The Dogma of the Oppressed

I’d never seen any of Charlie Kirk’s work prior to this week, but, I suspect like many people, I decided to check it out following his assassination. So, I did a search for Kirk’s name in YouTube and scrolled through the list of videos. It won’t surprise long-term readers to learn that the one which caught my eye was this one on the subject of the “toxic feminine”, featuring a debate between Kirk and the head of the Oxford Union debating club, a man called George Abaraonye.

I thought the debate was revealing for a number of reasons, but the part that particularly grabbed my attention began at around the two-minute mark. Kirk makes the correct observation that, while the notion of toxic masculinity is prevalent in our culture and is even taught in schools, toxic femininity is almost never discussed. He asks Abaraonye to comment on this, and the latter states that he thinks the reason is because there is a “double standard” at play. That is, toxic masculinity and toxic femininity do not come from the same source. Abaraonye goes on to claim that toxic masculinity comes from “a level of misogyny”, while toxic femininity is a response to that misogyny.

What was notable about that was that it won a round of applause from a majority of the audience, the only time they clapped during the debate. Clearly, Abaraonye had expressed a popular opinion. The only problem with it is that it is obviously wrong.

Let’s start with toxic masculinity, which, according to Abaraonye and those who applauded him, is always grounded in misogyny. If that were true, then we would expect the toxic masculine to always be directed against women. In fact, almost the opposite is the case. If we consider what is probably the main aspect of toxic masculinity that everybody would agree upon, hyper-aggression leading to unjustified violence, it is obvious that the main target of male violence is other men. In the most extreme case of murder, men are ten times more likely to kill another man than they are a woman. Even more telling, men kill women at far lower rates than women kill men. None of this could be true if toxic masculinity were grounded in misogyny.

What about toxic femininity? Abaraonye claims that this pattern of female behaviour is always a response to misogyny. Again, this is clearly wrong. Anybody who’s been to a co-ed high school knows that a clique of girls is perfectly capable of spontaneously manifesting the toxic feminine and that the main targets are invariably other girls. Just as boys predominantly use violence against other boys, girls use toxic femininity against girls (there’s even a stock phrase for it in the culture: mean girls). Therefore, toxic femininity is not simply a response to misogyny, unless we want to say that women are also misogynists (although, I seem to recall that Germaine Greer made that exact claim in her book The Female Eunuch).

Thus, it’s clear that Abaraonye’s argument doesn’t hold water in an empirical sense. However, the fact that both he and the esteemed audience at Oxford University clearly believe what he said is important because what he expressed is not actually an empirical claim but a dogma. Once we understand that, we have an answer to the question that Charlie Kirk posed at the start of the discussion. He asked, Why does the toxic feminine never get discussed?

The answer is found in Abaraonye’s framing of the issue. He said that the toxic feminine is a reaction against “oppression”, while the toxic masculine is “oppression”. Therefore, the toxic feminine is always morally justified. We don’t blame women for it. Our job is to go looking for the men who caused it in the first place or to blame it on the “system of oppression”. In practice, this means we don’t ever discuss the toxic feminine, and, even more importantly, we don’t even recognise it when it is right before our eyes. That is the power of dogma.

It is one of the defining features of the modern West that we are unconscious about our dogmas. In fact, we tell ourselves that we don’t have any. We don’t do dogma, philosophy or theology. We’re about “science” and responding to new data when it appears. All this sounds good in theory, but it’s complete BS. People and cultures always have dogmas. The only question is whether they are aware of them or not. In the modern West, we are simply not aware of the dogma that prevents us from recognising or discussing the toxic feminine.

The reason why Abaraonye got a round of applause from the Oxford audience was because he expressed one of the core beliefs that’s been present in modern Western culture for at least two hundred years and which has become particularly pronounced starting in the 1960s. The dogma states that there are the oppressors and the oppressed. One of the implications of the dogma is that the oppressed have the right to fight back against “the system”. Because that fight is just, they are absolved from any responsibility for their actions. Only oppressors can be held responsible.

