People have been warning against this stuff for awhile.
The levers used to drive change within the West come with many destructive and destabilizing consequences. I’m generally sympathetic to the lenses Douglas Murray uses to view current events:
Many mainstream publications and outlets now help to promote an ideological vision which justifies violence, upheaval, and radical change. You’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution. You’re either for today’s righteous moral crusaders or against today’s righteous moral crusaders.
Violence is justified against you, by individuals swarming in a mob, because you’re preventing (M)an from moving towards his (H)istorical ends, the (P)eople rising up against the (O)pressor and (F)ascism, creating the utopia (no place) to come.
The authorities won’t necessarily protect life and property, so Main Street could become lawless:
Many universities and foundations, governmental and corporarate bureaucracies, now harbor similar ideas within them. Policies, programs, novels and articles are spun out of knowledge claims which generally don’t hold up, drowning out the pursuit of truth.
Many tech platforms are following similar logic (Youtube is mainstreaming and monetizing).
A ‘Unity‘-making American Left cohort has splintered away, in order to defend freedom of speech, a more working-man Left, and the pursuit of truth through the mathematical sciences. I don’t share in these political views, but I’m guessing a decent middle could be built here.
Ted Cruz is a Constitutional Conservative (U.S. Senator) and Eric Weinstein is what I’m calling a New, New Left independent thinker (pro speech, pro-mathematical sciences, pro-change, anti-identity).
A classically liberal cohort, to which I’m more sympathetic, is also pushing against the collectivist, identitarian politickers, and will remain prime targets for radicals. Liberals often didn’t stand up to the ’68 radicals in American universities, and often don’t now, but there’s always hope.
I’m guessing Great Britain, with it’s more entrenched class structure and particular history, is further Left than the U.S. on many of these issues, but as to how to push back against the ideological capture within institutions, this isn’t a bad example:
And if you have any small ‘c’ conservative political views…bless your heart:
This Wendell Berry quote, from on “tolerance and multiculturalism,” from his essay “The Joy of Sales Resistance”, has stayed with me:
‘Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven’t been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on.’
And…:
‘Here our account of the disposition to be conservative and its current fortunes might be expected to end, with the man in whom this disposition is strong, last seen swimming against the tide, disregarded not because what he has to say is necessarily false but because it has become irrelevant; outmanoeuvred, not on account of any intrinsic demerit but merely by the flow of circumstance; a faded, timid, nostalgic character, provoking pity as an outcast and contempt as a reactionary. Nevertheless, I think there is something more to be said. Even in these circumstances, when a conservative disposition in respect of things in general is unmistakably at a discount, there are occasions when this disposition remains not only appropriate, but supremely so; and there are connections in which we are unavoidably disposed in a conservative direction.’
Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism In Politics And Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991. Print.
“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”
‘The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.’