https://www.theepochtimes.com/monomaniacal-pressure-groups-slice-away-at-our-freedom_3869178.htmlMonomaniacal Pressure Groups Slice Away at Our FreedomTheodore Dalrymple
June 22, 2021
Note: when reading articles from the Epoch Times, it's best to TURN OFF javascript in your browser. There are free add-ons which let you do this with a click of the mouse...George Orwell, in “Nineteen Eight-Four,” grasped an essential point about totalitarian propaganda, namely that the more outrageously false it was, the better it served its purpose, which was not to inform or persuade, but to humiliate and subdue.
In totalitarian states, it is not enough to lie low and keep silent: you have to join in, as if you enthusiastically believe the lies that you are obliged to repeat on pain of social ostracism at best and of severe punishment at worst.
If you can make people assent in public to what everyone knows to be false, you destroy their probity and therefore their moral authority to resist.
You also make them hostages to fortune: for when the orthodox doctrine changes, everyone fears to be held to account for having in the past publicly asserted things which are now in contradiction to the new orthodoxy.
Therefore no one is innocent and everyone is potentially punishable; every day, every minute of every day, becomes a kind of reprieve, like Caryl Chessman’s time on Death Row.
It would be a gross exaggeration to say that we live in a totalitarian state, indeed almost an insult to those who had actually experienced life in such states. Nevertheless, totalitarian ways of thinking and of taking control of organizations have advanced in our societies to the point at which many people live in what might be called totalitarian microclimates.
We do not as yet fear the midnight knock on the door, but most of us have to earn a living and the prospect of dismissal is sufficiently daunting that, if we work for organizations whose owners or managers subscribe to doctrines that we believe to be patently false, we feel obliged to conceal our disagreement or even to mouth the orthodox pieties du jour in order to retain our positions, despising ourselves for having done so. How many people now attend courses on their own supposed racism which revolt them but are a condition of their continued employment?
More at URL above...An excellent essay from Mr. Dalrymple, worth the time...
