The multiculturalist rhetoric attempts to legitimise its ideology by defining any opposition as ‘racist’. This word is part of the magical lexicon that delegitimises anything that does not conform to the liberal mindset. Those that insist on this language are not liberals; they are intolerant authoritarians who try to alienate those who disagree with their views. ‘Liberal tolerance’ is in fact quasi-dictatorial. The freedom to think for oneself is of inestimable value, and intolerant illiberals are trying to prevent people from doing so. Independence and the freedom to actualise one’s potential are prerogatives of the strong. It is not possible to achieve transcendence at any personal level without them.
In a free society, holding unpopular opinions should not be reason for social exclusion. If one really wants a ‘tolerant’ society, one must become intolerant of the current ‘negative tolerance’ regime, because it in itself epitomises intolerance. One would have to show tolerance to opinions which have been outlawed or suppressed. It is essential that we reopen the mental space and extinguish the Marxian ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (‘they know very well they are doing it, but still they do it’) for it is the freedom of thought which really necessitates tolerance.
Racism is a red line; if one of the liberal parties can convince the electorate that the only anti-mass immigration party in Sweden is ‘racist’, then their group manipulation measures have succeeded and they can be excluded from debate. But, of course, ‘racist’ is a word whose meaning has been hijacked, and it is now applied to all manner of opinions that do not conform to the sensitivity standards of political correctness. If somebody is accused of saying something ‘racist’, one can almost assume the guilty comment has nothing to do with ‘race’ by virtue of the nature of the accusation. It is a kind of identity politics that is both illogical and destructive. Accusations of racism tend to be instantly believed, and the function of the ‘r’ word is more or less that of an Austinian speech act (Austin, 1962: 52). It is quite literally ‘doing things with words’ as the accused’s role in the conversation has changed because it has been rendered illegitimate.
The ultimate objective with this accusation is perhaps ‘thought control’, a management of our perceptions of reality, to create a culturally Marxist mindset through value clarification where culture can only be discussed in terms of inequalities. Any thought or observation that fails to conform to the inexorable, but surely by now intellectually bankrupt cultural Marxism is typically painted as racism, xenophobia, homophobia etc.
Oversensitised safe-spacers use the social media cesspit, whose power as a means of bullying and puerile insult has become so strong and which evokes a false sense of community, to close down debate, to vilify, exclude and alienate anybody who is perceived as having crossed the line of political correctness.7 Liberal thinkers are far more active on social media than conservatives, who are typically awkward in defence because they are made to feel unsure as to whether their views are outdated. Employing pseudonymous speech, some students use social media not just as a platform to raise self-esteem but to hastily fabricate a moral panic, and close down any debate which they consider to be ‘offensive’. There are countless examples of social media being used to create a synthetic anger, but an obvious one is the resignation of the distinguished Noble laureate, Professor Tim Hunt, for making a few jocular comments at a lecture in South Korea. The flippant comment about the ‘problem of falling in love with female colleagues’ was perceived to be sexist, even if everybody laughed at the time. The discrepancy between the perceived wrong-doing and the vengeance wreaked is alarming to say the least. It seems as if barely a week goes by now without such an incident occurring.
The West has become curiously hyper-sensitive and this hyper-sensitivity is constantly nurtured. One of the obvious, but very malign consequences of this is that debate is drying up on a whole range of issues which might be considered sensitive in some way. We are moving away from freedom by incorporating the normative beliefs and thought processes of our society. It is obvious that we are losing our rhetorical freedom, as the spontaneity of expression has dried up. People rehearse a line in their heads first to make sure it will not cause upset; political stand-up comedy is threatened, perhaps endangered. At least, John Cleese thinks so. He has refused to do any more comedy gigs at universities. Debates are often no longer debates in the true sense of the word; questions are typically framed in the clichéd speech codes of a weak society whose members are suddenly so easily offended. Young people in particular are no longer sure how to operate linguistically in the world, and so they retreat into their own mini-groups where they feel more secure in expressing their opinions.
In academia, political correctness and the academic fad of post-modernism lies at the vortex of creating degrees in phony departments such as Women’s Studies and Gender Studies, subjects which have a highly politicised agenda and which employ fake academics who work on issues of non-binary gender theory and social inequality and who invariably have both a personal and ideological axe to grind. The cultural whim of gender theory states that a person’s ‘gender’ is whatever the person believes it to be. Such disciplines with their attempts at ideological colonisation of gender nihilism have had a highly negative impact on infinitely more thought-provoking fields such as anthropology, taking it away from its roots, its basic interest in ‘other’ cultures and moving it towards a highly politicised movement preoccupied with gender, migration, race and alleged social inequality. Women’s and Gender Studies’ lectures comprise often little more than a flagrant attack on conservative values. If it were not for the inequality they rage against, these elite institutions that the academics teach in would not exist. Women’s Studies and Gender Studies’ departments must be closed down, for they have zero intellectual credibility. They are built on an ideology, and the ideologues that teach this nonsense are completely disconnected from reality at the most fundamental level. They are programmes for activists. Nothing more. They are pathological to the core. We cannot use public funding to support vacuous subjects filled with nothing but politicised agendas.
