"Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"

We have long known and studied dignity cultures and honor-shame cultures. Now sociology professors Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning say there has emerged a new kind of social-interaction dynamic: victimhood culture, kicking off with an incident at Oberlin University.

The Oberlin student [who took offense at an email] took a different approach: After initially emailing the student who offended her, she decided to publicly air the encounter that provoked her and their subsequent exchange in the community at large, hoping to provoke sympathy and antagonism toward the emailer by advertising her status as an aggrieved party.   

 But she was met from the original emailer with even more strident claims that she had victimized him even more. And it went downhill from there - "There is no end to conflict in a victimhood culture."

What's distinguishes this culture from honor-shame or dignity cultures? The professors explain:

It isn’t honor culture.

“Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response,” they write. “But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor.”

But neither is it dignity culture:

“Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.”

The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”

It is, they say, “a victimhood culture.”

Read the whole thing, "The Rise of Victimhood Culture" in The Atlantic.

Now I have two responses. The first is that victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids. It is taking personal disagreements or conflicts to well, this level.


Remember one of the first rules of economics: That which is subsidized increases. When posting one's latest "I'm being repressed!" event across social media or public forums become routine, it will become rewarding. Posters become affirmed in their grievances and over time (not a long time!) want that affirmation again and again. So their level of "I'm offended" get lower and lower, their sprint to public revelation becomes quicker and sooner, and their claims of harm become ever-more insistent and exaggerated.

In short, victimhood culture is not about justice or peacemaking or conflict resolution. Quite the opposite: it is about domination and conflict creation and lengthening the fight, all the better to be affirmed. Victimhood culture is at bottom selfish, self-centered and ultimately self-defeating.

My second response is that victimhood culture is very specifically contrary to the teachings of Christ, so anyone who thinks him/herself a Christian who engages in it very seriously needs to get a new understanding.

Let me start with a referral to my essay of how Jesus rebutted the honor-shame dynamic that was firmly entrenched in first-century Judea, "How Jesus invented individual liberty."

Then how to get even with others the right way.

More urgently than ever, this is what we must teach our children.

Christians under genocide and American victimhood

Just last July, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt - the equivalent of our secretary of state - pointed out that Christians around the world were the most persecuted group of all.

When the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago, the European nations that Brother Andrew had visited undercover won their liberty and achieved one of the greatest advances of human freedom in modern history.

Yet when I became Foreign Secretary, I learned that almost a quarter of a billion Christians were still enduring persecution around the world.

The evidence shows sadly that the situation is becoming worse. The number of countries where Christians suffer because of their faith rose from 128 in 2015 to 144 a year later. In the Middle East, the very survival of Christianity as a living religion is in doubt.

A century ago, 20% of the region’s people were Christians; today the figure is below 5%.

(On Gov.UK, "Persecution of Christians review: Foreign Secretary’s speech following the final report") Secretary Hunt went on to say that 80 percent of the world's victims of religious persecution are Christians.

And that persecution is very often, if not usually, of the murderous kind:

Mass grave of murdered Christians in Syria.
Photos like this have been taken in many other places in the world.

Now,

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) shared the report compiled by the Bishop of Truro, the Right Reverend Philip Mounstephen. It states that violence and oppression against Christians are worsening as time goes by.

"Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity," the report states. "In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN."

The evidence shows that Christianity is "by far the most widely persecuted religion." 

Original ACLJ report is here.

Meanwhile, in the United States the hip and "woke" compete with one another on who belongs to the most oppressed victim group. Because victimhood brings status in the US today; the US is rapidly becoming ever-more dominated by a victimhood culture.

What we call victimhood culture combines some aspects of honor and dignity. People in a victimhood culture are like the honorable in having a high sensitivity to slight. They’re quite touchy, and always vigilant for offenses. Insults are serious business, and even unintentional slights might provoke a severe conflict. But, as in a dignity culture, people generally eschew violent vengeance in favor of relying on some authority figure or other third party. They complain to the law, to the human resources department at their corporation, to the administration at their university, or — possibly as a strategy of getting attention from one of the former — to the public at large.

The combination of high sensitivity with dependence on others encourages people to emphasize or exaggerate the severity of offenses. There’s a corresponding tendency to emphasize one’s degree of victimization, one’s vulnerability to harm, and one’s need for assistance and protection. People who air grievances are likely to appeal to such concepts as disadvantage, marginality, or trauma, while casting the conflict as a matter of oppression.

The result is that this culture also emphasizes a particular source of moral worth: victimhood. Victim identities are deserving of special care and deference. Contrariwise, the privileged are morally suspect if not deserving of outright contempt. Privilege is to victimhood as cowardice is to honor.

