First off, a bit of housekeeping.
Thanks for all the great comments over the last few days. I am, as usual, rather behind in responding to them. Sorry about that. I tend to wake in a morning, get all riled up, and spend the next few hours rattling off a few more Fergs and then the brain shuts down. By the time I’ve recharged a bit there’s a whole collection of new Fergs to prattle on about.
I was impressed by this piece from Tom Knighton
I can only read Tom’s freebies as I can’t afford to subscribe to writers on Substack1 but this piece is a great ‘summary’ of one of the major problems we have today; the celebration of weakness.
Tom’s not really saying anything ‘new’ here - it’s a re-statement of the themes probably first exposed by Lukianoff and Haidt in their ‘coddling’ thesis - but I do like the direct, no-nonsense, approach Tom takes here.
I’m not sure it’s specifically a Left/Right issue, but it’s true that the cult of the idolization weakness does seem to be more prevalent on the ‘left’. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ seem rather inadequate, these days, to properly describe the observed dynamic.
As a lecturer I regularly got a lot of flak from students because I was perceived to be a ‘tough’ teacher. I was tough (but always fair) with my grading, but I was also tough with the material. Rightly or wrongly, my reasoning was that I wanted to ‘push’ them beyond where they ‘needed’ to be. The idea here being that if they played along with me in this program, then they would find the stuff they actually needed (to get a decent grade) to be just that little bit easier.
We’ve probably all experienced this a bit. Think back to some of your classes. When you start off first learning about something it seems difficult (maybe) and you despair a bit that you’ll ever understand it. By the end of the course, the early stuff seems easy and you wondered why on earth you had a problem with it.
It didn’t work too well for the majority because like everything else it was a case of in one ear and the out the other. All they (the majority) really wanted was a set of ‘recipes’ to be able to get a good score and few really grasped the fact that rote learning was not enough.
The analogy I used was that of training fighters, or martial artists. You don’t hit them, in training, with a feather duster and expect good results.
We’ve probably all had times of weakness, or experienced unfairness; times when we needed to lean on others a bit. We hope we grow through those times and become stronger for them. In turn, we can then help others when they need the help.
Government aid, for example, is a wonderful thing (and certainly something I’m more than happy to pay taxes towards) when it’s used as a way of helping people “get back on their feet”. It’s not so wonderful when it turns into a permanent state of affairs.
Government, ideally, should be an enabler, not a disabler.
Provided it enables the right things, of course.
We’ve all witnessed the ‘kindness’ of the Be Kind Cult. The attacks on JK Rowling, for example, have been brutal, and sane people are left scratching their heads wondering what ‘crime’ Rowling has committed to be abused in this fashion?
The problem here is that we’re training a whole generation to think that shouting down any opposition, often in the most brutal of ways, is the right thing to do. And governments, with all their insidious bullshit about “hate speech” and “misinformation”, are rubbing their hands with glee and actively promoting this. It gives them so many more pretexts for control, surveillance and manipulation.
By allowing things like ‘cancel culture’ and the cancellation of banking services, or the writing of legislation that criminalises ‘hate’ speech or ‘misinformation’, governments2 are directly enabling this cult of weakness.
They’re very happy for this ‘new normal’ to emerge. But make no mistake, they don’t care about the issues as such. They do very much want to move to a culture where it is seen as the right thing to do, the ‘normal’ thing, to limit ‘hate’ speech and control ‘misinformation’. That’s their goal here - they don’t give the proverbial flying fornication about social ‘justice’ or whether Petunia identifies as a non-binary asexual lunchbox.
These things are just the Trojan horses they can conveniently hide in.
Governments have a great deal of control over the ‘narrative’. Take protests, for example.
Protest, even in the UK, over the death of George Fentanyl Floyd (GFF)3 - fine, go right on ahead, and here’s oodles of media coverage to help you.
Protest about the injustice of vaccine coercion? Not good. Very, very, bad and damaging. Almost total media blackout.
The BBC, for example, hardly covered the Canadian Trucker’s protest. My daughters were really surprised when I told them about it at the time - and they’re not exactly fans of the BBC and have become very aware of media manipulation as a result of covid.
Somebody, somewhere, is making these decisions on what to report. A couple of hundred thousand people marching through central London against de facto vaccine mandates? Nah - waste of time. 20 people gathering in Little Boxcutter in Nowhereshire to protest the destruction of Mongolian squirrels? Hugely important - got to get that on the front pages right now!
Who is making these decisions for the media organizations? Not the organizations themselves, obviously.
But why are we, as a society and in the media, encouraging this celebration of weakness and mental fragility? Why are we not valuing fortitude and forbearance more? Why are we expecting students, for example, to be “traumatized” when hearing views they disagree with?
I recall some colleges having a kind of ‘mourning’ period when GFF died - so that students could ‘cope’ with the, erm, trauma of it all. Some drugged up random dude you’ve never met meets a tragic (and unjust) end and you’re traumatized? Get out of here you pathetic streak of piss.
Angry? Perhaps - and certainly if you’ve swallowed the hokum this was racist. But traumatized? Give me a break.
Why are we doing this? Why are we giving so much attention to this faux trauma? Why are we training, and encouraging, kids that it is appropriate to be ‘traumatized’ by so many things?
They ‘justify’ the abuse of people like JK Rowling by pointing out the trauma her words cause to others. I should say allegedly cause, because there’s no way any mentally healthy person could be even remotely ‘traumatized’ by anything JK Rowling has ever publicly said.
Disagree with JKR? Fine. Get angry about what she said? Fine. Be traumatized by it? Go see a therapist. Urgently.
This expectation of harm, or trauma, “caused” by hurty words is really messing with people’s heads - and it’s not a good thing. Sticks and stones and all that, ran the time-honoured phrase that, presumably, is verboten these days.
But who’s promoting it and why? And why are governments so keen to enable it?
Substack really need to consider moving to a different revenue model. As the platform grows it seems to me to be a law of diminishing returns. It’s like building new malls in a city - all you do is to spread the jam a bit more thinly. I think a mix of direct subscription for those writers you really like and a kind of Netflix subscription type model might work well. It would certainly work better for me because I just can’t afford to subscribe to everyone - at most maybe a couple - because there’s just not enough in the piggy bank. But there’s tons of stuff I’d love to be able to read - but can’t because it’s effectively paywalled.
I’m not talking about the politicians here - they tend to be the ‘useful idiots’ that serve as frontispieces for the more permanent ‘bureaucracy’
His death was a tragedy and absolutely should not have happened - but he can hardly be seen as a completely innocent player here. Horrible, and tragic, situation made worse by everyone involved. I’m still waiting, though, for the convincing evidence this was anything to do with racism.
Bravo for the article and I wholeheartedly agree with you.
I also agree with your comment on Substack’s subscription policies.
I’m an avid reader and have free subscriptions to everything that interests me, but I could never afford more than a few paid ones...... especially with the inflation that our “elected” moron/criminal (USA 2020) created.
The inculcation of fragility and extravagant victimology is a great way to fend off accountability. Emotional train-wrecks can't manage clean pants, let alone political reform of any kind.