The political bias in academia, the Humanities and Social Sciences in particular, is threatening the integrity of research. It has a radical atheistic, teleological, anti-capitalist agenda, constantly trying to eke out some source of oppression or other, but at the same time creating paradoxically an oppressive atmosphere of liberal groupthink. Its authors appear to be blind to the hypocrisy. Some students in the US in particular are being educated with the notion that the West has done something ‘evil’, and in order to talk about this they should reassign their values as prejudices; they are poisoned with the ubiquitous chimera that man can liberate himself from tradition and pre-existing meaning. It is not a noble objective to try and transcend these human realities, these bonds and powers that tie societies together. Students at elite universities have been inculcated with a fear of celebrating success because their achievements may have been due to some kind of inequality in society.
Some of the opponents to this discourse live in fear of being ‘outed’. Academics are able to say ‘we on the Left’ without stopping to think that it would be totally unacceptable in a university context to say ‘we on the Right’. This is the hegemony that the Left has over thinking in academia. One is expected to endorse the verbal confetti, the meta-drivel of certain French intellectuals who too often talk about culture exclusively in terms of oppression and power. But, their followers are unable to dispense with power. All they can do is create alternative social orders that revolve around power and domination.
Always on the look-out for the oppressed, Foucault (to take one of these French intellectuals) thought culture and knowledge are primarily discourses of power, ‘structures of domination’. Foucault’s goal is subversion. He wants to persuade people that truth is linked to a form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. It is these cultural Marxists and post-Marxists (who traded rather peculiarly th
e unemployed working class for gay rights as their focus point) that have a grip on universities, and whose cultural theory has convulsed the Western academy.
The post-modernists see society as a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups centred around the oppressor-victim paradigm. For them, group identity and conformity are privileged over individualism; mediocrity over exceptionalism. It has long been understood by the cultural Marxist Left that groups are a more powerful vehicle to claim ideological and victim status than individuals. These post-modernists have enormous power over bureaucratic structures. Within these structures, the motivation is empathy; empathy is the problem-solving mechanism. It creates negative communities of spurious victims. In a culturally nihilistic society, ‘manufactured’ victim status (for it is no way ‘real’) confers an array of advantages ranging from positive job discrimination to superior status as inscribed in the law, such as hate-speech legislation. This might be at the expense of the bona fide victim. The post-modernists are anti-individuals. They do not care who you are. Their only concern is your group identity. Diversity consultants do this on a professional basis. They claim to find systemic bias and determine that these biases are the product of socialisation, for they believe we are born as ‘blank slates’.
Post-modernists are an intellectual mob with a power-seeking proclivity. They seek power, but dress it up in the cuddly language of compassion. They tell us that they are on the side of the oppressed. Everything is a struggle for power, and the evil is always elsewhere. We cannot inform privileged students that they are victims of society. It is firstly factually preposterous, and second it is a take on the world that is unaccountable and irresponsible. Post-modernism does not in anyway address the ills of the planet. It just passes the blame and leaves its students with a wholly negative anthropology. This is the prevailing fundamentalism of the academic world, and it is surely time for a new intellectual archaeology which offers students insights into the world from more diverse political and philosophical perspectives.
The kind of hypersensitivity that we witnessed in the Tim Hunt case (but also Bret Weinstein and many others) is in part a response to the hegemonic politically correct discourse that we find in our ‘social justice’ empowered institutions of learning. It invites listeners to judge any dissenting opinion using a rather limited, and highly politicised lexicon. Looking at the world of politics, political correctness, until Trump’s victory in the United States, was the dogma accepted by almost all the mainstream political parties everywhere in the West. This is why his comments got so much attention, and why he offers hope to those concerned by the developments in our universities. It was not because his comments were necessarily outrageous (although of course some of them were), but because they did not abide to the dogma of the liberal elite. He is a patriot, and wishes to take on the globalists. He thought the 2016 US Presidential Election was going to be rigged. That idea was received with scorn, but it seems electoral irregularities and fraud have happened before in the US as they have in Europe. In the case of the US, we were told that we would only get to hear about Clinton’s 30,000 deleted e-mails after the election. In Britain, it has been admitted by Sir Eric Pickles, the former Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, that electoral fraud has taken place in Muslim communities in England, but people dare not speak out about it for reasons of political correctness.8
But, in fact Trump is not the aberration that many people think he is. One might assume that he reflects the views of many of those that do not subscribe to the dogma. Building walls to defend borders might sound extreme but it works, as we know from Hungary. When Hungary started telling people the border was closed in 2015, the numbers crossing into Austria through the little town of Spielberg went from 2,000 a day to zero. With more migration crises on the horizon, we might soon face a situation where it will be a case of either build a wall or entertain collapse. Then, a wall does not look like such an extreme measure and we might all be doing it. Borders have to be policed. It is in the interests of everybody, except for people smugglers, criminals and EU bureaucrats with totalitarian aspirations.