When I posted the ACLJ report elsewhere, adding that "Americans would not know actual victimhood if it punched them in the face," a liberal friend of 20-plus years responded,

Suggest that to the family of the black man shot dead by police in a Walmart for holding a toy gun. Or the family of the black child shot dead by police in a Chicago park a few years ago for the same thing. The cop just rolled up, jumped out of the car and opened fire.

Then there are the thousands driven into bankruptcy by medical bills. The mentally ill walking the streets because we won't pay for treatment.

Or the veterans who can't receive decent care or who rely on food stamps that may be cut again so corporations can have tax cuts.

Or...

Don, I don't deny that Christians are being killed in other lands and that it is indeed genocide. But I think you are being pretty selective in defining victims. There are indeed many victims to be found in the US.

Of course there are true victims in America today. The murder rate in Chicago, Baltimore and some other Democrat-controlled cities is shocking. Those killed are certainly victims and often innocent victims.

But what we do not have is a real victim class, despite the devoted efforts of the Left to paint all black people, all homosexuals, all women, etc. as members of a specially-victimized class of persons, all of whom are dragged into victimhood just because of that identity.

No. Not even close to that. In the US today we do not have anything that even approaches the loosest definition of genocide as is happening to our brothers and sisters in Christ in much of the world. We do not have anything that approaches deliberate, planned, lethal persecution of a victim-class of people who are being killed, harmed, injured, deprived of rights or punished simply because of their religion.

And anyone who says, "Oh, America has lots of victims, too!" simply proves my point, that in America today, status-victimhood is a sought-after possession, and those who say that are incredibly equating, "I was triggered and offended by that joke about gays," with, "My husband and my children were beheaded because they were Christians."

I will backtrack, though, on one class of people who are definitely being killed genocidally in America purely because of their identity. That is the unborn, especially unborn black Americans.

But that is not merely acceptable to the Left, it is positively desirable. So perhaps you will understand when I find such protests against this post entirely unpersuasive and in fact unserious.

End note: American Christians are by no means under persecution (though sometimes discrimination), but that is not to say that the rhetorical groundwork is not being laid: Former Antifa College Professor: Kill Christians, Clock Trump With a Bat

Jeff Klinzman is a former adjunct Antifa College Professor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Former” because he turned in his resignation after his online comments garnered a considerable backlash. ...

Klinzman also acknowledged that he was Antifa, and made incendiary statements on his facebook page…such as wanting to “stop evangelical Christians” and then included a poem that said, “Kill them all and bury them deep in the ground.”
 
“It’s not pretty, and I’m not proud, but seeing what evangelical Christians are doing to this county and its people fills me with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.” 

He knows he need not worry, though. Another college will quickly hire him, and at a large increase in compensation.

Wokescolds, tribal victimhood identities, and class enemies

The Return of Ancient Prejudices, by Victor Davis Hanson, surveying the political and social landscape:

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

And what might those "noble purposes" be? IMO, they call come down to dependency on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "class enemies."

Beria was Stalin's chief of internal security. He said quite simply that anyone could be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced without knowing anything about him or her except their Communist class identity. This idea is waxing strong in America today:

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are “oppressed.” 

Favored classes have the virtue of having "revolutionary truth" ascribed to them, while unfavored classes have no redeeming virtue within or redemption without.

Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s,collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” 

As, for example, Caucasians and the concept of "while privilege." Inveighing charges against class enemies is the "noble purpose" behind the nearly-countless victimization hoaxes being perpetrated today. But the hoaxes continue - Jussie Smollett's arrest and potential prosecution do not signal the end. Why? Because, as Quillette explains,

[I]f you don’t follow conservative media, you may not have a sense of how often stories of hate crimes turn out to be false or a sense of what the false cases tend to look like.

Even fairly incompetent hoaxes might therefore succeed, which brings us to our second point: Hate crime hoaxes aren’t hard to pull off.

Especially with a compliant mainline media and Left-wing political establishment that wants the hoaxers' claims to be true.

No segment of American society is off limits for striking against class enemies. Recently, the Southern Baptist Church was stricken with details of child sexual abuse and assault made public, committed by some church workers and some pastors. That such acts deserve investigation and punishment surely needs no justification. But according to Stephanie Krehbiel, there is a class of church member who simply needs to be quiet, namely men. All men. Because an individual Baptist man may have abused or assaulted no one and so be personally innocent of anything -- except being a member of a class that is guilty of everything.

I covered earlier that we are seeing the the birth and growth of a new kind of social dynamic that never existed before: the victimhood culture. It never existed before because its birth and growth depend on social media and its enabling of instant tribal grouping across and without regard to bloodlines.

