The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  The contemporary intellectual culture is so quick to condemn anybody who strays from the orthodoxy — the prescribed commodity of ideas — as ‘bigots’, that it threatens not only freedom of expression but also any form of creative thinking. What ever happened to the opera of the mind, the battlefield of ideas and its cabaret of expressions? How can we turn back the clock to didactic thinking, the theatre of Stalinism?

  In most of the political debates in Sweden, the use of the word ‘racism’ is little more than a trite slogan to close down argument, a means to ensure the multiculturalist ideology is free of criticism. Unlike America, Sweden does not have a long history of racialised structures of inequality. And yet, criticism of immigration policy will leave one at risk of losing one’s job for one will have proven oneself morally deviant. One will have shown that one falls foul of Jantelagen, the idea that those who stand out as achievers or as norm-violators should be punished because success is due to the collective and not the individual. The Jantelag underpins arguably much of the egalitarianism in Sweden, and reads like the Ten Commandments. It is said that it goes back to Viking times. The essence of it is that if one is successful in life, it should not be assumed that this is because one worked hard or because one is ‘better’ than anybody else. It is ironic that this ancient maxim still has cultural currency in a country where billionaire wealth as a percentage of GDP is higher than in any other west European country (Sharma, 2016: 108).

  The Jantelag states that the reason for one’s success is because one was given the best opportunities. We are all in fact equal (apparently). Swedish students at school no longer go back to the old Viking manuscripts for their code of ethics, but are instead brought up on the thinking of the Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. After the Russian Revolution, Vygotsky and others wanted to build a new ‘socialist human being’. Vygotsky writes about how it is the community that ‘makes meaning’, not the individual. Individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social and cultural context within which it is embedded. Higher mental processes in the individual have their origin in social processes. Growing up under revolutionary Russia, Vygotsky wrote in the context of child development about the relationship between language and thought. Little did he know that after his premature death, his country would be enveloped in a totalitarian regime where his speculations on language and thought would play out in a rather dramatic fashion. Vygostsky (1987: 243-87) spoke of private, egocentric inner speech, and how it can go underground as it takes on a self-regulating function. It becomes a monologic speech form. In Soviet Russia, this kind of private, inner speech must have festered just as it does today in the West in a context of oppressive political correctness and groupthink.

  It is consensus that matters, even if it is a false one. Such suffocating social conformity is not questioned, even if the future of the nation is at stake. The price of violating the sacred taboos and going beyond the åsiktskorridor (the ‘corridor of opinions’ that one cannot move out of) can be extremely high. Even asking about the feasibility of integrating 160,000 asylum-seekers in one year would put one beyond the åsiktskorridor and risk an accusation of racism. In an environment of intense conditioning, political correctness acts as a form of middle class identity marking in Sweden. Its adherents are the new priesthood in a country where Christianity is almost dead. Political correctness is the new gospel, and public institutions across the country act as the pseudo-Church, policing the groupthink.

  Swedes like to maintain a balance and preserve a pleasant, consensual ambience. Private thoughts are almost by definition deviant ones since the level of supposed consensus is such that everybody knows more or less what everybody else is thinking, and therefore there is little point in articulating something. Or at least, that is how Sweden used to operate when it was a homogeneous society, and there was perhaps less reason to voice strong, controversial opinions. Social collectivism was the unquestionable norm. But striving for constant consensus becomes problematic when at least 20 per cent of the population are not ethnic Swedes.

  For a country that is more safety-conscious and less risk-taking in many respects than any other I know (it is law to have your car headlights on all the time throughout the year, and it is frowned upon if one goes for the shortest of walks without wearing a high visibility reflective running bib; what is more, the car engines in some taxis cannot start until the taxi driver has blown into the breathalyser mounted on the dash board and proved that he has not consumed any alcohol), Sweden has taken the most almighty risk with precious little discussion or debate. The norm in Swedish companies is for everybody to be involved in discussions, and for the discussion to continue until complete consensus has been achieved. Not so, it seems, when it comes to the most fundamental question of all — the future demographic and ethnic make-up of the country.

  A faux consensus-oriented society (to some extent it must be so, otherwise SD [Sverigedemokraterna], the anti-mass immigration party, would not be polling on 21 per cent) is a disaster in times of crisis because the national groupthink will lead to the wrong actions being taken. But, it is also dangerous. Violence can ensue when opinions are not aired because it is felt they do not conform to the groupthink. This might be the context in which mass shootings now occur in the US on a regular basis.

  The logic of the Volksgemeinschaft is that if one’s opinions do not fit into the liberal consensus, then one is persona non grata. There is a fear of being different in Sweden. Contrary voices are mocked and marginalised. If one is not actively promoting diversity (and its metonymic relationship with race which liberals are invariably anxious to forge), then one must be against it. If one is not pro-mass immigration, one must be a racist or Islamophobic. These are pre-programmed reactions, and prevent rational dialogue. This is the fallacy of false correspondences where erroneous conclusions relating to the central beliefs of an ideology are drawn, even if they do not correspond in any way to what was actually said. Such red herrings or false correspondences always relate to divisive issues.