Banning entry to the US for citizens that come from states that support terrorism is arguably just common sense in the current terrorist context, and not a reason for outrage. It is only unfortunate that the ban does not extend to Saudi Arabia. If Islamist attacks continue, then European countries may have little choice but to do precisely the same. Recent results in elections across Europe (most notably Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary) show that the electorate is getting tired of this cowardice, and that things are beginning to swing towards more anti-globalist thinking.
The speech codes and political correctness that we have been discussing comprise a ‘new cultural grammar’ that generates connotative messages (Eco, 1970: 553-54). It is a grammar because there are rules, but just as grammar is no longer taught in our schools, this new ‘cultural grammar’ is also not taught, but it will be frowned upon if one gets it wrong. It is a covert set of rules with an unwritten ideology that govern the behaviour and belief systems of a given society. These rules have a nihilistic purpose as they serve to redefine the basic social structures and ethos of our communities; theirs is a grammar that undermines our own culture. As with the hate-speech laws (to be discussed subsequently), Islam is a leading beneficiary of this new cultural grammar propagated by the West because it is totally excluded from this orthodoxy of nihilism. Hate-speech legislation works hand-in-hand with this cultural grammar. Weighed down by this masochistic social syntax, the inner life of the Western psyche is no longer the expansive, Faustian character that Spengler (1918) portrayed, a spirit and ‘adamantine will’ that was constantly trying to transcend the limits of existence; it is instead the rootless, Godless and feeble, untranscendental soul that Evola (1961) had in mind.
Political correctness is designed to restrict thought processes — an assault on the freedom of the mind. It is part of a cultural code that rapidly becomes stifling. The impact of this cultural grammar is entirely negative because it imparts a disrespect for the achievements of one’s own culture. But, just as the hate-speech laws are flawed because they will not actually have the desired effect, so is the objective of political correctness. It is of course a fallacy to assume that this lexical obfuscation will determine the way people think. Political correctness does not kill thought, it suppresses it and bigotry will only flourish in the vacuum that it creates. As in the Soviet Union, totalitarian mind control does not work completely. However, if it is felt that the suppressed thought cannot be expressed, then we are just left with the ballot box.
Prejudices are natural: ‘they are divinations of the order of the whole of things’ (Bloom, 1987: 43). We cannot think in any other terms, even if we are banned from expressing it. We can only pretend to speak with a disembodied voice of authority. There is probably prejudice in every society, and there always will be. We cannot expunge our preconceptions, and we must have the confidence to think logically about our inherited beliefs. Even if a word is delegitimised for a notion, we are still able to conceptualise it.
Fettered with this new cultural grammar, taking offence has become a veto on the speech that the ‘offended’ see as somehow threatening. In the context of this emerging public psychosis, many think it is just safer to keep quiet, and indeed increasingly this is the advice given by parents to children. It is ‘best not to rock the boat’, even if the changes to our society are absolutely fundamental. One can no longer ruffle feathers.
This public psychosis appears to be becoming irrational: over half a million Britons signed a petition requesting that Donald Trump be banned from entering the UK for his comment that he would prevent Muslims from countries with a history of terrorism entering the US. The petition triggered a three-hour debate in the UK Parliament. There is currently a petition in the UK to ban Steve Bannon from entering the country, but Islamists who call for the death of Christians are welcome. Societies in the West appear mo
re willing than ever to accept infringements on free speech. It is known at least that the EU has been trying to suppress it for years. In 2001, the European Court of Justice ruled that the European Union could suppress criticism of its institutions and leaders.9 The Establishment does not seem to condemn such extraordinary actions, but is instead content sleepwalking into this kind of bureaucratic authoritarianism.
Suddenly, oversensitised liberals are insulted by anything that does not adhere to the politically correct dogma. Any opinion that opposes the State sanctioned politically correct one is dismissed in the manner of a totalitarian regime. A coalition of cultural nihilists, feminists, gay activists, ethnic minorities and Islamic apologists have achieved hegemony in the public sphere by effectively creating a restrictive political climate which censors any views that do not conform to the politically correct orthodoxy which they have defined themselves. This hegemony is making our societies increasingly balkanised and atomistic. It is a powerful rhetorical tool and discursive practice used by the media and intelligentsia to silence the dissenting political opinion. It is this marginalisation which President Trump is constantly trying to push back against.
The word ‘racist’ is overused to such a degree it has become almost semantically vacuous, a kind of slur to reprehend anything that could be perceived as offensive in this oversensitised Western world that we live in. Those that succumb to such language are trying to short-circuit fruitful discussion by using slanderous labels that they think nullifies the need for debate. Debate and open minds are needed, not false absolutes and the secularised Christianity of human rights and Marxism. But, both privately and publicly, there seems to be little discussion in Sweden about the topics that really matter. The lively discussions that can take place in the British pub, the Greek restaurant, the Italian café, the Icelandic hot-tub just do not seem to occur in Sweden. Consensus is both the ideal and the social imperative; debates tend to be triggered by outsiders.
The Ideology of Failure Page 6