As Quillette explains,

... the third thing to know is that hate crime hoaxes thrive in a culture of victimhood. We use the term victimhood culture to refer to a new moral framework that differs from the older cultures of honor and dignity. Honor culture refers to a morality that revolves around physical bravery. In honor cultures one’s reputation is important, and it might be necessary to engage in violence to protect it. In the dignity cultures that replaced honor cultures, morality more often revolves around the idea that people have equal moral worth. Insults and slights don’t lower one’s status as they do in honor cultures, and people can ignore many minor offenses and go to the police and courts for more serious ones. Victimhood culture, which is in its most extreme form among campus activists, is different from both honor and dignity cultures. Its morality revolves around a narrative of oppression and victimhood, with victimhood acting as new kind of moral status, much like honor was a kind of moral status in many traditional societies.

Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture. You might falsely accuse someone of insulting you so that you have a chance to display your honor, but you’d be trying to get them to engage in a duel or some other kind of fight. You’d be trying to demonstrate strength, to show you can handle your conflicts on your own. The last thing you’d want to do is claim to be a victim in need of help. Hate crime hoaxes make a little more sense in a dignity culture. Hate crimes are offenses against dignity, and perhaps you’d have something to gain by falsely claiming victimhood. But in a moral world less focused on praising victims and demonizing the privileged, the benefits are lesser and skepticism is greater.

It is in a victimhood culture that hate crime hoaxes are most attractive.

As I wrote before,

Victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids.

 A better explanation of how the child-students in college today practice this is given by Rod Dreher in "Life Among The Wokescolds," in which he recounts what a college professor-friend related.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). ...

It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. ... 

... We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. 

 I'd love to have some fine ending, full of hope and promise. But I do not. As Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen wrote,

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Hard to put a happy face on that. Want to watch the perpetual infantilism of our children in action? The consider no more than Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's visit by elementary school kids and adults where she encountered wokescolds of all ages.


Update: Commentary: Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation. Well, as Prof. Daneen said, that's what the education establishment considers its most important goal.

The absolutism of feelings and the culture of victimhood

The mantra of our age:

Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’ - The New York Times

The imperfect data that linguists have collected indicates that "I feel like" became more common toward the end of the last century. In North American English, it seems to have become a synonym for "I think" or "I believe" only in the last decade or so. Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: "I feel like" is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument -a muddle that has political consequences.

 

Natasha Pangarkar, a senior at Williams College, hears "I feel like in the classroom on a daily basis," she said. "When you use the phrase I feel like, it gives you an out. You're not stating a fact so much as giving an opinion," she told me. "It's an effort to make our ideas more palatable to the other person." ...

 

This linguistic hedging is particularly common at universities, where calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces may have eroded students' inclination to assert or argue. It is safer to merely "feel." 

Bradley Campbell, a sociologist at California State University, Los Angeles, was an author of an article about the shift on many campuses from a "culture of dignity," which celebrates free speech, to a "culture of victimhood" marked by the assumption that "people are so fragile that they can't hear something offensive," he told me.

 

Yet here is the paradox: "I feel like" masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks. When people cite feelings or personal experience, you can't really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn't have that experience, or their experience is less valid," Ms Chai told me.

 

"It's a way of deflecting, avoiding full engagement with another person or group, Elisabeth Lasch Quinn, a historian at Syracuse University, said, "because it puts a shield up immediately. You cannot disagree." 

This is the inevitable end point of the ruins of the Meathead Generation, in which for the present generation "By far the most common basis for moral decision-making was doing whatever feels right or comfortable in a situation. Nearly four out of ten teens (38%) and three out of ten adults (31%) described that as their primary consideration." 

As for the culture of victimhood, when assertions are based on feelings rather than verifiable truths, then all relationships ultimately and pretty quickly devolve into assertions of power. 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

Oppressors insist on facts and even worse, insist that there is such a thing as objective, verifiable truth. But that's a "privileged" point of view, isn't it?

The day care attitude of young adults

The modern American university model.

Last year a young couple left my church because, as they told me, "You are not making us happy every week." The "you must please me" attitude is so rampant that the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University has responded. Sadly, I find the first paragraph completely credible and very sad. But it is indeed what pastors are facing more and more.

This is not day care! It's a university!

Dr. Everett Piper, President

Oklahoma Wesleyan University

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization.

Read the whole thing.

As I wrote in, "The absolutism of feelings and the culture of victimhood," when assertions are based on feelings rather than verifiable truths, then all relationships ultimately and pretty quickly devolve into assertions of power. 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

It is becoming this way everywhere.

Climate protests are how white people claim victimhood

Because we live now in a victimhood culture ("Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"), it is a matter of honor and social standing to be identified as a victim of something, somehow. It is simply an essential part of what it means to be woke.

So let's take a look at the recent children's marches against climate change. Notice anything?

These protests are extremely pale. I mean, they make NASCAR look like a melting pot! And some people are noticing:

This is an issue CNN contributor Bakari Sellers raised in an opinion piece last month. He writes: “Climate change should be a definitive issue for Black voters, but it isn’t. That is partly because environmental advocacy groups have not always looked like us, nor have they clarified what solutions mean for our communities. And few have articulated what real environmental justice looks like.”

