"Problematic" is Just Morality-Based Mind Control

A quick breakdown of a black magic political term.

There’s a criticism we’ve become so accustomed to seeing levied at everything that we’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to live in a culture without it.

It’s the kind of criticism that’s all-encompassing; there’s not a single situation where it can’t be applied. It’s not the kind of criticism that can constructively improve something or expand how we view it. This criticism is meant to enact a dead-end wherever it’s applied.

You know it, you’re sick of hearing it, but let’s trot it out once more for my latest personal brush with it:

problematic.

Words are powerful and this word wields that power for evil, like a script for casting a curse. Whatever it is, whenever it was, when something is deemed problematic, it’s marked for death. Problematic things become irredeemably tainted by whatever makes them problematic. The art of a painter who abused their spouse is forever viewed through the lens of that personal failing. The good ideas of a thinker who also held bad ideas are tainted by those bad ideas, thus becoming bad ideas themselves.

And in my latest experience, the book of an author who held prejudices against others at a time when others held prejudices against her is tainted, inseparable from her flaws, and thus unworthy of any engagement.

Is it really “growth” if it makes the realm of ideas we’re allowed to engage with shrink?

accidentally being subversive by…reading