In the Clarey Podcast 340 & a subsequent consultation, Captain Capitalism addressed empowerment in a pair of articles & had difficultly pinning down how the word 'empowerment' was used.
The root difficulty is a dual definition similar to 'equal opportunity' versus 'equal outcome'. Likewise, empowerment has an individualist and a collectivist usage. One empowerment is the power or capability to self-actualize. The individual develops the knowledge, skills & will to overcome obstacles & accomplish achievements to rise up Maslow’s hierarchy.
In contrast to this self actualizing empowerment or self-empowerment, there is a leftist version born of pop-psychology, AKA self-esteem culture, and has infected pop culture through Oprah & self-help books.
Podcast #340 examined the example of a tattooed 37 year old woman. To recap, she felt empowered by naked mountain climbing. The climbing was done for both the camera and male co-climbers. She appreciated the online praise for her pictures and real life attention, and encouraged other women to do the same.
The first trick of pop-empowerment is to give praise & good feelings, without requiring actual achievement. She got more publicity for stripping in an unusual setting, than if she had been the X thousandth to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, though the latter would have been a far more daunting achievement. Pop-empowerment is artificial flavoring without any nutritional content.
The second trick is to substitute group action in lieu of individual action. She call for other women to strip en masse. With enough numbers, she could conceivably reduce the social stigma on public nudity. While this is power to create lasting societal change, this power is wielded by the group at the expense of the individual’s time & energy.
The third trick lies in her pitch to these other women. By selling other women on stripping to become empowered, the naked climber is implying that they are currently disempowered. Specifically to this case, other women aren’t getting the same attention as her; therefore, they are missing out by keeping their clothes on. In addition to persuading the dupe to buy her cure, she is also persuading the dupe that they have that particular problem in the first place. Perish the thought that the other women need to hit the gym or something.
Example #2:
With the nude climber, the stakes are merely ‘likes’ and a brief local interest article. If we multiply the scale by about 400,000 times, we get the Million Man March of 1995. In that setting, these tricks become more apparent. The ostensible goal of the march was to improve black lives in the inner city. From the fiery, but peaceful protests of 2020 to present, we can surmise that these marches failed to meet those goals.
The first trick of promoting feels over reals was apparent with the Day of Absence. To show solidarity for inner city economic growth, they pushed participants to not show up for a day & not produce economic output.
The second trick was apparent in the fact that this march was followed by more marches : Million Mom, Millions More March, Million Muslim, Million Woman etc. Basically, to get the same feeling of progress & unity, they repeated the same group action.
The marchers were encouraged to pour their energies into the political organization and held a voter drive. They were convinced that a lack of political involvement was the problem & political empowerment was what they needed. The "solution" was to further empower the same political party than ran the inner city for decades & ran them into the ground.
In contrast to actual history, we can only imagine if a half a million had focused the past 25 years on getting youths into trades or the right major as was encouraged in the fine books "Worthless" or "Black Man's Guide oout of poverty". Through pop-empowerment, these hundreds of thousands were put into motion to advance the causes of politicians, activists & the media who got a story, and many marchers walked away with only a warm, fuzzy feeling.
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