Acclaimed Author Doris Lessing: Our Future Depends on Resisting Groupthink

January 14, 2015 | Culture, Education, Free Speech, Political Correctness, Politics, Society

British author and Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

Doris Lessing died in 2013 at the age of 94, just a few years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature.  She identified as a communist for many years and was also known as an icon of modern feminism. But she came to firmly reject communism as well as the label “feminist.”  A New York Times article from 30 years ago describes how her politically correct followers became confused and annoyed by her exploration into different ideas and trains of thought.

What’s especially fascinating to me is how Lessing developed some keen insights into how humans behave in groups and how we handle dissent.  She could see the noxious effects of groupthink on human relationships.  It disturbed her so much that in 1985 she gave five lectures on the subject, which are contained in a little known volume entitled “Prisons we Choose to Live Inside” (1986).  

It’s a gem, especially given Lessing’s legacy and renown. Consider these two passages that pretty much sum up the mechanics of political correctness:

“ .. . we can stand in a room full of dear friends, knowing that nine-tenths of them, if the pack demands it, will become our enemies. .. . But there is always the minority who do not and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority.”

” . . .  whenever people are actually forced to recognize, from real experience, what we are capable of, it is so shocking that we can’t take it in easily. Or take it in at all; we want to forget it.”

Lessing also contemplates the effects of technology and how poorly we use it:

“I believe that people coming after us will marvel that on the one hand we accumulated more and more information about our behavior, while on the other, we made no attempt at all to use it to improve our lives.”

In fact, our blindness to the realities of our own patterns of human behavior will be our downfall.  If we could just take a clinical look at the mechanics of groupthink and how it hurts us, we’d all become freer and happier.

Lessing also ventured to say that she believed that critical knowledge of human behavior is actually being hoarded by elites in order to amass their own power, prompting her to ask this:

“How is it that so-called democratic movements don’t make a point of instructing their members in the laws of crowd psychology, group psychology?”

Today everyone would do well to read this handy 77-page volume.  You may not agree with every opinion Lessing includes in it (I didn’t) but her insights are absolutely essential if we are to remain a free society.  I’ll offer more quotes from Lessing’s work in future posts.  I absolutely love it.

 

Corruption of Language, Transgender Law, Paris Massacre & the Abolition of Man

January 8, 2015 | Culture, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, History, Language, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society, Transgender

C S Lewis, author of The Abolition of Man and truly a prophet of the 20th century

Corruption of the language seems to be surrounding us as never before.

On one front, we see how the transgender lobby is selling the snake oil of “gender identity.”  This insists that being female and male does not exist in physical reality, but only in our minds. So at root, it’s not really an agenda about gender per se or equality.  It’s an agenda to corrupt the language and every single person’s perception of reality.  You will see this become more prevalent if “Leelah’s Law” — a reaction to the recent suicide of a transgender youth — is pushed.  I hope to write more about it, but the idea is to ban any counseling for kids that doesn’t affirm transgenderism.  Under the guise that it only bans something called “conversion therapy.”

On another related front, we can see how the push to control language is causing mayhem globally.  After the massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, there is a new debate about the limits of free speech.  The magazine publishes a lot of content hostile to religion – all religions – but the killings were based only on its depictions of the prophet Mohammed.

At The Federalist Sean Davis reminds us How CS Lewis Predicted Charlie Hebdo Censorship:

Western news organizations are falling all over themselves to censor images that raise the ire of violent terrorists, and C.S. Lewis predicted their exact behavior over 70 years ago when he published “The Abolition of Man,” his treatise on how the corruption of language leads inevitably to the corruption of mind and soul.

When we allow language to be so manipulated that it distorts reality, that puts civilization itself on the path to suicide.

I love the way CJ Ciaramella leads his article, also at the Federalist: “Everything you Need to Know about Voxsplaining the Charlie Hebdo Massacre:”

Sometime in the Paleolithic past, one guy said to his friends, “Hey, have you ever noticed how small Steve the Chief’s brow is? Look at me, I’m Steve No-Brow.” Everyone laughed, then Steve the Chief caved the guy’s head in with a rock. Human affairs with regards to unauthorized satire remained the same for the next 100,000 years or so, with the only difference being who was holding the biggest rock.

So how do you balance free speech with irresponsible speech?  The answer lies in something we call “Civil Society.” It subsists upon a common uncorrupted language and agreement to allow the free exchange of ideas.  Unfortunately, civil society is ceding authority to the corruption of  language enforced by political correctness.  If civil society is ever to be rebuilt, PC must be resisted and always fought.