There is a reason for this. For white progressives, climate change is a unique issue in which racial guilt plays little to no role. Other issues such as police brutality, income inequality, and even women’s rights and access to abortion are steeped in what they perceive as the racist foundation of our country. On these issues, white protesters in the post-Occupy age feel they bear no small amount of collective guilt. But on climate change, for once, they can be the victim, not just the ally.

And man, are they enjoying it. This is the moment for angry, young white people not only to be angry, but to actually be oppressed. 

But that's not all. Maybe POCs ("people of color" for you unwoke readers) are not merely uninformed, as Sellers implies. Maybe the rank and file POCs understand that climate activism is racist to its very core (also here).

Climate activism is a white-identity matter and is going to stay that way. Moreover, it is a distinctly white-privilege matter, centered in the upper-economic classes of Europe and America and their universities. Diverse it ain't, and it ain't gonna be.

This is the fight for the young white progressive, who maybe, just maybe, is feeling a little tired of having to take the backseat. On this issue, they get to move back to the front of the bus, lead, and bemoan their own oppression. Ah, to be oppressed, the golden ticket of progressive culture, the chance to shine. The moment when they can focus on themselves and accept the applause and grave approval of the progressive culture. Well, it was bound to happen. And they are truly making the most of it.

Indeed they are.

Update: Not Woke Enough: Climate Extremists ‘Extinction Rebellion’ Hit For Being Too White, Too Rich

The Guardian published an account by a young minority environmentalist that critiqued the movement for its lack of diversity, but also for its “glorification of arrest,” pointing out that upper-class, educated, white youth can be arrested and jailed and not face long-term consequences, whereas ethnic minorities may end up in jail for the rest of their lives, thanks to inequalities within the criminal justice system.

“The tactics of Extinction Rebellion are designed by and for middle-class, white Britain. Their central rhetoric about a dystopian future fails to cut through for those of us already faced with a nightmarish present, surrounded by poverty and austerity,” Athian Akec wrote, adding that “[t]he tactic of being purposely arrested strikes an uncomfortable note for many people of colour, given the adverse experiences people in my community have had with the police,” and then blames XR for failing to be as intersectional as possible — a key element of modern wokeness.

The anti-Left Leftists

It turns out that there is a type of Leftist that is fed up with what the American political Left has become. They are called anti-woke Leftists. They strike me as old-line Marxists, though I do not mean they are old people. Meet the anti-woke left, who make more sense than every 2020 Democrat candidate combined.

The left is in crisis across the West. It is out of power in most countries and out of touch with its historical working-class base. Class politics has given way to identity politics. And noble causes like anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-discrimination have congealed into a stifling morass of political correctness and competitive victimhood.

Thankfully, there are some pockets on the left who recognise this predicament. I’m in New York to try to understand the thinking behind the ‘dirtbag left’. The phrase was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left. ...

...  identitarian divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are ‘a distraction at best, an active detriment at worst’. ‘The biggest divide in American society is class and that’s it. I’m a class-first person’, she tells me.

Read the whole thing, very interesting., especially when they observe that social media's "call-out culture has no Marxist explanation." After all, the solidarity of the Masses is vaporware when social media by its nature, and identitarian politics by design, keep carving the Masses into smaller and more tightly-defined tribal groups.

Academic freedom is terminal

The report is from Britain but it is quite as valid here: Academic freedom is dying because profs are too scared of the repercussions to use it.

The book, edited by commentator and academic Joanna Williams, says that a culture of self-censorship in the academic community is so far advanced that there is no need for formal curbs on freed speech, since they exist in practice anyway.

Williams said: “The tendency for academics to police themselves and each other means that formal restrictions on academic freedom, although problematic, are actually rarely needed. One danger is that self-censorship becomes a routine part of academic life.

“New lecturers quickly learn how to avoid upsetting the student-customers who pay their wages and how to please the peer-reviewers who will green-light their work for publication and them for promotion. They learn how to comply with all manner of speech codes, safe-space and anti-harassment policies.

“Routine self-censorship not only does away with the need for too many overt restrictions on academic freedom it also reinforces an intolerance of dissent.”

The primary power tactic of the Left in America today is first, to define the terms of public debate and second, to dictate what may not be uttered without invoking furious retribution. That both of these tenets are pure power plays and nothing more seems hardly worth explaining. Speech control is joined at the hip to the Marxist categories of Oppressor-Oppressed, and these are defined by the speech controllers according to sex, class, race, disability, gender-identity and numerous other ways that are impossible to track because the speech controllers keep changing them. Witness the fury unleashed by the Left on Matt Lauer for his moderation of Sept. 7's "Commander in Chief Forum."

Lauer is getting raked over the coals by the Left, who contend that he wasn’t as tough on Trump as he should have been. The Washington Post said Lauer “was tougher on Ryan Lochte than on Donald Trump” ...

