Justin Murphy’s “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers”
Here is Justin Murphy describing his background, research, and activism:
Why is there not more rebellion against status quo institutions? How have economic and political processes pacified our capacity for radical collective action? As a political scientist, I am interested in the roles played by information, communication, and ideology in the pacification of political resistance and conflict. Before joining the faculty of Politics and IR at the University of Southampton in the UK, I did my PhD at Temple University in the US. There I was active in Occupy Wall Street, some civil disobedience and shutting down of things, some longer-term campaigns against the big U.S. banks, and sundry other works and deeds, including a radical warehouse project where I lived for nearly three years.
So Murphy is an academic on the left. He is therefore part of the establishment, a card-carrying member of the institutional structure that dominates intellectual discourse in the West. But, unlike the vast majority of his academic brethren, he is quite aware that the left is now the status quo and that it is doing everything it can to preserve its elite status — and that its self-preserving tactics are at base nothing more than irrational assertions of power and privilege. Murphy makes these claims in a blogpost: “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers.” Part of the subtitle says it all: “The real motivation of respectable progressivism is managing guilty conscience and conserving bourgeois privileges.”
What’s so refreshing about this is that instead of “exclud[ing] independent right-wing intellectual work on moral grounds,” he would actually “enjoy thinking” with intellectuals on the right. Indeed, moral indictments have become the stock in trade of establishment intellectuals — as noted in my three-part “Moralism and Moral Arguments in the War for Western Survival.” Moral condemnations are easy. No intellectual heavy lifting required. All one need do is appeal to conventional moral intuitions as shaped by the the same institutions that are now the status quo — the media and academic culture. As I note, those who dissent from the status quo are “not only misguided, [they are] malevolent … consumed by hatred, anger and fear towards non-Whites, gays, women and the entire victim class pantheon, or so goes the stereotype And that’s the problem. Being cast as evil means you are outside the moral community. There’s no need to talk with you, no need to be fair, or even worry about your safety. You are like an outlaw in Old Norse society — ‘a person [who] lost all of his or her civil rights and could be killed on sight without any legal repercussions.’” Read more