Minnesota’s Transgender Policy: Schools as Twilight Zones

December 1, 2014 | Biology, Children, Education, Family, Gender, Law, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Transgender

Today at the Federalist I write about how the Minnesota State High School League wants to inject gender politics into school sports.  It’s quite an overreach and an assault on families.  And it’s a top agenda item for the transgender lobby, which is pushing it hard. The idea is to allow students to play on either a boys or girls team, depending on their “gender identity,” not their biological sex which is rooted in physical reality.

Unfortunately, we live in an age in which we are compelled to point out the obvious because so many have become detached from physical reality, including folks who are just plain tired and wish to bury their head in the sand hoping it will all go away.  It won’t go away on its own.  We need to confront assaults on reality and common sense whenever they’re imposed on us.  Otherwise we end up in the Twilight Zone.  Down the rabbit hole.  And the world will just keep getting more surreal and less healthy for us and our children.

The MSHSL plans to vote on this policy on Thursday morning, December 4 at 9:30.  The place is the MSHSL Board Room at 2100 Freeway Blvd., Brooklyn Center, MN  You can get more details by clicking here.  If you are concerned about it and in the area, it’s definitely worth showing up, perhaps with a sign or placard to express opposition.

The other side — flush with cash and media support — has always depended on projecting a manufactured illusion of support, always way disproportionate to any actual level of public support.  Be prepared for that.

In my article, I list 12 reasons why the MSHSL is a terrible idea (for those who need to hear them):

  1. It’s totally anti-privacy.
  2. It drives children to consider physically unhealthy and drastic, irreversible options.
  3. It encourages children to reject their bodies and discourages children from accepting their bodies.
  4. It’s psychologically destabilizing.
  5. It attacks the child-parent relationship.
  6. It shows no respect for child development.
  7. It’s totally anti-Title IX.
  8. It promotes a double standard about rights and responsibilities.
  9. It contributes to destruction of any universal code of human dignity.
  10. It creates unprotected categories for bullying.
  11. Conscience protections are a lie.
  12. It assaults independent thought and enforces cult-like conformity.

 

Follow up about the Disruption of Speech at Catholic U

November 28, 2014 | Children, Education, Family, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Transgender

I hope each and every one of you reading this had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

This post is a follow up from my last post to let you know about my most recent Federalist article which I co-authored with Robert Oscar Lopez.   You can read a full account of our experience by clicking here.  (Just so you know:  in case the photo and headline strike you as a tad radioactive, we did not pick them!)  The Federalist piece goes into some detail about our speaking engagement at Catholic University being disrupted by protesters.  You can see them chanting in the clip below, as the room cleared out:

Here’s a brief synopsis of what Bobby and I had discussed:

Bobby spoke about the new Children’s Rights Movement.  It is building awareness of child trafficking, particularly through abuses by the growing industry of artificial reproductive technologies and exploitative and lucrative adoption industries.  Unfortunately, those lobbies are increasingly selling services that result in and depend upon the deliberate separation of children from their biological parents.  Social scientists have used various statistics to claim that it doesn’t matter for children if you separate them from their biological parents.  But it does matter to children, and it matters deeply. We know from millennia of history and literature and experience that children suffer a primal wound from such separation, even when their caretakers provide good homes.  They develop coping mechanisms, to be sure. But that doesn’t make it right.

So speaking up for the right of a child to know their origins is something those lobbies, as well as the LGBT lobby, wish to suppress. I followed Bobby’s talk with a presentation about how to speak out in a culture of fear.  “Political Correctness” is a euphemism for the silencing tactics of power elites who are pushing power-consolidating agendas.  It works by isolating and marginalizing anybody who might get in the way of those agendas, through smears and threats and psychological manipulation. I think it’s critical that each and every one of us build awareness of those tactics — as well as an understanding of our own human weaknesses — so that we can keep ourselves and our minds free.  Free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. If we don’t push back, we will lose it.  The protesters will lose their freedom as well, though, sadly, they don’t realize that.

Two major ironies here.  First, that Catholic University was under attack for being, well, Catholic.  Second, the protesters gave a live demonstration of my presentation.

