The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  The West is prioritising a vacuous system of beliefs based on a fallacious cultural relativist principle. If everybody should tolerate everybody else’s beliefs and cultural practices, then relativism becomes a trans-cultural moral principle and relativism is false since it would be disregarding the diversity of cultural beliefs. We are asking people to be tolerant of intolerance in another culture, but not in our own.18 The relativist has a worldview of their own, one that they exempt from their relativism to make their own pronouncements about no one belief being universally true. It is structurally self-confuting. Individually, how can we not be ethnocentric when cultural prejudice is innate? Diversity is a pernicious ideology because it assumes that everybody of a certain ethnicity thinks exactly the same. The basis for the philosophy is that the way somebody thinks is inextricably tied to their group identity. That is what the racists think. This is precisely the biological essentialism that the post-modernists are always complaining about.

  And yet the same people on the Left who rush to denounce so-called imperialists often fully hypocritically support the EU and its previous accession talks with Turkey, a country bordering on a dictatorship after the failed coup in July 2016, and one which sports an appalling human rights record. When the EU attempts to go beyond what is normally defined as the geography of Europe, it is clear in fact that the imperial fantasy is not dead.

  In the spirit of this blanket cultural relativism, Swedish Integration Minister Erik Ullenberg’s justification for removing the word ‘race’ from Swedish legislation was that he was concerned some might infer that a certain race is ‘better’ than an other.19 He wanted to deny the concept of race, but could not formulate the denial without using the word ‘race’, and so demonstrated the meaninglessness of his project. Such initiatives suggest that Sweden has officially endorsed cultural Marxism. Swedish liberal politicians and journalists harbour a curious wish to create a society of rootless people. Journalists always entice SD members to talk about ‘Swedish values’. Once the SD politician has listed them, they then quickly follow it up with the assertion that the stated values are not in fact Swedish, but ‘international’.

  Their perennial intention is apparently to convince people that Sweden does not stand for anything. This is the contemporary doxa amongst Leftist thinkers. If the Swedish people are not rooted to anything, then there can be no objection to allowing in so many people with roots that belong elsewhere because there is no cultural content to dilute. Note that the same politicians and journalists talk all the time of ‘integration’, but if Swedes are rootless and a Swedish value system is a myth, then one might rightly question what one is trying to integrate them into. The idea that Sweden needs to be created ex nihilo is both false and ludicrous, and is engineered so that the cultural nihilists can appeal to their tiresome universalist principles as the basis of society. But there is no reason to assume that liberal democracy will reign supreme in the future. The new Chinese middle class will not be living in a liberal democracy. Turkey and Russia have turned authoritarian. There are potentially millions of young radicalised Arab males, many of whom have come to Europe. They have not grown up under liberal democracy.

  But there are of course Swedish values and there is such a thing as society. It is not a random assembly of individuals. There is a Swedish cultural ethos based on centuries of heritage, solidarity and bonds of trust between people who do not know one another but share an identity. Nationality means many things, but it is not about owning the right document or certificate.

  Migration should be a contractual arrangement. Surely, even the multiculturalist can see that the Swedish way should be based on ‘a certain idea of living together’ (to quote the European Court of Human Rights in their upholding of the French burqa ban).20 Sadly, for many of the ‘new Swedes’, welfare support is often their only modality of belonging to Sweden. Some are conspicuous aliens who have made sometimes little effort to be part of their host country. Many of these people belong first and foremost to the exiled ummah. They are ‘clients’ of the Swedish welfare system. They are housed in one of the suburban ghettos, given enough money to live off, but no opportunities to move into mainstream society. Not ever mastering the language, some tend to turn inwards to the Muslim community where they have been sent, and many of them remain there for the rest of their lives. They are not ‘outsiders’ there. It is not difficult to see why integration works better in the UK than in the Scandinavian countries.

  As Scruton (2015: 238) notes, ‘relativist beliefs exist because they sustain a community — the new ummah of the rootless’ — the globalists who wish to expunge all social identity markers perhaps, but who will end up with a society where public order does not work because the sense of loyalty and allegiance has been erased. But, it is our rootedness in our surroundings that creates unknowingly an existential framework which governs large parts of our lives and our overall philosophy. To belong somewhere is to be part of the collective consciousness that defines the community, that community which is the permanent and perpetual condition of things. As a member of a community, one belongs to an organic reality. It is not clear what can be gained from constantly trying to undermine such parameters of belonging and idioms of social association. The notion of ‘belonging’ should conjure up positive feelings of intimacy and attachment, not negative ones inspired by the neurotic relativist dogma.