The New York Times had two separate articles on Lauer’s performance, one titled “Matt Lauer Fields Storm of Criticism over Clinton-Trump Forum.” The other headline called his performance “pathetic.” The Times’ Nicholas Kristof called Lauer “an embarrassment to journalism.” 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

Professors who wander off the narrow, approved path become class enemies. who are anyone who does not toe the line of "revolutionary truth." This is the result of postmodern deconstructionism, which I explained here:

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak. 

The appetite of tyrannical ideology is never sated. When the commissars run out of one group of class enemies they always invent another.

American college campuses are starting to resemble George Orwell’s Oceania with its Thought Police, or East Germany under the Stasi. College newspapers have been muzzled and trashed, and students are disciplined or suspended for “hate speech,” while exponentially more are being shamed and silenced on social media by their peers. Professors quake at the possibility of accidentally offending any student and are rethinking syllabi and restricting class discussions to only the most anodyne topics. A Brandeis professor endured a secret administrative investigation for racial harassment after using the word wetback in class while explaining its use as a pejorative. [boldface added]

Inevitably, Leftists always devour their own.

Sarah Hoyt:

LISTEN CAREFULLY FOR THOSE YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO MOCK.  THOSE ARE THE ONES WHO OWN YOU: North Korean Citizens Warned Against ‘Hostile’ Speech.

As Glenn Reynolds has described it, "you can’t speak here, this is a university!"

The hate crime hoaxing

Forbes points out what should be obvious, that there really are not more Hate Crimes At Schools Following Donald Trump's Election.

The stories tend to sound the same: swastikas in school bathrooms; gangs of white men in #MAGA shirts harassing women in hijabs; racist sticky notes.

Emboldened young supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, we are told, have taken his triumph and turned it into an opportunity to harass, humiliate and even assault people at schools and colleges around the U.S. The problem is finding examples of pro-Trump activists wreaking havoc on schools and campuses that hold up to scrutiny.

In fact, it’s much easier to find examples of violence against students who have openly backed Trump; there are more than a few stories of kids being pummeled for disagreeing with the losing side (detailed below.) We did see anti-Trump protests by college and high school students around the country turn violent in cities such as Portland, Ore., as agitators joined the groups. Who didn’t hear angry students clearly shouting “F*#% Trump” in news footage from post-election rallies?

Since the election, a female student at North Park University in Chicago who claimed someone posted an anti-gay, pro-Trump note on her door and sent her abusive emails turned out to be making it all up. The alleged hate crimes were a “countrywide epidemic,” Taylor Volk told NBC 5 on Nov. 15. A week later the university president said she “fabricated” the whole thing and is no longer a student there.

A commenter on Instapundit pointed out,

"Crybully" is really the best new word for this. All the angsty, tearful assertions by SJW that "they're afraid for their lives now" are nothing more than emotionally manipulative performance art. They're lying toddlers, hoping some concerned authority figure will swoop in down and save them from that which they simply don't like.

All too often in their lives, this has worked for them. Thanks for nothing, parental and educational malpractice.

Today, wearing the mantle of victimhood is the main way the Left cements its claim to moral authority and hence political power.

However, verified criminal assaults have been carried out against perceived or actual Trump supporters:

• At Bayside H.S. in Brevard County, Fla., Andre Hudson, 17, was charged with felony battery after he punched a fellow student who was holding a Trump sign in gym class, according to ClickOrlando.com.

• In California, cellphone videos rolled as a female student at Woodside H.S. calmly removed her glasses before beating up sophomore Jade Armenio, a Trump supporter. The attacker reportedly said that Armenio had commented approvingly on an anti-Mexican online message, which Armenio denied to KGO-TV.

• At an anti-Trump walkout at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md., a 15-year-old student wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat got kicked and punched by five of his fellow students and was taken to the hospital, according to The Washington Post.

• And near Houston, an 11-year-old boy wound up on crutches following his admission to classmates that he had voted for Trump in a school mock election. School officials at Stafford Intermediate School suspended the alleged attackers as an investigation continued. “This is America,” said Mary Lemmon, the boy’s mother, to Fox 26. “Everyone has the right to their own opinion, and they shouldn’t be beat up for it.”

Why do these attacks take place? Simply because The party of peace and love beats the crap out of its opponents. Violence or its threat always underlies their means.

In "The ruins of the Meathead Generation," I named the three abysses that result from the idea that all truth is relative. Since today we have taught almost everyone younger than 35-40 that what they feel is more important and more authoritative than what they know, we should not be surprised that:

1. With no idea of transcendent authority, human relationships become merely contests of power.

2. Religion is suppressed but the inherent religious nature of humanity simply finds other outlets.

3. Human life is meaningless and serves no higher purpose because there is no higher purpose to serve.
 

The empty abyss of emotions and feelings: Ignorance is power for rule makers

In "The ruins of the Meathead Generation," I named the three abysses that result from the idea that all truth is relative:

1. With no idea of transcendent authority, human relationships become merely contests of power.

2. Religion is suppressed but the inherent religious nature of humanity simply finds other outlets.

3. Human life is meaningless and serves no higher purpose because there is no higher purpose to serve.

Herewith the first. I do recommend you read the other post first, though, since it serves as the foundation.

