Lordre: philosophy

Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Six signs someone is a neocon

Neoconservatives turn America into all the things it always tried to condemn in other nations - warmongers, tyrants, torturers and enemies of freedom. Guilty of launching the Iraq War, torture programs, and mass surveillance against their own people, there is seemingly no limit to what they might try to do.

Some of these traits may be shared simply by extremists on either side of the political spectrum, but any prominent person or intellectual adopting the below views is a neoconservative. They are a neoconservative because they have the views exclusive to the neoconservative ideology, complete with its absolutistic, utopistic bloodlust.

#1 Condemning “appeasement” regularly

They like to say “appeasement” frequently when describing supposedly weak responses to international conflicts, using it with regard to virtually every war, especially wars their country was already unethically involved in.

#2 Blaming the world's problems on a single “dictator”

They keep pointing to a single person as the public enemy at all times (usually a perceived authoritarian figure e.g., Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Bill Clinton, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin). They portray all these people almost like some reincarnating bogeyman, and the extent of their political theory is that killing or impeaching this bogeyman over and over again will save the world. They claim that political events surrounding this dictator have moral clarity and are like a movie, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end at which this “villain” is killed or defeated, by them or some hero figure, usually an American.

#3 Saying “can”, “should”, and “must” too often

Usually this is preceded by the word “America” or “we” as shorthand for the nation, or Western military alliances like NATO and US or Coalition military forces, usually accompanied by the idea that these forces are invincible in war and are only held back by weak liberals. They might personally have the physical prowess of a potato resting on a couch, but believe that their suggestions about sending soldiers into combat makes them akin to a cape-wearing hero. They also might make statements that America would have won or even did win in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but was betrayed by liberals (very similar to the “stabbed in the back” Nazi myth about World War One).

#4 Hating Kissinger and Carter

They think Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, is a coward for not sharing their simplistic good-vs-evil view of international affairs and conflicts. They might also really hate Jimmy Carter, seeing his administration as the weakest in American history. They might think America was later redeemed by the hero Ronald Reagan, seen by them as a superhero who single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union. They hold the false belief that the Cold War was not a complicated affair ended by agreements, and instead insist it was simple battle between good and evil, believing that the good side (the West) won this “war”, and Russia surrendered and gave up its security (a key cause of the current Ukraine war).

#5 Advocating atrocities

They are willing to go on television and just advocate killing a civilian, even if this isn't their job, and think this is socially acceptable. They might think other members of their own society or fellow citizens should be censored, detained, tortured or killed for disagreeing with them on issues such as the above, presenting their own view as an unambiguously moral or factually correct default position rather than realising they are bloodthirsty fanatics for an ideology. They have no moral problems with torturing your body and killing your entire family if they judged you to be an impediment to their ideology (yet another trait they share with Nazis).

#6 Having protagonist syndrome

Another thing all neocons have in common is that their ideas are rooted in entertainment rather than reality. Neocons have Hollywood brains that love simplicity, villains, heroes, and a lot of violence against whoever they decided is bad (even if it later becomes clear that they are not bad). To quote someone taking the neocon path, “I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo”.

There is the 'dead internet theory' according to which most of the supposed humans on the internet are fakes, although this hypothesis probably doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

However, things that are far more important may be mostly fake. The advanced democracies in what we call the West are home to exceedingly unpopular regimes that seem to rely more on backing by pre-existing rulers, manipulative lobbies and media conglomerates than authentic popular support. As such, the democratic mandate of these regimes could be said to be false.

When a democracy gets too old

If the majority of people are against the regime, then such a regime cannot be said to be a living democracy. Perhaps a democracy being "advanced" translates to it being "aged", dying, or perhaps dead. These democracies are advanced and unflinching in their confidence not due to some sort of robustness and maturity, but because of their inflexibility and lack of any true loyalty to the people.

One can speculate that advanced democracies are long dead, having sagged outside the bounds of their original constitutions to become evil. Stepping outside of metaphor, it would mean they have existed for so long that any way of gaming the system to thwart the wishes of the people has long ago been discovered and refined to perfection by the few who have power. Every loophole is mapped by those who need to know about it, such that there are infinite ways of thwarting the people and defying their will, while maintaining the window-dressing of democracy.

