Friday, 11 November 2016
No, we're not turning our back on liberalism
Whenever I turn on the radio (usually BBC Radio 4) these days, it's all about women. For decades now women have been able to climb to the the very top of any profession, including politics yet we still have to endure endless waffle about women's equality. The largely fictitious notion of the gender pay gap continues to test my patience.
It seems the singular purpose of the modern left is to promote a fictitious notion that the gender pay imbalance is wilfully discriminatory. There is a narrative that men and women are exactly equal in all things therefore those social norms which appreciate the natural differences are discriminatory barriers rather than just the natural order of things. We are told that the way that men and women develop separate stratas in the workplace is a result of gender conditioning. This has caused the left to attack gender norms at a very early age.
The intent is to rip any kind of normality out of the system. As bad as that is, the left do not seek to win the argument - rather they seek an ever more powerful state to enforce their worldview creating a toxic environment where people are no longer free to venture even fairly pedestrian opinions. To venture a worldview that does not conform to this orthodoxy is considered populism or misogyny.
There is a steadfast determination to ignore the facts of life that human beings form communities based on the same basic hierarchies the world over. Tribes centred around family where the elder males have authority. It's in our biology and other mammals behave in a similar way.
In this I am the first one to say that sentience means we are not obliged to follow the norms, but that is a far stretch from denying they exist altogether. That is what the left seek to do - to promote rootless individualism as superior to the family and to replace the family with the state.
As it happens, in a healthy society families are central to everything and the root of all hard won prosperity. The most capable tends to be the one with the most authority. That is not to say the contributions of all are not equally valid, it just says that some are better befitting certain functions within the hierarchy. Breadwinners and homemakers. Artists and thinkers, mechanics and labourers. It's why writers need accountants and accountants need writers.
In a liberal society we appreciate that we all have our distinctions and limitations and we recognise that nobody should endure discrimination or punishment for those facets which cannot be changed. Gender, sexual preference, skin colour. But it goes further than that. We try to open doors for people os that people can break out of predetermined roles and destinies. That to me is social progress, where nobody is limited by class and physical attributes.
But when liberals begin to attack the very foundation of our morality and our values and seek to replace them with an ultra-permissive, anything goes morality we lose any kind of cohesion and moral authority. Moral relativism takes hold to such an extent that we can no longer defend those things we value.
What the left have done is to identify all social norms as inherently evil - which has given rise to the cult of the self which in turn has spawned the now toxic brand of feminism we see on the internet and the perverse social justice movement which processes everything through the prism of identity. It centres around a certain narcissism whereby individual rights become entitlements on the basis of one's sense of victimhood. From this is born the right not to be offended or triggered - and with that goes the death of free speech. Opposition is inherently oppression it seems.
And this is why the culture war of the last decade goes so heavily with what is happening on a more visible level in politics. In what is now seen as a backlash against political correctness, there is something more seismic happening. When you look at all the Western aid and development agencies and their output on social media, you will see much of it is devoted to the UN sustainable development goals. One of these goals is gender equality. It is not what it says on the tin. It's the export of pervasive leftist values.
At the very top levels of global governance it is a convergence of politically correct global leaders and very powerful NGOs and academic figures. There is an inherent distortion right there. Nobody with traditional socially conservative views or a degree of scepticism ends up in senior roles in global governance.
To climb the greasy pole in NGOs and academia you must think as they do, speak as they do and never question anything. If there is one universal truth of our existence it is that the rewards go to those best able to conform. Somewhere along the line the left have secured almost total dominance of the NGOcracy and academia to the point where safe spaces are tolerated in universities. Trigger warnings and the likes are the product of Western academia. That should have been a sign that free enquiry is now dead in the water.
These are the institutions which use the financial power of the west to force their social agenda on developing countries. Not just developing countries either. Not content with utterly debasing the west they seek to export their twisted ideology to the rest of the world. And this in some way goes toward explaining why the West is about to lose considerable influence with more and more developing countries waking up to the cultural imperialism of the transnational left.
Though the UK and the US through navel-gazing self-indulgence may have wilfully demolished their own cultural norms, India is still very much a tribal patriarchy as is Africa. They are not as keen to sacrifice their cultural norms, not least when the product of our moral self-immolation is our young girls out on the street being molested by dozen while the biggest killer of men my age after heart attacks is suicide. Western left wing liberalism is nothing to aspire to.
