The Mindlessness of the Liberal

The liberal-democratic man, just as his communist counterpart, lives in a world almost totally packed with conventions and interpretations, with very little space for individual initiative. He relies almost exclusively on ready-made formulas, moves within well-known stereotypes of thought and language through which he expresses his feelings of approval and disapproval and justifies his role in a community. The ideology that surrounds him is not only a set of concepts but also a system of mandatory practices: like an erstwhile African savage, he is expected to dance his ritual dances in order to manifest his tribal affiliation through the well-trained gestures and rhythms the village sorcerers taught him so that he could express his enthusiasm for the war his superiors thought it rational to wage against the enemies, or to give his joyful support of peace if this accords with the strategy of the tribe. For him there is no reality apart from that which bears the meaning given to it by the sorcerers. Nothing else exists, and if it does, it is not worth communicating.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.130-131.

Advertising With an Agenda

Today, it is not longer enough to simply advertise a product; the companies feel an irresistible need to attach to it a message that is ideologically correct. Even if this message does not have any commercial function—and it hardly ever does—any occasion is good to prove oneself to be a proponent of the brotherhood of races, a critic of the Church, and a supporter of homosexual marriage. This sycophantic wheedling is practiced by journalists, TV morons, pornographers, athletes, professors, artists, professional groups, and young people already infected with the ideological mass culture.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.121

Sexual Utopia Replaced by Sexual Anarchy

The sexual utopia did not come about, but sex was politicized and became a part of the official agenda of the state and its institutions. The rebels, without a moment’s hesitation, joined the ranks of the political structures and became their functionaries. The consequences of all this, however, were not necessarily quite those that were planned. Once institutionalized and absorbed into the system, sexual freedom permeated law, customs, social practices, schools, educational programs, and public discourse. Since then, the issues of human sexuality, abortion, homosexuality, and so-called reproductive rights have been espoused by the mainstream and begun to be the basic identification marks in liberal-democratic politics. Today, they are supported by the United Nations, the WHO, International tribunals, governments, the parliamentary majority, European institutions, universities, and innumerable think-tanks and non-governmental organizations. Long-haired hippies chanting “make love, not war” have been replaced by today’s politicians, teachers, bureaucrats, and lawyers.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.110-111.

The Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution is arguably the most extreme manifestation of the episodic nature of man. To surrender one’s life to sexual pleasure meant once and for all abandoning any attempt to give one’s existence a unifying meaning; this pleasure is, like no other, related to what is short-lived and ephemeral. Many wise men in the history of European thought consistently warned against the effects of the uncontrolled reign of pleasures over human life. In classical ethics pleasures were feared because they not only do not have a self-mitigating mechanism, but are likely, when unchecked, to do away with external mitigating measures. These warnings were not treated with the seriousness they deserved by modern utilitarians. With the growth of consumerism this fear evaporated. As the new rhetoric of sexual liberation declared the existing limitations on sex consumption unacceptable, the time finally came to push the cult of pleasure to a new low. Free sex was not only pleasure; it also stood for spontaneity against souls technology and productivity; it stood for peace and universal harmony, with no constraints, no domination, no discrimination.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.109-110.

Making Pleasure the Center of Life

Bringing pleasure to the center of life engendered a different image of human nature. Human beings, in this view, no longer think of themselves in terms of the whole of their existence, but in terms of moments and episodes. It could not be otherwise because there is no such thing as the pleasure of life. One can talk about pleasures and pleasant moments that happen in life, and one can even encourage people to collect those pleasures and pleasant moments, the more the better. But the latter strategy, even if successful, does not predetermine whether this or that particular life in its entirety is or is not happy. It may have many pleasant moments, but these do not automatically translate themselves into a unifying moral scenario, nor make a life fulfilled. To have a fulfilling life it is necessary to give it a durable inherent meaning that may very well coexist with having many pleasant moments, but is in no way a result of these moments, no matter how many. One can, of course, construe one's life as a series of episodes, but this must, to a greater or lesser degree, undermine the sense of continuity of existence, in more extreme cases leading to different identifications, each associated with a different episode. But even if our lives are episodic, our selves are not. Hence the life dedicated to the accumulation of pleasures, but lacking an internal unity, will most likely not be a happy life because a human being cannot renounce his unity without negative consequences.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.109.

