Imagine that you are just starting college. A few weeks in, the dean holds a lecture to welcome the students and to outline which viewpoints are allowed and which ones aren’t. He ends his speech and lets everyone know that supplies to make posters will be available to all students.
A few of your new friends pull you aside one day. They tell you that some of your teachers are suspected of having some of those viewpoints which aren’t allowed. One of them has a wealthy father—which is suspicious to say the least. As for your favorite teacher, well, he seems to hold the correct viewpoints but your classmates tell you that he doesn’t praise the party leader enough.
Some of the students begin to make posters, making accusations towards a few teachers. Maybe even you decide to make one about that teacher with the wealthy father. He gave you a poor grade and you felt it was undeserved. Days go by and you start to see posters all over campus. You see a few about your favorite teacher.
The dean sees that things are getting a bit out of hand. He informs the students that posters making accusations towards teachers are no longer allowed.
But your classmates tell you “The party leader said it was good to rebel! It’s the right thing to do!”. They are right. The party leader praised rebellion. So you and your classmates decide to make posters questioning the dean and his loyalty.
The dean decides to lift the ban on accusatory posters about teachers—in order to escape accusations towards him. The students are reinvigorated after this decision. You can feel it in the air. There is a new energy among your classmates. It’s dangerous. But it’s revolutionary.
Students begin to attack the teachers who are suspected of having beliefs counter to their own—some are attacked for being “unkind”. Some of the teachers confess to minor crimes and are then given a “Dunce” hat and paraded around the campus. They shamefully walk as the students yell. Placards hang from their necks with forced apologies.
Then there are the teachers who wouldn’t confess. The more sadistic students hold the teachers in what they call a “jet plane” position. The teacher kneels while students pull his hair and stretch his arms out and back. You watch as two students do this to your favorite teacher for over an hour. He finally confesses.
Your classmates decide to go after the vice principal. They open the door to his office to find him hanging by a rope from the celling. He hung himself to avoid the accusations.
The violence continues to intensify for the next few weeks, not only at your school, but at hundreds of schools across the country.
This isn’t just a thought experiment. These things happened to real people. Real people who felt pain, experienced fear and love, and had families. This is what school looked like during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s. Eventually in 1966 Chairman Mao Zedong decided to shut all the schools down for not allowing revolutionary acts, and sent students to work.
The low end estimate of deaths caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution is 1 million. The high end is 20 million.
In 2017 Bret Weinstein received notice that bothered him. Organizers had set a day in which they wanted white people to stay off campus. Bret, then the professor of evolutionary biology at Evergreen, was shocked. For many years the college held a Day of Absence, in which people of color were given the choice to meet off campus and discuss how to make the college more supportive of all students. But this was something different. This was a forceful demand to kick a group of people out based on the color of their skin.
Weinstein made his thoughts public by writing an email which was widely circulated around campus. Bret refused to adhere to the day of absence and in turn students began to protest and branded Bret a racist.
As the days went on, students demanded Bret to be fired and the protests escalated. In order to address concerns, the president of Evergreen held a meeting for students—many videos of this meeting can be found on YouTube.
The videos show the president trying to address concerns while students scream at him. The president makes hand gestures while talking which causes some students shout “put your hands down!” and “don’t point!”. The students demand apologies from the faculty. At one point, the president begs to use the bathroom and two students escort him—they won’t allow him to go alone.
The protests continued at Evergreen. Police called Bret to warn him not to come to campus. They told him that mobs of students were looking for him and there is nothing that they could do because the college asked them to stand down.
While being interviewed by Joe Rogan, Bret warned that “We are previewing where this goes to its logical extreme”.
So what is the “logical extreme” that Weinstein talked about? Where does this go? Evergreen is far from the only college in America that has used protests and mobs to silence the voices that the mob disagreed with. But what happens when this spills out of colleges into society?
Three years after Evergreen, we are beginning to get a glimpse of what this kind of thing looks like in the real world. We are seeing it most prominently in places like Seattle and Portland. The internet is littered with videos of mobs bent on silencing people who disagree. You must agree with them. You must kneel. You must obey.
A video out of Washington D.C. shows a crowd of protesters demanding that everyone in a restaurant must raise their fist. The crowd surrounds and screams at a woman who refuses.
There is no room for dialogue. You agree with everything they believe or you are the enemy.
Race is paramount. It’s the most important thing; not the contents of your character, but the color of your skin.
Videos from Portland show mobs yelling at the mayor to resign, they yell “Fuck Ted Wheeler!” as he thanks them for being there.
You must agree. You must show your support. Post a black square on Instagram to show people that you are with them. Virtue signal. Confess your crimes. Shoulder your guilt. If you don’t, you must be racist. You must be evil.
You might ask “Why is it a big deal if I put my fist up for the mob to avoid conflict? What is the risk of doing ‘antiracist’ training at my job? I’m not racist, but a few hours can’t hurt”.
“Ideology dismisses the individual’s true stature as an expression of divinity and attempts to squeeze the individual into its utopian vision.”
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
When you cower to the mob, a part of your soul dies. You lose any self respect that you may have for yourself, and you give up your individualism to become a cog in the utopian machine. Going against your own beliefs is bound to fill you with resentment over time. On your deathbed you will be full of bitterness and regret because you never spoke up. You never told the truth. A society of corrupted individuals ends up becoming a corrupted society.
We don’t have to look far back in history to find a corrupted society with an ideology that was:
- Started by the intellectual class
- Held by dishonest individuals
- Pushed under the guise of kindness towards humanity
- ended in millions of false accusations, imprisonments, and deaths
A Russian newspaper written on November 1, 1918 openly explained “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused.”
The fate of the arbitrarily accused was torture, decades of imprisonment in a gulags (a forced labor camp), and death. Around 20 million people were sent to the Soviet gulags.
A book can be written solely on the forms of interrogation and torture used by Soviet officials.
So, how do we stop things from degenerating any further?
The first and most important thing is to tell the truth and to say what you think regardless of the outcome. Doing this requires both humility and courage. The humility to admit when you are wrong or ignorant, and the courage to take on criticism and even violence for speaking the truth. You must, as Marcus Aurelius put it, speak with “heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest”.
You will absolutely pay a price for speaking the truth, but you pay a price regardless of whether you speak the truth or not. People timidly wait for the time in which it is safe for them to speak. It will never be safe to speak. But it’s even less safe when you don’t speak. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are two striking examples of that.
Secondly, do not apologize to the mob if you did nothing wrong (this only applies if you are in fact innocent). Your apology will never be enough. If you give them an inch they will take a mile, and they will take your dignity as well. Accusations of racism, homophobia, sexism—and other similar epithets—are a tool to silence people. It’s a clever tool, for how can someone argue against them. How can you possibly prove that you aren’t a racist? You can’t. So don’t even try. If you know in your heart that you aren’t whatever epithet they throw at you, why waste your energy trying to argue?
Lastly, work on yourself. A mob and a society are both made up of individuals. You hold much more power than you think. You are a part of a network and your character and your actions matter. As Solzhenitsyn said during his 8 years in the Soviet gulag system, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”.
Sources
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
Born Red by Yuan Gao
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
The Joe Rogan Experience: Bret Weinstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq4Y87idawk
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