Rulers have effectively insulated themselves from the people, so that the system is effectively a lifeless and sterile corporate husk. The only “democracy” to be witnessed is futile cosmetics and the repetition of the word itself, more like an article of faith than a factual reality.

Young democracies are full of life and purpose, having recently emancipated their people. However, all old democracies, even in the ancient world, eventually perished, having lost support among anyone other than a small elite who were cheating and exploiting the system.

'Lesser evil'

Voter apathy is far worse than mere low turnout in elections, since it includes those who only grudgingly cast votes for the lesser evil, as if any living democracy would be like that. This gives rise to a reality in which nobody other than a tiny minority, heavily engaged in the political system and shaping the available candidates, believes in its legitimacy. Meanwhile, the vast majority are quietly resigned to being governed by whoever is in power or picking from a menu that features nothing they want, feeling certain that any effort they made to participate would be thwarted successfully by the pack of wolves who fought their way to the top long ago.

The result is that advanced democracies may be hostage to a hyper-vocal and aggressively involved minority, perhaps twenty percent of the people, often driven more by their deep contempt for all the other people than any respect for their will.

If the above speculation is right, then the ones who most like to pretend democracy is alive may be those who believe it serves their narrow interests. Such a group is hardly the people, who are in fact lifeless corpses kicked and beaten by that narrow group who rule. The say of those lambs is absent, they are dead, and what persists is only the hijacking of the state by predators eating them.

All of this is, of course, only an exercise in speculation, like the dead internet theory. But it helps to sometimes posit the most diabolic interpretation of the state of things, so to stimulate thought.

Any metrics according to which countries are deemed better or freer than others are entirely arbitrary, set by countries that happen to have the most influence and want to glamorise themselves.

The creation of such charts proves nothing, and tells us more about the people who would make them than any of the countries on them. You would only engage in that sort of measuring contest because your own regime has a serious problem - its obsession with the others - which is bad enough behaviour for us to write off your regime as the worst of the lot. I will not need any analysis of these Indians who have been shot by the cowboy, to be able to tell that the cowboy is the worst person present.

Who makes these charts?

The defenders of the economic core basically define success into existence, manipulating the structures of knowledge so that our very perception of success is favourable to their national and class interests. At present, the world's economic core is still largely based in Western countries, even if it is slowly shifting towards China.

Few will deny that it is a pleasant life in the West, when compared with many other countries. However, this is the result of centuries of stable police-order and the continuous economic plunder of weaker nations. We deny other countries the ability to enforce or normalise the sort of internal order that our countries achieved long ago, instead sanctioning or destroying countries that threaten to become powerful or more state-like before they can join the club. Countries that undergo a necessary nation-building process but violate human rights along the way, rather than being seen as being in a developmental stage to true statehood, are treated as abominations by us at some opportunistic moment such as a civil war. We plunge them back to the state of nature, as in the case of Libya in 2011, forcing them to have to develop into a polity all over again.

Interrupting the story of another nation

A supreme irony of Western bombardments of other countries is that our own standards of civilised behaviour are the result of the most brutal enforcement of order in our countries, and our own perfection of the art of mass murder. Somehow, we seem to believe that a country like Syria needs no Lincoln in its own history, its civil war is unacceptable, and it should instead have suddenly become a fairly developed capitalist country with no intermediate stage. In reality, the evolution of Western states relied on fairly authoritarian methods and incredibly deadly weapons to get to where we are. The main reason we deal with mass protests and avert civil conflicts better than our supposed moral inferiors in poorer countries like Libya and Syria is simply due to having developed (through murderous experience) safer technologies of repression like teargas and rubber bullets, along with better-trained security forces.

The West's talk of the faults of other countries is dishonest, anyway, and just a set of lines for the West to play its role of gunslinger in a conflict. We discuss "democracy" during the course of an intervention, only as a cynical deception aimed at our own population. There is no truth to the idea of our countries spreading democracy, whatsoever, as democracy by definition originates from a sovereign people and not from a foreign power or alliance structure. Any intervention, as occurred in Libya and Syria, is an offense against democracy.

