernism and Critical Marxism - the intellectual weapons of the elite intelligentsia, emphasize victim-centric story-telling and narrative-weaving, always around overtly skewed negative critiques of the West, and always hostile to objective and empirical methods of knowledge production - are the two hemispheres that make up the radical agenda of the stereotypical, globally minded, anti-west, anti-anglo, “de-colonizing” grievance actor, a.k.a the Woke.

While Critical Marxism seeks to proletarianize groups based on certain identity features (which, according to activist ideology, signals inherent oppression), it also shares many similarities with aspects of postmodernism, including an array of epistemic tools obscuring the fact that victims, or those acting as victims (false victims), are no less capable of dishonesty and greed than non-victims. What is consistent in both of these mutually reinforcing hemispheres of negative Western critique, is the overt rejection of fact-based reasoning and the unquestioning acceptance of the stories of the so-called “oppressed,” always fused with an ahistorical catastrophizing consistent with exclusively negative and speculative modes of analysis. And in all of this, of course, liberal principles, and the logic associated with enlightenment rationality, are nowhere to be found.

These dual hemispheres, and their intersection with antiracism, was illustrated in the essay Charting the Great Illiberal Subversion in Canadian Education.  Discussed was Abigail Bakan, who until 2018 was head of the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), and her approach to ideological anti-racism:

“According to Bakan’s book Theorizing Anti-racism (2014), Anti-racism ideology draws from two related but distinct intellectual heritages: there are those anti-racist theorists whose arguments are drawn from a Marxist intellectual tradition and those anti-racist theorists who lean more toward postmodernist argumentation. While Bakan herself prefers to argue like a Marxist, she has great esteem for her postmodernist counterparts since both ‘critiques’ can be employed to dissolve the liberal West and reshape according to the radical mold.”

Finding those who are not yet lost

Complicating matters, there are those who are neither dishonest nor specifically illiberal, but their engagement in social issues often makes them the useful idiots who’s ignorance is the substrate upon which the most fallacious activist narratives cling. I believe this is the largest and most important group, unlike the hard-core “social justice warrior” activists, these people are still reachable. In fact, it is imperative that we reach them. If they can be shown objective information, and the sound and principled argumentation of independent writers, some can be convinced that what they have been led to believe may not be the full story. Indeed it is not.

With enough supporters of independent fact-finders, fueled by the outrage that comes when people realize they have been mis-led in grand fashion, political moves, like calls for anti-rent seeking laws or regulations on grifters who monetize grievance by stoking public outrage, might be things worth considering. 

But first it’s important to understand the damage that grievance based activism does. Even before any compensation is paid, an activist narrative is established. In order to secure the largest rewards possible, the narrative must be as awful as possible. The incentive is to stretch credulity, to invent, to strategically insert radical language, to move things out of context so they appear maximally abhorrent.  Even among those who truly believe wrongs were committed the incentive is to obscure the truth in order to help “survivors” receive justice. No matter what the intention may be, this type of illiberalism and dishonesty leads to the corrupt misappropriation of tax-payer funds and does more to hurt those it was intended to help.

Until a critical mass of citizens come to terms with the damage that misplaced and unthinking virtue does to the public good, and how it is cynically tied to grievance activism through the machinations of small minorities of illiberal social agitators, the pushback, or counter-resistance, will not be able to make an impactful difference. Grievance based activism, in doing more to enrich elite activists than alleviating problems associated with grievances, will continue unabated, and the misappropriation of public funds will further strengthen both the false narratives employed, and the means around which disingenuous rent-seekers thrive.

The destructiveness of these oikophobic narratives is immeasurable. Entire generations are growing up believing they are either oppressors living on stolen land, or victims who had their land and culture stolen. No nuance. No counter-narrative. Nothing positive ever occurred. White settlers did nothing for the indigenous except bring disease, steal their land, and comitt genocide. What could possibly be more demoralizing? Reconciliation is a ruse. And worse, what is never asked, out of misplaced cultural sensitivity and the soft bigotry of low expectations, is at what point non-indigenous peoples responsibility for indigenous present day circumstances ends, and indigenous responsibility for those same circumstances begins? The same question can be asked regarding indigenous perpetrated violent crime.

Tough Conversations

Such conversations are not permitted in the places they are needed most. The elephant in the room regarding the substandard conditions of modern First Nations, is alcohol and substance abuse. And one of the most important of those conversations is the one started by Harold R. Johnson in his book “How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours).” In that book, Johnson, in commenting on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, said that the commission “had the courage to look at alcohol, but they did not have the courage to look at it in the face.” 

Indeed, the Royal Commission's multi-volume report - meant to be a grand investigation with proposed solutions, regarding the challenges of the relationships between indigenous Canadians, the government, and Canadian society - contained less than eight pages on the subject of alcohol and concluded that “in any case, the widely held belief that most Aboriginal people consume excessive amounts of alcohol on a regular basis appears to be incorrect.”

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The issue of alcohol and substance abuse in indigenous communities is one that involves at least a degree of personal responsibility, this was discussed in my essay Before we talk about the Indigenous and alcohol, but the grievance industry denies this and provides indigenous substance abusers with endless excuses for their own poor choices. Usually in the form of so-called intergenerational trauma linked to Indian Residential Schools - an idea debunked by Barbara Kay in her analysis of “epigenetics” in an op-ed for the Epoch Times.

When money is awarded to individuals through processes of grievance activism, there is no evidence showing it helps alleviate the underlying circumstances which, in vicious and senseless cycles, catalyze more and more grievances.  In many cases individuals are likely to be hurt when awarded a windfall which can end up fueling a pre-existing substance abuse issue. This was discussed in my article Indigenous Suffering is the Point, citing a comparison by Tom Flanagan of the community well-being (CWB) index of those First Nations which received compensation from Specific Claims, against the CWB Index of those First Nations which did not. In that same article, I quoted historian Ken Coates who concluded:

“Put bluntly, Canada is not getting what it is paying for – and what’s worse, the massive spending is not improving lives in Indigenous communities.”

The next piece will take a closer look at federal indigenous spending, and discuss aspects of a long-established trend in Canadian grievance activism - that is, the use of the class action lawsuit in rent-seeking efforts to capitalize on new “past wrongs.”

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author on indigenous issues, read Re-Evaluating Canada’s (Un)Truth and Reconciliation Commission

1. Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples pg. 147