When truth must be denied because it’s unacceptable…
…then you’re in a heap of trouble. How can a problem be solved if it can’t even be named, or described, or discussed?
This isn’t about Trump and Baltimore’s rats, although that’s one of many recent incidents that sparked the train of thought that led to this post. The furor that ensued after Trump’s rat tweet reminded me of a principle I first learned not long after 9/11, which is that PC thought leads away from the ability to deal with a problem.
Speech doesn’t solve things. But speech can make it more difficult to solve things, if a certain way of looking at something become verboten.
I’m not calling for a free-for-all of abusive speech or racist speech or hyperbole. But when (for example) the connection between extreme fundamentalist versions of Islam and terrorism could not be voiced without an answering scream of “Islamophobia,” when no black person can be criticized without the response of “Racist!” towards the one voicing the critique, when a rat-infested crime-ridden city such as Baltimore can’t be described that way because it happens to be run by Democrats and has a large black population—then we have a problem that leads us to be unable to ever go about trying to solve those problems.
But these days a truth—for example, “there are a lot of rats in Baltimore, and the city has failed to deal with the problem”—takes a back seat to the implications some people draw from that truth, although not necessarily one the speaker expresses or means to express. It is the listener who insists on hearing criticism of a black person as inevitably racist when nothing racial has been said. It is the listener who imagines that accurately describing the specific city of Baltimore and its rats negatively are speaking out against black communities in some general way.
I am reminded of a quote I’ve discussed before, written by Czech author Milan Kundera, in which he coins the phrase “imagology.” The quote is from the book Immortality, and it bears repeating:
…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.
That book was written in 1988.
But it took only a year after the book with all these grim prophecies was published and the whole edifice of this Communist imagology burned and crushed across all Eastern Europe. So it actually existed only among rare true believers in the Party ranks.
Sergey:
The USSR fell, it’s true.
But NOT leftism. Or belief in Socialism, or Marxism. They live on. And on.
And imagology is rampant in Western Europe, Canada, and to a certain extent the US—particularly the left.
The state of the Left, the Democrats, and the media: degringolade.
Carl Popper explained attraction of Marxism based on his own experience, he was a Marxist in his youth. Marxism is a religion, a messianic one, and it gives an unifying explanation of everything in history and its meaning, so it provides something important what a secular ideology of consumerism can not give. Religions usually die hard.
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
? Theodore Dalrymple
I don’t think we should “solve” Baltimore but leave it as an enduring monument to what a vile city results from progressive government. Sorry to seem so callous but I am fresh out of sympathy for shithole cities.
You cant fix an open sewer hoping for good governance and rational solutions. The sewer exists to suck up money. That is its only purpose.
That’s one of the damaging effects of communism: not only does the party dictate the “truth”, they require you to agree with them. Forcing you to believe and repeat a lie.
Do that long enough, and you’ll believe that we’ve always been at war with Oceania.
Hereogar:
Please read this post I wrote on the subject in 2006.
An excerpt:
neo:
I thought you or a commenter here had posted that quote previously. I posted it now because it seemed to fit and thought maybe some lurkers might not have seen it before.
But you are correct. The “unpersoning”, make a person disappear from history right in front of people’s eyes was just one of the many evil tools of the “workers’ paradise”.
neo:
Apologies for piling on but…
Does it seem to you that with the social media bannings, the Title IX kangaroo courts in our universities and the extreme intellectual degeneracy of so much of our “news” media, that we’re seeing, in effect, the recreation of Mao’s Red Guard for enforcement of the Cultural Revolution?
Urban areas ruled for decades by democrats do not see rat infestations, murder associated with drug gangs, failing schools, etcetera as problems to be solved. Those problems are features, not bugs. It has been reported that Cumming’s city received almost 16 billion in federal aid last year. If that is true, 16 billion should be more than enough to exterminate rats and dispose of trash. If true, where did the billions go? My guess is to line democrat politicians’ pockets.