With no idea of transcendent authority, human relationships become merely contests of power.  

This is in fact the basic premise of postmodern deconstructionism, which I explained here:

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak. 

The primary power tactic of the Left in America today is first, to define the terms of public debate and second, to dictate what may not be uttered without invoking furious retribution. That both of these tenets are pure power plays and nothing more seems hardly worth explaining. Speech control is joined at the hip to the Marxist categories of Oppressor-Oppressed, and these are defined by the speech controllers according to sex, class, race, disability, gender-identity and numerous other ways that are impossible to track because the speech controllers keep changing them. Witness the fury unleashed by the Left on Matt Lauer for his moderation of Sept. 7's "Commander in Chief Forum."

Lauer is getting raked over the coals by the Left, who contend that he wasn’t as tough on Trump as he should have been. The Washington Post said Lauer “was tougher on Ryan Lochte than on Donald Trump” ...

The New York Times had two separate articles on Lauer’s performance, one titled “Matt Lauer Fields Storm of Criticism over Clinton-Trump Forum.” The other headline called his performance “pathetic.” The Times’ Nicholas Kristof called Lauer “an embarrassment to journalism.” 

No wonder that college campuses have become the main place "where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power."

... our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment. Today it is a great sin on college campuses — and elsewhere! — to make anyone other than the “privileged” feel uncomfortable, challenged, or otherwise psychologically threatened by the use of the wrong words or concepts.

Take, for example, Rutgers University's just-announced new rules for students:

• Students in at least one Rutgers University residence hall are being encouraged to use only language that is “helpful” and “necessary” to avoid committing microaggressions. 
• The display, which is part of the school's "Language Matters" campaign, also includes hand-written definitions of the three types of microaggressions, as well as a flyer listing potentially-offensive words and phrases.

Simply avoiding offensive language, however, is not enough according to Rutgers, which claims that microaggressions can also be “nonverbal” and “environmental,” but fails to elaborate further.

Rutgers also has a Bias Prevention Education Team that handles reports of microaggressions and other “bias incidents,” which experienced a surge of reports after alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos visited campus last semester, the anonymous student claimed. Liberal students memorably protested the event by covering themselves in fake blood, but still complained vehemently that the university had tolerated what they deemed “hate speech.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, "Professors Tell Students: Disagree With Climate Change? Shut Up, Get Out."

... three professors from the University of Colorado, who have declared that on the subject of climate change, their students aren't allowed to dissent with their views: Three professors co-teaching an online course called “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs recently told their students via email that man-made climate change is not open for debate, and those who think otherwise have no place in their course.

“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email... .

The email also banned discussion on class message boards, and told students who have a problem with that to drop the class.

"Shut up," they explained. As law Prof. Glenn Reynolds observes, the operative rule in American colleges today is simple: "you can’t speak here, this is a university!"

This sort of thing is played put on campuses all over the country. The latest oppression de jour is sexual assault on campus. Rape or real sexual assault, in which the  victim is physically overpowered by the assailant and violated sexually, by force and without consent, is apparently too rare an event for today's university administrators and federally-funded campus bureaucrats. So the definition of sexual assault must be expanded. See, for example, Yale University:

The bizarre procedures of Yale’s sprawling sexual assault bureaucracy may well be the worst in the nation. We have come to realize this because Yale is the only university to publicly document all campus allegations of sexual assault, the result of a 2012 agreement with the Obama administration. Reports issued by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler don’t provide much detail, but with each new report, we see more clearly a campus environment characterized more by witch hunts than a pursuit of justice.

Consider this item: “An administrator informed a Title IX Coordinator that a Yale College student reported that another YC student made unwanted advances.” On the basis of this third-hand allegation, a current Yale student is being investigated.

The most recent Spangler Report, just published, says 20 Yale undergraduates were accused of sexual assault in the first six months of 2016. Twenty-six undergraduates filed sexual assault complaints. Assuming all were female (the source of around 99 percent of campus complaints), it would mean an annual violent crime rate for Yale undergraduate women of 1.9 percent, without taking into account any attempted murder or felony assault claims. That would be just under the annual violent crime rate for the city FBI stats deem the most dangerous in the country, Detroit.