When applied to the question of the toxic feminine, the oppressor-oppressed dogma says that women belong to the category of the oppressed and therefore cannot be held responsible for their bad behaviour. That is why, even though the toxic feminine is highly prevalent in modern society (what I call the Devouring Mother), and even though many women are in direct positions of power, we do not recognise or talk about the toxic feminine. The same goes for any group that is said to belong to the “oppressed” category. Their bad behaviour is always excused, tolerated, and often never even recognised at all.

I think one of the things that makes the killing of Charlie Kirk a watershed moment is that it placed in the starkest possible relief the consequences of the oppressor-oppressed dogma. The spontaneous but collective expressions of schadenfreude that came in the aftermath of the assassination were the natural consequence of a dogma which has been instilled into several generations of university students. Those students have been encouraged to see themselves as the oppressed fighting against the system. The result has been that their own bad behaviour has been tacitly encouraged. That’s why so many took to social media to openly and explicitly express their support for a murder. These people have never been held to account for their behaviour because they have always been able to use the excuse of standing up to oppression. That’s why they invariably applied the usual cliched labels of oppression to Kirk to justify his murder.

How fitting then that one of the higher profile people who did that was the man who Charlie Kirk debated in the video about the toxic feminine, George Abaraonye. In the aftermath of the shooting, Abaraonye took to social media and wrote, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go”. What makes that comment especially contemptible is that Abaraonye had met Kirk in person and had a perfectly respectable and civilised debate with him. For him, Kirk wasn’t just some abstract image on a computer screen but in somebody he’s met in real life. If you can’t feel some baseline amount of humanity for somebody who debated you in a civilised fashion, something is very wrong.

To top it all off, when Abaraonye’s callous posts went viral, the Oxford Union debating club not only defended him but even tried to characterise him as the victim because of some reportedly racist comments that he received. In other words, they fell back onto the same old oppressor-oppressed dogma, according to which Abaraonye cannot be held responsible for his actions because he is oppressed.

Of course, it’s absurd that the president of the debating club at one of the most prestigious universities in the world should consider himself oppressed, but that is testament to how strongly the oppressor-oppressed dogma has taken hold of some of the top institutions of our society. People far wealthier and more powerful than Abaraonye regularly play to this dogma. Once you understand that, you also understand why our governing classes never take responsibility for anything. In that respect, George Abaraonye is indeed receiving a first-class education at Oxford, one that will set him up for a bright future, where he can pretend to be fighting the system while being in charge of the system.

The toxicity of the oppressor-oppressed dogma when applied to politics is that it creates a positive feedback loop. Any bad decisions made by those in power which earn them criticism can be written off as the result of “oppression”, either against themselves or some marginal group that is somehow implicated. We had this exact dynamic appear in just the last week here in Australia, where criticism of our ridiculous immigration program was written off as racism against “Indian Australians”. This victim card has been so successful for so long that our entire political class uses it as the default reaction against every criticism. The result is that they never take responsibility for anything.

It’s also worth observing that the oppressor-oppressed dogma provides the philosophical underpinning for what has usefully been called The Grievance Industry. The mass hypocrisy on display hides the enormous sums of money that are at stake. Much of that money comes from government programs and NGOs and is used to fund patronage networks that are built around helping the oppressed. Because the oppressor-oppressed dogma has been allowed to determine who are the good people and who are the bad people, it also determines who should be the recipients of this largesse. No wonder that elites are tripping over themselves to be seen as champions of the oppressed.

In short, the oppressor-oppressed dogma is used to justify the exercise of power by people who claim to be fighting against power. That is why the people who genuinely believe the dogma have zero self-awareness. If they did, they would have to acknowledge that their position is absurd.

If, as seems likely, Charlie Kirk’s death has laid bare the absurdity and toxicity of this dogma to the general public, the ramifications for politics in western society in the years and decades ahead could be huge.