The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  It is difficult to even question the rationale of universal human rights in a consensus society like Sweden without rapidly being labelled a ‘fascist’. As de Benoist (2001: 9) observes, ‘it is as blasphemous and shocking to criticise the ideology of human rights as it once was to doubt the existence of God’. Religion and liberal ideology have swapped roles. Liberal ideology is now treated like the word of God, and religion is a topic of public ridicule (amongst liberal intellectuals at least). It is a remarkable volte-face, and some might say the crowning achievement of secularism.

  The whole subjective question of human rights is another example of the intolerance of the Leftist ideologues. It cannot be debated, for it is treated as absolute dogma. Christian dogma is more likely to be discussed than the universality of human rights. It sits at the centre of the liberal creed, a cocktail of contradictions that stipulates human rights as an anthropological universal but at the same time endorses a relativist perspective. However, many of the cultures which we are told to embrace under the multiculturalist umbrella are unambiguous in their rebuttal of Western values which are packaged by the relativists as ‘universal’. The common truth of the universality of human rights is completely erroneous. It is the stuff of satire and caricature, an assault on the phenomenology of the human fact.

  For the ideologues, it is unsettling that some people might want to escape liberal aporias and might not share these values, this overinflated sense of responsibility, hysterical moral zeal or ‘hypermorality’ (Gehlen, 1969) that the migrants have been so quick to manipulate and cash in on. And, therefore human rights can operate as a pseudo-ideology, a social pathology because it dogmatically stipulates that every individual from the Middle East headed to Sweden is a victimised refugee, even if that is a statistical lie. It plays into this naïve optimistic universalism that the Left is constantly seeking to embrace, and has become something akin to a societal compulsive disorder. Many hope that the migrants to Sweden will constitute cheap labour for an ageing economy. Instead, segregation of the sort that has been witnessed in Sweden the last five years or so might result in urban caliphates and Wahabist nests.

  Reflecting on human rights and political correctness, Lacanian Žižek has something useful to say when he states that ‘political correctness is indeed paradigmatic of a form of modern totalitarianism’.12 Many will think this is nothing but populist fear-mongering, as totalitarianism is rightly associated with mass, state-endorsed violence and that is thankfully not the case here, but political correctness along with groupthink was originally a feature of totalitarianism. It has its roots in cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School whose aim was to unleash a cultural revolution on Western society, but the term political correctness comes in fact from Soviet times when it referred to the extension of political control to ethics, behaviour and education. Political correctness was there to ensure that all aspects of life were consistent with ideological orthodoxy, and that is more or less its function today. However, it is important to understand that ab initio political correctness was through cultural Marxism at least explicitly a mode of anti-Western thinking.

  Political correctness is of course not totalitarian in the conventional sense as we are not talking about the State controlling every aspect of our lives, but when used as multiculturalist propaganda it is conducive to a totalitarianism of the mind because only the politically correct viewpoint can be the legitimate one. This is characteristic of Goldberg’s (2009) ‘liberal fascism’; a term which is not oxymoronic in any way, but an accurate portrayal of the current state of affairs in parts of Western Europe. However, Goldberg in his book at least uses the term in a different context. He argues that fascist movements were and are left-wing, and states the case for liberalism having its doctrinal roots in European fascism.

  As it is a form of totalitarianism that defines itself paradoxically in terms of ‘liberal goodness’, political correctness is especially difficult to disagree with. If one were to disagree with it, one would a priori not be compassionate, which in a society like Sweden would be reason for being ostracised. But, it is a form of totalitarianism nonetheless. It is a paradoxical form of totalitarianism practised by a group who might be Christian in their actions, but most likely atheistic in their beliefs. All those who believe in freedom (wherever they sit on the political spectrum) must surely reject political correctness because, if nothing else, it represents a constraint on ideological choice.

  In Sweden, intolerant conformists acting in accordance with the politically correct orthodoxy wish to depolarise gender identities. Sweden is consistently setting new lows for political correctness as feminists (women and men who define themselves as such) are given carte blanche to create a gender-neutral society on the grounds that gender is an obstacle to participation in a liberal democracy. There should be an effort to push back against these pressures because the nature of nature is polarity. There are only two genders. Sweden is trying to turn sexual norms completely upside down in accordance with the latest dogma. There are genderless schools (for example, Egalia School in Stockholm) where the teachers are not allowed to use the pronoun ‘him’ or ‘her’. This kind of social engineering has been rolled out on a national level. Sweden, and increasingly other countries in the West, is trying to educate young children to think about issues of gender when they are still at an age when this is no proper concern of theirs.

