Watching a man in a dress call a woman a misogynist is just so 2023. I don't waste too much time calling it out. I do question how what's left of the Left has become so stupid, not to mention tyrannical.
There's no mystery behind it all. The madness has arisen directly out of a relentless anti-realism that insisted that everything is a matter of social construction in the context of asymmetrical power relations, and everything reduces to power. There is no reality other than power and its deconstruction. Or so the apology goes. It turns out that the great unmaskers of power are quite selective in which power they seek to deconstruct and thereby destroy, ignoring other forms more favourable to their own prejudices and preferences. In the absence of objective standards it is all quite arbitrary, of course.
It's all about language. Language not only changes, it is also changed. And changed in such a way as to change behaviour and reconstruct reality. Language is malleable but also manipulable. Changing language changes the reality we live in as social beings. Human beings are immersed in culture; those who put themselves in a position to control and manipulate that culture obtain a power to control and manipulate people. This is about exerting a power over people.
Somewhere in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, 'humanity' decided to take morality and all other matters into its own hands, dispense with God, and set about creating Heaven here on Earth. Progress was secularised as humanism discarded the ancient idea that man was made in God's image in favour of the view of men as gods themselves. It's affected views all across the political spectrum, left to right and all points in between. Unfortunately we have found that there is no 'we,' that 'humanity' is an abstraction that fractures into as many goods – and false gods – as there are human beings. Politics dissolves into an endless contention between rival human gods, with neither negotiation nor compromise possible, only an endless fight in an unwinnable war. Much of the frenzy and fever in politics at present is evidence of secular liberals in search of the greater meaning and purpose that the belief in God once brought. It's the Left on the whole that has adopted a retrograde religiosity, a surrogate religion, a new Puritanism that seeks to control and manipulate language to coerce behaviour and belief. The peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri identified free-will as 'God's greatest gift.' The secular religiosity of the present seeks to coerce will.
These are dangerous times. In terms of material quantity, there has never been a better time to be alive. Human beings are healthier, wealthier, and longer lived than ever before in history, and in greater numbers. I nearly said 'better educated,' too, but this is questionable, so I shall simply say longer educated. And yet there is a profound dis-at-ease. I would suggest this has come through the collapse of the qualitative dimension through the abandoning of God. The expansion of means has been accompanied by a diminution of meaning, of a belief in objective reality, morality, and an objectively valuable world, all of which is fundamental to a belief in God and the practical commitments that flow from that. We are now seeing the moral – and political – unravelling that follows what Nietzsche called 'the death of God.' What makes the political conflicts of the present age so intractable is that most of the protagonists, from left to right, are non-religious and even irreligious, and therefore cannot recognize their fundamentally religious roots:
"O where was God when all things fell apart;
When with the fury went our hopes and dreams?
We kept him at a distance from the start,
And now our world was bursting at the seams.
The same reports of threats we heard for years,
Till background noise was all that they became,
As we ignored our deeply hidden fears,
And thought our lives would always be the same.
Whatever we desired had been met
And modest were the challenges we faced.
By paying little portion of our debt,
At ease we yet to our destruction raced.
We had been playing heaven here on earth.
Too late we found out what these games were worth."
—Joseph Mirra