Goalposts are moving

Metrics of success can be altered in order to pursue new aims. This was one of the goals of the Great Reset, advocated by those who gather at Davos. They wanted responsibility to the environment and society to be somehow measured as criteria of success, rather than just something like economic growth. One could see this as an attempt by Western countries to shift the goalposts, realising that they are being overtaken by China, so that they desire to alter the meaning of success so that they can go on convincing everyone that they are still more successful than China.

The adjustment of the metrics of success, in fact, discredits indexes that that try to portray some country or group of countries as better than others or more ahead. If one can simply convince people that other things are more important or better indicators of success and happiness than GDP, for example, then why is GDP cited to prove anything? A country like Cuba certainly will rank ahead of the US in a number of ways (healthcare, anyone?), so why does the US not surrender to the superior nation?

To conclude, what (or rather who) makes a country successful is the person writing the criteria that will be used to assess success. It has nothing to do with preventing armies of homeless people on the streets, reducing child mortality, providing free healthcare, or any other thing that might be most pleasing to people.

Regardless of the passing novelties of culture, falling like leaves in the autumn, there are indispensable riches that transcend even a dead civilisation or social order, to persist. The essential heirlooms of a civilisation are protected and planted again, like acorns.

The origin of the term "radical" came from the Latin word for "root". Those who were radical would hack at the root, or get to the root of the problem. They would, to use an expression favoured by Jean-Paul Marat, bring the hatchet (or ax) to their root.

Inevitable moral decay?

Far from needing to be hacked down, trees eventually die by themselves. If nothing else brings illness to the tree, its death can occur when it becomes so large that it can no longer support its own weight. Then, however majestic it may seem, it will collapse. A tree may even rot while it stands, such that its great size and apparent triumph over other trees may mean nothing.

There have been successive civilisations that were at the centre of the economic life of the world. Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the more vaguely defined "Western civilisation" of the present day, with its multiple centres in London, Washington DC, Paris and elsewhere. There is no disputing that each of them collapsed, nor can we dispute that the collapse was necessary for the continued excellence of humanity, although the modern one cannot countenance its own ultimate fate as anything similar.

Many people of a conservative persuasion believe they see things rotten about our society, things that are continuously changing for the worse. They may point to increased sexual liberty and rights that were not typical of the higher and more accomplished stages of a civilisation. It has been argued that a higher civilisation adopts puritanical moral structures and a focus on scientific and artistic accomplishments in order to impress, and that denying excessive sexual liberty assists in this because it helps to keep humanity focused on human excellence rather than primitive joy. Those of a liberal persuasion, on the other hand, welcome any increase in personal liberty, and will only laugh at the above, but their response likely isn't any newer than the views of people during other declines.

It is difficult to form a rational case in relation to the idea of the moral corruption of society, because the outcome depends on one's pre-existing values. The very process of analysing flaws in the moral character of society requires first of all adopting values without rational justification, such as the view that excellence and intellect are better than laziness and pleasure.

How to detect decadence

Decadence, the steady loss of what gave a culture its value, may manifest in worsening cultural products and art forms that are not worth saving, in contrast to the creations of what would have been considered the works of a higher civilisation in its golden age. Everything is just a passing, worthless thing. This may result in a decreased ability to identify with any kind of culture and eventually, with other people in society. Even still, we may still have powerful governments, reminiscent of empires of old, dependent on the inertia of past accomplishments, up until the moment of their failure.

The idea of decadence implies that those who succumb to it either don't recognise it or don't recognise a problem with it, maybe instead being pleased with it. The concept suggests that a society can become sick without even realising it, because its own capacity to recognise goodness or judge itself is also being corrupted, succumbing to the same cultural and intellectual sickness it cannot see.

Decadence also signifies age. If it is a real sickness, it is inescapable and everyone is somewhat infected. Where the conservative is wrong might, then, not be in his dismay at the diminishing of moral or cultural value, but in his delusions that he can do anything to reverse it. A dead tree cannot be restored to a living one, and the clock cannot be turned back on society. Only a fresh acorn, planted elsewhere, has any potential after that.

To fell the tree

It is possible to appreciate both the progressive and the conservative, to see their roles in history.

