When Your Only Tool is an Oppression Hammer

Racist Labs

Why is it considering that Chinese Virologists may have accidentally released COVID-19 while doing virus research is racist, but saying that Chinese people eat diseased bats they sell to each other in filthy wet markets is not racist? Many people have asked this sarcastically. The non-sarcastic answer is simple and purely political.

If the public came to believe that Chinese researchers were responsible for releasing a deadly worldwide plague with the effects that COVID ended up having, there would be a real danger they’d demand that the US government confront the Chinese govt in some way… which none of the ruling class could stomach. There were strong incentives to stop anyone reputable from repeating this claim, and to deride and discredit anyone who seriously discussed it.

If it came from bats and spread in a wet-market, that has drastically fewer geopolitical considerations.

For many decades leftists had a powerful tool for securing compliance from the public — identify something as racist. All American school teach the horrors of racism and valorize the victors of the Civil Rights Movement. Now we instinctively support anything that mimics the Civil Rights Movement, which has led to cargo-cult activism (like Pause AI). And we recoil from things which would brand us racists.

So you bust out the ol’ faithful tool again. The thing that you need people to not say because dear god, do you want a war with china??… that thing is racist. It must be known to be racist quickly and with great vigor, because this shit is important. It’s Simulacra Level 2 - they say it not because it’s true, but because it’s really important to stop the dangerous thing, and this will stop the dangerous thing.

Of course this has a number of negative effects, like making people lose all trust in the institutions they can see lying to them at every turn. And making the tool less and less effective as people come to see it’s just lies and manipulation. “I guess I’m a racist then. I wonder how many racists are also actually just good people who believe true things the govt finds inconvenient.”

Mental Toolkit Poverty

The really sad part is this that overreliance on a single powerful tool impoverishes one’s world model, and thus one’s ability to even think about their present situation.

A friend ran into a perplexing situation:

My friend, male, has a wife, female (at birth) who is nonbinary. They are worried for the wife because of this presidency (due to being nonbinary). I'm confused about what rights or privileges they're worried about.

In the terms they phrased it, this is laughably dumb. Upon closer inspection, they may have good reason to be afraid!

One could be vaguely worried about the culture swinging back to a place where sex out of marriage is strongly stigmatized. Or being known to be kinky can endanger your ability to get hired or keep a job. Or occasional recreational drug use could get you ill treatment by neighbors and community. This sort of shift would make life shittier for me and most of my friends. I don’t want to return to a repressive puritan society!

But notably, that couple didn't have the ability to say/think this. Most leftists probably can’t say/think that! You can only think with the tools you have, and their only mental tools are those of Oppression. If they are scared it must somehow fit into the language of Oppression or they won’t have any way to fight it. There must be a Racism or Sexism or Transphobia. So they see Republicans gaining in power and feel vibes of "oh no, this could be a bad culture shift" and the words that come out are the "well they want to oppress me because I'm this oppressed minority"

When the only tool you have is the Oppression Hammer you don’t even know it’s the only tool you have, and it doesn’t occur to you there’s some other way to unclog a pipe. It would be in all of our interests, as other people living in this house, to make them aware of the other tools out there.