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si_mon628
@GeneralStrike
How does a person get to the position he's adopted? I think in his old self-help guides he offered basically neutral to mildly helpful advice for people who don't really face significant (e.g. systemic) problems.
That would be fine I guess, but faced with the prospect of anyone who faces problems that can't be solved through individual correction, rather than say "Well, that's OK, your problems aren't in the scope of what I advised about and you need a different set of solutions" he appears to have been unable to reckon with the non-universality of his ideas, and decided that the problem was not that his ten rules for whatever were not applicable in every case, but that if they didn't work it was because the person was not trying hard enough, or lying.
He's moved into constructing an unfalsifiable position, and anyone who disagrees with it is not only inferior and weak, but mendacious and evil. Everything thereafter is in service to that - if reality contradicts his views, it's not him that's wrong, it's woke leftist academics distorting the truth. He has to deny the existence of systemic racism, sexism, etc because they would otherwise provide concrete examples of problems that you can't fix through minor personal development. And given all of the above, he has to support heirarchy because assuming that people have equitable opportunities in a society that isn't significantly influenced by systemic inequalities, the heirarchies that exist must be fairly arrived at, rational, and good.
I mean personally I think he seems to be a bigoted person, seeking to maintain the centrality of conservative white male experience in the face of a slowly diversifying academia (his old 'postmodern-neomarxist' thing could be a made-up bogeyman like 'judeo-bolshevism' and certainly functions as such, but might also be a swipe at the work of indigenous scholars in Canada), but his transit from a person with unexamined prejudices to what we see now might be a sort of schismatic process by which he doubles down on refusing to examine those prejudices precisely because they are being shown up for what they are.