Behind the Sexual Revolution

The sexual revolution was the culmination of growing consumerism in Western societies, which in turn stemmed from the unprecedented prosperity an security that these societies had managed to achieve. Until the 1960s, the growing number of easily available goods did not include sex: this was regulated by existing social practices as well as by the old moral precepts going back to classical ethics. This growing consumerism tended to weaken both social practices and moral precepts, and replaced them with far less demanding and seemingly more natural criteria of a utilitarian kind, pleasure being the principal yardstick to measure the value of human goals. The impressive efficiency of modern civilization accustomed people to expect that their actions would be instantly gratified. Whatever delayed or hindered this gratification  was considered unnatural, repressive, incomprehensible, and in the long run unacceptable.

When we look at this mental change from the perspective of the history of philosophy, we can see in it the final—though, thank God, not yet closed—phase of a long process. From the beginning, pleasure was considered by philosophers to be and important part of the human experience, also having a complicated but powerful relation to morality. For twenty-five centuries the nature of this relationship had been the subject of an engaging and often illuminating debate. This debate unavoidably occasioned the use of other concepts, not identical to that of pleasure but somehow related to it: happiness, fulfillment, flourishing, and a few others. At the end of the day pleasure finally outclassed its rivals.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.108.

What Socialists Really Mean

Socialists cry, “Power to the people,” and raise the clenched fist as they say it.  We all know they really mean “Power over people. Power to the state!”

Margaret Thatcher

Epidemic of Ignorance In America

Basic content knowledge, including broad knowledge of civics, has been withheld from generations of students by our public schools. Instead, students have been fed — both in K-12 and in our universities — a steady diet of increasing resentment for American principles of freedom, tolerance, and constitutional self-governance. The radicalization of American education has been going on for decades.

This cannot be an accident. Those who claim that more government control over our lives will somehow “make us free” — the elites, the ruling classes — are committed to making the rest of us ignorant of what was actually at play in the American Revolution: an awareness that too much power in the hands of too few people is a bad thing. If such knowledge remained common, it would be bad news for the control freaks of the world. This is why they are committed to cultivating ignorance in youth, and then programming them to vote for the ruling class.

Policies of multiculturalism then brought us the insanity of identity politics, which basically erases a person’s individual identity and replaces it with various sorts of pigeon-holing. Students are only permitted to find self-worth through something called “intersectionality,” which scores them based on how many victim points they can claim.

Political correctness is designed to make sure they never question their miseducation, and instead conform to the elitist program from the fear of being socially isolated and academically punished if they show any tendencies towards independent thought. That’s a miserable way to live, so we shouldn’t be surprised that so many college students are going insane. …

The cultivators of ignorance have aimed not simply to destroy America’s national heritage, but also to destroy America’s very compass: the Judeo-Christian principles that form basis of the rule of law, and, therefore, freedom. Without that compass, Americans are set adrift, increasingly answering only to raw emotions of rage, envy, and grievance.

Too many Americans don’t really know what our rights and freedoms mean. They are groping around in the dark and have been programmed to swallow the lie that America was never great. As a result, we are too often dealing with a dumbed-down electorate unable to understand the basic framework of our republic.

They’re unable to understand what it means to govern ourselves, and they’re unable to understand the meaning of true freedom — that one must be free from government restraints in order to find his purpose and live freely. With the loss of this knowledge, and a culture that leads them astray from that birthright, they predictably become less able to think their own thoughts. Those who have completely lost their compass are more inclined to lose their minds in blind rage. And that is, sadly, where too many Americans are.