  The discussion of illegal immigrants in Sweden, if one ever arises, has been polarised between the anti-mass immigration party and the naïve do-gooders with their culture of sentimentality and self-righteous hatred for those who do not share their moralising views — views which must be expressed at every opportunity. This kind of political polarisation is now being witnessed right across Europe. A Swedish society of ultra-liberal values has become nihilistic and self-destructive in nature. But, even more disturbing is the complete intolerance of any opposition to the ultra-liberal propaganda that is heard through all the media channels, as we will see. The resulting intellectual gloop goes hand-in-hand with a collapse of objective political analysis in Sweden. Surely, at some point such a society has to break down. Political correctness was meant to unite different social and ethnic groups. Instead, it silently divides them. It is perhaps in this respect that a multiculturalist ideology embedded in political correctness feels most totalitarian: the opposition is wrong-footed, because to speak the truth might not fall within the limits of acceptable discourse. But also because political correctness is not just a question of stating that one should use one word instead of another. One might argue that it has become moreover the basis for social relations more generally in the West.

  Political correctness acts like a virus because it creates the problem it claims it is trying to prevent, and so it requires more of itself. Political correctness comes before factual correctness. The ‘tolerant’ ideology that promotes multiculturalism does not ‘tolerate’ free speech, criticism of Islam or minorities or any opinion independent of its own stifling ideology. It is a conversation strategy that always supports the minority or the alleged marginalised, be it the refugee or the ethnic minority; a form of pervasive sanctioning that threatens creativity and expression. It creates mental barriers resulting in thinking and speaking framed in perversely different ways. What is spoken is the parroted opinions of commoditised gro
upthink, what is thought is a chain of free associations. If the latter slips into the former, one is rebuked. In this respect, political correctness acts as a form of groupspeech. For the liberal-left elite, autonomy has become heteronomy whilst heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. A politically incorrect argument is null and void in an environment of linguistic cleansing. Political correctness has become tyrannical because it aims to banish ideas which do not conform to the ideology. It is an attempt at a form of cultural conditioning, but it results in specious, politically correct statements of no intellectual value.

  Those who object to the dictates of this political correctness are sent for diversity training, a form of re-education to free them from the apparently pernicious white, male hegemonic discourse. Many universities are now employing lawyers to give diversity training to Freshers. Nothing has changed over the years: the behaviour of male rugby and football teams is absolutely no different today from twenty years ago. What has changed is that young people live now in an age where they have been encouraged to become oversensitised to language, to see themselves as the perennial victim. Today, we live in a culture of victimhood where advertisements on television, radio and in the Press constantly invite people to consider whether they may be a ‘victim’ of some kind of scam or other, and thus eligible for a payout. We are thus invited to become not only overly sensitive to language, but also to actions. Suddenly, all kinds of actions should be perceived as ‘harassment’. In this Brave New World, language is sanitised, actions are regulated and opinions are sanctioned by a powerful, but vicious social media who will force through nasty, spiteful language the resignations of any high profile figures who question the orthodoxy.

  The consequence of political correctness is that people feel as if they cannot speak out against certain events and cannot act on their beliefs. This can be seen in the response to non-terrorist incidents on British soil. When the police tried to deal with the cases of the grooming of young girls by Asian men in Oxford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Derby and Bradford, they were accused of institutional racism. Commentators on the Left did everything possible to blur the facts, claiming completely implausibly that it had nothing to do with ethnicity and religion. Indifferent to the torture that over a thousand British girls were faced with, they ran to defend the perpetrators (all of whom happened to be Muslim) in a despicable display of betrayal. In certain circles, the case was barely mentioned because it muddled their perverse ideology. It is widely approved of to make films about paedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church, but it would be politically incorrect to make a film (or perhaps even make mention of) the same abuse handed out to children by grooming gangs.

  Over a thousand British girls were abused and nothing was done about it in part because of the oppressive culture of political correctness. Western societies are falling over backwards to accommodate the multiculturalists’ vision, even if it means turning a blind eye to the most appalling abuse. British children were abused, raped and tortured by gangs of Pakistani men. The Oxford imam, commenting on the abuse and rape of white girls, said: ‘race and religion were inextricably linked to the recent spate of grooming rings in which Muslim men have targeted under-age white girls’.10 This ever so obvious conclusion can be made by an Asian, but not by a white Briton. Immigrant group social behaviour cannot be considered beyond criticism. Laughing at the culture of political correctness, the groomers acted as if they were above the law, as if they had carte blanche to disseminate their evil knowing that the Leftist media and key members of the Labour Party (and no doubt one or two other ennobled, pro-Islam éminence grises) would rush to defend them.

