The Authoritarian Impulse

the horror of watching Americans beg to be controlled

I woke up a couple of hours ago with racing thoughts and fully aware that I would not go back to sleep.

This is nothing new for me, having been sleep disordered my entire life.

Usually there’s no clear reason for a night like this.

This time, though, I know what it’s about. I’m appalled, horrified, and deeply disturbed by something I’m seeing in others’ behavior, as well as by what the mirror of their behavior shows me about myself.

Last week I read two books by North Korean defector Yeonmi Park. They continue to resonate in my mind and affect my thinking almost hourly.

The risks that human beings must take for freedom right now, today, in 2023, are jaw-dropping. The depravity of totalitarian societies is sickening. The horrors that people, particularly women, often endure on their way to freedom are humbling for me to contemplate from my apartment—the apartment where I live alone, beholden to no one, with complete freedom to live, work, and speak as I choose.

When these heavy thoughts start to weigh on me, sometimes I distract myself with the internet. Lately, on Substack Notes.

The primary topic on Substack Notes—and by volume of Notes I’ve seen, nothing else even comes close to being an area of equal concern—is how much, if any, content moderation/censorship Substack should be doing. Specifically, there is an ongoing battle between lefties begging, demanding, pleading, emoting, and otherwise performatively seeking reassurance and commitment from Substack that Notes will be heavily censored to keep users “safe” from “hate” and “violence”—and those who want Substack to stay as far away from Twitter-style rules as possible.

I have been blocked on Notes several times now by people who I asked, politely and in good faith, to define hate and violence. (None of them answered.) The first one, told me that “all we want” was to not use the n-word, advocate killing Jews, or “foment violence against trans people”.

I asked her, what does it mean to “foment violence against trans people”? Does the fact that I do not believe transwomen are women and will not pretend otherwise make me guilty of “fomenting violence”?

Another user who was asking for “protection from slurs and racism” didn’t answer my question about what “racism” means. I laid out the meaning I was given in college: that all white people are racist, whether they intend it or not, and that the only moral path for white people is to acknowledge this and seek to ameliorate the harm our existence causes POC by “allyship.” I asked if that’s what she meant by “racism.”

Again, no answer. Likely a block, though I haven’t double-checked this.

I am actually quite happy about these blocks, on one level. I am naive and optimistic enough to hope that they will notice that blocking me worked. They no longer see my troublesome questions. They are no longer subjected to the horror of my disagreement. My evil, violent thoughts no longer harm them.

Substack has provided mute and block options for Notes, and they work.

Unlike comment sections, over which writers have complete control, on Notes you may still have to see something you don’t like. The four or five seconds of reading enough to determine that this isn’t someone you are going to want to interact with, and the extra half-second to right-click and choose to block the person, is in my opinion well worth the benefit of avoiding what Twitter eventually turned into, pre-Musk: a place where simple recognition of reality resulted in bans, thanks to a system of people insisting that reality constitutes hate. (Referring there to the people who got banned for tweeting things like “men aren’t women,” though there are other, equally egregious, examples.)

The calls for censorship are deafening right now in part because Substack CEO Chris Best gave an interview wherein the journalist tried very hard to shove him into a corner. Again and again, the journalist tried to make him feel obligated to promise that yes, yes, of course Substack will swoop in and make sure nobody ever has to deal with anything they don’t like online!

Best did a good job, but it’s obvious he’s going to be under ongoing intense and serious pressure. Here are two snippets from that interview:

and

I have no prediction on what is going to happen with Substack Notes. For Substack to continue to leave the responsibility where it belongs—on individual users—Best will have to bear up under an astonishing amount of pressure. I hope he’s got the intestinal fortitude for it.

But social media drama of this sort is not what I really want to talk about. What’s on my mind this morning is actually broader and more important than that.

Reminders of COVID Authoritarianism

I recently listened to a three-hour podcast that Sam Harris (about whose fall into lunacy I have written several times) did with Maajid Naawaz. It was notable for how desperate Sam was to create counter-factuals wherein authoritarianism, up to and including people being held down by cops and injected against their will, would be justifiable. He said repeatedly that he felt that COVID was a “dress rehearsal” for a really deadly pandemic, and we have proven that we would fail if/when that time came. In his mind, a “pass” would seem to be willingness to forego informed consent as a fundamental principle.

Nuremburg was not that long ago, and that its lessons are so easily forgotten is depressing.

What if the vaccines were perfectly safe AND stopped transmission AND what if COVID was a lot more deadly AND it mostly hurt children? We have to be willing to say that yes, COVID emergency measures including government enforced lockdowns and cops holding people down to jab them would be justified then, right? RIGHT?!?

(The above is a paraphrase, not a caricature.)

One of the great ironies is that attitudes like Sam Harris’s are the primary reason why a truly deadly pandemic, if one comes in our lifetimes, probably will kill many more people than it needs to. If he and others like him humbly admitted that they got everything wrong, apologized to people who were persecuted, fired, etc., under vaccine mandates, and supported reparations—then, and only then, might I and people like me be willing to hear them out if, in the future, a new pandemic comes and they want to argue for authoritarian measures being necessary.

Now? I would simply conclude that if their arguments seemed more compelling this time, it’s because they learned from their mistakes during COVID and got better at lying.

What Do They Have In Common?

What do COVID authoritarians share with people on Notes begging for a security blanket of reassurance (yes, it’s a Venn diagram with significant overlap) that a powerful authority will swoop in and protect them if they ask?

