After Parkland, one friend posted about perhaps joining the NRA out of spite (“I’m tempted to join the NRA if only to fight the ridiculous group thinkâ€). This post, which contained absolutely nothing threatening, was anonymously reported to his local police department who dispatched a detective to interview him.
Another friend received a phone call from a high school friend, whom he had not spoken to in many years, who expressed deep concern for his worsening “radical conservative’ views. “We’re very worried about you.†She made it sound like a number of people were discussing this concern behind his back and clearly wished to help him mend his ways.
Liberal and democratic thought had been, from the very beginning –- with few exceptions -– minimalist when it came to its image of the human being. The triumph of liberalism and democracy was supposed to be emancipatory also in the sense that man was to become free from excessive demands imposed on him by unrealistic metaphysics invented by an aristocratic culture in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In other words, an important part of the message of modernity was to legitimize a lowering of human aspirations. Aspiring to great goals was not ruled out in particular cases, but greatness was no longer inscribed in the essence of humanity. The main principle behind the minimalist perspective was equality: from the point of view of a liberal order one cannot prioritize human objectives. Only the means can be prioritized in terms of efficiency, provided this does not jeopardize the rules of peaceful cooperation. …
There were, as I’ve said, exceptions to this view –- few, but worth noting. Among the eighteenth century authors, Kant, who defended liberalism, set up high standards for humanity; in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and T.H. Green had similar intentions. The last two aptly perceived the danger of mediocrity that the democratic rule was inconspicuously imposing on modern societies. They both believed –- differences notwithstanding -– that some form of liberalism, or rather, a philosophy of liberty, was a possible remedy to the creeping disease of mediocrity. Mill remained under the partial, albeit indirect influence of German Romanticism, and thus attributed a particular role to great, creative individuals whose exceptionality or even eccentricity could –- in a free environment -– pull men out of a democratic slumber.
But these ideas did not find followers, and liberal democratic thought and practice increasingly fell into the logic of minimalism. Lowering the requirements is a process that has no end. Once people become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical, or unnecessary, it is only a matter of time before natural inertia takes its course and even the new lowered standards are deemed unacceptable. One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the coarse. Quite often a step down as been welcomed as refreshing, natural, and healthy, and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of this process of simplification, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education, and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking, especially in the last decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum. A liberal-democratic man refused to learn these artificial and awkward arrangements, the usefulness of which seemed to him at first doubtful, and soon -– null. He felt he had no time for them, apparently believing that their absence would make life easier and more enjoyable. In their place he establish new criteria: use, practicality, usefulness, pleasure, convenience, and immediate gratification, the combination of which turned out to be a deadly weapon against the old social forms. The old customs crumbled, and so did rules of propriety, a sense of decorum, a respect for hierarchy.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway quotes an essay on totalitarianism by Vaclav Havel in connection with the ouster by Mozilla of CEO Brendan Eich.
[L]et’s revisit an old essay by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, poet, dissident and eventual president. Havel, who died in 2011, was a great man of freedom, if somewhat idiosyncratic in his political views. He was a fierce anti-communist who was also wary of consumerism, a long-time supporter of the Green Party who favored state action against global warming, and a skeptic of ideology who supported civil unions for same-sex couples.
“The Power of the Powerless,†written under a communist regime in 1978, is his landmark essay about dissent. It’s a wonderful read, no matter your political persuasion. It asks everyone to look at how they contribute to totalitarian systems, with no exceptions. It specifically says its message is “a kind of warning to the West,†revealing our own latent tendencies to set aside our moral integrity. Reading it again after the Eich dismissal, I couldn’t help but think of how it applies to our current situation in the States. …
To explain how dissent works, Havel introduced the manager of a hypothetical fruit-and-vegetable shop who places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!†He’s not actually enthusiastic about the sign’s message. It’s just one of the things that people in a post-totalitarian system do even if they “never think about†what it means. He does it because everyone does it. It’s what you do to get along in life and live “in harmony with society.†(For our purposes, you can imagine that slogan is a red equal sign that you put up on your Facebook page.)
The subtext of the grocer’s sign is “I do what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me.†It protects him from supervisors above and informants below.
Havel is skeptical of ideology. He says that dictatorships can just use raw power, but “the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically … the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse.†We don’t have a dictatorship, obviously, but we do have complex mechanisms of power and larger and more stratified society.
In any case, individuals need not believe the lies of an ideology so much as behave as though they do, or at least tolerate them in silence or get along with those who work with them. “For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system,†Havel says. …
In the greengrocer scenario, Havel notes that if the text of the sign read “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,†he might be embarrassed and ashamed to put it up. The dissidents are the ones who, by refusing to put the sign up, or refusing to recant, shine a huge light on the system, including the ones who go along to get along. All of a sudden those Facebook signs, those reflexive statements, those cries of “Bigot!†look less like shows of strength and more like shows of weakness.
British director, film-writer Richard Curtis (best-known in America for Four Wedding and a Funeral) evidently thought what he was doing to nonconformists with the latest 10/10 carbon reduction eco-campaign in his No Pressure short film was funny, but viewers are reacting with distaste to its gleefully sanguinary totalitarianism.
The film’s makers are evidently trying to remove it from public view, and climate skeptics are working hard keeping it available.
James Delingpole
With little attention from the public or the MSM this week, Congress made Barack Obama’s most alarming campaign promise into a reality by funding an expansion of the Americorps federal youth community volunteer program into a vastly larger, uniformed and politically-indoctrinated cadre of young people.
The Obama Administration has already had its own little Kristallnacht, in which public fury was deliberately whipped up against financial industry executives by government officials, who were publicly pilloried as allegedly responsible for causing the economic crisis by greed and dishonesty. The supposed wrong-doing of today’s American financial sector, just like the false accusations of the burning of the German Reichstag by the Jews in the 1930s, is being used as a similar excuse for a governmental power-grab and for similar extraordinary punitive steps against a minority.
The Washington Examiner finds the creation of an “Obama Youth” also decidedly sinister. These kinds of paramilitary cadres, “just as powerful, just as strong” as the regular military, are a traditional hallmark, and effective tool of social control, favored by totalitarians everywhere, by the Lukashenkos, the Castros, the Chavezes, and now by Barack Obama.
With almost no public attention, both chambers of Congress in the past week advanced an alarming expansion of the Americorps national service plan, with the number of federally funded community service job increasing from 75,000 to 250,000 at a cost of $5.7 billion. Lurking behind the feel-good rhetoric spouted by the measure’s advocates is a bill that on closer inspection reveals multiple provisions that together create a strong odor of creepy authoritarianism. The House passed the measure overwhelmingly, while only 14 senators had the sense and courage to vote against it on a key procedural motion. Every legislator who either voted for this bill or didn’t vote at all has some serious explaining to do.
Last summer, then-candidate Barack Obama threw civil liberties to the wind when he proposed “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded†as the regular military. The expanded Americorps is not quite so disturbing, but a number of provisions in the bill raise serious concerns.
To begin with, the legislation threatens the voluntary nature of Americorps by calling for consideration of “a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people.†It anticipates the possibility of requiring “all individuals in the United States†to perform such service – including elementary school students. The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service,†while establishing “campuses†that serve as “operational headquarters,†complete with “superintendents†and “uniforms†for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And it calls for creation of “a permanent cadre†in a “National Community Civilian Corps.â€
But that’s not all. The bill also calls for “youth engagement zones†in which “service learning†is “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.†This updated form of voluntary community service is also to be “integrated into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula†at all levels of schooling. Sounds like a government curriculum for government approved “service learning,†which is nothing less than indoctrination.
