I recently read Live not by Lies, by Rod Dreher. Takeaways:
1. Social Justice ideology is antithetical to liberalism. You can get that from Pluckrose and Lindsay (Dreher cites Lindsay).
2. The Social Justice movement manipulates language and pressures people to accept lies. You can get that from Jordan Peterson, who first came to prominence because he was not willing to let government dictate his use of gender pronouns. Dreher does not cite Peterson, but he does cite Orwell, who wrote the classic warning about coerced lying.
3. The tyranny that is coming to this country will be a “soft” tyranny. Mass surveillance will come from technology firms, not from a secret police. Enforcement will come from social pressure, restrictions on employment, and de-platforming, not from imprisonment, torture, or assassinations.
4. Dreher’s main claim is that in order to resist this tyranny, one must learn from the Christian resistance to the Soviet Union. Above all, we must not allow Social Justice propaganda to obliterate history and destroy freedom of conscience. We should live with the hope that truth will defeat tyranny.
“WWSS” – What would Alexander Solzhenitsyn say?
Dreher’s main claim – that lessons from Christian resistance to USSR in the former Warsaw Pact countries are applicable to the current situation and should be studied and emulated – is unconvincing because the circumstances in which Polish and Czech Catholics had found themselves after WWII are not at all analogous to the circumstances in which Western Christian (and non-Christian) dissidents find themselves now:
In addition, Dreher’s Russian/Soviet history is bad, and despite the subtitle “A Manual for Christian Dissidents” it’s not a manual because it does not contain specific steps to follow. For more, please read Handle’s review of Dreher’s book, from which I quoted above.
You must read Handle’s review of Drehrer:
https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2020/10/06/review-of-rod-drehers-live-not-by-lies/
“We should live with the hope that truth will defeat tyranny.”
That’s a nice hope, but is it a likelihood? I try to stay positive, but it’s (increasingly) tough to do so.
Like two commenters above, please read Handle’s review- it is lengthy, but worth it if you read or intend to read Dreher’s book.
This part is just laughably naive on Dreher’s part:
Tyranny usually begins softly, it never ends that way. It will eventually be imprisonment, torture, and assassinations. Count on it.
It doesn’t quite have to be torture.
In Revelations:
“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
Imagine if you couldn’t go to the grocery store and buy food. Not because a man with a gun was stopping you, but because an algorithm decided to cancel your access to payment methods.
Or you couldn’t be employed because it was banned, but because anyone that employed you would have their social credit score reduced and public mark of shame placed on their storefront (say, a yelp advisory saying you are racist).
And furthermore the police wouldn’t protect anyone with such a mark from violent mobs, even if the law officially said they should, and the police would never be punished for their non-action, but punished if they did do their jobs.
None of this rises to the level of “secret police spiriting you away to the Gulag at night”, but it will work.
The fundamental problem a Christian would face is that when objecting to communism he was likely to be backed up by his flock (the only people that mattered to him) but when fighting Wokeism he is likely to be shunned by his flock (for what is Woke-ism but a claim to a better version of core non-spiritual Christian teaching).
“Finally, the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant. “
-Hannah Arendt
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/07/11/hannah-arendt-reflections-violence/
#1: The Cult of Progressivism proudly lumps “classic liberals” with the rest of the world that they hate.
#2: To the Cult, their own dictionary is the only dictionary. This is important. Their definitions are correct and inviolate to them. There is no argument because everything has been decided for them. And that’s why you can’t talk to them. To them, there is no ambiguity, no questions, no doubt. Just the clarity of a zealot following orders.
The leading constraint on Soviet oppression was the existence of the US. Soviet leadership could have bumbled along for a lot longer if there was no better government to compare against.
Similarly, the leading constraint on Wokeness is the existence of a large unwoke country that’s more functional. China is far from ideal, but for this purpose it will probably do — it is sufficient for them to censor/”reduce distribution of” different ideas than the US, the market for truth still functions with irrational buyers as long as the buyers aren’t all colluding. And if China falters, India may get there.
The Democrats now realize that Chinese competition greatly increases the effective cost of the more efficiency-reducing parts of their domestic agenda, so there’s no way a Biden presidency would reverse the US’s turn against China. Fortunately, it’s far too late to prevent China from being a functional competitor. The US is only likely to prevail if the pursuit of excellence remains sufficiently protected; the exact terms remain to be negotiated, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for emigrating to a more stable place like Switzerland or Singapore in the meantime, but in the end there are few Americans who are okay with actually losing to China.