Now you might think that Yale's administrators and faculty would be horrified to know that their campus is one of the most dangerous places in the country for women. But no, because they and the intended audience - other Leftists and the immense federal bureaucracy - know well and good that a female at Yale has no greater chance of being physically threatened, much less actually harmed, than in the most Ozzie-and-Harriet neighborhood in the country. But you can't burnish your Leftist credentials with that or get grants and tax write-offs, either. (A truly safe campus provides no opportunities for graft or expansion of power for administrators, so the Left can't admit to them.) You have to expand what sexual assault or rape has always meant. You have to expand what constitutes sexual offenses to include, for example, "unwanted looks" (yes, that's a category) or, as above, "unwanted advances," not further defined but probably means only that a male student asked a female student out on a date, which she refused. Then when he asked her out again later she considered it a form of sexual assault.

Think this exaggerates? A former attorney of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights informs us that OCR has mandated that all “unwelcome” sexual conduct or speech shall be classified and treated by universities as "sexual harassment.” And here is how the White House defines "sexual violence:"

Sexual violence refers to a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient and include remarks about physical appearance; persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient; [or] unwanted touching….These behaviors could be initiated by someone known or unknown to the recipient, including someone they are in a relationship with.

"Remarks about physical appearance" -- "Hello, Susan, you look nice today," said Jim, who will now be driven from school because he just committed sexual violence. 

"Persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient" -- I think I already covered that, see a couple of paragraphs up.

Increasingly, college professors, even law professors, are refusing to teach about sexual violence or law because students complained:

Plante is one of many academics who increasingly find themselves walking on eggshells to avoid offending their students. Some law school professors have stopped teaching rape law due to complaints from students who claim the subject is traumatizing—even though educating students about this important topic should be more important than making everybody in class comfortable all of the time. 

If professors want to warn their students before discussing particularly disturbing subjects, that’s fine. But it’s concerning that strenuous objection from the students is leading academic to stop teaching these subjects entirely.

So you wind up with an Auburn University female student accusing Auburn football player Jovon Robinson of smashing her head into a door and bloodying her knees, which causes his dismissal from the team after the school's Title IX coordinator gets involved. Then the woman tells the coach and the coordinator, in writing, that she made the whole thing up merely because she was upset that Robinson had asked her to leave his room. (You can't make this stuff up.) But the Title IX coordinator was unmoved, and Robinson, guilty of nothing at all, and the number one-ranked college junior footballer in the country before dismissal, now has no future in the sport.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would find this sadly, entirely familiar.

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). ...

Ancient liberties and assumptions of innocence mean nothing when it comes to “racism" [substitute sexual assaulter, especially a football player]: You are guilty until proven innocent, which is nearly impossible, and even then you are forever suspect.

That is exactly the hellhole that Jovon Robinson finds himself in; that he is black is of no help because athletes are greater class enemies than black men (but how curious that a black male is assumed to be innately sexually predatory by the Left.) As in the old USSR, now on America's college campuses:

Party members [read, "Title IX coordinators"] signed death warrants [expulsion orders] for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s, collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” Stigmatizing entire institutions and groups makes it much easier to carry out wholesale change. ... If a crime can be collectivized all can be guilty because they belong to the wrong group. 

You know, like men, especially athletes. And apparently even more, black male athletes.

But why stop with matters sexual or legal? Let's look at Yale's other speech-controlling endeavor:

At Yale, a committee has been established to take a fresh look at the names of the various ivy covered buildings around the 317 year old institution to see if any of the names associated with the structures are either racist or offensive to anyone.

Bu wait! as they say. There's more!

ANNVILLE, Pa. (AP) — Students at a small Pennsylvania college are demanding that administrators rename a building called "Lynch Memorial Hall" because of the racial overtones of the word "lynch."

The building is named after Clyde A. Lynch, who was president of Lebanon Valley College from 1932 until his death in 1950.

Students for a Democratic Society was a far-Left activist movement on American campuses from the mid-1960s to the end of the decade. Its influence remains deep. It main organizing principle was simple, "The issue isn't the issue." When you want to have a demonstration and shut down the campus, any issue will do; just pick one and go with it. The point of Yale's and countless other schools' speech-control policies is not really the issue they pretend to address. The issue is always, always, always power and control. George Orwell understood this well when he wrote in 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Where to begin? Well, how about where the overwhelming majority of American kids get their education, the public schools system. Education journalist Bruce Deitrick Price explains what happened when a parent had an unplanned, frank conversation with her child's principal:

Finally the principal, aggravated and arrogant, told me schools no longer believe in academic excellence because demanding subjects no longer appeal to the mainstream student or to his parents.

He proclaimed that his program, his syllabus, his teachers were all fully in compliance with local, state, and federal standards, and he wasn't going to change a single thing to accommodate me or my daughter.

He said proudly he is a "Progressive," he has a Ph.D., and he had "helped" develop and design many of those standards, and he believed in them.  He said any kid who wants a higher-level education for a professional career will have to get it somewhere else. 

