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Notes -
Arnold Kling on Michael Huemer on Thought Crime
It kind of goes without saying, but inherent in the notion of "thought crime" are both crime and punishment. If it doesn't deserve punishment, then it's not a crime.
Amen, brother. But is this just preaching to the choir? Consider: A whole lot of NPCs and talking heads sure ate up The Narrative. Propaganda is effective, to an extent, but beyond that extent it is deeply corrosive, particularly to any intellectual class, who become disillusioned and cynical. Thought crime is next.
Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are all about thought crime. You have to take the salvation of Jesus into your heart or something, and if you don't, have fun with eternal damnation. I can accept Aquinas, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. These are men who appealed to reason, writing to convince and persuade.
I imagine only atheists see the appeal of comparing woke (progressive, successor) ideology to a religion of sorts, likely filling some kind of primitive need for tribal loyalty, purity tests, and expensive signals (rabid adherence to nonsense). I'd love to hear Antonin Scalia's take though. Or L. Ron Hubbard's. Perhaps what we are seeing with successor ideology is not an individual need for such, but instead just the character of mass movements, the nature of power, its patterns of growth and movement and perpetuation. Are propaganda and thought crime inevitable?
Let's take it back to 1984. Orwell demonstrates the existential horror of a regime that can successfully deploy thought crime. Didn't he make it blindingly obvious for everyone? I'm pretty sure we were all nodding our heads in 8th grade English class about the evils of totalitarianism, only a few years after the USSR fell. I suspect this issue is particularly salient for me, as a libertarian.
Anyways, I'm not mad, just disappointed.
I'll echo what others have said, in that I suspect you are self-congratulating here. My experience has been religious folks very much identifying the religious features of woke-values.
Is it because they recognize the conflict of like-kind epistemic demands or is it because they are more likely to be on the right and see the progressives as a mirror from the left? Not sure.
Overall, i think it is not necessarily being religious or even on the right that makes one recognize wokism as a proto-religion, but overinvestment in idealized liberalism that makes one miss it. Part of this is because progressivism intentionally very much uses the langauge of frank liberalism to hide from the social and often legal barriers to forced ideological commitments. I don't personally care about the sociological implications of wokism being like a religion nearly as much as the socio-legal gerrymandering of what counts as 'neutral human decency' and what counts as imposed ideology.
Take for example the idea of using preferred pronouns. The liberal understands it as a acknowledgement of liberal desire to define oneself autonomously and sees undermining it as on a spectrum from a competing right to liberal self-expression or an affront to secular decency all the way to an invalidation of the other person's freedom. Meanwhile the religious person recognizes it as expression of an ontologolical truth in line with "Muhammad is the true prophet" or John 3:16, and understands it on those terms.
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