First, China probably isn’t an actual option for most non-Chinese. I’m probably more pro-Asian then anyone I know, and I lived in Asia for a little while, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that its very difficult to feel comfortable in an Asian country. I don’t mean materially comfortable or polite. I mean these cultures are geared toward oriental tastes and not western ones. It’s fine for a visit and maybe a few oddballs, but I can’t imagine these places ever assimilating large groups of foreigners the way say America did with non-Anglos.
As to China pushing us to sanity by winning a war, I guess you could say Germany and Japan were pushed into sanity by losing a war, but consider what you’re asking for! I also am not sure that the Chinese would treat us the way we treated Germany/Japan after WWII.
Beyond that, China better win that war in like the next generation. They are on path to lose half their population every generation. It’s difficult for me to label any power with a 1.0 TFR “ascending”.
The topic of the parent post is the Soviet Union, survival under it, and the analogy to Wokeness in Power.
The Soviet Union never lost a hot war with the US. It fell because enough of its leadership saw how much their system sucked relative to the US’s, and didn’t see the point of continuing what they were doing.
Within our lifetimes, the US is also very unlikely to lose a hot war involving its own territory. But if the political establishment doesn’t do a good enough job of protecting the pursuit of excellence, it could start to lose a cold war. Importantly, Wokeness in Power would not only be at war with China. India, Japan, and quite a few other countries are only willing to give lip service to Wokeness, if even that.
The Soviet Union was trash. Low bar.
I posed a question to fiends. What happens if the US loses a few aircraft carriers in the South China Sea in the next two decades. Does it approach it like Russia 1905 and arising a peace treaty or England 1940 and approach it as an existential struggle.
Somewhat off topic, but I’ve always loved the folks that I’ve met here in the U.S. from China, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, et. al. But, much much less so for the folks from India. Why might this be? Am I just missing something culturally?
Part of it may be caste discrimination. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/04/25/605030018/when-caste-discrimination-comes-to-the-united-states ).
Thanks! I should have noted that I’m sitting in the premium seats, so caste probably has nothing to do with it. But, interesting link.
Example of what I’m referring to: just met our new Korean next door neighbors last night. They literally just arrived in the U.S. a few weeks ago. Instant camaraderie despite the cultural differences. With our Indian neighbors, not even close…it just feels weird and uncomfortable.
There are all kinds of cultural differences. South Asia and East Asia are as different from each other as either is from America. But most notably, the East Asian cultural obsession with harmony does not extend to South Asia.
There is a huge difference between East Asians and Indians. East Asians are a high IQ people, a true people. Indians aren’t a people at all. They are a small (well, everything in Asia is BIG) caste of high IQs and a vast mass of low IQs. Indian history is…complicated. The bottom line is you can’t call them a true “people”. They are a myriad of barely connected peoples.
I like East Asians a lot more than Indians too. There is something different about a high IQ minority that is part of a low IQ population versus a high IQ population. It’s pretty obvious from the numbers that East Asians share more of my values than Indians. I saw a lot more East Asians growing up in the NYC area (which retain a certain New Amsterdam get real about getting rich attitude) and more Indians in the “bullshit and be a government contractor” DC sphere.
In my claims data nearly all of my absolutely and ridiculously fraudulent claims are from Indian doctors. I mean, how many obviously fraudulent pain compound cream claims can these Indian podiatrist write? It boggles the mind. I once knew of a woman in a nursing home that had been sent so many boxes of fraudulent compounding creams that there entire apartment was full to the brim, and this was as much trend as anecdote.
The Indian doctor I saw out here seemed OK enough, I don’t know how to evaluate the value of Indian immigration. I’d probably accept geniuses but not +1SD cogs. My bar for East Asians is a lot lower then Indians.
The soft tyranny of social media ( I presume that’s what you mean by “technology firms” ) seems trivial to avoid. That is if agency is a thing. In order to take this seriously, wouldn’t you have to embrace Russiagate then? I can’t take Russiagate seriously while ascribing agency to people.
Then again, as an actual technologist, I see “tech” now as a giant mudslide of doom anyway. It’s a terrible way to make a living now. The FAANG companies have completely diverged form the standard, progress-bearing interpretation of how tech is to be used.
This is the same pattern that led to talk radio in the 19990s; a combination of slipping margins and financialization took radio from being a serious enterprise to being a bunch of bloviating blowhards. It rather stopped being funny when Alex Jones went too far.
I still keep Facebook; I post there very sporadically and if I see one instance of politically tinged blather, you get unfollowed . I’m mainly there for my kids.
Meanwhile, Martin Gurri’s Twitter feed ain’t bad as an aggregator. But I have no Twitter account.
Don’t people talk to their kids any more?