Do not worship your wound as your God.

I call the social justice warriors petunias or the wounded. Because they cannot handle reality, and need to hold themselves in high self regard, they take their least attractive characteristics and flaunt them. If you tell them to get fit, lose weight — you are fat shaming. If you say their tendency to gender fluidity hunts with trauma, emotional instability and self harm you are just a homophobe.

They are perfect, and reality must bend so all can worship them. For they are perfect: their weaknesses are strengths.

I view the current Science Fiction Culture War as, bluntly, Gnostics trying to force their individual Divine Realities onto all of Fandom, rather than keeping them contained within their art. Fandom itself is being reshaped as a ‘Healing’ Subculture away from Harsh Reality where the Damaged elevate their sins and failings into virtues and talents so they become the new Godheads, and, as such their power rests in their ability to collect and organise other Gnostics to tear down the old Godheads. No Divine Light shall outshine their own.

With their incessant need to be perceived as Godheads, all people who refuse to recognise them as such must be expelled. The tactics for expulsion will grow increasingly-vicious depending on the perceived threat level by a Thought Criminal to the Gnostic’s own Divine Reality, (particularly if the Criminal follows the Way of Faith, and is more objectively-talented).

They’re trying to world-build reality, and throwing tantrums when reality isn’t easily-malleable to their self-perceived Godwill. You might laugh at weak-chinned, skinny-fat John Scalzi’s delusions of being mistaken for a Badass Marine; or that wearing bad drag is somehow promoting feminism; or that all women are secretly smiling at him; or his need to inflate his page view stats all as evidence for his obvious-delusion about reality. That’s exactly the point: he’s World Building his Divine Reality, and giving his acolytes framing instructions to exist within, lest they risk expulsion from his Divine Light.

This is their weak point: I suspect they’re always aware that their reality is constructed, at least to some degree. Coupled with the inherent sense of inferiority based on their initial four qualities, Gnostics usually have some kind of related persecution complex by Faceless, Evil Others, which drives them increasingly-mad, and eventually makes all praise they receive hollow anyway. The sense of persecution and paranoia must persist, which means the Divine Scriptures get increasingly-obnoxious, and eventually drive away their moderate followers.

You’ll have observed they’re unwilling to debate opposing viewpoints; block rather than entertain criticism, and often respond in violent narcissistic fury or outright goal evasion when presented with factual corrections. You’re not arguing with a rational human being, you’re arguing with a Mad Evangelist promoting their own personal religion with them as Godhead.

Reality is Triggering. Use it at every opportunity.

So what happens to the Culture when the Gnostics are in charge? Since the Divine Reality of every Gnostic is individual and heavily-personalised, conflict with the other ‘Gnostic Gods’ in any subculture is inevitable, particularly if one Reality threatens another.

Fandom becomes a hell of bitchy infighting, incriminations, tears and hysterical tantrums, where all sense of Community eventually erodes and the sensible people leave the culture to a bunch of atomised broken individuals, whom all claim to be inclusive of and to support each other, but absolutely-despise anyone outshining their own Divine Light, even for a moment.

At the science fiction cons, Baen authors and the conservatives have not been welcome for a few years. They are now confronting each other in an escaliting virtue spiral as to who has the greatest disabilities and thus the greatest need to be worshipped.

They are building not reality, but their own personal hells. And reminding them reality is elsewhere is needed. For without correction they will not feel shame, have no need to seek repentence and God, and worshipping themselves, slumber to perdition.

Be not them nor like them.