  Relativism and political correctness are perhaps nowhere more suffocating than in the American education system. In the US in particular, but also increasingly in the UK, education is turning into some kind of strange therapy. Some universities in the UK have dissent-free ‘safe spaces’ where coddled students can be free of banter or any kind of language that might somehow be perceived to be sexist, racist or any other -ist. Only speech that stigmatises the opponent and conforms to the feminist, anti-racist ideology is acceptable. This silencing of the opposition is to be found in all totalitarian regimes, as it serves to underpin the crucial distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

  As a sign of the depressing globalisation of American university norms, Edinburgh University for instance operates a ‘safe space’ policy where there is a zero tolerance policy towards discrimination based on: age, class, disability, gender and gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, political affiliation, pregnancy and maternity, race and ethnicity, religion, belief and sexual orientation.21 It is difficult to know how this works in practice. The policy also includes a clause which states that it does not discriminate against anybody on the grounds that they are a sex worker (whorephobia). Goldsmiths, London adds biphobia, transphobia, disablism, nationality, gender presentation and language ability amongst others to the endless list of reasons for which somebody might take offence.22 Our corporatised universities are beginning to look like something out of a Monty Python skit, with the causes of the cultural Marxists resembling a malignant self-parody, with their over-concern for minor detail. Sadly, this is not a case of surreal humour or hyperbolic absurdity, but one of a plethora of examples of despotic university bureaucrats trying to turn a dynamic environment into a sterile one through attempts at policing thought.

  Universities are becoming oppressive breeding grounds of dogmatism with the multiculturalist, anti-racist ideology that lecturers are passing onto their students. It is not fascist to defend one’s culture and history, or to attempt to preserve the prevailing social ecology. It is fascist to close down debate through threatened violence and thuggery. Students should be taught that they can be proud (and not guilty) of what their grandparents did, for they were defenders of freedom. We cannot educate people in self-hatred. They should understand that culture and intellect are not objects of resentment, and that it is both good and correct to celebrate achievement. Instead, students nowadays constantly crave some kind of moral superiority by declaring war on the past, by attempting to remove statues of Cecil Rhodes for instance in the manner of the Taliban blowing up Buddhist monuments. They desire a propagandistic
mutability of the past whereby the past can be modified or massaged to match the ideologised vision of the present — another feature of totalitarianism.

  This kind of guilt and self-contempt is absolutely key to the liberal ideologisation of the individual. As Žižek (1984: 41) correctly observes, the reason why the KGB recruited so many people from Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s was because a section of the well-connected upper class felt a great sense of guilt. Around them, there was economic chaos and misery, and yet they were living a great life of privilege. It is for this reason that communism had such appeal. The KGB made hay whilst the sun shone within the Oxbridge Colleges. Eighty years later, things are slightly different. Students at Canadian universities are now encouraged to report their ‘white privilege’. This kind of discrimination and vilification of white men borders on abuse. Notably, class is never on the list of privileges, and thus the biggest losers of such a perverse project are exactly the group that need most help: white, working class males. The post-modernists are attacking knowledge and creating an ethos of institutional atrophy at the heart of our universities. Nowadays, those who are white and have a whiff of privilege about them are made to feel guilty about any perceived superiority, and thus some of them choose to feign the habits and speech of the working classes. We saw this with many members of the previous Cabinet in the UK Government who went out of their way to even change the way they spoke. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was well known for peppering his speech with glottal stops to make him sound like a yob, but then even the Prime Minister at the time (David Cameron) started doing it, desperate for some covert prestige. ‘Call me Dave’ seemed to be the only way, except for those that know him or are related to him of course. This guilt complex is a Western syndrome and has reached levels of paranoia. The same people that are telling us that race does not exist imply that one should somehow feel a specious sense of guilt for being ‘white’. Such flaccid, bourgeois liberalism, riddled with such contradictions, is trying to corrupt our social consciousness. Fortunately, there is something of a backlash against this disingenuous behaviour, and many people in the UK irrespective of their political position warm to the Conservative Backbencher, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP simply because he does not try to be somebody else. He is posh, and is the first to admit it. He is also a brilliant polymath and the most effective backbencher of my generation.

  For the multiculturalist nihilist, the problem with white males appears to be that they have been historically the dominant group, and this feeds into the Foucaultian ‘economy of power relations’ (Foucault, 1983: 208-26). The multiculturalists are thus correcting the ideology of the other by enforcing their own dominating ideology, and therefore once again are the epitome of hypocrisy with their double-standards moral fervour. They wish to destroy one alleged hegemony, and then create their own. This moral bullying is often indicative of the atheistic multiculturalist who has forgotten that dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts. The multiculturalist believes that the migrant who assaults German women and children is rebelling against German power structures, and that Germans who criticise such assaults are racists. The German media became unambiguously an enemy of its own people when it tried to defend and make excuses for the Afghan, ISIS-flag-carrying axe murderer who came to Germany in 2016 claiming that he was a refugee.23 We are living in surreal times where we absolutely cannot trust our own liberal media to support the ethnic majority.

