The right to judge

A clever woman told me once that I had no right to judge others because ‘I don’t know how to suffer,’ that before judging others, one must gain the right to judge, from suffering.

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Raw Youth (1875)

Published almost one hundred and fifty years ago, but merge that quote into modern identity politics and you have a major source of political repression.

Your identity excludes suffering

So you do not suffer
So you cannot judge
So you cannot speak
So you are nobody

Of course as we know, identity politics is not about having an identity but suppressing the right to even have an identity, about becoming the lowest common denominator in a political ethos, a useful idiot fed only on the thin gruel of righteousness.