Another post up at The Everyman, here explaining why the diversity, inclusion, tolerance ideology is naturally and inevitably totalitarian.
We moderns have a bad habit of not defining our terms. We like ideas that sound good and tend not to dig in deeper to try to pin down what they are actually saying. So we say things like “everyone should be included.” Except, we very clearly do not mean “everyone”, since we certainly don’t intend to include the criminal, the insane, the drug-addict, or so on. Nor, most of the time, do we mean to include ‘obviously bad people’ like bigots, sexists, fascists, anti-vaxers, and so on.
Some of you, reading the latter list, might think “you’re right, people shouldn’t be excluded just because of their opinions”. But that isn’t my point. The point is that there will always be limits to tolerance, including tolerance of individual opinion, all the way until it crosses the line into simple anarchy (wherein any idea of PTID is eliminated, since anyone can be as ‘intolerant’ as they like in an anarchy so long as they have the muscle to back it up). That is the nature of society: it must have things that simply cannot be accepted or tolerated.
The problem here, as in many other cases, is that the necessary limitations are not built into or defined by the principle, but merely assumed. We say “all are welcome,” but in practical terms what we mean to say is “all are welcome who adhere to our standards.” Only, because it is against PTID to enforce our own standards as if they were true, we don’t mention or define that part and pretend not to notice it.
To put it another way, the common canard, “I don’t care what you believe as long as you’re a good person” is dependent upon what constitutes a ‘good person’ in the speaker’s mind. Which in turn is dependent upon his view of the world—that is, his beliefs. So, what he is really saying is “I don’t care what you believe so long as your behavior more or less matches what I believe.”
Now, most of us, I think would admit all this. We know that there must be standards and that when we say “all are welcome” we don’t literally mean ‘all’. We mean ‘all within reason.’ That is, we assume that we can ground our PTID in a kind of lowest common denominator of agreed truths, things that no reasonable person would dispute. ‘Mere Reality’, to co-opt a term.
Experience has shown that this doesn’t work, and a very little consideration should have told us that it wouldn’t. When you take tolerance as one of your chief virtues and fill people’s heads with tales of heroic acceptance, they will naturally seek opportunities to practice it (because what people want most of all is to think well of themselves). And since, as noted, any commonly agreed ‘ground’ of truth will exclude someone, they will always find a new cause to champion and new oppressors to condemn in order to demonstrate their virtue.
Thus the logic of tolerance itself causes the lowest common denominator to shift ever lower. Just as young Medieval knights, lacking wars at home, would go off to seek battles in foreign lands to prove their virtue, so young people brought up on paeans to PTID will seek new abominations to tolerate so as to prove their own enlightenment.
And since we’ve now reached the point where even acknowledging basic human biology can be regarded as shockingly intolerant, it should be clear that there is no bottom of ‘basic’ reality that everyone can safely assume.
But all this is by way of an introduction. There’s a much worse problem on top of it.
Find out what that worse problem is by reading the rest here.