Stella Morabito, In An America This Ignorant, It’s No Wonder We Struggle To Stay Free

Sexual Promiscuity is Necessary for Socialism to Succeed

The concept [that human sexual impulses had been deleteriously suppressed and if sex was liberated life would be immeasurably nicer] received its revolutionary form from Herbert Marcuse, who back in the 1950s came up with a theory—a mixture of Freudianism and Marxism—explaining how to combine sexual liberation with a political struggle to overthrow the system. His argument was roughly composed of two elements: the first a rather diabolical image of the modern capitalist world, able to repel and neutralize all the revolutionary movements of change; the second, an interpretation of sex as the only power in man and society, inherently subversive and as yet uncontrolled by the powers that be. Hence, the proclamation of sexual liberation was a call to political collective action, and sex itself became the paramount political weapon. For some time, this diagnosis remained unnoticed and was considered by many to be quite silly.  Why would sexual promiscuity be a tool of political struggle? The very idea seemed unworthy of intellectual attention. However, after several years this theory gained great popularity, especially—as is fairly easy to understand—among young people, including the rebellious students on university campuses.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.107-108.

The Politicization of Sex is Necessary for Socialism to Succeed

The stifling intrusiveness of liberal democracy should not come to us as a surprise once we remember its inner dialectic. Liberalism, ass we recall, created a private man and wanted to deliver the vast majority of human race from the burden—unnatural and unnecessary, as liberals thought—of politics. It succeeded in the first task, and failed in the second. Liberalism, indeed, made people private on an unprecedented scale. Yet these people, having discovered the importance of their privacy, did not renounce politics. Hence when a liberal-democratic man became involve in political activities, it was natural that he imbued them with what he regarded to be the closest to him, what he lived for and breathed and what provided him with the reason for being. But these were matters so far regarded as private. The liberal-democratic man politicized his privacy, perhaps his main contribution to the change in thinking about politics. He politicized marriage, family relations, communal life, language. In this he resembled his communists comrade. But his greatest success in this regard, unmatched so far by any competitor, was to politicize the area that seemed to be the most private of all things private, the most intimate of all things intimate and thus the least appropriate to political meddling: the realm of sex.

Obviously the intentions to politicize sex had appeared before in radical programs aimed at fundamental transformation of society, including the destruction of its traditional institutions. Those radicals and revolutionaries who were looking for a better foundation for a better society knew very well that their program must fail unless they managed to do something with the family. This institution was always considered, quite understandably, to be the most serious obstacle to the task of building a new society.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.105-106.

No Such People as “Palestinians”

In order to destroy the impression of the tiny Jewish state’s facing enormous Muslim Arab foes and prevailing, the Soviet KGB (the Soviet Committee for State Security) developed the fiction of an even smaller people, the “Palestinians,” menaced by a well-oiled and ruthless Israeli war machine. In A.D. 134, the Romans had expelled the Jews from Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine, a name they plucked from the Bible, the name of the Israelites ancient enemies, the Philistines. But never had the name Palestinian referred to anything but a region, not to a people or an ethnicity. In the 1960s, however, the KGB and … Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Robert Spencer, The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, pg. 309

Tolerance the Last Virtue?

Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved society. When you have an immoral society that has blatantly, proudly, violated all of the commandments of God, there is one last virtue they insist upon: tolerance for their immorality.

D. James Kennedy

The War of Political Correctness

… In a liberal democracy seemingly everything is permissible, but politically incorrect events immediately trigger an avalanche reaction of resistance: intellectuals protest, journalists on television twist their faces in moral indignation, comedians use the whip of satire, and the lumpen-intelligentsia, delighted with all that indignation, whistle, heckle, stomp their feet, and demand exemplary punishment of the perpetrators. …

The warriors of political correctness thing of themselves in the category of the struggle between David and Goliath. Nothing can be further from the truth. They belong to the mainstream, having all the instruments of power at their disposal. On their side are the courts, both national and international, the UN and its agencies, the European Union with all its institutions, countless media, universities, and public opinion. The illusion they cherish of being a brave minority heroically facing the whole world, false as it is, gives them nevertheless a strange sense of comfort: they feel absolutely safe, being equipped with the most powerful political tools in today’s world but at the same time priding themselves on their courage and decency, which are more formidable the more awesome the image of the enemy becomes.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.104-105

With Liberals, What Is Incidental Must be Treated as Systematic

In both communism and liberal democracy we encounter the same peculiarity: what is incidental is treated as a systematic problem, which really means that whatever happens is systemic and nothing is incidental to the system. It thus becomes natural for true liberal democrats—as it was for true communists—to harass their colleagues because of a causal remark, or a lack of vigilance, or an improper joke, making the lives of unruly individuals difficult by constantly admonishing and creating further regulations and stricter laws. By doing so, the self-proclaimed guardians of purity see themselves as carrying on their shoulders the responsibility for the future of liberal democracy worldwide. If not for their effort and dedication, this great political enterprise, they think, would become fouled, and then—perish the thought. 

