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How Do We Reach Such People?
The depravity of Hamas is shocking but not surprising. The kneejerk supportive reaction of many Muslims, even many American Muslims, is also not surprising given the structural resistance within that creed for critical introspection. However, the number of non-Muslim Westerners who cheered the Hamas atrocities—and the intensity of that support–was a shocking and terrifying surprise. Affirming intentionally inhumane behavior is not a matter of ideological or geopolitical disagreement, nor in the case of non-Muslim American college kids, was it a function of defensive religious partisanship. Such people are characterologically and cognitively deformed. How can Americans get that way?
Could this really be merely the result of the bumper-sticker level of dialog on college campuses with its dogmatic categories based on race, sexual “identity” definitions of the moment, epithets of “denier,” “hater” or “____phobic” hurled at dissidents?
The one-size-fits-all category of oppressor/victim informed the dubious ideas that those who burned cities and injured people after the death of George Floyd should not be held culpable and that incarceration for violent minority offenders is unjust regardless of legal and factual guilt or innocence. But can it really cause people to approve the dismemberment of babies, rape, torture, and murder?
George Orwell pondered the effect of dumbing down language in Politics and the English Language:
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
What we are witnessing is not merely the depressing fact that younger Americans have absorbed some bad ideological content but that their mode of thinking and knowing itself appears to have been significantly damaged. What do you do with people who are being conditioned to become immune to natural human inclinations, common sense, evidence, logic, or original thought?
The sheer insanity of LGBTQ+ support for Hamas, or #MeToo devotees cheering rapists and misogyny, makes sense only if truth and justice are nothing more than allegiance to the workings of The Narrative in the moment. Resisting oppressors is justice and intersectional analysis denies or postpones even the most obvious conflicts of interest. That’s nuts.
The bumper-sticker thought processes of the woke seem to be the natural excretions of spectacularly vapid habits of mind as found in the works of prominent word salad emitters as if to validate Orwell’s notion that bad language and defective thought are both cause and effect. First, here is a sample of ethical deep thoughts from the incomparable Judith Butler:
[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance–to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.
So there, Kant, Aristotle, Maimonides, and Mill– take that! (Extra credit for diagramming the second sentence in the sample above.) Clarity in wokedom is reserved for politically useful artificial categories and identification of enemies. If in pursuing ethical inquiry, we were to make the mistake of thinking of ourselves as individuals expected to act on a well-informed conscience ready to work through even grey areas and nuance, then Robin DiAngelo is on the spot to push us each back into our assigned roles and race-defined categories:
Being good or bad is not relevant. Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided. Whites have blind spots on racism, and I have blind spots on racism. Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious.
Like mental patients who have constructed defenses against whatever intrusive realities might threaten the carefully crafted fictional world, we have a growing mass of malignant loons reinforcing each other’s delusion in a sea of stupid filled with linguistic garbage. There is growing evidence that the woke are less happy and more likely to report mental disorders (especially young left-leaning women). Does that make them more or less amenable to a new outlook? How do we roll back the rise of insanity and militant incompetence to be able to reach and rescue such people? Do we need a new language that provides both therapy and apostolate? Are we looking at a moment of momentous opportunity for uplifting reforms or the brink of despair?
Published in General
This reflects the impact that the instantaneous access to information, truth or not, on the internet and cell phones in each individual’s hands has had. Formerly, most views of individuals were subject to influence more locally supporting a concept like subsidiarity. The more recent technological impact works in both directions, increasing availability of information from foreign sources and reducing any apparent need for local provision. This is the process of losing one’s local culture and having it displaced by a foreign culture.
There is also the fact that people rarely change their opinions after they reach adulthood.
Unless it hurts too much not to.
That’s what happened to me and that is, I believe, what is happening to a number of people who would’ve counted themselves as righteous Dems until the left did something too painfully awful to ignore. The latest example being Jewish liberals.
Which country in the Global South is free when you use that yardstick?
