What is "lived experience"?

That's my truth

“Lived experience” and “my truth” are the kinds of anecdotal evidence used to defend far-left religious ideas about gender, race, and class. The idea is that you cannot question the person because if you do you are questioning their firsthand experience. In my last post, I told you about Rousseau’s view that the general will is inerrant. The human will, when recounting “lived experience,” cannot err. This is the kind of evidence used to support radical gender identity claims and in discussing the impact of “colonialism.”

This ASU West workshop was advertised as a “dialogue series,” although no alternative perspectives were invited or permitted. Instead, the workshop engaged in “decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist pedagogies to reveal the differential lived experience of some in academia.” I wish they had invited me. As the only person in my College not pushing the Marx-Freud religion, I have had a unique “differential lived experience.”

In other posts, I’ve called into question the assumptions behind the “decolonial” and “anti-racist” religion with its roots in Marx-Freud. This workshop linked feminism with these radical ideologies (you said it, not me). Apparently, these three are linked in NewARC’s mind.

Their argument goes like this: I am being oppressed, the proof is my own firsthand experience, and this is caused by colonialism, which is due to racism. Their argument is unsound if 1. colonialism isn’t due to racism, 2. your oppression isn’t caused by colonialism, or 3. you are mistaken about your oppression.

That would be a worthwhile dialogue. Let’s debate it. How can it be shown that colonialism was the cause of a specific event today? Or, how can it be shown that colonialism was due to (caused by) racism? I don’t think it can be shown, and I think we can show the truth of a more coherent interpretation of the modern era.

What about number 3 above? Can we be mistaken about our own experience? The Marx-Freud religion, sometimes taught as “postmodernism,” says “yes.” The postmodernist says that we all interpret our experiences and that our interpretation might be mistaken. Your experience might be that God loves you and saved you through the atoning death of Christ. But the Marx-Freud priest will say that this is just an opiate or wish fulfillment, and you need to grow up and face life.

So, on the one hand, the postmodernist critiques the meaning of our experience, and on the other hand, the postmodernist tells us their meaning cannot be questioned. “It is my truth.” If personal experience is inerrant, then postmodernism and the Marx-Freud religion are false. If personal experience is not inerrant, then we are free to question whether or not someone has correctly understood their own experience.

For everyone else, especially Christians, personal experience can be questioned. But not the Marx-Freud oppression experience. “Do as I say, not as I do.”