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.103

Political Correctness

There is nothing mysterious about [the rise of political correctness].  It is simply a practical consequence of the view that the duty of citizens of the liberal-democratic society is to participate in the great collective enterprise, where everyone cooperates with everyone else at all levels and under all circumstances. I we look at three…examples—family life, a book’s content, and popular jokes—we can see that from the politically correct perspective they are no longer irrelevant trivialities. They illustrate what is absolutely crucial for the entire logic of liberal democracy. Because the logic of this system turns on “dialogue,” “respect,” “equal rights,” “openness,” and “tolerance,” everything is by definition political, and nothing that relates, however remotely, to these notations is trivial, minor, or irrelevant. A slight offensive remark must always be regarded as a manifestation of mortal sin. What seems a barely visible mark on the surface conceals underneath swirling currents of hatred, intolerance, racism, and hegemony. The body responsible for ensuring that these terrible things do not surface is the state, with all the instruments at its disposal. It is the state that should incessantly work to impose and improve cooperation policies by removing all real and potential barriers, creating a favorable legal environment, and reshaping public space and education in such a way that the people’s minds internalize the rules of politically correct thinking.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.100

Multiculturalism Hoax

The word “multiculturalism,” still used today despite numerous criticisms and ridicule, represents yet another hoax that liberal democracy created and that turned out to be surprisingly effective. Both parts of the word misrepresent reality. Multiculturalism is not about culture but about politics. In fact, they should be “polit” (as in “politburo”) rather than “cultur,” and “mono” rather than “multi.”

Many ingredients of the multicultural cake are not ingredients any more but have become the cake itself. Feminism is not the “culture” of feminists or feminist parties or women, but the political platform espoused by governments, the European Union, and many international institutions; the ideology of homosexuality is no longer in the hands of homosexual activists and their organizations but is a major item in national and global agendas. A nation that would dare to entertain any misgivings in this regard or, for example, include wording in its Constitution—as was recently done by the Hungarians—that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, would be subjected to almost worldwide condemnation expressed in the rhetoric of rage and hatred.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.95-96

The Liberal Fraud of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, an idea that has become extremely popular in recent decades, is nothing more that a program to build a society in which there exist not many cultures, but many political identities attached to many real or, more often, imagined collectives. Multiculturalism encourages what is today called identity politics. This term may be misleading. It has little to do with a defense of the rich fabric of societies and their historically constituted communities, but should be rather seen as a program of politicization of certain groups that could radically change the fabric of society. …

Women, homosexuals, Muslims, ethnic groups are being perceived as, and transformed into, quasi-parties, organized from above by the political or ideological leadership and not possessing other characteristics than those resulting from the struggle for power against other groups and no other identity than that provided by this leadership, allowing no ideological dissent. Whoever is not a member of this quasi-party, even though for some reason—be it sex, birth, or color—he should be included, but stays outside its boundaries or sometimes even opposes it, is the enemy, a sellout, and a traitor. A black American who condemns the absurdity of African-Americanism, regardless of his virtues and achievements, is considered as much a traitor to his race. A woman who rejects feminism for its crude and destructive ideological content is a traitor to the sisterhood.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.95

Liberalism Cannot Live with Traditional Schooling

Just as communism was not possible with families adhering to the feudal-patriarchal system, so liberal democracy is believed to be incomplete and unsuccessful with schools respecting traditional moral and cultural authoritarianism. The arguments are analogous. Just as a person coming from a noncommunist community could not become a full-fledged, dedicated, and efficient citizen of the communist state, so a graduate of a traditional school will never be a faithful and reliable citizen of the liberal-democratic state.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.93

