Category Archives: Culture war

Why people don’t admit they’re wrong

The no longer know how to think critically

Todd Hayden has written an article (“Admit You’re Wrong, Or Die“) in which he observes that people are less able to admit they’re wrong than they used to be.

What is this? I am a pretty old guy, and I do remember a time when people were more flexible. Sure, no one likes to admit they’re wrong, but they actually used to do that, at least occasionally.

He looks for reasons:

I will stick to the idea that much of this resistance to absorbing the evidential truth and changing minds accordingly has to do with a decades-long priming. People in general no longer know up from down—as they blindly navigate the bizarre-o streets of the 2000s. Not much that their senses pick up is automatically, as it used to be, identified accurately.

He blames technology:

Anything our senses are asked to evaluate as evidence is rejected as such, like in a magic show. Nothing can be trusted anymore, until some certain type of authority says it can be. There’s the catch.

He also, briefly and obliquely, touches on education:

If you have nearly no system of determining reality (your senses and common sense), and have never been taught to critically think so you can ascertain truth with a blindfold on, then you are going to be looking for someone to whisper in your ear to describe what it is you are looking at but cannot see. [My emphasis, PwG]

I am currently reading a book by Gary North, his last, called “The Biblical Structure of History”, in which he lays out that modern historians, not basing their study on the presupposition of a creator God, have no way of referencing their perception of the past to anything fixed. Therefore, their history becomes something totally random and relative.

This perception of history became dominant soon after the first world war. It has by now percolated throughout society. The result is that people no longer know what to believe, but still must make their way through society and life. And so they latch on to “some certain type of authority” who tells them what’s up and what’s down, what’s right and what’s wrong. No matter how much it contradicts their “common sense”. And they believe it, and act accordingly.

Why Orwell matters

His defence of freedom flies in the face of all that is woke and regressive today.

Article by Bruno Waterfield.

Excerpts:

Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. . . . [T]hink of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview.

This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.

HM the Queen Elizabeth II RIP

Some reactions to the death of Elizabeth II which somehow got overlooked by mainstream media

Nigel Farage pays tribute to the Queen following her passing at the age of 96

Idiots react to the Queen’s death, by Paul Joseph Watson (NB: Some bad language)

Jordan Peterson Comments on the Queen’s Passing

A countercultural queen: Frank Furedi and Brendan O’Neill discuss the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the war on history.

Queen Elizabeth and the End of History, The woke elites’ war on the past is a menace to freedom and democracy. Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Slightly different subject, but still:

Nigel Farage reacts to King Charles III addressing the nation for the first time as monarch

Superabundance

We are entering an age of plenty, say authors Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley

The video of the discussion between Dr. Jordan Peterson and the authors of the book with this title is here.

Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley are co-authors of the new book, “Super Abundance”. They sit down with Dr Jordan B Peterson to discuss their studies into overpopulation, the myths surrounding the subject, and how academia has created a new philosophy that demonizes modern man simply for existing.

Marian Tupy is the co-author of “Super Abundance”, as well as “10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know” and “The Simon Abundance Index”. He is the current editor of humanprogress.org, and is a senior fellow at the center for global liberty and prosperity.

Gale Pooley is the co-author of “Super Abundance,” and is also an Associate Professor of business management at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. He has taught economics all over the world, and earned his PHD from the University of Idaho. He is also well known for his role in the development of the Simon Abundance Index.

Falling Apart of the Civilization

A new religion is rising, which doesn't want its valueless, hedonistic, animalistic ways to be challenged

Article by Jayant Bhandari.

Excerpts:

A rapidly rising insidious religion is wreaking havoc in the West and the Third World. It has hollowed out Christianity. It is quickly finding converts in the Muslim world, in a silent apostasy that even the fundamentalists cannot challenge. It is finding converts worldwide, even when people speciously continue to adhere to their formal religions.

It looks cute, non-violent, mostly innocuous, secular, and even kind-hearted.

It is proliferating, not because of any conspiracy or proselytization but because its growth is a natural outcome of falling away from civilizational restraints and ethical conduct. It is a result of entropy. It has come to be known as “wokeism,” a belief system of no beliefs, a value system of no values, where there is no objective morality. If you engage in female genital mutilation as an immigrant, there is no problem among the “wokes.” You have the right to preserve your culture.

For the wokes, everything is subjective and relative. Emotions, not reason or morality, are the basis of logic.

They have come to control the institutions in the Western world. They don’t understand the concept of classical justice. Their ideology is deeply imbued with multiculturalism, diversity, feminism, LGBTQ, environmentalism, egalitarianism, affirmative actions, safe spaces, etc. It is not that there is a problem with any of the issues they raise, but they lack comprehension or understanding of the associated costs. More importantly, behind the façade of their activism is an attempt to transfer the responsibility for their failure in life to others and to get free resources.

What matters to the wokes is virtue-signaling while they have no empathy or compassion for anyone—their materialistic, animalistic desires drive them. Lacking any moral fabric, they have no inhibitions about dipping their hands in others’ pockets. They feel no shame in asking for the unearned. Lacking self-responsibility, they always have someone to blame for their real or imagined suffering. Unable to think critically or think at all, they don’t want their valueless, hedonistic, animalistic ways to be challenged.

New definition of socialism

A recent Orwellian change in the Oxford English Dictionary

I’ve just learnt that at some point at or before 13th January 2019, the OED added some interesting words to its definition of the word “socialism”.

According an entry in Kristen R. Ghodsee’s blog, dated 13th January 2019, this is how the OED defines socialism (emphasis added by me, PwG):

“Frequently with capital initial. A theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society; advocacy or practice of such a system, esp. as a political movement. Now also: any of various systems of liberal social democracy which retain a commitment to social justice and social reform, or feature some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.”

