From Lies to Absurdities

 

 “And lies, since they are often used as substitutes for more violent means, are apt to be considered relatively harmless tools in the arsenal of political action.” > Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics

 

The best response to lies, especially in politics, is often not the truth.

Or rather, not the facts, which we intuitively believe ought to be the simple antidote to the lies, but instead the truth about why the lies are being adhered to and propagated in the first place.

Politicians of the Right often tell lies nowadays with such a steady flow that we get a parallel media stream of ‘fact checkers’ struggling to keep up.

But the Left have their own special trick when it comes to lies: packaging them into absurdities, which are a form of untruth that is that much harder to counteract one by one with factual ripostes. 

 

The two most obvious sets of codified absurdities in contemporary Leftist discourse are Transgenderism and Palestinianism. I am not going to waste my time explaining in depth the individual fibs which underpin these ideologies because, as I said at the start, the truth rarely helps. They don’t go away. 

 

And one of the reasons that they don’t, is that what ought to be an issue mattering only to a small minority of highly-engaged individuals directly connected to it, becomes almost existential for the whole far-left movement. 

 

This is what we need to understand better then: is there something about counter-factual, codified absurdity per se that makes it broadly useful to the radical left? 

 

Historically the identities that progressives stood up to defend were those which were, to all intents and purposes fixed and non-elective, such as ethnicity and sexuality. One might express one’s ethnicity and sexuality in a variety of different ways of course, but these could never be entirely ‘made up’ e.g. no matter what the law says, whatever we think about them individually or collectively, they persist as observable parts of the human condition. (Crucially, also no matter what ‘History’ says or does as well.) 

 

Trans identity on the other hand is grounded in a curious double game. It begins by celebrating that it is completely elective. Everyone is free to choose their own gender. And at the same time another parallel configuration of everyone is completely un-free to safely pass judgement, as they might otherwise be with such elective decision-making processes.

This simultaneous exploitation of hyper-freedom and hyper un-freedom is clearly what interests the authoritarian Left here, and we can see them applying a version of the same mechanism on a variety of other cultural issues, thereby blurring all distinction between nature, nurture and personal choice. 

 

The trick is to root opinion in an underlying, indisputably fixed characteristic of the old sort of identity. So, the form of censure we now know as ‘Islamophobia’ involves applying the charge of ‘racism’ to anyone who would dare to openly debate the cultural or elective aspects of a religious ideology. Trans extremists wrap themselves in the rainbow flag in a somewhat similar fashion. All criticism — pretty much all commentary even — thus becomes ‘discrimination’. 

 

In such an environment any broadly tolerant person is going to lose track of the basic distinction between the fixed things we should all be fundamentally obliged to tolerate and the fabricated fallacies we should be permitted to unpick without fear of social or legal censure. 

 

This is all very deliberate on the part of the radicals. The essential shiftiness is then consciously retro-fitted to all parts of the human condition, so that aspects of it one might actively (or even unknowingly) discriminate against become a kind of transgression and even race and sexuality begin, by default, to appear like conscious patterns of rebellion against societal norms. 

 

And if one transgresses, one MUST be a victim of Hate, almost by default, and so left with little alternative than the enveloping embrace of illiberal-liberal Love. Get with the programme or the programme will get you.

One identity that has been thrown under the battle bus — sacrificed to the wider goals of this project of radical dishonesty — is that of sex, specifically the rights of the ‘fairer sex’, formerly fellow-travellers with the progressive movement. 

 

There is something almost pitiful about the way certain subsets of humanity now rail against their newfound status as enemies of the ‘humane’, ineffectually tossing facts at the problem, and often paying the prescribed consequences. 

 

Now, you might not care one bit about the desire of say, women and Jews to maintain their own limited ‘protected spaces’ where their traditional, occasionally very hazardous antagonists are excluded, but be advised, Absurdity has bigger plans for pretty much everyone, which could ultimately include many aspects of the lifestyle you currently cherish.

And the mendacious ideological bullies on both extremes, are keenly aware that the best way to have their own way, is to get the rest of us to most of their own dirty work for them. Though in the UK they have been seeking and sometimes also getting assistance that they ought not to have received from the Police and other authorities.