The believers in progress perform a necessary role in the life of a civilisation, allowing the adoption of new ideas, new scientific models, and new technologies, but any kind of utopia may ultimately prove impossible or harmful, and so the reactionaries also have a valid role. If indeed a civilisation collapses, those who depended on its present state are not going to be the seeds of a new tree; only conservatives could create new civilisations or establish the next outposts of progress. Think what you like of them, but they bear with them a tried and tested formula for how to construct a society and civilisation, whereas the modern liberal only bears faith in the progress of the existing model and will refuse to go back to past traditions or simplicity.

The conclusion that necessarily follows from identifying what is considered decadent is that a thing is unworthy of respect or loyalty, once it is sufficiently debased that you no longer identify with it. It follows that a decadent culture or civilisation imperils those outside of it, like a rotten tree that threatens to fall when it might be inconvenient and should therefore be felled with all urgency. Its destruction, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, can eventually be justified.

The notion of decadence, the eventual degeneration of a society or civilisation due to its own failings, once fascinated scholars. However, such a notion is now virtually unheard of except to some conservatives.

Interest in the idea of civilisational deterioration and collapse could have diminished because the idea was offensive to believers in the creed of perpetual social progress and development. Western campuses have, for a long time, been unfriendly to any idea that could align with reactionary rhetoric, such as a theory about moral decline, so most eminent thinkers in the West will avoid the topic completely.

Those of us most likely to talk about some form of civilisational decadence or moral deterioration gripping the developed and so-called "civilised" countries, namely the West, are likely to be of the reactionary mindset. This was not always the case.

There was a Marxist-Leninist notion of decadence, although it had no social or moral meaning and was only an economic observation. This was simply the theory that the epoch of capitalism could come to the end of its life, as capitalism could exhaust itself as a model of progress and from then on, only destroy its own accomplishments through war or turn into imperialism.

Civilisational longevity

In liberal and secular humanist thought, there seems to be no heed given to the longevity of one's culture or civilisation at all. All rational discourse is focused on the welfare, happiness and rights of individuals in the here and now. There is no thought for the morrow, as everything is invested in just doing what is right today. This is miraculously subverted when the issue of human survival is brought up. As soon as scientists suggest building settlements on Mars as a long-term investment against an extinction on Earth, the modern liberal is likely to support that endeavour, apparently forgetting that it does nothing for the welfare or rights of the individual.

People of the liberal persuasion are inhibited from investing in civilisational survival as any kind of priority, because it entails a kind of collectivism that could clash with individual rights. If investing in the distant future of humanity or our civilisation is made into any kind of priority, it could result in restrictions on behaviour that are offensive to individual liberty. It could, for example, result in social pressure to reproduce, which the liberal ideology prefers to treat as being solely the concern of the individual, not of the society or species.

It could be that a civilisation with a liberal monoculture could persist indefinitely, because it might gain traction with everyone on our planet, and hence there would be no threat from inside or outside. However, against a civilisation that has a sense of its own survival and longevity, a liberal civilisation may be an inadequate competitor.

While the Chinese civilisation could have a very strong awareness of itself and its needs, a liberal civilisation in the West may simply be a swarm of wandering individuals who are increasingly disparate, self-interested, and have no thought for whether their own civilisation could or should survive to tomorrow. Invariably, there will be those who will cry out now and claim that the Western liberal civilisation must be defiantly preserved and fought for, but is that not contrary to its own thesis, placing the focus on the individual's happiness? By being synonymous with liberalism, the West is unable to cast off its liberal preferences or put the civilisation's longevity ahead of the individual.

Cultural liberalism as decadence

Perhaps the granting of inordinate liberty to people is indeed decadence, a celebration of vice, which undermines the bonds that held society together and once made it anything worth fighting for. That is certainly what those of a conservative religious mind will tell us. There will always be those of that mind, and their greater moral certitude and reliance on a proven path of tradition may be a kind of inoculation against any peril that could originate from the excessive fixation on individual liberty.