But every country that was colonised and now is no longer would count itself more free than before.
Hard thing to put into a chant, I grant you.
They mean free of occupation, free of colonisation.
India is far from perfect. India is far from free for many of us. And yet, we are more free than we were when the British ruled us for their own benefit. It’s not complicated.
Then expel all the Muslims and restore the region to its previous, Christian and Jewish status before the genocidal Arabs invaded.
But to hell with the Paleostinians who cry about “occupation”: They repeatedly tried to wipe out the Jews, and thereby lost all moral claim to the land that Jews now hold.
Is there some accepted understanding of why such a large percentage of Jews in America are Democrats?
Some R>’s may recall that I have mentioned before that I thought a lot of the good mystery fiction writers have some in-depth understanding and knowledge of the corruption taking place in our central government and I keep picking fiction novels that illustrate this in a timely way.
So here it is again, this week I started reading Steve Berry’s ‘The Alexandria Link’!
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I’ve heard Dennis Prager say that it’s secular Jews who vote Democrat. Their religion is leftism, not Judaism. It’s been that way for a while — from Karl Marx to Bernie Sanders and George Soros. Which is why it’s been so completely dishonest to call Soros critics “anti-Semitic.” That’s just BS. Soros is more anti-Semitic than any of his critics.
I just read Thad McCotter at American Greatness and he repeated the old trope that Nazism is right wing.
How so? I’ve asked this before. What puts Nazism on the political Right?
Just because German Nazis hated Soviet commies doesn’t make them right-wing conservatives in the American sense (or even the European sense, I would argue). Nazis were collectivists, too, like any “good” American progressive. It’s just that they had certain out-groups who were “eliminated” from their collective. National socialism is only one step removed from international socialism (Soviet style), with a particular racial/ethnic/nationalist sick twist.
Progressives are showing their true anti-Semitic colors now that they’ve marched through the institutions and indoctrinated our young people.
This will not end well.
I think it is due to an almost genetic reaction to conservatism as always somehow being reducible to’blood and soil’ nationalism that would target and exclude Jews. Combine that with strong inherent ethical concerns about social justice and the seductive appeal of socialism to intellectuals and the box is complete.
Antisemitism in the US used to be overt. The KKK at the rural end and ‘country club’ racism at the higher end. I suspect the Dems worked to convince people that these were right-wing things.
The enemy of my enemy is my backstabber-in-waiting.
My country fought a war about it. According to the Hamasniks, we’re still “colonizers.”
How ’bout yours?
Gaza is free of occupation—has been since 2005. Things are supposed to be peachy there by now…hmmnnn….
Free of occupation by….?
Free of colonization by…?
You know, I hear that the Germans have lost interest in allowing Muslims to immigrate, and are thinking about maybe expelling a few…
When the indigenous people of Europe get fed up with being oppressed and occupied, and stage their own intifada against the colonizers, I’m going to remind you of this conversation, @Zafar.
It’s a nice theory, but once the Germans – and the French, and others – don’t-have-children-themselves out of existence, the muslims can just move in.
WOW!!
I agree.
Sixty percent of Germans now want a total ban on immigration from Muslim countries.
Seems wise and prudent:
That’s what triggered David Horowitz’s break with the left: He was a red diaper baby and a prominent New Left intellectual in the sixties and seventies. But in 1974 Black Panther gangsters* raped and murdered his friend Betty Van Patter when she discovered evidence of corruption and fraud in the Panthers’ financial records. By the early 1980’s he had completely rejected leftism and supported Ronald Reagan.
See his autobiographical book Radical Son. Also Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey for a retrospective look at his thinking over the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s.
See Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties for a collection of essays by various former leftists, which developed out of a 1980’s conference on that topic.
Then Germans better start having more of their own children.
We are the pandas from Fight Club.
The import of muslims probably wouldn’t have even started if they were having enough children themselves.
I believe the importing of Muslims began in the 1950’s with Turkish guest workers when there was a labor shortage during the post WWII economic boom.