Stepford Students Campaign against Free Minds at Catholic University

November 22, 2014 | Culture, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society

Professor Robert Lopez and I dealt with a bunch of spoiled kids representing the LGBT lobby when they crashed our event at Catholic University the other night.  They didn’t want us presenting topics of interest to the Anscombe Society there:  Lopez on the rights of children and I on political correctness. During Q and A things got loud and aggressive and very disruptive.  The shills came out of their seats and did their thing: juvenile chanting and flag waving, intended to shut us up.  This turned out to be an unwitting performance of Stella’s talk about the coercive tactics of political correctness.

I’ll write more about it all, but I’d like to refer you to an article today about the phenomenon.  Please look it up by clicking here: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/

I say it’s way past time that we call out mindless Stepford students on their disruptive habits.  I’ll explore more on this in the days ahead.

 

“The Wave” and the Cult Mindset

July 18, 2014 | Community, Culture, Education, History, Hollywood, Loneliness, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society

Human beings — especially Americans these days — don’t seem to understand how susceptible we are to group think.   A cult mindset can be very contagious if it is left unchecked.  Cults grow where people feel a sense of isolation, when they don’t ask hard questions, and when they are weak on discernment.  Below is a short movie called “The Wave.”  It’s based on actual events at a high school during the 1960’s.  It started with a teacher-supervised class experiment in group think, but it took on an ominous life of its own.

If you want to delve into the background, click here to look over the website www.thewavehome.com which was put together by the original participants. Here is an excerpt from the website:

In spring 1967, in Palo Alto, California, history teacher Ron Jones conducted an experiment with his class of 15-year-olds to sample the experience of the attraction and rise of the Nazis in Germany before World War II.  In a matter of days the experiment began to get out of control, as those attracted to the movement became aggressive zealots and the rigid rules invited confusion and chaos.  This story has attracted considerable attention over the years through films, books, plays and musicals, and verges on urban legend.  It serves as a teaching tool, to facilitate discussion of those uncomfortable topics of history, human nature, psychology, group behavior, intolerance and hate.

As an aside, I don’t want anyone to get too put off when they discover that Norman Lear produced this 1981 TV movie.  That’s fascinating, of course, because Lear is about as far left/statist as one can get in Hollywood.  And yet “The Wave” is an important story with urgent lessons for all of us. There seems to be a pattern among those who claimed to fight for independent thought in earlier eras, but who push political correctness so hard today. One can only wonder if the hijacking of stories and images warning against totalitarianism serve only to promote their power agendas of today.

Are we Headed to a Future Claiming “All your Children Belong to Us?”

July 10, 2014 | Culture, Education, Family, Freedom of Association, Law, Society

Where are we headed?   Looks like a pretty dystopian future, which should be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention.   For a preview, remember when MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry told us us we “have to get over our notion that children belong to their parents or their families.” We need a more “collective” idea, she asserted.  Watch here:

Last year I wrote an article about this: “The War on the Family Enters a New Stage,” which you can read by clicking here. 

But moving “forward” Glenn Cook of the Las Vegas Review-Journal offers a fascinating report: “All your children Belong to Us.”  Cook notes what’s going on in Scotland, a push to assign each family an official state guardian.  It’s chilling:

The Scottish government for years has pursued what amounts to state-sponsored surveillance of families. By August 2016 — unless a court or public pressure can stop it — the country will appoint an official state guardian for every child in Scotland. The jobs will be filled by teachers, social workers, health care professionals and the like. The feel-good part of the plan makes every guardian a personal resource to families, available to answer questions. The sinister part of the plan gives those guardians access to a family’s records, and requires them to monitor and report every child’s development and welfare and recommend household changes. Thus, legislation to expand free school meals and subsidized child care becomes the means to create the Family Stasi.

What happens when a family doesn’t return a guardian’s call to check in? What happens when a parent rejects an, ahem, friendly suggestion from said guardian using a few choice curse words? A knock on the door from police and social workers, that’s what.

We all know that destruction of family autonomy has been a top priority of so-called progressives for many years,  centuries, even.  Yet it’s hard to fathom that such an agenda could ever really prevail.

I think we’ve gotten this far on the road to hell for four basic reasons.  First, we can’t fathom that anyone would let it happen, and can’t fathom that anyone would even want it to happen, so many of us simply tune out those agendas as mad ravings. Second, the ground has been softened through the breakdown of families, particularly the absence of fathers, as more people buy into the bait offered by the so-called progressives.  Third,  the side pushing to control our relationships has been unrelenting and very organized. Fourth, all of the above results in a resistance that is weak and disorganized.