Sadly, they are not getting it somewhere else. Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen writes,

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture. ...

At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Providence College Prof. Anthony Esolen describes what he and his peers are up against in “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization.”

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. Those of my students who know some grammar took Latin in high school or were taught at home. The writing of most students is irreparable in the way that aphasia is. You cannot point to a sentence and say, simply, ‘Your verb here does not agree with your subject.’ That is not only because they do not understand the terms of the comment. It is also because many of their sentences will have no clear subject or verb to begin with. The students make grammatical errors for which there are no names. Their experience of the written language has been formed by junk fiction in school, text messages, blog posts, blather on the airwaves, and the bureaucratic sludge that they are taught for ‘formal’ writing, and that George Orwell identified and skewered seventy years ago. The best of them are bad writers of English; the others write no language known to man.

Wall Street Journal editorialist Bret Stephens wrote in 2012,

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president. ...

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

Then there is Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College who identifies as gay and mixed-race. She wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.”

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.” (link)

This is controlling the present: make sure the next generation is historically rootless (which is how you control the past) and lack the intellectual training or skills to develop themselves. But controlling the present is only a tactic. Power and nothing else is the goal. There is no transcendent Truth against which we must measure ourselves, our words, or our deeds.  Control what people may say and what they may do and you control the present. Keep them intentionally ignorant of the history of their own cultural heritage and you control the past. Both together lock the future up in your hands.

Prof. Daneen again:

Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

They won’t fight against anyone, because that’s not seemly, but they won’t fight for anyone or anything either. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.

No wonder that the generation born after 1980 has been called the most narcissistic ever, including by journals such as Time ("Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation") and Psychology Today ("The Narcissism Epidemic," and "Meet the most narcissistic generation ever").

They have no deep sense of historical location or history compared to their ancestors. That is why, for example, they are dismissive of the time-tested traditions and teachings of the Church, my particular field of expertise, and seek even from worship mostly to be entertained ("worshiptainment," as we call it) or emotional highs - which is to say experiences and feelings, not knowledge or wisdom.

They have not been taught that they are members of something greater or that there is a calling higher and holier than personal feel-goodism. They grew up in the self-esteem movement that assured them they were special (you know, just like everyone else!) and they got sports trophies just for showing up for practices and games.

Noted British philosopher Roger Scruton explains the result:

Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’

Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable. Indeed, even calling them ‘beliefs’ is slightly suspect. The correct word is ‘opinions’. If you try to express your certainties in a classroom today you are apt to be looked at askance, not because you are wrong, but because of the strangeness of being certain about anything and the even greater strangeness of wanting to impart your certainties to others. The person with certainties is the excluder, the one who disrespects the right we all have to form our own ‘opinions’ about what matters.

However, as soon as inclusiveness itself is questioned, freedom is cast aside. Students seem to be as prepared as they ever were to demand that ‘no platform’ be given to people who speak or think in the wrong way. Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them. The greatest sin is a refusal to end each sentence with a question mark.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Not only is there no such thing as Truth, it is unforgivable even to speak as if there is. You have your truth and I have mine, and can't we all just get along?

We are almost at the point achieved by the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, when everyone knew that they were being fed lies and distortions but no one knew how to do anything about it and the price for trying to do so is much too high, anyway.  So everyone went along because they saw no other avenue.

Former Soviet spy Victor Suvorov wrote what this is like in Inside the Soviet Army, in which he served as a tank officer before entering Soviet military intelligence. One day he and his commander spent an evening making sure that their soldiers on liberty in a nearby town obeyed the rules and the law. Suvorov pointed out that uniform regulations called for brown gloves, but brown gloves were simply unobtainable either through the supply system or on the market. Nobody could get brown gloves, including himself and his battalion commander. So everyone wore black gloves; after all, it was winter and gloves were essential.

Nonetheless, the two officers spent the evening citing soldiers for fines for wearing black gloves rather than brown, all while wearing black gloves themselves when writing the citations. And not one soldier or NCO blinked an eye. Everyone knows that common sense and rational thinking are completely useless in navigating Leftist systems. There are layers of power and control that are not questioned. Had Suvorov and his commander encountered a more senior officer who cited them while wearing black gloves himself, they would have thought nothing of it, either. The objective of these systems is not to persuade but to control:

And here we are:

Frostburg State University in Maryland was found in violation of Title IX after two students filed complaints with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The school found several things wrong with Frostburg’s investigation process, but one of the most notable findings was that using “common sense” and “reason” are considered violations of Title IX, the anti sex-discrimination statute that is used to force schools to adjudicate felony sexual assault.

Secretary Brezhnev would be proud of us: we have reached the point where common sense and reasonableness are legally intolerable. But here's the thing: only the revolutionary vanguard (meaning those who are grabbing more and more power) even know the what and the when and the how (there is no why). The rest of us proles can't be told, for in the Left there is no room for power sharing.