The answer as to whether our current society or civilisation is destined for collapse due to moral decay cannot be asserted by me, but such a situation, even if real, may not be as troubling as it sounds. There are enough reasons to suspect some sort of civilisational collapse could occur, but it is unlikely to happen on a truly global scale or simultaneously in multiple countries.

Despite the globalisation, the world is actually becoming too fragmented for any kind of global failure of society and civilisation, and may even be too fragmented for a shared economic collapse. Countries and regions even within the West are taking quite different courses socially (the French and British approaches to how to manage cultural diversity, or the differences between individual US states on LGBT rights and birth control, for example, are very different).

If conservative worriers about a moral collapse are right, then, to use the metaphor of the Titanic, there is still reason to think the West is large enough and divided into enough compartments to stay afloat in some form. It won't be going down, in whole, even if the worst predictions of moral decay are valid.

Far from deterring an attempt by China to achieve reunification with Taiwan by force, might sending weapons to Taiwan actually encourage a military scenario?

Preparing for a military conflict in Taiwan, like in Ukraine, may only make one inevitable. The arming of a hostile power on the doorstep of one's "enemy" can only be perceived by them as creating a springboard for damaging them via some form of provocation and border conflict.

While war is not preferable, having an enemy constantly knocking on your door and making menacing sounds about its military power at your doorstep requires countermeasures. Taiwan's development of missiles that can hit mainland China ought to be of particular concern to Beijing's military experts.

From Ukraine to Taiwan

If Taiwan is at the command of Washington, as Beijing no doubt suspects, then the US could encourage the outbreak of a local conflict at any time of its choosing in order to damage China. As we saw with Ukraine, it seemed that everything was done to provoke the Russians into what the US hopes to be a costly occupation and a strategic defeat for them.

Ever-increasing stockpiles of Western weapons, bellicose rhetoric and eventually a threat to build a nuclear weapon were undertaken by Ukraine's government prior to Russia's attack, almost as if they wanted to do whatever it took to convince Russia that an attack was the right move. Clearly, China also has red lines with Taiwan. If Taiwan announced that it would build nuclear weapons to "deter" China, for example, this could prompt China to take military action urgently in Taiwan.

Western talking heads and politicians will have us believe that arming Ukraine gave the Russians pause and made them think twice about what they were already planning to do. There is no recognition of the fact that an opposing alliance pouring its weapons onto one's doorstep might actually provoke the military action one hoped to deter.

Put yourself in their shoes

If you ask someone here in the UK, there may be an almost a complete inability to see this situation as the equivalent of Russia arming an independent Texas against the US or China arming an independent Scotland against England. Many minds won't be able to process that comparison, because of a failure to even momentarily identify with the "enemy". The badness of the enemy is taken to be an uncontested fact that even the "enemy" population must surely see.

I see an inability to comprehend the idea that the other side might think similarly to us, almost like a failure of the theory of mind (the ability that arises in infants to understand the motives of others, by realising that they also have mental states too). Without a theory of mind, you will be unable to tell if someone else will resist being stabbed with sharp sticks, like you would, because you are no longer able to imagine being in their position. You might imagine another person as some unpredictable monster and attribute everything to this, rather than trying to understand that they are an agent like you.

Of course Britain would take military action against another country that tried to threaten us by arming an enemy on our doorstep. Even if many soldiers died, the patriots would insist on sending more, and heap praise on the fallen. No foreign weapon supply would deter us in that situation, and in fact it would just outrage us and encourage us even more. Unfortunately, we are now unable to imagine that other countries might think similarly, even when any glimpse at the facts will show that they do.

Although it should be used extremely sparingly, death should exist as a penalty for some crimes in some circumstances.

Death is already a punishment the state can use on you, in the sense that it has the power and, if it gives itself it, the right to employ lethal force against you. When we speak of the death penalty, the only thing we are really talking about is one of many circumstances in which an authority exercises its right to kill you.

If you are a threat the state deems unacceptable to it or you present an imminent threat of killing others (hot pursuit), the authority in the land gives himself the option to kill you. So, why is this power not extended to other situations where the ruling authority might require your death for the safety of innumerable others and the protection of society? The answer is that liberal absolutes dictate the law, in the case of the UK, and these absolutes cannot adjust to changes in society and the behaviour of the citizen.

