Does Reality Still Bite?

You will believe what we tell you to believe. 

You will not doubt what we tell you to believe.

You will accept as real whatever we say is real.

You will neither question nor doubt our word. If you do, we will shut you down and shut you up.

There is no such thing as freedom of expression. Governments in Great Britain and France have recently done everything in their power to take control over expression. 

Even the Biden administration has been leaning on social media to suppress stories it does not like. 

You have no right to disagree, lest you want to be thrown in jail.

You will be charged with inciting to riot. You will be denounced as a Holocaust denier, a climate denier or perhaps a Covid denier. 

You will demonstrate your superior virtue by walking around with a little paper mask covering your face. Serious bureaucrats dreamed this up, as a way to limit the damage of the Covid virus.

In the end, as everyone knows by now, the country of Sweden, where leaders did not lose their minds over the epidemic, had a better health record than did other countries where people did lose their minds.

And, you must believe that we are facing a climate crisis, and that the world, the planet and the environment is being threatened with extinction. You can fight the good fight by flinging a can of paint at a painting in a museum. It will make you feel better, but it will do nothing for the miserable planet.

So, orthodoxy must prevail. You must hold to the correct dogmas. As Roger Kimball points out, society will rise up and smite you if you disagree:

Imagine: because people like Al Gore, Bill Gates and Greta Thunberg declare that there is a “climate emergency,” politicians enact policies to curtail the use of fossil fuels, the magic key to energy production and hence prosperity. A huge industry of “green energy” initiatives emerges to capitalize on this exacerbated gullibility. As with Covid, all dissent, no matter how well founded, is angrily repudiated as a form of “climate denial,” a tort some campaigners propose to punish with long prison sentences or even death. This rank insanity is transmogrified into normal behavior by reverse gaslighting.

Of course, as we have often had occasion to point out, this form of climate hysteria assumes that we know what will happen tomorrow, and that we know it to a scientific certainty. Yet, as Wittgenstein himself once said: There is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. Hypothesis, yes; fact; no.

How do serious authorities persuade people to accept a lie as the truth? Why, they threaten you with ostracism. People who fail to accept the prevalent dogma are punished, by being expelled from polite and even impolite society. 

The goal is to create a society where everyone thinks the same thoughts, feels the same feelings and believes the same beliefs. It has been tried before, generally in terms of religious dogma. We are so sophisticated that we no longer accept religious dogma, but have made everything else into dogma.

Of course, this is an especially pernicious way to produce social cohesion. No one really ever knows what you do or do not believe. Most people do not read minds. Mental states are not as clearly visible as are actions.

The most obvious consequence is distrust and suspicion. If you spend your time questioning what your friends and colleagues really believe and what they accept as dogmatic truth you will have very little bandwidth to work together and to produce something useful.

The most flagrant example lies in the world of transmania.

Kimball explains:

Imagine: biological males — or, to avoid the pleonasm, just “males” — pretend to be females so they can compete as women in sporting events. That practice, and the bureaucracy that encourages and protects it, is insane. But our media, the people we have elected to represent us, and the battalions of unelected minions who enforce the zeitgeist not only insist that it is normal, but insist as well that we pledge our allegiance to its normality.

Of course, as I have sometimes remarked, women should boycott events where they are being forced to compete against biological males. One understands that this entails risk, but someone somewhere needs to do something.

It ought to be obvious that those who are delusionally persuaded that they were born in the wrong body suffer from some severe psychological discomfort. They reject the idea that their delusions are discordant with reality; they think that their delusions are reality.

So they must find another culprit-- and that must be other people. The transgendered imagine that they are suffering because other people do not universally consider them to belong to the sex they imagine they belong to.

They are suffering because someone misgendered them. Or because someone referred to them with the wrong pronouns. Nothing is quite so totalitarian as forcing other people to use the pronouns that you prefer. And if you do not go along, if you commit this crime against their delusions, you will be expelled from society. 

This line of argument assumes that there is no such thing as an objective reality. It assumes that reality is what everyone thinks is real. But, in that circumstance we cannot judge a hypothesis against reality, or against an experiment. Rather than apply a reality test, we try to force everyone to believe it.