Self-appointed “Progressives” sacrifice progress on the altar of their own cultural Puritanism
A smugly pharisaic cult that calls itself “progressive”, but which doesn’t have anything to do with the traditional left, and which even highly contradicts itself, so that it neither makes sense, nor does it firmly tell what it wants the world to turn into, goes viral during those years, trying to take over the public discourse and police everybody’s thoughts, everybody’s words, fill everybody’s sane feeling of “doing nothing wrong” arbitrarily with fear and shame of possibly doing the wrong with their every move (and that being the fault of their lives). It researches internet histories for just the smallest in violations of a mindset/ideology which barely anyone outside of its circles understands and supports.
They do that in order to be able to appeal to the mob to “hang the perpetrator higher”, much less like leftists, but more like just ordinary egomaniacs whose world circulates entirely around themselves and which can’t let anybody live anything else that they don’t understand or approve.
Meanwhile, even former allies don’t seem safe from that self-righteous method, once they take a single stance which the “cult” mob disapproves. Everything that they don’t agree with becomes a fatal lashing out against everyone to ruin their lives because they deem it “legitimate” to do so.
This... isn’t leftist. It’s the classic strategy from the right to ban everything they don’t approve. To cleanse the world from material, ideas and thought which they arbitrarily deem “a sin” out of whatever conservative or religious mindset. Or out of fear from anything which can become dangerous to their power inside the political system.
This isn’t even progressive ‘cause it downright paralyzes progress. You can see it its effects: People shut their mouths or censor their own speech in advance in order to not become victim of the all-destroying lash that outlaws you and calls for making your life miserable as long as you live (calling straight down for your suicide would be illegal), necessary debates disappear from the screen, unpopular as well as factually wrong or controversial stances move to the underground and develop themselves further in the darkness where barely anyone gets to know how their stories continue, people shy away from making public speeches or actually enter practicing an activity in the public and the public culture turns into a one-sided mash of monoculture which doesn’t reflect peoples’ everyday life nor the reality overall.
That is the very nature of what one knows from dogmatic theocracies as well as totalitarian dictatorships - only this time, there’s a different bunch of people sitting in the seats who command it. Not old white heterosexual men, but old and young, heterosexual as well as homo- and bisexual, binary and nonbinary, gender-reaffirmed as well as cis, black, brown and white men, women and neutrois. Who, instead of working with the gun and the threat of physical execution, work with brutal shaming and outlawing, leaving it either to the victim itself to beat itself up over its “misbehavior” or to someone unassociated and anonymous who wants to to carry out the dirty work, letting it appear like an accident, an overshoot or something else which they can’t be held responsible for because that “was an individual’s decision we disassociate from”.
They do that in order to be able to appeal to the mob to “hang the perpetrator higher”, much less like leftists, but more like just ordinary egomaniacs whose world circulates entirely around themselves and which can’t let anybody live anything else that they don’t understand or approve.
Meanwhile, even former allies don’t seem safe from that self-righteous method, once they take a single stance which the “cult” mob disapproves. Everything that they don’t agree with becomes a fatal lashing out against everyone to ruin their lives because they deem it “legitimate” to do so.
This... isn’t leftist. It’s the classic strategy from the right to ban everything they don’t approve. To cleanse the world from material, ideas and thought which they arbitrarily deem “a sin” out of whatever conservative or religious mindset. Or out of fear from anything which can become dangerous to their power inside the political system.
This isn’t even progressive ‘cause it downright paralyzes progress. You can see it its effects: People shut their mouths or censor their own speech in advance in order to not become victim of the all-destroying lash that outlaws you and calls for making your life miserable as long as you live (calling straight down for your suicide would be illegal), necessary debates disappear from the screen, unpopular as well as factually wrong or controversial stances move to the underground and develop themselves further in the darkness where barely anyone gets to know how their stories continue, people shy away from making public speeches or actually enter practicing an activity in the public and the public culture turns into a one-sided mash of monoculture which doesn’t reflect peoples’ everyday life nor the reality overall.
That is the very nature of what one knows from dogmatic theocracies as well as totalitarian dictatorships - only this time, there’s a different bunch of people sitting in the seats who command it. Not old white heterosexual men, but old and young, heterosexual as well as homo- and bisexual, binary and nonbinary, gender-reaffirmed as well as cis, black, brown and white men, women and neutrois. Who, instead of working with the gun and the threat of physical execution, work with brutal shaming and outlawing, leaving it either to the victim itself to beat itself up over its “misbehavior” or to someone unassociated and anonymous who wants to to carry out the dirty work, letting it appear like an accident, an overshoot or something else which they can’t be held responsible for because that “was an individual’s decision we disassociate from”.