Capital punishment as a moderating influence

The killing of a defenceless captive by an authority, an execution, may be justifiable if the alternative is known to involve a greater degree of unrest, suffering and death. Some crimes are so severe, for example, that not executing the perpetrators encourages acts of vigilantism that cannot be contained.

Take, for example, those who are found guilty of sexual assaults on children. The perceived inadequacy of the punishment for that offence has given rise to vigilantes who actively hunt such offenders, as well as legions who, with modern social media, may be prepared to falsely accuse and shame individuals who are merely suspected. Happening because of the perceived inadequacy of the legal authorities, this can push the falsely accused into undue distress or even suicide in larger numbers than the potential executions that would be required to calm the situation. As such, failure to kill the perpetrator presents a continuous risk to the lives of others even if the perpetrator is detained. In contrast, a state in which those guilty of this crime are executed would not experience as much vigilantism and distress, and things could be handled always in a more orderly way.

On the inevitable innocent victims

One could argue that an innocent suspect's death may also placate society and avert deeper tragedy under some circumstances, and that my argument above is therefore absurd because it would encourage random executions when the state feels they will placate the crowd. The killing of innocents is yet another thing destabilising to the social order, and therefore bad for the same reason as leaving alive those who have been confirmed to have monstrous guilt.

Even when applied sparingly, the death penalty will sometimes take innocent lives, but it can be used in such a way that it results in fewer innocent lost lives than the chaos of never applying it. It is likely that the number of executions that are truly necessary for the reasons outlined above is extremely low, but capital punishment should still be available to a ruling power in the same way that lethal force is to be employed in situations of immediate peril.

Many decry the informal alliance that exists between governments and technology companies, but is it really necessarily bad? Over time, could high-tech spies actually create a utopia? A kind of good, even if it is born of evil?

If widespread enough, surveillance and transparency could actually create a panopticon of accountability, rearing individuals who respond as if they were under the eye of God. While a world of surveillance can be initially created by a sinister Machiavellian elite, those who grow up in that world of surveillance may become beings of impeccable character, committed to obeying the law.

Being treated harshly as one matures, like being watched, could help to bring about significantly restrained and considerate behaviour. Awareness that we can be caught committing crimes, by small devices we may not be able to see, could encourage a steadfast adherence to the law at all times. It could become so ingrained in us that, even when not being watched, we act as though we are being watched.

Good children of the system

Inevitably, any technology-based totalitarianism would at first experience abuse. Those who establish systems of surveillance aren't always inclined to benevolence, but in fact are more likely to be paranoid and unscrupulous. In such a case, we should expect that they themselves are of dubious moral character, perhaps even of a criminal mindset. They likely did many things in their lives that were dependent upon not being monitored, which perhaps makes their decision to create a monitored society somewhat ironic.

A child who grows up in the monitored world of techno-totalitarianism is the future master of that world, because all men die, including the tyrant. Raised in circumstances that deter or detect all crime and immorality, and establish some punishment for it, the new generation should encounter a filter that ensures only the best of them will qualify to represent authority in that society. Intense background checks, barring those with any criminal history from office, may ensure that only the most morally clean individuals may ascend to power.

By the time the original tyrants who established a system of totalitarian surveillance are gone, and replaced with the children they had raised, those in that new generation may be benevolent to a degree unknown even to current democratic forms of government. They will be those who dissatisfied no-one, were never detected committing any offence, and were at all times loyal.

The unaccountable class

There are many potential pitfalls to a techno-totalitarian system. For one thing, one must at first accept repressive totalitarian rule in the first place, which means enduring a lot of injustice and arbitrary power. Another problem is that such a system is likely to create a kind of static adherence to whatever the last ideology was, which was in a position of influence when the techno-totalitarian system was set up. Any ideology that usurps all power and moral authority will deem the others to be criminal by nature. As such, many of the detained or suppressed in that society may not be criminal at all but simply creative thinkers. Finally, there is also the pitfall of class, wherein the rulers are exempt from all modes of surveillance and accountability for their own crimes while monitoring those of a lower class, and those of the lower class are compelled to goodness because of their lower status, official or unofficial, while those who rule have no such obligation.

