Critical Theory teaches its adherents how not to understand texts, art, or speech like neurotypical human beings. Under the influence of its doctrines, people lose their God-given ability to discern key non-linguistic features of communication and consequently become learning disabled.
As I’ve observed in other posts, words and symbols take on meaning from the context in which they’re deployed. As I wrote around this time last year:
“Words are not completely comprehensible on their own; they also take on additional – or sometimes even new – significance from the gestalt in which they sit — much like tofu soaks up the flavors of the other ingredients in an Asian dish.
“Take a sentence like ‘I love my mother.’ This sentence is composed of four utterly prosaic words — yet do we really know what it means? Don’t we need to hear the inflection with which it was said? Don’t we need to see the speaker’s body language? Don’t we need to know why/where/when/etc. it was said? If this sentence appears in a poem lauding the beauty of Mother Earth, ‘mother’ likely does not mean our female parent. If this sentence is uttered with a particular stress after a long sigh, most of us effortlessly intuit that it’s meant to be ironic.”
All of this richness gets lost, however, once the social justice bully gets to work. Suppose, for example, you decide to write a protagonist who starts off with a few unconsciously bigoted notions but eventually learns to cast such mistaken ideas aside. Sounds like great fodder for a redemption arc, no? Nope, sorry: if you attempt to publish this seemingly innocuous, morally upright story, some motivated busybody on Goodreads is going to tear you apart. Why? Because critical social justice impedes one’s ability to comprehend how character development works.