When exactly did that “now” of the “now also” happen?

It’s quite obvious what has happened, and why. Believers in socialism have still not accepted that their path to paradise has failed miserably, abysmally. So they want to rescue their idea by stowing away on “liberal social democracy”. It’s no secret that left-wing types are heavily overrepresented in academia. They will have had the clout to get that change done.

Secondly, this is a great way to bring in socialism back in again through the back door. First change the definition, then have as many people as possible campaign for “social justice” and “social reform” and more “state interventionism”. In the meantime scoffing baselessly at anyone who shows that these concepts will necessarily lead to socialism. At some point in the future, when it is deemed safe to do so, declare openly that all those campaigners are really demanding socialism – just refer to the OED! And then demand its full implementation.

Back Off, Oh Masters of the Universe

Big corporations like Deloitte are leading us down the path to totalitarianism, says Jordan Peterson

Deloitte have produced a study about climate models and say that urgent action is needed. Psychologist and polymath Jordan Peterson has an appropriate answer.

A written version is here:

https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/2022/08/15/peddlers-environmental-doom-have-shown-true-totalitarian-colours/ [close the gap between “telegraph.” and “co.uk”]

Excerpts:

And what will it take to do so? Here’s the most alarming part: nothing more than “a coordinated transition” that “will require governments, along with the financial services and technology sectors to catalyze, facilitate and accelerate progress; foster information flows across systems; and align individual incentives with collective goals.”

A clearer statement of totalitarian inclination could hardly be penned. 

The one thing the Deloitte models guarantee is that if we do what they recommend we will definitely be poorer than we would have been otherwise for an indefinite but hypothetically transitory period.

Yet any reduction in economic output (however “temporary” and “necessary”) will be purchased at the cost of the lives of those who are barely making it now. Period.

Meghan Markle and the aristocracy of victimhood

How Meghan became the Princess of Postmodernism.

Article by Brendan O’Neill, in which he reviews Tom Bower’s new book, Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors.

Excerpts:

Isn’t it striking that the Trump administration was continually slammed by liberals for its promotion of ‘alternative facts’, whereas Meghan is loved by liberals despite also seeming to deal in ‘alternative facts’? The Trumpite Orwellian category of ‘alternative facts’ really means pushing ‘claims that do not conform to objective reality’, raged USA Today. ‘Traditionally known as false or misleading claims; also, lies’, it continued. Does that apply to the Duchess of Sussex, too? Are her claims about being an only child and getting married three days before she actually got married also ‘alternative facts’, false claims, misinformation?

[…]

This is not to say Meghan Markle is a liar. It is more complicated than that, and in a sense more sinister. She appears to be a product of the end of truth. She seems symbolic of a postmodern culture in which self-definition now takes precedence over objective reality. In which our narcissistic description of ourselves carries more weight than any anchored, measurable facts about ourselves. In which one can ‘identify’ as anything one chooses, however estranged your identification might be from material reality. A man can be a woman, despite having a penis, and Meghan Markle can be an only child, despite having siblings. That’s their truth, man.

[…]

Together Meghan and Harry have become globe-trotting moral reprimanders, with often unwittingly hilarious results. Meghan guest-edited Vogue, using it as a pulpit to preach about the evils of climate change. Yet she takes private jets the way the rest of us order Ubers, says Bower. Harry flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change. ‘His plane was just one of the 114 private jets, as well as a fleet of super yachts, that had ferried billionaires and celebrities to the festival.’ Later, at a press conference in Amsterdam to promote an eco-travel campaign (!), Harry is outraged when a journalist asks him about his private jet-setting. Ninety-nine per cent of my flights are commercial, he says. Actually, at least 60 per cent of your flights are private, he is informed. ‘No one is perfect’, he replies. A few days later the pair flew by private jet to attend the wedding of a close friend who was getting hitched to the son of an oil billionaire.

[…]

We may never know all the facts about some of these stories. But we should bear in mind a point Bower makes well – that in the woke ‘religion’ of Hollywood celebrities, ‘the concept of “universal truth” [is] false’. Indeed, Meghan herself has said that ‘life is about storytelling, about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we’re told, what we buy into’. We all have the right to ‘create our own truth about the world’, she says. Behold the Princess of Postmodernism, for whom truth is whatever she says it is. I am the Truth – the final rallying cry of the narcissistic new aristocracy.

Our woke civil service is frustrating democracy

A "regime of managers" is taking hold

In 1941, an American author called James Burnham wrote a very perceptive book called “The Managerial Revolution”. Basically, he said that “regime of managers” was taking over the world. Meaning, in government, civil servants and, in business, the managers in the classical sense.

They were taking away power from the politicians (the representatives of the people) and from the business owners.

The result is a self-centred short-termism. This is on full display in the examples described by Ian Acheson here. He mentions the scandal of the Tavistock Centre for gender-identity services.

During her time as equalities minister, Badenoch was assured by senior officials that everything was just fine at the clinic and that there was more than a hint of ‘transphobia’ in the many concerning reports that were leaking out. She writes that she was advised ‘repeatedly’ that meeting Keira Bell, one of the victims of this state-funded ideology, would be ‘inappropriate’.

This is a familiar theme from my years as a senior government official. Civil servants will sometimes do everything possible to stop or at least slow the designs of the elected politicians who are supposed to be running their departments.

[…]

This Whitehall groupthink will be a problem for the new administration when we get our next prime minister. Many senior public-sector leaders now take their instructions on policy from internal networks of activists. This is not endemic, but it is entrenched. Myriad publicly funded pressure groups, like Stonewall, are now a part of the policymaking machine. But even the current government’s efforts to divest from them will not be enough. Officials that don’t agree are still held in thrall to these groups through fear of career-cancelling allegations of anything ending in ‘phobia’.