Speaking Power to Truth

As the crushing of Dr. Jason Richwine reminds us, a popular pastime in 21st Century America is to speak power to truth.

As I wrote recently:

I'm reminded of a famous quote from 1984:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Orwell turned out to be wrong about secret policemen: over the course of the 20th Century, even they tended to get tired of killing and beating massive numbers of people. The KGB stopped shooting political prisoners or working them to death in the uranium mine, and  instead just locked them up in psychiatric hospitals.

But Orwell's real subject, the one he knew best from introspection and socializing, was the intellectual mind (e.g., Eric Blair). And, for his kind, he hasn't been proven wrong yet about the metaphorical "intoxication of power, ... the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless."

Granted, vastly swelling the population of America with disposable diaper-dropping Mexicans in the name of protecting the environment sounds pretty prima facie stupid. But that's not the point. The point is to grab any available tool to hammer The Enemy: i.e., other white people whom you find disagreeable. 

And that never gets old.

Theodore Dalrymple has famously noted:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better."