"You cannot sedate all the things you hate"
Marilyn Manson - Dogma
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"I am a citizen of the world"
Diogenes (a man who did a lot of hating but no sedating)
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"Son, quite aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of - well, you, for example - quite aside from that trained-in emotional prejudice, for coldly practical reasons I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea . . . because we are not civilized."
"Huh?"
"Obvious. If we didn't have a tribal taboo about the matter so strong that you honestly believed it was an instinct, I can think of a long list of people I wouldn't trust with my back turned, not with the price of beef what it is today. Eh?"
Duke grudged a grin. "Maybe you've got something there. I wouldn't want to take a chance on my ex-mother-in-law. She hates my guts."
"You see? Or how about our charming neighbour on the south, who is so casual about other people's fences and livestock during the hunting season? I wouldn't want to bet that you and I wouldn't wind up in his freezer if we didn't have that taboo. But Mike I would trust utterly - because Mike is civilized."
"Huh?"
"Mike is utterly civilized, Martian style."
Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
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"- should not listen to fascism. It should not be tolerated in civil society. Nazis are not welcome in civil society."
"Fuck tha police! Power to the people!"
two civil socialites interrupting the We Need to Talk About Diversity panel at Portland State on 2018/02/17 - minute 20:45 in this video
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"Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language
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"considering what is more that as a result of the labours
left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry
of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond
all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labours
of men that as a result of the labours unfinished of Testew and
Cunard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons
unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann
it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labours
of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of
Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many
deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy
that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of
alimentation and defecation is seen to waste and pine waste and
pine and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons
unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture"
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot (1948) (Lucky's Speech (or rather, for reasons unknown, just part of it... and yes, what is more, it goes on like that))
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Boghossian finally interrupts: "What's the question? What's the question?!"
Lucky questioner during the question&answer session at the We Need to Talk About Diversity panel
(a lovely example of being torn between two desires; he'd obviously like
to dress up his grandstanding in scientific jargon but doesn't want to
be thought a heretic by his antiscientific friends of the same "intersectional" faith, and so oscillates endlessly from jargon to jargon like Buridan's ass)
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"Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one
had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some
extent — for they were not of great importance in England — against
Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and
‘fellow-travelers’.
[...]
The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would
‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable,
and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they
condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.
[...]
The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue
that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a
little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased
and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven
that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe
in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism."
George Orwell - The Prevention of Literature
(1946 !)
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The Good Place proved surprisingly palatable, for TeeVee fare. After a lively first and half of second season, its writers were ultimately permitted to pull things together again at the end of season four for one of the more memorable endings in the history of the medium. As for intervening filler, well... an even mix of Brady Bunch grade TV triteness reinterpreted via the prosocial insanity of our times, bashing straight white men at every turn for guaranteed applause moments. Without spoiling too much, the show deals with the fairness or unfairness of heaven and hell, with cackling demons talking about torturing human souls with penis flatteners (but no vaginal lava) for the crime of sexual harrassment (but never for sexual entrapment) etc. Standard schtick. Later episodes present a possible alternative, but it's quite literally a case of "meet the new demons, same as the old demons" except now they're doing it for your own good... so long as you obey.
"If, once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned men - whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds - will do you the kindness of strangling you before lighting the pyre" - Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2004
Fifteen years ago in the mid-2000s, we would've found ourselves at a loss for examples of facetious dogmatism in popular culture to rival inquisitorial soul-saving. Lucky we're "woke" now. The cruelest lie of religion, Job's promise that all evil serves the higher good, of an invisible master plan to right all wrongs, is now openly touted on the supposed left wing of politics via "equity" campaigns rehashing tired old Bolshevik promises of absolute equality by pillage. Under the tutelage of the Malleus Maleficarum of our age, we're assured that only witches would deny being witches, and no amount of abuse is too much to force them to admit guilt. After all, you're helping whites overcome their "fragility" by forcing them to admit to arbitrary crimes and punish themselves by stepping aside for those born a more moral breed. You're saving their sick souls, really. What could be more noble?
The key word in "power to the people" is power, "people" being defined
according to political convenience. The vandals who shouted or implied
it in that Portland State video above would certainly blanch at the
notion of including straight white men (or any combination thereof) as
"people" deserving of power. Implicitly, they have also endowed
themselves with the singular power to decide who are "the people" and
who are "Nazis" - to rule on others' right to speak or to be censored.
Of course, why stop at Nazis? Why not expand the definition to everyone who might be a Nazi - say, anyone born the wrong skin color, a Nazi color. That'll root out the racists!
As for "fuck tha poh-leece" well now, that's just masturbation. We've had ample evidence through the past decades that snowflakes, social justice warriors and associated activists are no more than self-aggrandizing, sadistic, powermongering control freaks, every bit as multimillennially mundane as the holier-than-thou church ladies and inquisitors preceding them. Let's not forget where the term snowflake came from: "you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." Just as the older religion would prefer to reframe the discussion of Life of Brian from its critique of mindless faith to an imaginary insult against Jesus, the faithful of the new faiths in the moral superiority of women, blacks, gays, etc. would very much like to reframe the "snowflake" brand as attacking weakness, that they melt at stress. Oh, nonono children. We despise you for your narcissism in appointing yourselves the thought police.