If we look at the immigrant communities in the UK it is those who still respect the natural order of family who tend to do extremely well and become rich. The system works. And in its own way, the Indian subcontinent has its own equality. Pakistan has had a number of very senior female leaders largely because of lot of politic is is now civic administration that the men are only too happy to leave to the women.
The consequence of this globalist clan atop of Western globalism is a completely unaccountable moralising, warmongering elite, far out of touch with their peoples. And if you look at the distribution of the votes in the US election and the EU referendum it is the shires and the counties turning on the cities. This isn't a redneck rejection of liberalism. It is a rejection of the mortality imposed by the metropolitan left which sees normal health family hierarchies and some kind of antiquated oppressive artificial structure. The greatest sin in modern Western life is to be normal.
But then the retort always comes back "what is normal?". Well I can tell you what isn't fucking normal. Teenagers describing themselves as gender fluid and taking hormones to prevent the onset of puberty. A moral muddle that results in young people committing themselves to a life of utter misery ultimately resulting in reversion surgery or suicide.
The way you define normal, which is a fairly broad definition that can encompass all kinds of lifestyles, is by removing those factors on the fringes and making value based judgements. But then we have debased public discourse to such an extent where we can no longer adequately identify and condemn the destructive and the abnormal. The natural conclusion to this is when we start simply accepting malicious behavior as simply holding different values. We have taken tolerance to a level of uncaring permissiveness. One might even say we have simply given up.
But then this tyranny of what is laughingly known as progressivism is on borrowed time. It always was a moral and intellectual perversion and it was always a minority view. How it came to be one of the most powerful ideas of a century is for the historians but now it seems the majority have finally lost patience and stood up to the left. In this we are not turning our backs on liberalism. We are merely putting an end to the gradual erosion of those, dare I say it, traditional values on which our modern and open society is built. I think this is what makes Theresa May, herself a church and shires Conservative, the right lady at the right time.
The sad part of this is that there will inevitably be a tiny minority who think we are going back to the old days where rampant and open homophobia is acceptable and we will no doubt see an unfortunate spike in racist incidents. But it is a typical left wing lie to say that mainstream society has suddenly become intolerant and racist. That trick might have worked for the last twenty years but the election of Trump tells you that the majority no longer care what you call them. The more offensive to the left the better.
And it is so telling that across the USA we now see the left spitting venom. We now see the true face of the "tolerant" left in all its bile. We can see that it was never about advancing a better society for all. It was about the minority weilding power over the majority - to impose a twisted morality on society without its consent - from the United Nations to the local primary school.
And this is what voters across the west are rebelling against. The pious left sneer at the working class for wanting things back how they used to be. Few are daft enough to expect that we can reopen the mines or turn back the clock but almost everyone with a functioning sense of social awareness can tell that we have lost something. We have lost the social hierarchies and structures that bring order, safety and community. They have been demolished and replaced with a nanny government that does the job half as well if it does it at all.
I very much doubt that the election of Trump or indeed Brexit will bring about the economic renaissance we are promised but we have turned a corner where the toxic left are on the back foot. We are no longer going to be cowed and harangued by these people. We can no longer tolerate people being interviewed under caution by the police for merely expressing a politically incorrect opinion. We can no longer watch helplessly as politically correct values undermine our safety and national security.
The contempt we have seen for democracy form the left, not least in attempts to stall Brexit is really a sign that these people realise that the game is up. They cannot walk away from this fight because they know that the moment we leave the EU, the power is no longer their to do with as they please and they will have to win arguments rather than use the mechanisms of the state to enforce their worldview. And that terrifies them because they know they can't win the argument and they never could. The Polly Toynbee's, the Owen Jones's and the Laurie Pennys are the antithesis of decency and now they are fully exposed. Their ideology is about the total control of others - what they think and how they live. They are not liberals.
Neither the USA nor the UK have turned their back on liberalism. Nobody wants to see a reversal of social progress or see a retreat from those hard won liberties we have gained, but the poisonous ideas of the left are now a threat to our prosperity global standing and our security. The world view of the "social justice warrior" is the world view of the spoiled child and we can no longer afford to let these people make the running.
Without a functioning academia where free enquiry comes first we cannot hope to maintain our liberties or our place at the forefront of innovation. The pervasive lie that the normal behaviour of ordinary people is backward and obsolete is one of the most sickening attacks on decency in years. More than anything it attacks the family and replaces it with the state. In so doing it destroys our freedoms and it attacks the basis of our prosperity, health and wellbeing. We have drawn a line in the sand. To hell with these people. We will pay any price to be rid of them even if it means voting for men like Trump.
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