  Propagandistic travesty comes before common sense and reason. It is reasonable to assume that this ultra-feminist and well-resourced massaging of the psyche might do long-term psychological damage to the next generation of children. They might be left simply confused as to who they are. That is what normally happens if one redefines ingrained concepts. This extremist thinking is to be found everywhere in Sweden. If it continues as the State ideology, then it might succeed in destroying the conventional family as a social construct. The dissolution of gender differences is the next stage in the incessant trend to constantly create new categories and permutations of pan-sexual union. If historical conventions are not being questioned, then it cannot be ‘progress’. Without family, one is left with nothing but the totalitarian State as the support network. The ideology of any totalitarian regime has as its end goal to make its citizens depend on the state for everything. It is therefore perhaps not so surprising that State ultra-feminism has become the ideological cornerstone. In Sweden, the State with its secularist ideology has become de facto God, and the State has become the family as well. This kind of thinking has long ceased to be part of the egalitarian project, whose objectives were achieved many years ago. It looks increasingly like a project in State control.

  These initiatives chime with the suggested amendments made to the Swedish Constitution in 2009 (En reformerad grundlag, 2009: 83) which would make the language ‘gender neutral’ (könsneutralt). Many Swedes seem to subscribe to the strange anti-essentialist fantasy that gender and sexuality are purely social constructs, whatever people choose to make of them, which can be constructed to achieve different political goals. And thus they believe language should reflect that.

  It might be old-fashioned to assume that gender is a binary notion with so-called ‘gender-outlaws’ demanding recognition for a range of gender identities. The whole bear-trap of gender and sexuality has become neither fish nor fowl apparently. There is an attempt to capture the political space by couching arguments in terms that are thought to be too sensitive to deconstruct. Frame something in liberal groupthink terms, no matter how absurd, and few will refute it, as it would ‘out them’ for not belonging to the liberal hegemony. Total relativism undermines even the basic fundamentals of human society, and thus everything is up for liberal reanalysis.

  Back in Stockholm, the books at school have been carefully selected to avoid traditional portrayals of gender and parenting roles. There are ‘gender officers’ in some schools to make sure this sort of thing is done correctly, and to ensure for instance that boys are given the chance to play with dolls. Sleeping Beauty an
d Cinderella are not acceptable as they may be deemed sexist. Instead, pre-school children might be given a book where two male giraffes adopt an abandoned crocodile. Other schools have gender-neutral changing rooms for those uncomfortable with the label ‘male’ and ‘female’. In this regard, they are just following the norm set by universities in the West. In Norway, NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Company) changed the names of the characters in the extremely popular children’s story of Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren. In the original story, the main character’s father is absent. This is because he is a negerkonge (‘negro king’) on a tropical island. The NRK version has him being a sydhavskonge (‘southern sea king’).13 The ideologues that fuss over these things are like stray dogs. They recognise no boundaries, no master, and wander around aimlessly, defecating on the metaphorical pavements.

  At the Swedish Parliament, a baroque painting of a woman bearing her breasts was removed as it was thought it would cause offence to apparently both women and Muslims.14 On that basis, previous exhibitions of baroque paintings at the National Museum in Stockholm, such as the one in 2014 or the Rubens exhibition in 2010, would have to have been banned. All kinds of statues would have to be covered up. Elsewhere, Swedish books are being removed from library shelves for containing ‘stereotypical depictions of other cultures’.15

  It is crucial that a response is found to counter this conditioned consciousness because it is profoundly irrational, inimical to common sense and is leading to the ‘politics of folly’ (Tuchman, 1984). Political correctness is intolerant bigotry — the very thing that it is meant to oppose. Had the political correctness been put aside and an open, democratic discussion been possible, a solution might have been found earlier to the inflammatory social problems of modern Sweden: the explosion in rape statistics and the gang-style shootings in the major cities that we seldom hear about in the Swedish Press. This has been but one of the costs of unshared idealism. The moralistic ideology of the liberal elite comprising politicians, journalists, academics and judges has closed down the debate completely. There is little point having an open society if minds are closed. In such an environment, any extremist ideology such as militant Islam can only prosper.

  To speak out against these developments in Sweden would leave one being described as ‘unenlightened’. No society has ever done this before. This is an attempt to create a society of rootless people, denying their history, culture and now gender. A society which has been told it has no culture, that neither race nor gender exist, might encounter a militant Islamist ideology for which these issues have profound, theological significance. Chaos will ensue as the increasingly secular democracies are left supine before the zeal of radicalism.

  Categories are necessary. The ultra-liberal can try and do away with them, believing, because he has been sufficiently ideologised, that their inherent prejudices are offensive, but he will just recreate subsequent permutations of them. With the current obsessions of ‘equality’ and ‘tolerance’, he has arguably already done so. No society has ever lived without some system of categories or classification, because man is a social animal.16 It is the same with stereotypes: we can pretend they do not exist, that they are erroneous or inherently racist, but they will always be there. They will reemerge if expunged because group identities, professions and social differences cannot be completely erased. In a complex world, the mind needs to resort to perceptions of group identity to simplify the information and create some kind of social order.