I see two forces as primary drivers. (I’ll be looking forward to the comments to see what the rest of you see.)

First, they are controlled by fear. They have put their faith in experts, who are mostly leftist academics like themselves. They do not understand other perspectives. They are terrified that people will have a voice, influence, success, etc., who disagree with them. Some of them are so brainwashed by the media and their compatriots on the Left that they actually feel and experience themselves as harmed by disagreement.

This is, I think, literal for many of them. They truly believe that my statement, “I do not believe that transwomen are women” harms them. They think it’s an act of violence. Life has gotten so easy for so many people that things like “microaggressions” feel like real and serious obstacles to happiness.

This is a position of total infantilization, and it’s terribly sad. Another person’s statement, “I do not believe in you or your view of yourself” or “I do not see you as you see yourself and I think your view of yourself is delusionally wrong” should be something that rolls off an adult’s back.

If you are a child hearing that from a parent, of course this is likely to be damaging.

If you are an adult hearing this, especially harshly, from someone in a relationship with a real power differential (your clergy, therapist, etc.), it could be damaging, yes, but it shouldn’t be crushing.

If this comes out of the blue from your very best friend—sure, it makes sense for this to be upsetting and take some time to work through. Being upset by that is understandable.

To desperately want authorities to enforce your views—to lock down your neighbors, to hold them down and jab them by force, to remove them from their jobs, to kick them off Substack or Twitter, to cancel them from their employment because they do not see you as you see yourself—this is not understandable, and it is not excusable.

For a stranger’s view to be consequential, much less devastating to the point that it feels like actual violence, is narcissism gone to seed. Immaturity run amok.

It’s pathetic.

And it is a total moral failure.

Second, they believe that they are superior—morally, intellectually, and otherwise—and they desperately need to have this belief reinforced.

One way that these two forces overlap, I think, is the insecurity so evident in the need to have authorities do more than provide mute and block buttons.

Where does it come from?

On some level—maybe conscious, maybe not—I think that critical theorists, grievance studies academics, activists, activist journalists, etc., understand that they’re mostly peddling useless nonsense.

Imagine that your job was to teach POC to stop being happy and content and constantly feel slighted by “microaggressions,” or to re-interpret American classics like To Kill A Mockingbird as promoting white supremacy, or to do HR seminars about the erasure of pansexuals during Pride Month.

Might you resent your redneck neighbors—the ones who can grow their own food, fix their own cars, change their own tires, and otherwise demonstrate a significantly greater ability to cope with real life?

Might you feel inferior to them, and need desperately to find ways to assert your superiority?

Both of these factors have, in many cases, roots in Cluster B disorders, traits, and behaviors. I believe in the accuracy of my friend Josh’s thesis that the modern leftist movement overtaking our culture is a case of Cluster B disorders taking over everything. Society at large is now an abusive home. (Check out Josh’s show and Substack for more on this.)

What Can We Do?

This is a harder question, of course. It may be that we cannot do much about our fellow Americans who are desperate to justify, institute, and argue for authoritarian measures, under the cloak of “emergencies” or “protection from hate.”

People who don’t value freedom will be willing to risk freedom in ways that those of us who prize it never will.

Looking in the Mirror

But….do any of us prize freedom enough? I don’t. If I did, the books I read last week wouldn’t weigh so heavily on me. They were humbling and convicting reminders of how lucky I am—reminders I really needed.

I grew up in a social milieu where boys often saw the military as their only route out of poverty. Nearly always, they were correct.

When I was eight or nine, the big brother of a neighborhood friend enlisted. He was kind to me, a good kid who would stop and play games with his little sisters and me, never let his friends be mean to us, and never made fun of us for crying. I had a conversation with him, pre-deployment, that went something like this:

Me: “Aren’t you scared of dying over there? The Middle East is like a great big sandbox and lots of American soldiers come home in boxes.”

Him: “Sure, I’m scared of dying. I think everyone who’s honest is scared of dying. But my mom and my sisters have freedom that women and girls over there don’t have and will probably never have. I love my country because it’s the best place in the world for my mom and my sisters. And I’m ok with dying to protect their freedom.”

Me: (started tearing up) “I’ll miss you bad if you die.”

Him: (hugged me) “I’ll try very hard to come home, but if I don’t, you remember that this is the best country in the world for girls and make a good life for yourself, ok?”

He came home. (Other boys I grew up with and around didn’t.) He stayed in the military and was able to move his family to a better neighborhood before I was an adult, at which point I lost touch with him and his family.

I’ve never forgotten him.

But I also don’t remember him nearly enough.

I have my own struggles with being controlled by fear—PTSD is an anxiety disorder, by definition a case of having irrational levels of fear—and with the insecurity that leads people to need desperately to prove their superiority.

It was winning two lotteries, at roughly the same time, that saved me from becoming a leftist zombie myself. I got one of the last five sane therapists on earth at roughly the same time some very smart, based people became my friends and started helping me put myself back together after a dark and damaging past.

Without both of these blessings, my four years of university would have radicalized me. I am 100% certain that I’d have bought it all hook, line, and sinker. I’d probably, if I had to guess, be a member of Antifa, and I’m not kidding about that. I hated myself, as a result of my past, and they would have offered me a chance to prove that I deserved to be alive in a powerful, dramatic way — putting my body on the line for a cause.

I have been extremely lucky as an adult, and it’s up to me to do everything I can to help protect what matters.

Today I will count these and all my other blessings, be grateful to the men and women whose sacrifices facilitated and ensure them, and try to live by the words of Marcus Aurelius.

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About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

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