Liberalism—A Doctrine of Power

Liberalism is primarily a doctrine of power, both self-regarding and other-regarding: it aims to limit the power of other agents, and at the same time grants enormous prerogatives for itself. In a sense it is a super-theory of society, logically prior to and—by its own declaration of self-importance—higher than any other. It attributes to itself the right to be more general, more spacious, and more universal than any of its rivals. Its goal is—as the liberals say—to create a general framework within which others will be able to cooperate. The liberals will never voluntarily give up this admittedly highest of political prerogatives to anyone and will never agree to share it. …

In its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity. The organizing principle of liberalism—as in all other philosophies aiming to change the world radically—is therefore dualism, not pluralism.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.77, 78

Communism and Liberal Democracy are Equal

Communism and liberal democracy are related by a similarly paradoxical approach to politics: both promised to reduce the role of politics in human life, yet induced politicization on a scale unknown in previous history.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.73

The Liberal Invasion of Universities

The universities are undergoing the same process [of liberal takeover], which is most unfortunate because they were regarded for centuries as free industries of the human mind. Today, any such belief is clearly in discord with reality. The entire educational process has been systematically standardized to make it as close as possible to the liberal-democratic model, in which group rights are carefully watched, detailed verification and appeal procedures have been established, and the principle of equality in increasingly more influential in academic community relations. The humanities and social sciences have long since declared a keen interest in participating in the process of liberal-democratic changes and are vigorously supported in their actions by ministries of education, political associations, and supranational institutions. The liberal-democratic jargon, which so painfully dominates political life also invaded academic life, which slowly became a reflection of the entire public sphere. Universities are increasingly eager to introduce a liberal-democratic regime, which makes the vast majority of academics convinced that they operate in an institution that enjoys the greatest freedom in its history. But in fact, freedom is in retreat.

The emergence of liberal democracy at educational institutions led—as elsewhere—to considerable restrictions of the very liberty that universities enjoyed previously. These developments are undermining a long and admirable academic tradition. Of course, in the post communist countries, not much was left to be undermined because the old regime managed to deal with the academic tradition very effectively—with no small participation of the academics themselves. Remnants of tradition were occasionally still invoked as a weapon against the excessive intrusion of the communist government. Whatever else remained of the old days was wiped clean by the new order. In an age of an increasing number of rights, continuous group demands, equality, and officially hunted deviations from the established political line, academic tradition did not stand a chance. The Universities began to resemble businesses on the one hand and liberal-democratic political structures on the other.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.68-6

The Uglification of America #2

Today, while waiting for some food at a high upscale place, I again noticed not only all the overweight, unattractive people, but the truly laughable hairstyles of some. So many females, including one that had to be sixty or so, with purple or pink dyed hair. So many with uncombed, sloppy hair. Too many with that extra short look that often advertises a hatred of men. And the men with all the shaved heads. Are there that many guys who are going bald now? With so many balding men desperately trying to save what they have, or miraculously grow back what they’ve lost, why do so many even young males just shave it all off completely? Again, even forty years ago, that shaved head look advertised potential criminality. Think Lex Luthor.

Donald Jeffries, The Uglification of America

The Uglification of America #1

One can’t help but notice the absurdly casual, slovenly way most Americans dress now. Not at home. In public. Did anyone envision seeing adults parading around in stores wearing pajama pants? So many men and women just appear to have “punted,” to simply have stopped trying to appear attractive in any way, shape or form. Instead, they slide on their XXL sweat pants, and their XXXL tee shirts, and parade about as proudly as their in-shape ancestors did.

Factor in the gratuitous tattoos that are everywhere now. I see otherwise good-looking young girls with an entire arm, perhaps both arms, completely covered in tattoos. There’s a good reason why, in the past, only pirates and drunken sailors got tattoos. They don’t make anyone look better. And when your skin is mostly camouflaged by ugly conglomerations of ink, it automatically causes others to view you less respectively. Tramp stamps, and all that.

Donald Jeffries, The Uglification of America

Morality From Evolution?