  The same happened after large groups of girls in Sweden were molested by migrants from the Middle East and North Africa at various music festivals in 2016. Our fear of racism has led to a dangerous culture of self-censorship, not being able to act when one knows something is wrong. We are losing reasoned argument. It creates a sense of unease when in one’s homeland the ancient tradition of fox hunting is banned, but not halal meat, where, in accordance with Islamic law, the jugular vein is cut and the animal is left to bleed to death. In 2012, a France2 television documentary revealed that all of the slaughterhouses in the greater Paris metropolitan area are now producing all of their meat in accordance with Islamic shari’ah law.11 The meat is not marked as such. Such developments indicate that society’s norms are increasingly dictated to us by an unassailable minority. It might be argued that halal is a way to impose aspects of shari’ah law on a non-Muslim majority.

  If we were on a level playing field, surely both fox hunting and halal meat should be banned on the grounds of barbarism. Combining such liberalism with an open door policy to radically different cultures has resulted in a muddled sense of priorities and values. There is something very wrong here, as the non-immigrant population feel extremely awkward taking a stand in their own country. It is this PC culture, an Orwellian threat which regulates free thinking and leads to ambiguous one-way conversations, that has led indirectly to a basket of social problems which are increasingly unmanageable. There is a chasm, a jarring disconnect between an all-pervasive public dogma and private thinking. The lack of response to the political correctness agenda is an insidious part of our cultural grammar that has been institutionalised right across the public sector. Attempts to enforce consensus have meant that we have lost certain essential freedoms. What we can communicate and are allowed to believe is increasingly monitored. Leaders of the West are more concerned to condemn what they believe is Islamophobia than Islamist zealotry. The relentless accusation of Islamophobia is often little more than a muzzle on free speech, an effective shield against criticism of any kind. Europe is sometimes unwilling to recognise the real threat of Islamic terrorism, and instead the sentiment is more often an accommodationist one.

  The word ‘Islamophobic’ is used to scare people into silence. The constant recycling of this kind of language against opponents of multiculturalism amounts to a secular fatwa because it acts as a pseudo-ruling against free speech, a form of psychological terrorism. It is a means of intimidation, and so-called ‘liberals’ are increasingly managing to enshrine these bogus accusations into the legal system. Hate-speech laws should protect our own cultural values or norms (and, yes, we have our own: we have not yet become the Leftist blank slate that cultural and historical revisionists aspire to). Instead, step-by-step, we are moving conceptually closer to a system of shari’ah law, and that means irrevocable change as the nation is founded on the notion of a secular law. A nation which has conflicting (and not shared) conceptions of justice will unsurprisingly in the long-term become a troubled one. In the face of this threat, relativism is not the answer. Relativism has no values to defend.

  A rhetoric of alleged victimhood and the moral superiority that comes with it has brought about a form of disappropriation on behalf of the ethnic Briton, usurping the moral and cultural infrastructure of the West. It is an insidious ideology and to tackle it, our thinking will need to be urgently reprioritised as our cultural heritage and basic system of values are being undermined. The integuments of Western societies are at stake. This is not turning the cultural clock back to the 1950s. It is putting faith and trust in a system and model that has worked for centuries, and not an ill-conceived dictatorial project with a multiculturalist agenda.

  ***

  It is my belief that our sense of values is being turned upside down by a spurious idiom of universal human rights which has become inflationary and is invoked every time a minority chooses to disregard his host culture. In the secular societies that we in the West live in today, human rights have been sacralised and mobilised as an ideological tool. The universal human rights idiom sits at the centre of the hegemonic politically correct liberal groupthink, and works to prioritise universality and the abstract over an established, concrete life and stable conceptions of identity based on security and community. The airy-fairy objective of universality ends up impinging on the freedom of the settled community, and c
ontradicting the relativist cause that the human rights advocates have been told they must not question. Ideological imperialism can only end in disaster. It always does. Human rights discourse is synonymous with ideological and legislative protection for any minority group. If legislation is continuously put in place that might potentially offend the majority, then an avoidable conflict might be escalated even if the original idea was a well-intentioned one.

  Human rights and its subjective rhetoric of ‘making amends’ should not be allowed to trample all over religious beliefs, traditional morality and people’s sense of belonging. If a country wishes to prioritise spiritual values over human rights, then that choice should be respected. If another nation wishes to question the self-evident doctrines of the Church of universal human rights, then, as intelligent beings, we should at least listen to them. Surely, relativism would insist on that, and surely a real democracy would give a hearing to the majority as well as the minority. But it should really be obvious that there are no truly universal human rights, otherwise there would not be multiple permutations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As de Benoist (2011: 61) points out, if human rights are so obviously universal, then why have we just decided this over the last fifty years? Ostensibly, there can be nothing inherent in its universality. There is a contradiction between the ‘historical contingency that presided at its elaboration and the demand of universality which it intends to affirm’ (de Benoist, 2011: 61). The universality they appeal to is the liberal, secularised Western societies based on mass consumption (de Benoist, 2011: 16).