I listen to several podcasts that are by, for, and about very Woke people who regard themselves as being members of multiple victim classes, which they usually phrase as “multiply marginalized identities” or “being oppressed along several axes.”
Lately the meme that’s taking hold regards work. It is much harder for them to work a forty hour a week job than it is for other people, you see. Further, it is oppressive in and of itself for them to be expected to be as productive as other people when they have to do all this extra labor just to exist in the world.
This idea is popping up in similar forms — how workplace rewards should reflect the effort required, and how every single thing takes more effort from them.
So, I predict that soon we will see demands for pay differentials based on identity markers. This should be illegal, but many things that used to be unthinkable — like the government telling private businesses that they are required to exercise control over their employees’ healthcare choices — no longer are.
I bounced this idea off a couple of friends, one of whom replied: “But how is it a ‘prediction’ if you're looking at a fucking highway with no exits and saying ‘Yep. This will take us to the end of the highway’?” This made me laugh, because he’s right.
My prediction here is, on one level, so flatly where we are headed that it’s a form of hubris to write it down.
The little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” did not speak any great or profound insight. He just told the truth. As I am doing here.
Still, I wanted to put my prediction on the record.