Half-science, Dostoevsky, Re-education, Cult

“Half-science is a despot such as has never been seen before. A despot with its own priests and slaves, a despot before whom everything has bowed down with a love and superstition unthinkable till now, before whom even science itself trembles and caters to.”

That is from Demons by Dostoevsky published in 1872, and spoken by the character Shatov, someone who has renounced his former progressive liberal/socialist ideals. Under socialist principles, obviously the entire focus and the only morality is that which serves the realisation of the socialist state, via whatever means - revolution, corrupting of existing society so it can be overthrown via revolution or from within through the implanting of its ideology into that society. Though supposedly strictly materialists, in which case one might imagine a strict adherence to material reality, what is key here is that ideology and its goal are immeasurably higher than reality, which according to the ideological fantasy is actually itself progressing through history towards the ideological goal. 

So everything and everyone that serves this somehow built-in progress is good, everything that hinders it is bad, and must be eliminated/cancelled - and thus one can see for example Engels, the co-writer with Marx of The Communist Manifesto, with obvious pleasure to the point of sensuality, repeatedly talk of “exterminating” everything/everyone hostile to the triumph of the coming Revolution. Everything therefore is to serve as propaganda for the cause, even “material reality” and “science” which can now be altered at will to serve the cause. And so we arrive at the astonishing penetration of Dostoevsky and this ideological despotic “half-science”, as time has ‘progressed’ leading to ‘birthing persons’ rather than mothers, and so on. It’s not a question of science! It’s half-science where the declared parameters of “reality” can be bent and twisted unto whatever shape to serve the cult and its ideology of utopian “progress”. And from the same novel, the utterance of the despotic revolutionary figure Pyotr Verkhovensky sums up so much of the progressive spirit of our age and how people’s qualms are overcome: “I can get them to go through fire if I just yell at them, “You’re not liberal enough!”

So anyway I have a sister who was adopted, having been born with spina bifida and to some degree learning difficulties due to extremely unethical nuclear testing near her city of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan under the communist utopia of the Soviet Union, and where the local population, insofar as they were a concern, were pretty much used as guinea pigs to see how they responded to the radiation. Very serious birth defects were rife in the region as a consequence. 

Anyway, all these years later I witnessed her this last year be asked by a helpful educator in a third-level institution whether she was a boy or a girl or transgender or neutral. Until very recently this of course is not a question a sane person would ask an obvious girl. From her wheelchair my sister answered she was a girl but was bewilderedly asking me afterwards, in her innocence, what the hell was wrong with the woman. Was she mad? (Fortunately no one overheard or she may have been taken away and arrested for hate speech.) I can’t remember if I tried explaining that the wise educator, at the very cutting edge of progress, was part of a deranged, megalomaniacal cult.

So now to the issue of pronouns where my sister, if she had felt like it after enough successful indoctrinating or “re-educating” - as the Soviet Communists used to say - could say she was a boy, and only a bigot could question this mighty truth of “half-science.” Language has now become “fluid”, and meaning need not correspond to reality, but instead the parameters of reality and meaning are at the whim of half-science’s priesthood.

It’s helpful to see more clearly what is happening here intellectually if we transfer this methodology and attitude to language into the field of mathematics and science. Imagine for example a team of scientists involved in serious mathematical and atomic investigations, which of course require the utmost discipline and precision. Now however the individual scientists are at liberty to view numbers as unfixed, and so perhaps one scientist for some reason had an antipathy towards even numbers, perhaps due to some childhood trauma - maybe he or she was attacked by an even number of vicious dogs - and so this scientist chooses, for the sake of their personal wellbeing, their inner safe space, to identify the number 6 as 5 or 4 as 3 and so on, depending on where their mood is taking them. This would of course be all very beautiful, but unfortunately these investigations would not go very well. Perhaps catastrophically.

Obviously the entire discipline of mathematics completely falls apart if under the sway of such a perverse and infantile intellectual spirit. The integrity of the language is intentionally violated, and meaning departs. And in the same way if a culture treats language in this arbitrary and meaningless manner, then since meaningfulness and language are inseparable, such a culture is on the path of and to idiocy and madness. This is the spiritual spirit of antichrist transferred to the intellectual realm. The debasement of truth enthroned.

One final thing to add is from a book called The Saint of the Prisons about life in Communist prisons in 1950s Romania. Some of what happened there to break people’s spirits, particularly if the target was deeply Christian, was so demonically and almost unimaginably evil I won’t go into, particularly the methodologies of what was termed “re-education” carried out at Pitesti prison. Why I bring this book up though is to quote from the excellent foreword to the book, with my particular focus on the re-writing of language under communism.

Romanian communists chiefly followed a number of objectives that, according to their line of thought, would have allowed them to create the “new man,” re-educated:

  - to destroy the traditional social order . . .  in order to separate people from their past and to remove their roots. A man with no roots is easy to manipulate. . . . (Thus) to replace traditional society with A. Huxley’s “Brave New World” [the envisioning of a society fully enslaved to the cult of ‘Progress’] and atheism.

… - to alter knowledge and to limit the thought horizons by manipulating and confiscating the language. “Of all the monopolies enjoyed by the Soviet State none would be so crucial as its monopoly on the definition of words. The ultimate weapon of political control would be the dictionary.” (Robert Tucker ‘Stalin and the Uses of Psychology, 1956). It is interesting to note the out-of-the-ordinary intensive activity to write and re-write dictionaries taking place in the USSR after 1950.

And that should put into focus things like “mis-gendering” and choosing one’s pronouns, which is now become an integral part of education/indoctrination, and to a degree people who haven’t glimpsed it firsthand might find hard to fathom.