Because creating a technological totalitarianism requires somewhat unscrupulous behaviour in the first place, it seems likely that a prospective utopia (the merits of which are actually dubious even if accomplished) will be interrupted by one of the pitfalls above. It is unlikely that bad people take any steps to prevent, in particular, the formation of a class of unaccountable people to govern those who are accountable, when ideally all should be accountable.

If one subscribes to the notion of social progress, the sheer amount of protest and alarm emanating from the idea's own adherents today is absurd. Surely, things should have improved by now? Surely, the ills of society are at least milder than in the past?

Instead, we seem to have entered an era of exaggerated grievances. We look for stupid things to complain about, rally in protest against irrelevant half-injustices that aren't comparable with the horrendous atrocities of the past, and declare war on other people and their point of view rather than actual policies of the state.

In Westernised society, where being overweight is literally more of a problem than hunger, anything that goes even slightly awry or encumbers people's personal wishes will increasingly be subject to comparisons with major civil rights breaches and even mass murder in the past. It is why the US vice president compared the kerfuffle of January 6 2020 with past wars and mass-casualty attacks on the United States, specifically the 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor. It is why vaccine mandates and mask mandates are compared with the Holocaust by radical conservatives. The complete lack of resemblance between the events being compared is so staggering that it seems like a joke.

Oppression in Western societies today

For the most part, there is no real oppression in Western societies anymore, and the belief in it is just whipped up through exaggeration for one political cause or another. Nobody is being mistreated or abused on any scale of note, and the complaints are downright pathetic compared to the plight of previous generations.

We see this behaviour on both the right and the left, showing that it is common to the whole society. People on the right assert that Christians and whites are persecuted in the US, overreacting to attempts to merely maintain a secular constitution and allow equal representation. People on the left see racist utterances and behaviour as tantamount to fascism and regard themselves as resistance fighters.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature makes the case that things have universally improved compared to the past, in terms of decreasing violence. People live longer, there is less hunger, and there is less to care about. When I read George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, it dawned on me how lucky I am. Had I been born a century ago, literal hunger and cold would have been a regular worry in my life, rather than complaining that I should be paid more in my job or that bosses should work harder not to hurt the feelings of their employees. Go back a century further, and I could be wearing rags and living somewhere in a swamp, like some miserable character in The Lord of the Rings. Comparisons with the severe realities of the past make any complaint I might have about my life and the way someone treated me seem like frivolous nonsense.

In Western societies, we have come a long way from a past marked by hunger, war, genocide, and civil rights struggles aiming for human beings not to be treated like animals. Now, the grievances have turned elsewhere, and the concerns we have are often inane.

Currently, we have a major effort in society to root out just about anything that makes people feel uncomfortable in any way. Many refer to this as "wokeness" but it is really just social liberal militancy being continued in the absence of major injustices to work against. Journalists contribute to it, because their business is always to create moral panic and sell papers.

While some of the goals of social liberal protest are valid, like ending police executions of African Americans and the coercion against women by powerful men, other issues I will not get into border on the absurd. The cause as a whole is unfocused, too, making it just as concerned with nonsense like disapproving of the way someone talks as it is with preventing murder. Surely, there are priorities? Surely, some things are unworthy of concern and do not require any response or even comment?

Rights are at risk of being confused with privileges such as respect, approval and other people being nice to us. The desire to get rid of something as insignificant as "microaggressions", as has become a cause célèbre of some commentators and activists, is unrealistic. It confuses being treated with respect, with human rights. It borders on trying to iron out the wrinkles from other people's facial expressions.

It is not a human right that other people must express no negative assumptions about us. Other people must be permitted to be resentful and hurt our feelings, with no rational justification whatsoever, as they have always done. They must look at and speak to us however they please, and we must do nothing, because that is life. Other people are agents of their own will, and they have every right to be horrible people. Not everyone is your friend, nor should they be.

What people have done is allow rampant speculation and theorisation about their fellow citizens, including a drift towards conspiratorial and paranoid thinking on all sides and at all levels to adjust for the lack of actual material failings or true oppression to talk about. It seems we needed the real oppression. Now that it is gone, we don't know what to do and are gnawing at each other.