On the contrary, there is not a particle of reliable experimental evidence suggesting that our moral standards are nothing more than random molecule combinations. In fact, it is illogical to the highest degree to equate moral standards with physical adaptations that can evolve in response to environmental conditions. If our moral codes were determined individually by our chromosomal makeup, then how could we reward or condemn the actions of other people? If no distinction is made between mankind and the animal kingdom, then why should we be disgusted when people engage in acts of bestiality? Why not love our pets more than friends and relatives? Why not act uncivilized like wild animals? Why even wear clothing? How does one account for the existence of human reason and free will? Those two truths are regarded as self-evident. These so-called evolutionary explanations are simply imaginary, subjective, hypothetical constructs. It is not coherent philosophy because it is not consonant with the reality of our nature.

Jesse L, The Moral Argument Against Evolution

When Freedom Becomes Slavery and Slavery Becomes Freedom

Over the last few decades we have observed legislation that has been passed in the name of freedom and of liberal democracy, but which led, with little social resistance, to a considerable limitation of liberty. Parity and quota regulations are a case in point. Although they are typical egalitarian measures, and as such inherently inimical to freedom, they have been largely accepted as a political imperative of a liberal society. One cannot nowadays appoint an executive or elect a representative, be it in politics, business, or art, without a prior selection according to sex, ethnicity, or some other nonrelevant criterion. Another type of legislation, extremely dangerous and also illustrating “coercion to freedom,” relates to what has been called “hate speech,” and still another to “domestic violence”; these phrases tend to incriminate more and more acts of conduct and speech, allowing for further drastic intervention by the government and the courts in family life, the media, public institutions, and schools. When such laws were being passed in some European countries some time ago, an immediate reaction was far from favorable. Many people and institutions—especially in the Untied States—voiced an opinion that such measures were Orwellian in nature, in the sense that the libertarian rhetoric was used to cover up coercion, making people believe that slavery is freedom and freedom is slavery. Later on, the adjective “Orwellian” was dropped and more countries, including the United States, adopted similar regulations spontaneously carried by the general will, with more and more support by the people or those who claimed to represent the people’s will; anyhow, the citizens did not protest, probably having been convinced that they were witnessing a global civilization of freedom in the making.

A similar pressure is exerted on education in general, the result being a rigorous conformity of thought and conduct—all, naturally, in the name of empowerment of students and teachers. Consequently, teacher, like parents, can do less and less, although most of them probably think that the changes are inevitable, and that never before did they enjoy so much freedom. The real power has been shifting to government officials, who—ostensibly ignorer to empower young people—decide how their minds should be formed, free from the potential subversive influence of teachers and parents. But then both teachers and parents have ceased to rebel because over time they also have become part of the great universal liberal-democratic will, bragging about their sincere and deep devotion to it. Coercion and spontaneity overlap in an almost perfect symbiosis. And if there is still someone who has not resigned himself to it, he will soon be called to order by the government and the courts.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 67-68

The Culture That the Socialist Left Has Wrought

The conservatives, who, in principle, should oppose the socialists and liberal democrats, quite sincerely argue that they, too, are open, pluralistic, tolerant, and inclusive, dedicated to the entitlements of individuals and groups, non-discriminatory and even supportive of the claims of feminists and homosexual activists. All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of those concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same cliches, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not the authors but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves.

The grand design, its supported say, should be implemented at all cost because it is believed to bring with itself freedom, autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and all other liberal-democratic treasures. Therefore, all barriers that block its coming can and must be broken down, also for the benefit of those who put up these barriers. If abortion means freedom, then we should raise the consciousness of those who think differently; force doctors to support this freedom and silence priests so they do not interfere with it. If same-sex marriage means freedom, we should then compel its opponents to accept it and silence fools who may have doubts about it. If political correctness is a necessity of life in the liberal-democratic society, then imposing it is, after all, nothing else but a measure of its emancipation for all.  The groups that managed to capture this liberal phraseology and the logic that underlies it—such as homosexuals and feminists—have exerted a disproportionate influence on the government to the extent that the state institutions, including the courts, have taken upon themselves the task of breaking the resistance of less conscious and more stubborn groups—that is, of coercing them to freedom.

