Amerika

On the heels of the recent politically-motivated dismissal of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, a number of thinkers have questioned the wisdom of this “soft totalitarian” approach toward quashing conservative values.

Of all sources, pro-gay-marriage writer Andrew Sullivan writes against the hounding:

It turns out that Eich might have saved his job had he recanted, like all heretics must. But given the choice of recanting, he failed. Hence the lighting of the fires:

Throughout the interviews, it was not hard to get the sense that Eich really wanted to stick strongly by his views about gay marriage, which run counter to much of the tech industry and, increasingly, the general population in the U.S. For example, he repeatedly declined to answer when asked if he would donate to a similar initiative today.

Instead, he tried to unsuccessfully hedge those sentiments and, perhaps more importantly, did not seem to understand that he might have to pay the inevitable price for having them. Thus, something had to give — and it did.

He did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy! There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights.

Many conservative writers are suggesting a boycott of Mozilla in response. Some have even noticed the hand of a corporate monopoly behind it. But in my view, boycotts of one company for one incident of many that are part of an ongoing problem is not enough.

We are dealing with two issues here: (1) the persecution of conservatives via “soft totalitarian” methods and (2) the ongoing question of whether conservatives and liberals can co-exist in the same society.

Let us look at this from the perspective of a Realist, or someone whose bottom line is functionality and the design of things that work. In other words, we are not ideologues, nor are we politically-minded; we care what works, not what we can declare “should be” or “should work” and then go home.

The persecution of conservatives has steadily accelerated over the past sixty-nine years. Much as happened in Revolutionary France and in the Soviet Union, the official centralized authority has declared that any belief but its own is insane, morally wrong, and must be crushed. The difference with “soft” totalitarianism is that the crushing is done by our fellow citizens using legal methods like boycotts, ostracization, and so on. Looking back over American law since WWII, it seems that this was always the intention, which was to marginalize any viewpoint except that of the left.

While this process takes a leftist face, it is my opinion that what we’re actually seeing here is a universal tendency of human groups called Crowdism. When radical individuals gather, they form a Crowd based not on what they want, but on a desire for no obligations or values to impede their pursuit of personal desires. Once they’ve formed a lynch mob, they go on a witch-hunt for realists so that there will be no dissenting voices, so that the Crowdists can be as individualistic as they please. Society becomes dysfunctional at that point and collapses shortly thereafter, but Crowdists never notice this because narcissists (or as I call them, solipsists) are generally oblivious to anything but themselves. Reality is usually an unwelcome surprise for such people.

Looking at the process from this top-down view, it’s clear that no amount of compromise, reasoning, etc. is going to stop the hate-train. They will continue until they eliminate us and then eliminate themselves, leaving behind a burnt-out wasteland with third-world levels of corruption, hygiene, disorder and lack of public services.

This ties into the second question, which is whether conservatives and liberals can co-exist in the same society. Liberalism is a Messianic philosophy that, in order to suppress reality, has invented an alternate reality. Because that is a reality replacement, anyone who does not accept it is a threat. Thus liberal philosophies must crush dissenters (good parody here) or there’s a threat that someone might opt-out of the fantasy reality and people will see that the Emperor has no clothes and all will end badly for the left.

And with those two questions out of the way, we might ask ourselves: what should conservatives do about this?

We have tried live and left live, but as the above shows, that cannot work. We have tried compromise, but that ends up creating mainstream conservative parties that are half-liberal and thus lose their actual constituents and fail to gain any new ones, who’d rather have full liberalism instead because it’s easier and promises more freebies. We have tried making moral objections and calling for fairness, but to a Messianic belief system, the only fairness is in crushing our evil and replacing it with their “good.” So what to do?

I suggest we try the one thing we have traditionally refused to try: we become threatening. In particular, I think we should remind people that actions have consequences.

Right now, you can grow up in this society, adopt crazy liberal views, and go through your life with reasonable certainty that you will never suffer any real consequences for them. After all, conservatives generally play fair and view political views as separate from job performance, your fitness as a neighbor, and so on.

I suggest that we attack the weakest link in that chain, which is youth. Anders Breivik hit on one version of this by shooting young Communists, which encouraged parents across Norway to withdraw their children from leftist programs because suddenly — wake up call! — their kids are at risk from participating in such things. I suggest we do something similar here, which is to identify teenage leftists and find ways to exclude them from jobs, schools, and other opportunities. I suggest we hit them so hard that their parents realize that far from a harmless trend, leftism will damage their children’s futures. At that point, parents are going to stop supporting such things.

And what about the kids? Won’t this just encourage them to be more leftist, like smoking dope and listening to heavy metal? No, because unlike those two, the consequences here are real. A kid caught with small amounts of marijuana faces little actual legal action unless that kid has priors. There’s also little risk of being caught when everyone else is doing it and none of them are facing any consequences. That changes when it is no longer a question of law enforcement. Kids like rebellion that won’t really get them in trouble. They tend to avoid rebellion that does get them into trouble, like hard drugs or joining neo-Nazi gangs. If we can extend the same stigma to leftism, the next generation will drop it and bury the current ones as they age.

Leftists can’t object to this. After all, it’s their own strategy reversed onto them. Turnabout is fair play. And since it’s clear they intend to genocide conservatives as surely as the passenger pigeon, we should counteract this not with an impotent boycott of Mozilla, but with an attack on liberalism itself.

Tags: anders breivik, crowdism, drugs, heavy metal, liberalism