J.K. Rowling and John Rawls

As bad as things get, our regime cannot self-correct. In this series of essays, I do not define our regime as “liberal”; I will take up liberalism another time, as I will also do throne and altar. Our regime is marked not by liberal notions of individualism or natural rights, but by egalitarianism. Our regime could be called “communist”; it could be called “abolitionist.” What makes our regime a unique one is that it treats things like “power” or “wealth” as evils in themselves, because they make injustice possible. Our regime seeks to “abolish injustice” altogether; it is inherently hypocritical: the regime’s most devoted men acquire power by denouncing power, status by denouncing status, wealth by denouncing wealth, and so on. They get away with this because of poor fools like J.K. Rowling and failed intellectuals such as John Rawls and Karl Popper.

Consider Rowling: she represents the kind of person whose instincts finally rebelled. She cannot stomach the promotion of transgenderism. None of the arguments used to claim that “trans rights” are about “protecting the vulnerable” can persuade her that biologically mutilated people are healthy people, or that men passing themselves off as women should be permitted to win easy prizes in women’s athletic competitions. She knows this is wrong.

J.K. Rowling’s instincts on this issue are so adamant that she isn’t even swayed by the Transgender Ideal. An activist could show her some kid suffering from serious biological abnormalities, while also suffering from bullying by jocks and discrimination by Christians. It’s on behalf of this kind of “case,” this ideal possibility, that leftists are fighting for legal and social changes. This idealized transgender kid is a source of their power, but the ideal isn’t enough to persuade J.K. Rowling. She’s not buying it.

The abolitionist wishes to eradicate the anxiety such an ideal teenager would feel by absolutely normalizing the abnormality, which necessarily includes establishing the abnormality as respectable. And since it is respectable, and was (and is) persecuted, it is therefore necessarily an act of bravery for such a confused teenager to assert his equality. Even if such an idealized test-case Trans Teenager were to exist, Rowling cannot abide the social and legal changes. She cannot bring herself to treat that test-case as equal to, and indeed better than, normal teenagers (the “cisgendered”).

Nevertheless, Rowling is terrible at explaining why she cannot bring herself to embrace this sexual identity as she clearly has the homosexual identity. Like the leftist who wants to abolish the suffering of transgender teenagers, Rowling is incapable of expressing her moral convictions in any way other than the abolition of “discrimination.” On the transgender issue, Rowling justifies herself by appealing to the suffering of women. When “transgender men” take prestige and prize money away from women athletes, Rowling blames misogyny.

I doubt that Rowling genuinely believes transgender activism is a “men’s rights” or a patriarchal attack on women. What seems more likely is that she just doesn’t know any other way of justifying her instinctual revulsion. She refuses to admit transgenderism is healthy or equal, and her only way of defending that refusal is an appeal to feminism. It’s absurd to think we need more feminism to correct the evil of the transgender activism. Feminism does not occupy any advantageous position for attacking transgenderism, outside of the dead-end opposition of one protected class (women) against another protected class (trans teenagers). Spiritually, feminism is no different from any of the LGBTQ+ Alphabet Activisms.

Enter John Rawls

Rawls understood that Liberalism had taken a decisive turn, that our once Liberal civilization would be faced with these sorts of dilemmas: “do we protect the women, or do we protect the poor confused trans teenagers?”

Rawls not only understood that Liberalism had taken this turn, he was happy it had, and wanted Liberalism to take this turn even harder than it had. He helped it along by establishing a principle by which the new regime could continually resolve these sorts of disputes between “protected classes”. He called his solution the “original position.”

The “original position” is a thought experiment that lets the experimenter (the Scientist of Justice) determine which claims to justice are legitimate. If you are having a hard time adjudicating competing claims, says Rawls, you should try to imagine yourself the weakest and lowest person in society and then, from this person’s point of view, think of what kind of society would suit you, or which side in a controversy would best serve your interests.

As you can imagine, the victory of Rawlsian ideas incentivizes the continual discovery of, and identification with, oppressed identities.

Connected to this “original position” was the Rawlsian justification of inequality: inequality can legitimately exist in a society so long as its existence is a necessity for better serving the most oppressed and weakest among us.

J.K. Rowling is clearly beholden to this kind of thinking. She prefers to polish her “feminist” bona-fides and attack “misogyny,” rather than explain the right of rational people to rule over, or at least avoid, insane people. That is, her foundation is “protect the oppressed,” rather than “live well” or “obey God.” She is not concerned with “nature” or “God.” If one resolutely avoids recognizing or defending the right of some people to distinguish themselves and set standards—including the lower limits of what is acceptable—then there is no way, intellectually at first, but practically soon after, of stopping a race to the bottom.

Rowling will try to justify herself by appealing to oppressed women, but in the race of oppression, she’s never going to persuade her compatriots that “women” are as oppressed as “trans teenagers.” Her way of trying to “stop the victim protection program” at a specific point is bound to fail.

The only way to stop the race to the bottom is to consciously uphold a (non-hypocritical) standard or ideal of what is best, i.e., a standard by which all are judged in society. For example: if you think some forms of sexual perversion are acceptable, but some are too destructive, you will have to explain this in terms of their proximity to what is sexually healthy. Other examples: laziness, hygiene, slovenliness, vulgarity, ability to contribute to society, and so on: normal societies have ideals of work ethic, cleanliness, decency, and virtue. These ideals allow these societies to put limits on how much people “let themselves go,” or how much vice and degeneracy society will tolerate. If a society is only capable of asserting a desire to avoid “harming” its denizens, then it has no ability to require discipline or decency.

Conclusion

I know readers of MCC are not fooled by today’s regime or its modes of self-justification. In the next essay I will assess the (much more persuasive) Liberal regime. I may do two regimes in one essay, and go ahead and assess the Throne and Altar regime alongside the Liberalism that replaced it.

I conclude with a declamation characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism:

Rawls, and today’s little-c communists, set everyone up for failure. How nauseating it is to hear all these rich, famous, and powerful people gush about how much they love the poor and oppressed, how they judge themselves successes or failures by just how many poor people they help. And then to have to suffer this self-congratulation when it is obvious things are getting worse.

When our billionaires, politicians, and “thought leaders” lock people in their homes, put dissenters into prisons (when they can’t bleed them dry in legal battles), or otherwise vindictively harass anyone who isn’t as shameless as themselves, do they really believe they are helping “the poor and oppressed”? When the rich get richer by denouncing wealth, or powerful by denouncing power, do they ever stop and reflect? I leave it to their own consciences to judge their conduct and ask for the freedom to go my own way.

Thankfully (we should always end on a positive note), all conflicts between truth and hypocrisy end the same way. The hypocrites always lose, the only observable difference being how much civilization is destroyed, and how many indignities meted out, before the final collapse.