Today, those who write and speak not only face more limitations than they used to, but all the institutions and communities that traditionally stood in the way of this “coercion to freedom” are being dismantled. As in all utopias, so in a liberal democracy it is believed that the irrational residues of the past should be removed.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.66-67

Liberalism Degenerates to Socialism Then Communism — Every Time

Once the liberal democracy became established, those who in the past had complained about the growth of the communist state and compared it with a glorious example of the asceticism of a liberal state could invoke such a contrast no longer. The liberal-democratic state—still more effective than a communist state—slowly and steadily underwent a similar expansion and likewise deeply intruded in the lives of its citizens. However, while the communist state’s spread and intrusive interference had their source in the determination of the authorities who, in order to survive, had to impose, forcefully, more and more controls of social spontaneity, in a liberal-democratic state the source of this growing intrusion was the citizens themselves, both as individuals and as members of the privilege-seeking groups.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.62

Identity Group Politics is From Leftists, and is About Control

The starting position of liberalism—and at the same time a final perspective—is a hypothetical situation in which relatively independent units cooperate through a system of contracts. The democratization turned liberalism into a doctrine in which the primary agents were no longer individuals, but groups and the institutions of the democratic state. Instead of individuals striving for the enrichment of social capital with new ideas and aspirations, there emerged people voicing demands called rights and acting within the scope of organized groups. These groups subsequently petitioned state institutions and exerted pressure on them to change legislation and political practices; over time, they began to affect judicial decisions by the courts, demanding legal acceptance of their position and acquired privileges. In the final outcome the state in liberal democracy ceased to be an institution pursuing the common good, but became a hostage of groups that treated it solely as an instrument of change securing their interests.

The state, more and more involved in the process of supporting group aspirations, largely lost its general republican character and turned into a conglomerate of the social, economic, cultural, and other policy programs enacted and imposed through democratic procedures. This, in turn, meant that the state had to take over more and more specific responsibilities, far beyond the normal operations of the state apparatus. As the new expectations of the groups had more and more to do with their status and social recognition, the traditional means of the state policy were no longer sufficient. It became necessary to intervene deeply into the social substance—where the roots of status and recognition resided—either through direct political action or indirectly by changing the laws, making appropriate judicial decisions, and adjusting morality and social mores drastically to guarantee equality.  The state representatives, armed with the rhetoric of anti discrimination, felt if was their duty to regulate matters that for too long had remained unregulated, which often means giving privileges to certain groups and taking them away from others.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.61-62

Leftists Keep Trying Socialism Regardless of its Failure

Why then, if we agree that democracy has its weaknesses, would such weaknesses be reduced by having more democracy? In what way will more democracy reduce, for example, democratic vulgarity, or the cult of mediocrity, or the weakening of social customs and traditions, or the overproduction of legislation, or the omnipresent spirit of partisanship penetrating every aspect of life? If the increasing role of the masses led to the vulgarization of culture, why would placing even greater importance on the same masses lead to culture’s refinement? If democracy introduces yet further groups in the political and legislative process and provides them with the tools to secure their interests through legislation, which, in turn, leads to legislative excesses, then why would the increased number of these groups and their increased influence generate legislative restraint? And so forth, and so on.

Let us note that a similar rhetoric was used in communism. When faced with the notoriously recurring symptoms of decay the system, communist rulers and propagandists euphemistically called them “distortions,” always saying that these resulted from the deviation from socialism and that more genuine socialism was needed to set things right. No empirical experience could support this claim—in fact the opposite seemed truer and trued every day—but evidence usually has little value against a strong political faith.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.54

Why We Are Losing Freedom

It is hard to imagine freedom without classical philosophy and the heritage of antiquity, without Christianity and scholasticism, without different traditions in the philosophy of law and political and social practices, without ancient and modern republicanism, without strong anthropology and ethics of virtues and duties, without Anglo-Saxon and continental conservatism or many other components of the entire Western civilization.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.45

Entertainment is the Left’s Identity

For important reasons liberal democracy and entertainment found enthusiastic allies in each other. Entertainment became the most obvious and direct manifestation of freedom that liberalism offered humanity and, at the same time, the most tangible confirmation of the dominant status of the democratic man and his tastes. To be sure, his dominance was larger, deeper, and more consequential and by no means exhausted itself in an inner necessity to have fun. And yet the omnipresence of entertainment was something by which the democratic man became easily recognized: it was his trademark, his coat of arms, his—so to speak—symbolic identity card.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.37