Rather than accept the milder sources of discomfort, namely the faults in other human beings, we risk demanding that all prejudice and stigma, no matter how minor, is ironed out like some intolerable wrinkle. But this presupposes that society can even be perfect and achieve equality of outcome at all times, or that human life can even exist in such an unprecedentedly kind society. For all we know, the implicit goal of a kind and perfect society is like wanting to breathe pure oxygen.

I am not trying to defend evil and imperfection, but to just acknowledge it will always be there, in the way Christian theologians acknowledge our world as fallen.

The search for evil

Among conservatives, the conspiratorial thinking about the pandemic and masks is precisely parallel to the nonsensical Critical Race Theory (CRT) in how it exploits paranoia and engages in exaggeration, gnawing at non-issues or even valid health policies because they can't find any true fault with the system. The fact is that radicals are no longer interested in the root of anything (the origin of the word itself) but they are interested in constructing imaginary injustices and writing a wealth of worthless drivel about them.

To believe that other people and the government advising you to get a vaccine or encouraging masks is tantamount to civil rights breaches is absurd. It might be different in Austria, where the government has actually taken coercive measures, but Germany and Austria have always been more authoritarian than Britain and America and that is their business.

Other conservatives believe even more deranged conspiracy theories, explicitly labelling all the scientific community and all the world's governments as being out to get them and even kill them. The theories are insane, but prolific on the internet, alleging global depopulation agendas, et cetera. This is the most extreme example of imagining ugliness in the world to match the grotesquery of our own primitive psyche.

There is no evidence of the evil claimed by conspiracy theorists, but their conspiracy theories are ample evidence of evil within the human mind and the bizarre human need to invent some form of Satanic force to resist.

In the perfect society, humans become blemishes

Humans are tougher than they look. We are built for adversity. Taking all adversity away may be like removing the ground we were walking on, and could have psychological or even physical results on us that we weren't aware of. If the source of unkindness is our own nature, which is possible, then trying to achieve societies of absolute kindness and inclusion may be impossible and even dangerous.

Even removing material shortages and injustices may have been a dangerous move, since it has caused us to obsess about human behaviour rather than systemic problems. Americans gnaw at one another rather than at actual repairable problems, and increasingly list other people as the problems in their lives. It is less pronounced in Britain, but has the potential to get just as bad due to the constant export of American behaviour and concerns to us through the cultural umbilical cord between the countries.

There are valid reasons, whether you subscribe to either the scientific model of evolution or to a religious theology, to believe that unkindness emanates from humans and cannot be ironed out. It may simply arise from us with no reason other than our neurology and behaviour, commanding us to find or even invent problems and continuously exert the same levels of energy to correct them.

In one of the Matrix movies, the creator of the false reality in which humanity is trapped explains that earlier iterations were perfect, but that the human mind refused to accept it. A more believable version of reality, with injustices and disappointments, was introduced instead, so that the sinful minds of humanity could accept it as real.

For those more traditional, consider the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis, humanity was given a perfect world, but became aware of good and evil. That mere awareness itself planted the seeds of wickedness, and we were cast out. As such, by attempting to create a utopia on Earth, we may not be navigating a path back to the Garden, but a path to self-inflicted evil and suffering. Even if given perfection and material abundance, or able to create it, renewed hostility under new guises will only cause us to fall again.

The fixation on minor ills in the pursuit of social justice, the rooting out of microaggressions, comparison of even the subtlest forms of prejudice or disfavour with past murder and genocide by affixing the same labels to it, is the result of a kind of utopia forming. Comfort is so high and expectations are such that true hunger and injustice are unheard of, and new problems are imagined instead. In the end, the only bad thing in our lives becomes other people. All hatred and desire to fix things becomes targeted at other people, and there is no end to it. When everything is perfect and expectations are of a perfect life devoid of all disappointment, human forms and behaviours begin to look like blemishes.

It may be that the ultimate form of society is impossible, because the primitive and violent minds of men will still search desperately for anything wrong with it and react with disproportionate hatred. The knowledge of evil begets evil because it begets fear, which is enough to motivate hatred.

Pages