  Even if Western culture has given us Mozart, Shakespeare, Bach and Pushkin, it is considered inherently flawed, because this genius has come almost exclusively from Western white males. And therefore, it is better to live in a dissolute world, to indulge in an effete, self-critical culture without freethinking iconoclasts. We live in a world where Stockholm University removes all the pictures of white male Professors (so-called DWEMs — Dead White European Males) from the walls for no other reason than because they are ‘white and male’.24 Paradoxically, this was done apparently in the name of ‘diversity and tolerance’. Hertford College, Oxford did the same, and then the trend caught on in a number of the other Oxford colleges. In such a context, the incoming culture thus rapidly becomes the strong culture, as we have been so busy denying and repudiating our own. Multiculturalist dogma in practice is therefore a much more sinister notion than simply respecting other cultures, a notion which few could disagree with. This vainglorious experiment risks creating cultural apartheid, a mosaic of conflicting identities. It employs a speech code that amounts to a form of Wittgensteinian verbal imprisonment: an obsessively homogenising, neutral language that is based on the systematic shunning of stereotypes devoid of judgement and opinions, but anxious to employ cuddly euphemisms. Such language makes it easy to forget that liberalism is authoritarian and concerned with control and power, even if it is not as brutal as the real totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

  Language that ‘locks up thought’ fences in ideas that can only be expressed in a private arena, and so thinking and prejudice is privatised and open debate is shunted from the regulated public space to the unregulated Internet — the memic abyss. If thinking about the ‘big topics’ is internalised en masse, then a section of society risks being pushed towards a shadowy periphery. There are legal limits to expression, but not yet legal limits to thinking. With the policing of public debate, one should surely expect radicalisation to continue to flourish. Equality legislation will have had totally the wrong effect, and might with retrospect be seen as a mistake, as it will have disaffected a significant percentage of the population whose voice has been silenced by the law.

  In part, this explains the pervasive malice and nastiness that is to be found on both left- and right-wing oriented Internet chat forums, often written by people who, when not sitting in front of their PC, are perfectly decent and well-mannered. This dichotomy of pseudo-totalitarian, over-regulated socio-cultural spheres and cornered thinking will create many more problems for our Western societies in the future, if it is not addressed. The countries that the liberals blanket-label as ‘racist’ such as Russia have other authoritarian issues of their own, but they do not have this problem, because speech is not policed for political correctness (it might be policed for other things). The narrative of political correctness is quite rightly irrelevant.

  In such a context, cursing under one’s breath or sacrosanct silence becomes an active force, something more than a sign of introspection in an age of anxiety. Increasingly, some people refuse to voice any political opinion; an air of intimidation lingers when the daylight is dim and the shadows are tawny. The gathering clouds look increasingly autocratic in moments of Socratic doubt. Ways of speaking and the symbolic patterns of language have been redefined by liberal norms which are in fact illiberal. Spoken language is constantly screened by liberals for evidence of ‘sexism’ or ‘racism’, not understanding that language evolves in a context of complex, intertwined language contact and social processes. Language is not auto-telic; it does not have its own agenda in the way that ‘liberal fascists’ seems to think it does.

  Sweden, and indeed much of the West, is suffocating in political correctness: a secularised, pseudo-religion that requires unthinking support and demands absolute loyalty amongst the groupthink apparatchiks. Ironically, these are often the same liberals that fought in the 1960s to free us from dogma. And in a further ironic twist, they typically comprise anti-Christian activists who put the rather Christian virtue of ‘pity’ at the centre of our society. Some might claim that a society run on Christian virtues is a ‘weak’ one; a society run on Christian virtues by atheists is a perverse, ideologically and morally confused one. Life is and always will be essentially unfair because the strong thrive and the weak suffer. Society can attempt to mitigate some of this, sometimes quite successfully so, and this is to be applauded. However, we cannot deny the fact entirely, because it is a reflection of human nature.

  Today, those in denial ar
e often demagogues of a fraudulent diversity, hypocrites who represent a complex, illogical consciousness, an affaire fatale, which is rapidly eroding individualism. They might hail the end to ‘whiteness’ with their paeans of multiculturalist openness, but would not dream of sending their children to schools with large numbers of students from ethnic minorities. They want to be relativists, but their curious repudiation of the West and their cosmopolitan contempt for embedded identity shows them to be anything but relativists. This is an attempt to package some very ‘unprogressive’ thinking as ‘progressive’ and its proponents have been accurately described as the ‘Regressive Left’ (Nawaz, 2012). As we have seen, Leftist thinking is often anti-Enlightenment, but it is the Enlightenment that espoused values such as equality that they apparently care so much about.

  What matters in society now is not the objective truth, but the anti-knowledge which is wrapped up in a manufactured set of politicised emotions. Anything that does not fall within these boundaries is an unwelcome truth or stereotype, and thus we have an information war between the ideologised liberal mainstream media and the Internet where the facts can be obtained (as well as many unpleasant rants). Both sources engage in fake news too. Such a culture of falsity has become intimidating in academia where the tendency to self-censorship is particularly prevalent, and the weight of the PC culture can be burdensome. If you speak your mind, you risk rejection from your colleagues. It is that simple.

  The truth cannot be constantly blurred. Otherwise, society’s problems cannot be addressed, or worse still the finger will be pointed at the wrong group. Not just political correctness, but liberal groupthink has rendered it taboo to make ever so obvious connections about the repercussions of the changes taking place in our society. A small nation such as Sweden cannot be allowed to descend vers la boue, to move silently towards an unspoken catafalque in the name of politicised charity, so laden with ideology. And newcomers cannot perhaps be expected to give up the ultimate exigencies in their lives: their identity. We are living in times of complex entanglement and subverted reticulations. We will not be able to ‘progress’ until the institutional culture of silence and intimidation has been dismantled.