@Hereogar,
My wife grew up in the Cultural Revolution. She sees many parallels with what is going on with today’s American Demsheviks.
“…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed.” [my emphasis]
Poppycock. What people believe to be the truth is entirely separate from the actual truth, which exists separate from belief. Gravity exists whether we accept it or not. Cuba and Venezuela demonstrate the reality of a society in denial of economic reality. In denial of the individuals right to self-determination. Beliefs govern our actions and the more contrary to reality our beliefs, the more consequential the conditions that must be endured.
Ultimately, as Cuba, Venezuela and Western Europe demonstrate, reality will have the final say. As for ‘unpersoning’ the uncooperative, such a society creates the poison that will kill it.
Hereogar,
In America, the possible recreation of Mao’s Red Guard for enforcement of the Cultural Revolution will have a decidedly different result.
“It has been reported that Cumming’s city received almost 16 billion in federal aid last year. If that is true, 16 billion should be more than enough to exterminate rats and dispose of trash. If true, where did the billions go? My guess is to line democrat politicians’ pockets.” parker
It’s a virtual certainty that corrupt democrat politicians and administrators funneled that money into their pockets… What a marvelous opportunity for Trump to repeatedly ask that rhetorical question of them…
They’ve provided the “rat infested” crisis and Trump’s just the man to rub their collective faces in it.
I remember things being polarized and Democrats to the left, but I don’t remember anything like today. Today’s Democrats sound close to the Weather Underground without the clotted Marxspeak.
Damn you, Bill Ayers!
You had better believe that biological male in a dress really is a woman or else….A while back there was a debate on facebook where I was arguing with a progressive about the case of a biological male in a women’s shelter for women who in many cases had been abused by men. One of the actual females had complained about having to share a room with this guy and had been threatened by the Canadians. The guy I was debating actually seriously asked where should the trans person be able to go if “she” couldn’t go to the women’s shelter ? I said not there, because he is not a she. Apparently the consensus of the progs is that that is hateful.
They’ve provided the “rat infested” crisis and Trump’s just the man to rub their collective faces in it.
Geoffrey Britain: I’ve been waiting for a Republican to do this in a blunt way. Trump has fulfilled my wish in spades.
Did anyone watch “The Wire,” a long-arc tv series from the 2000s? It was kind of a Tom Wolfe take — a mosaic of interlocking stories at different social levels — on Baltimore except it was written by typical leftie screenwriters.
The only problem was that they were honest enough to portray Baltimore politics accurately, i.e. controlled by liberals and blacks, so there were no heartless, corrupt, white conservatives to blame when you looked up the food chain. Baltimore’s problems were Baltimore’s problems, not created by Reagan, Bush or Trump if he were President back then.
“The Wire” never confronted this reality, but did create some memorable characters and plots.
Reality in your face is ignored by the left. If it is impossible to be igrored it is explained away as the dirty, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, islamophobic, transgender haters. There is only one way to resolve this. CW2.
Geoffrey Britain:
I think you completely misunderstood what Kundera was saying.
He was speaking ironically about creating the truth, the most democratic truth. He was speaking as though he was in the shoes of the people “creating the truth”—what they believe, as relativists and propagandists. Not what he believes is the actual truth, otherwise known as “reality”—the truth his grandmother knew because she didn’t have a middleman trying to tell her lies and therefore create a new “truth.”
Reality in your face is ignored by the left. If it is impossible to be igrored it is explained away as the dirty, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, islamophobic, transgender haters. There is only one way to resolve this. CW2.
Read Unitended Consequences by John Ross. It is a road map.
Hereogar:
Funny you should ask.
See this, this, and this.
The only countries where socialism and Marxism are not dirty words are those that never felt them on their own hides: USA, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. Eastern Europe is now mostly free from these illusions, and Czech Republic and Hungary who were military invaded by Soviets are the most ardent anti-Communists.
neo:
Thanks for the links.
I, obviously, need to do a better job of keeping up with what you have to say.
“The Baltimore Rats” – that does have a nice ring to it as a baseball team name, actually…