Moral Supremacy

Why Some Feel Justified Being Inhumane

When left-wing activists confronted Riley Gaines at a San Francisco State University (SFSU) event, they weren’t too happy. Ms. Gaines was chased down a hallway, attacked by a man and found herself barricaded in a room for hours as protestors screamed and threatened her from outside. All for the apparent crime of standing up for female-exclusive spaces.

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When SFSU released a statement after the fact, they didn’t apologize to Gaines for the disrupted event or the assault on her, but instead praised the protestors and took their side. San Francisco State University’s president, Lynn Mahoney, released a statement, “The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,"

Mahoney capped it off with a bizarre, "To our trans community, please know how welcome you are. We will turn this moment into an opportunity to listen and learn about how we can better support you." The university later released a statement saying they were “proud” of how the event was handled.

The ‘very online’ crowd knows this is far from an isolated occurrence. Other leftist rioters have committed violence with palpable enjoyment on their faces. A columnist for the New Zealand Herald demonstrated just that by grinning after another woman’s rights activist, Posie Parker, was assaulted for a similar speech in Auckland.

To the uninitiated, this could seem bizarre. How can the side which committed assault, hurled sexist expletives, and cornered a frightened woman wear a smile on their face while doing it? And perhaps more concerningly for our future, how can a public university praise such protestors?

What happens in circumstances like these is what I call ‘moral supremacy’. The perception of being on the ‘right side of history’ and a downright better person than your opposition leads to the justification and normalization of this behavior. And this phenomenon is not anything new, in fact it has deep roots in left-wing activist history.

Consider the case of Herbert Marcuse, a neo-Marxist professor popular in the 1960s. In a 1969 essay he wrote: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left”. He endorses intolerance against political opponents.

Marcuse is worth quoting at length. When discussing what methods could be used to counter reactionaries, he writes, “They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc”. Here, truly, the cat is out of the bag. Marcuse openly endorses and advocates for withdrawing freedom of speech and assembly and rights from anyone who opposes left-wing policies such as expanded government healthcare and social security.

And this sentiment goes much further back in history than the 1960s. In the socialist Soviet Union, the editor-in-chief of the state propaganda newspaper Pravda, wrote this: “We see now that infringement of freedom is necessary with regard to the opponents of the revolution. At a time of revolution we cannot allow freedom for the enemies of the people and of the revolution. That is a surely clear, irrefutable conclusion.”

This is the invariable and inevitable outcome of considering oneself as being on the side of ‘liberating tolerance’ (or ‘liberation’) and historical justice. Moral supremacy induces you into perceiving your opponents as mere bowling pins to knock down. You could justify anything, if a moral supremacist. You could even deny them their humanity, their civil rights to speech and assembly, all the while feeling justified and superior while doing it.

When you want to understand these events, to catch a glimpse into the inner psychology of these participants, remember moral supremacy.