The only way around this — and it’s daunting — is to actually build a resistance.  How?  I’m not sure, but I know how it has to start.  It has to start with individuals talking one-on-one to others, as friends — not as adversaries — and expressing what they feel about this.  We can’t allow this sort of group think to sink in.  By openly sharing our concerns about these things to others, we open them up to sensing and see a resistance that they can be a part of.  That’s where it has to begin.  It would also help to have leaders who are real leaders, not peacocks obsessed with their turf.  It requires a lot of adaptability, strength of character, wits, and dedication.

Excuse me for speaking (Silly me, I thought I had a “right”)

April 22, 2014 | Education, Free Speech, Law, Political Correctness, Propaganda

Your right to think out loud is officially up for debate.   Last night the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia held a “panel discussion” on the topic “The Future of Free Speech.”  In it we were treated to the pros and cons of allowing human beings to speak their minds.  That’s what we’ve come to, and it’s appalling.

What next?  A panel discussion on the pros and cons of allowing human beings to breathe?

As with all such discussions, an elitist few take it upon themselves to tell the unwashed masses what they may and may not say — or by logical extension, what they may or may not think.  These self-appointed arbiters of speech and thought are nothing more than a clique or a mob that’s set itself up to control others.  It’s a power grab, and their thinly veiled guise is to claim to protect us all from “hate speech.”  In other words, it’s a protection racket.  There’s no way around this.

Everything about last night’s C-SPAN panel was disturbing:  the arrogance of the plaintiffs, the willingness of the defendants to play nice and even seem jovial about negotiating the rights of everyone else, and the venue itself, the Constitution Center, which seemed happy to give tyranny a day in court.  (No doubt there will be more to come.)   If you care to check it out, here’s the link:  http://www.c-span.org/video/?318476-1/free-speech-us

Political Correctness and the Cult Mindset

April 15, 2014 | Culture, Education, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society

My essay in the Federalist today is about Americans’ woeful ignorance of the techniques of brainwashing.  Click here to read:  “Cults in Our Midst:  Patty Hearst and the Brainwashing of America.”  My take is that it’s been exactly 40 years since Patty Hearst stunned the nation by robbing a bank with her radical comrades from “The Symbionese Liberation Army,” two months after they kidnapped and brainwashed her.

They started the way any bully or cult leader pushes an agenda:  by isolating the individual and separating the person from all relationships the aggressor can’t control.   Political correctness depends on this sort of thing.  It’s a program of behavior modification through language control.  It seeks to impose language that vilifies people who don’t conform so that they are separated and isolated from others. (You know the drill:  “bigot,” etc.)

Interestingly, the term “brainwashing” has become politically incorrect.  We should ask ourselves: Why?  The term simply comes from the Chinese/Maoist expression “hse nao” which means to “wash the brain” so that other thoughts can be programmed into it. Is the word politically incorrect because it’s a false concept?  No.  It’s politically incorrect because it is  true.  It’s very real.

If Americans understood the processes and techniques of coercive persuasion, they’d become more immune to them.  Political correctness would lose its hold, just as a magician’s tricks lose their appeal when you see them exposed.

Here are some brief excerpts from my essay, which I hope you’ll read:

In a sense, political correctness, though more subtle, is analogous to the dark closet in which Patty Hearst was isolated, blindfolded, and incessantly propagandized. It serves to silence us and create the conditions in which the arbiters of correctness can tear down the old world view and rebuild it in their image. We’re told being one of them is to be morally superior, on the right side of history. Those who oppose it are labeled, repeatedly and loudly: bigot, racist, homophobe.

In Cults in our Midst, Singer warned that cult techniques “should be studied and revealed so that citizens can be taught countermeasures in order to avoid being exploited by such groups.” She also cautioned: “The psychotechnology of thought reform is not going to go away… Education, information and vigilance are constantly needed if we are to keep us, and our minds, free.”

 

 

Bait and Switch: How Same Sex Marriage Ends Family Autonomy

April 9, 2014 | Bureaucracy, Culture, Education, Family, Law, Politics, Propaganda, Society

“Relationships, Power, and Freedom” is the central theme of this blog.  I really hope you’ll read my article published today in The Federalist because in it I attempt to get right into the intersection of each of these three qualities in our lives.  Click here for the link to my article, “Bait and Switch:  How Same Sex Marriage Ends Family Autonomy.”

Preserving civil marriage is key, because without it the family can no longer exist autonomously and serve as a wall of separation between the individual and the state. Abolishing it would have huge implications for the survival of freedom of association and all of our personal relationships.

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