Look all around you, in every medium, for the innumerable proofs that the neon-haired, falsetto-sermonizing, self-appointed saints and martyrs of these new religions of anti-maleness, anti-whiteness and anti-straightness have no interest in equality, that they hunger only to establish new pecking orders with themselves at the top. It might seem absurd or only quaint for instance for a webcomic to uphold the right of a furry to crash a ren-faire, until you remember the author has immersed herself in a subculture obsessed with flash and showing each other up, all about who's wearing the grandest hat, that since furries are simply FANCIER than people in clogs and tunics and therefore more special, they're just BETTER and deserve to lord it over. Just as humane meat farming had to be one-upped by vegetarianism, which in turn had to be one-upped by veganism, which in turn had to be one-upped by ever loftier character levels of veganism, which in turn had to be one-upped by breatharianism, just as politicized gay rights had to be usurped by gay marriage and gays' limelight had to be usurped by transsexuals, and transsexuals had to be usurped by sexualities in thirty-one flavors, just as older religions constantly schism into ever more "saved" brands of KoolAid quaffers, just so, every new brand of borrowed self-righteousness, every popular cause, as soon as it becomes popular enough to be called a "group" or a "movement" or a "community" taking pride in its disciplined action, will inevitably breed ever more fanatical true believers.
They used to ask whether you marched in the May Day parade. Now they demand
to know why you didn't march in the Pride Day parade. We're talking
about the same people. Mrs. Grundy's just wearing a new hat. Observe the glee with which they corner their victims, the rush, the exhilaration, the power trip inherent in hunting down heretics, be they "racist" or "sexist" or "homophobic" (or better yet all three and other slurs besides) or in other words anyone who does not bend the knee to the newly bootstrapped aristocracy. John Oliver does not need to rationally convince you that a man actually becomes a woman by the
thaumaturgy of plastic surgery, only to force you to cognitively
dissonate from observable reality on his command for fear of social stigmatization. It's about power - the power to make you say 2+2=5, or call a random narcissist by the royal "they" or self-flagellate for being born the wrong sex. The students of Evergreen College can attack you with bats, then demand authorities destroy evidence of their crime, and twenty million rabid vermin can riot and rampage, looting and torching city block by city block, then claim all the damage was secretly done by a handful of subversive infiltrator neo-nazis, because they have been taught by fifty years' worth of post-modernist anti-intellectualism that they can redefine reality to suit themselves. The righteousness of a jihad justifies any extremes and makes any lie a truth, any sin a virtue, so long as it serves the cause.
Like most good art, Waiting for Godot is open to interpretation, moreso for its deliberate vagueness. While most cling to religious or psychoanalytical approaches, its composition in the years following World War 2 positions it at the root of new waves of class struggles and political idolatry which would dominate the next half-century, with the two protagonists representing middle-class intelligentsia both analytical and aesthetic, and Pozzo and Lucky the upper and lower classes respectively. That scene linked above, especially, makes a poignant jab at Marxists' hollow glorification of the proletariat: a draft animal adorned with a superficial badge of class (to wit: a hat) which can output only an incoherent stream of nonsensical blather drowning out all else not by erudition but by volume, driving the more articulate to madness. In retrospect, I'm more impressed by Beckett's foretelling of social "sciences" and especially humanities' vertiginous plunge into the circle-jerk of circular quotations and stock phraseology facilitated by denial of objective reality. I'm even more amused by the observation that when the rich grows annoyed with his pet's braying, he orders the middle-class to disarm it... then "hold him up" so that the system does not collapse. Repeatedly. One of the defining ironies of the facetiously populist George Floyd riots is that they overwhelmingly attacked easily accessible (and lootable) middle-class workplaces, not seats of power or the mansions on the hill. Just as Lenin loved his useful idiots, the rich so wholeheartedly encourage these puffed-up new faiths of social "justice" through dictatorial fiat because they serve the timeless dictum divide et impera, pitting women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, and no-one against multibillionaires. "I'll orientate him!" indeed.
Whatever the solutions to social issues might be, you will not find them expressed by an incoherent gaggle of narcissistic
sadists justifying themselves by fanatical adherence to a newly minted
orthodoxy of social superiority based on base superficialities. These little corporals with their baseball bats and megaphones, with dreams of imperial thrones in their eyes, represent nothing but tyranny. Want a little secret? Lean in close to my barrel an' lemme piss on yer leg: the measure of civilization (to whatever extent we find it desirable) is not eliminating hatred, but coexisting with people you hate. It is not found in badges of membership to hierarchies old or new, in unshakable inquisitorial righteousness, but in the atheistic, cautiously anarchistic civis mundi.
I am not a very civilized cynic, but I avoid you to minimize coexistence. Prosocial "justice" activists seek to hound bad thoughts out of existence precisely because they too are uncivilized, because to them, animalistic impulse equates to action. We need civilized rules against harmful action, not speech. Action like preventing others from speaking. We need to acknowledge that powermongering is neither an aristocratic trait nor a capitalist one, neither a male one nor a white one but a human one, an animal one, an evolutionary adaptation. The self-described left wing shares in it as much as the right; mob rule is every bit a dictatorship, and in fact the former props up the latter.
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