A pitiful substitute for thought

Link: Zoe Williams: Bulletproof but loaded | Comment is free | The Guardian.

We laughed at the obsessives on our University campus who could explain everything in terms of race, class or sexual orientation. University was such an exhilarating experience after the squalid anti-intellectualism of our comprehensive schools that we could not take seriously those who preferred such formulae to thought. Most hilarious of all were leftist students from privileged backgrounds who, on any logical application of their own formulae, were the enemy. They simply decided that holding with greater intensity the views that cast them as such would exonerate them. Indeed, in a classic piece of doublethink, heterosexual whites from wealthy backgrounds seemed to think themselves more virtuous for being leftist witch-hunters of racists and homophobes.

How we chortled at the way such people saw such issues where there were patently none. How we chuckled at the way losers cast themselves as heroes for possessing random attributes, rather than for the content of their characters. They were no different from their "enemies" who were supposed to believe themselves superior for possessing other random attributes. They were perpetrators of identical fallacies; walking refutations of their own pretended logic.

My favourite University moment was the impassioned declaration by a Trotskyite at a Union meeting that there would be "no real sex" until the Revolution. What a wonderfully transparent descent from the abstract to the personal. I wonder if he still blushes at the memory of his inadvertent revelation?

We should not have laughed. While those of us who were there to learn left University to get on with our lives, the class/race/sex retards stayed on as academics or left to go into politics, journalism or both. They would do anything to escape the need to think, it seems. Zoe Williams' piece on the Guardian "Comment is Free" site today is a case in point. I can honestly say that I had never considered "hoody" a codeword for black youth. Any mental images I had formed when I heard the word had involved the sort of pizza-faced yob who constitutes the main threat when walking the streets of my home town. In her warped view of the universe however, Zoe has scored bonus points for "discovering" concealed racism in public discourse. Sadly, she has more influence in the world than those of us who can see her for the obsessive thought-avoider that she is.

Compare and contrast this little article by Theodore Dalrymple. Isn't it remarkable how little press the chocolate bar killing has had? I don't know the races of the accused. In British journalism, that usually means they are from a background which would contradict the standard formula of "ethnic minority = victim". Try googling "Dejon Thompson Patrick Rowe images" and you will get a picture of the victim and of the Lion bar featured in the fatal affair, but no pictures of the named killers. Maybe that is because they were minors at the time of the crime, but why is their ethnicity never stated, while that of the victim is mentioned everywhere? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are allowed to know he was Turkish, because that fits the formula. After all, we always know that the perpetrator is white or heterosexual in a so-called "hate crime". Indeed the concept of "hate crime" only serves the purpose of reinforcing such thought-free formulae. As the wonderful DCI Gene Hunt character played by Philip Glenister in Life on Mars asked, when introduced to the concept; "As opposed to what; a love crime?"

Behaviours that are consistently rewarded, increase. Behaviours that are consistently punished, decrease. This is because people have free will and are capable of controlling their own behaviours. That is true of all classes, sexes and races and the people who really demean minority groups are those who formulaically explain human behaviour by reference to such matters. A crime is a crime, regardless of the perpetrator and all should be equal before the law. Those who use sex, race and class as factors in social formulae threaten the future well-being of us all, as well as insulting the humans they categorise.

Comments

[Kinderling]

Brilliant expose on the pressure upon rich white kids to peddle defensively Marxist propeganda aimed against themselves, (to reject all that their parents did for them to achieve privilege), and then to actually live the rhetoric. Didn't this happen to Paul McCartney, to believe John's dream of the Beatles and then become a mere soap-peddling parody?
Isn't this NuLabour, pressure-inverted people living the dream but not knowing how to make any country work?
For a government has to connect with a nation of normal hard working people, yet in every echolon of government there are people who openly say there is no such thing as normal.
The only people who can do business with them are crooks. Liars who support these self-deniers.
Any projects run to budget? Pleeese.