Ah, relativism.
"Every personal belief system is equal, as long as
you believe it." I'm okay, you're okay, blah, blah, blah.
I remember one psych prof I had who actually had resurrected the old game of "Lifeboat" for the course we were taking.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this particular bit of nonsense, "Lifeboat" is a game in "values clarification". It used to be used in high schools back in the 1970's, and it goes (with variations) sort of like this:
A ship hits an iceberg and sinks. In one lifeboat, there are several people: an old man in his 70's with a heart condition, and old lady in her 80's with terminal cancer, a young girl in her 20's on her way to meet her fiance, a young man in his late teens taking a vacation before going off to college, an award-winning brain surgeon, and a best-selling novelist.
Unfortunately, there is only enough food in the lifeboat to feed four people, not six.....so, the point of the game is that you have to figure out which two people you're going to throw overboard, which two you're going to sacrifice so the others can live. (Naturally, there is no choice of rationing food, sharing your portions with the others, etc.; it's set up so two people die regardless.)
You were given ten minutes to think things over, and then the prof went around the room, asking each student who was saved and who was drowned, and why---keeping in mind all the time, of course, that supposedly there were no "right" answers; it's all relative.
Naturally, most of the students chose to chuck the old man and old woman overboard, rationalizing it by saying, "Well, they're elderly, and lived a long life, while the kids are just getting started.....besides, they're both in ill health, and will be dead before long anyway, so you're really just hastening the inevitable", etc., etc.
It came around to me, and I said, "The young woman and the young man go overboard."
There was a sort of startled gasp, and the prof raised his eyebrows, and said, "That's an interesting choice. Care to illustrate how you arrived at it?"
I said, "Sure. I'm basing this on my value system. All values are equal, as you said."
"That's right," the prof said. "No one value system is above any other system."
"Good," I said. "So, for the purposes of this exercise, we'll say that my value system is that I am a 100% committed Nazi. That's my value system. Now, the old man is in ill health, sure, but he's very rich, and has made very generous contributions to the Nazi Party. So he has to be kept alive at all costs. The old woman was once a hotel landlady in Vienna, and she was very kind to the Fuhrer when he lived there as a young man. So she has to be saved.
The young woman, while attractive, is also a Jew, so she is simply a subhuman species anyway, so if we toss her overboard, it'll save us the time and expense of gassing her later, and the same for the young man, who is a Gypsy---if we drown him now, we won't have to bother shooting him later."
By now, every kid in the class was gazing at me in goggle-eyed horror, and the professor was angry, because he was smart enough to see that I'd turned the tables on his silly little game and used it against him, while still technically remaining within the rules of the exercise. He made some gruff comment about "making light of the exercise, not taking this seriously", and I said, "But if all value systems are the same, what sort of value judgements would a committed Nazi be
expected to make?"
He brushed this off and went on to something else rather rapidly, being highly annoyed that I had just torpedoed his classroom exercise.
So much for relativism. They like those high liberal ideals about diversity and inclusiveness and multiculturalism and all that baloney, just as long as the diverse cultures they want to include are something they agree with or admire. Throw something they don't agree with into the mix, and you never saw somebody's prejudice come out so fast in your life.
