Let's talk about ideal authority

"I get involved

But I'm not advocating

You got an opinion

Yeah, you're well up for slating."

"Everyone's At It" - Lily Allen

(Some statements on this post respond to a mindset I don't share anymore.)

Ideals, opinions and priorities vary from one person to another; that's how it is and how it should be. That's what makes us interesting as existing entities: we all behave differently as individuals, perhaps following some common patterns (I'm not going to discuss the essentiality of those again) but, in some way, uniquely. This means we, within our years of existence, have reached our very own result of an evolution nobody else has gone through, and that is what makes us a significant unit among human society, because nobody else will ever be us.

Once stated that we, with our Marxism or our technocratism, are significant and important with our ideals, I must throw a question: should there be a dominant ideal?

To put a now-popular example, it's easily reasonable that we should all look for equality for every human being, but even among those whose objective is reaching equal treatment for all of humanity there are different focuses and points of view. This, per se, joins my first point to make the most positive equation ever though... The issue here is, and now I'm going to start a fire, "feminism."

There's a reason why I put that on quotations: feminism per se is not a problem, but most people putting themselves under the tag "feminist" are often discriminative against one human collective or another (e.g. TERFs, RadFems, etc.), so it becomes a spiky tag that brings the word "discrimination" to several minds. That for, I speak as an egalitarian humanist, but in no way as a feminist, and I'd agree with everyone whose priority was equality for all humans, even if they had chosen to tag themselves that way.

Now, considering those are ideals, why are they an issue within diversity of opinions? Well, the problems come when discriminative people under the tag "feminist" discriminate those who look for equality but don't identify with the so mentioned adjective, counting, because of the name, with the inconditional support of actual feminism and everything that carries the same name. This ends up to make it acceptable for everything that smells of "feminism" to discriminate anything and anyone who disagrees at some point, leading to a state of ideal authority and, eventually, to an intellectual dictatory where everything published must agree with the dominant point of view in order to avoid punishment and shaming, and that is the issue.

This was just an example, but as some ideals and movements get popular the same kind of opressing extremism might appear in other topics of debate such as veganism or religion. And dominant ideals, even the ones we agree with, are something to question and, sometimes, fight against.