  Political correctness might be seen as an authoritarian thought-code that claims to stand for tolerance, but is in fact ‘fascist’. As Orwell (1944) himself said, ‘fascism’ has become ‘an almost entirely meaningless word’, but is synonymous with bullying; and political correctness can indeed be seen as a form of bullying. Political correctness is an attempt to enforce and sometimes legalise certain kinds of behaviour, and thus has no place in a ‘free’ society. Anything that falls foul of ‘enforcing stereotypes’ is politically incorrect, and thus unacceptable. The implications of political correctness are therefore profound, because its advocates are looking to sanctify a certain kind of life and mould a certain kind of person. They seek to create clones of themselves: a mêlée of technocratic zombies devoid of vim. Political correctness is much more than just words. It is a ‘way of belonging’ as well as a ‘way of speaking’. If one can speak and think uncritically about all the liberal universalist notions, then one truly ‘belongs’ in the global village. By accepting the liberalist ideology that one does not belong to anything, one has finally found somewhat paradoxically that one belongs to something universal, even if it is wholly abstract.

  In this Brave New World without stereotypes, conversation must be neutral, carefully packaged in a sanitised vocabulary as every vestige of identity is stripped or concealed: it is to live in a world of countermanded Ball tickets, a world without religion, class, gender, race, sexuality and political opinion where people are of equal ability. It is not an attempt at creating inclusiveness, it is an attempt at creating a homogeneous universe without colour, personality, flair, detail or mischief of any kind (a sort of ethnographic nightmare). This in itself is rather ironic as political correctness advocates are meant to be advocating ‘diversity’ über alles.

  There has to be space for self-irony and mockery. Always. We must be free to shock, and play with life and especially words: small parcels of magic to be treated like little nuggets of gold. This stifling wind is blowing down hypnotic, endless roads where the traveller is meant to rationalise who he is and why he is not better than who he is. It implies an impaired contact with reality, a form of cultural neurosis. Every age has its own collective neurosis, and this is ours. But, it must also have its own psychotherapy to deal with its neurosis. Political correctness is therefore a kind of psychosis where self-obsessed careerists navigate unthinkingly a false reality. It is only those that speak out against it that have not succumbed to this collective psychosis.

  Political correctness at universities across the UK has now almost reached the epidemic proportions that it has in America. Political correctness is crying out for affirmative action, but academics give in to these demands without fail because, once again, any response to political correctness is considered politically incorrect. Humour is really the best strategy to deal with inanity; flippancy is the finest armour-plating against the enemy. One should aim to bring an air of persiflage to the proceedings.

  ‘Enforcing stereotypes’ is universally the platform for comedy. If we are not able to talk in terms of stereotypes and not able to be critical, then comedy really is dead since all humour is critical in some way. Humour and laughter is surely an important function of every gathering, every society. If nothing else, it operates, as Bergson (1975: 76) pointed out, as a control mechanism for deviant behaviour, and as a social means of recognising an absurdity. It creates an arena for the examination of controversial social issues, and a means of connecting across boundaries. In the absence of this social corrective, if criticism is not allowed, and there is no humour, who is to say that one is not living in a totalitarian state? Who is to say whether our future will be neither democratic nor free, but instead totalitarian masquerading as democratic and free?

  Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual’s human beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual’s own culture. It purports to be a mode of thinking where there are no objective truths that transcend individual and cultural perspectives. In practice, it has been employed as a tool of unrelenting intellectual assault for a politically correct, moralistic ideology. This is the Lebenswelt that we are meant to all share. The form of cultural relativism practised by the liberal elite is effectively spiritual entropy with a masochistic distaste for its own culture; a secular heresy of Christianity and a pernicious lie. It is implausibly overpermissive, and is an attempt at mobilising a rather perverse imagination. Cultural relativism might be acceptable as a principle if its adherenc
e and normative advocacy were universal. But shari’ah law for instance is explicit in its institutionalisation of inferior status for non-Muslims; the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims is the cornerstone of an entire system of humiliating regulations for non-believers. Shari’ah ‘is a complete way of life based on a submission to God alone’ (Qutb, 1964: 82). It crowds out anything non-Islamic.

  As Qutb, the former leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, says in Maʿalim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), ‘anyone who serves someone other than God’— be that someone (or something) a priest, president, a parliament, or a legal statute of a secular state — ‘is outside God’s religion, although he may claim to profess this religion’ (1964: 60). The Kantian categorical imperative — the maxim that nobody should act on a principle that he would not wish to be universal — an idea that is so central to thinking in the West since the Enlightenment, would be incomprehensible to the Islamic culture which centralises the notion of ‘honour’.

  This might become the context in which the liberal West is preaching the benefits of cultural relativism. Its result is that there is no measure of truth or morality. On the one hand, we are saying we will turn a blind eye to a Muslim uncle who removes his niece’s clitoris with a knife because it is their traditional culture (there has never been a single FGM conviction in the UK, but we know the practice is widespread), but on the other hand certain representatives of the incoming Islamic culture (but also Western politicians) are telling us we should convert our churches to mosques (the demand made recently in Sweden).17 It is doubly feeble: respecting others even if their values are completely alien to our own, but at the same time letting our own values be subjugated by other, ill-intentioned ones. Only a confused nation that has lost its purpose, forgotten its historical trajectory could be ambivalent to such developments. There is at least no chance of Sweden falling into the Thucydidean trap.