Our Culture is Living in an Alternate Reality

In today’s world entertainment is not just a pastime or style, but a substance that permeates everything: schools and universities, upbringing of children, intellectual life, art, morality, and religion. It has become dear to the hearts of students, professors, entrepreneurs, journalists, engineers, scientists, writers, even priests. Entertainment imposes itself psychologically, intellectually, socially, and also, strange as it might sound, spiritually. A failure to provide human endeavors—even the most noble ones—with an entertaining wrapping is today unthinkable and borders on sin.

The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertissement: that is, an activity…that separates us from the seriousness of existence and fills this existence with false content. Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competitions, aspiring to honors-making careers, and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds slowly get used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one, and are lured by its attractions.

The difference between Pascal’s divertissement and today’s entertainment—or rather, having fun, as it has become customary to say—is that the modern man, no matter how much a desire to have fun has captured his soul, knows very well that it is an artificial construction, not the real thing. Whether some other, more objective reality exists is to him a matter of indifference, and if told there is not, he would probably still remain unmoved. Having neutralized all musings about objectivity, the modern man takes pride in his deep involvement in entertainment, which in the absence of other objective references he considers natural.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.36-37

Invented “Dignity”

Since the issue of the [1948] Universal Declaration [of Human Rights], dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born, without any moral achievement or effort. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.33

Being Lured to the Common and Mediocre

Man, feeling secure and enjoying the increasingly abundant benefits of a modern civilization, was slowly releasing himself from the compelling pressure of strict and demanding rules derived from religion and classical ethics. He was no longer in the mood to embark on a painful and uncertain journey to higher goals…. 

The gradual process in which the higher aspirations were being replaced by the lower tells us, no doubt, something about human nature: namely, that unless met with strong resistance or an attractive inspiration it shows a powerful tendency to be lured by the common and the mediocre. “Common,” indeed, has ceased to be a word of disapproval in a liberal-democratic rhetoric, or rather, has ceased to be used at all. When so much is common, nothing really is. This change is but a small signal of corruption of basic categories by which for centuries people described and evaluated their conduct.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.30, 31.

Questions Rendering Darwinism Useless

If the Theory of Evolution has so much evidence backing it up, then why are critics so heavily assaulted with ad hominem attacks? How does one account for the times when proponents of Darwinism made forgeries? (Examples would include Piltdown Man and the Archaeoraptor.)  Why are there contradictory results when geologists use dating methods? How does one account for the fact that humans have characteristics that provide no advantages for survival such as music and religion? Why do living organisms have symmetry? Where did all the elements originate? How does one account for their precise design? When and where did compounds come into being? (Many compounds must have came into existence as compounds because interaction between elements is relatively scarce.) Which elements and compounds were included in the primordial soup? Where did gravity and energy come from? Why are babies still born helpless? How could the precise, natural process of blood clotting arise from blind, unguided chance? These are only some of the countless questions that render Darwinism useless.

Jesse L., Why I Reject Darwinism As Science

When You Lower Standards

Lowering the requirements is a process that has no end. Once people become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical, or unnecessary, it is only a matter of time before natural inertia takes its course and even the new lowered standards are deemed unacceptable. One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the coarse. Quite often a step down has been welcomed as a refreshing, natural, and healthy, and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of this process of simplification, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education, and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking, especially in the last decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum. A liberal-democratic man refused to learn these artificial and awkward arrangements, the usefulness of which seemed to him at first doubtful, and soon—null. He felt he had no time for them, apparently believing that their absence would make life easier and more enjoyable. In their place he established new criteria: ease, practicality, usefulness, pleasure, convenience, and immediate gratification, the combination of which turned out be a deadly weapon against the old social forms. The old customs crumbled, and so did rules of propriety, a sense of decorum, a respect for hierarchy. 

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 29-30.

Inevitable Consequences of Liberal Democracy

In a liberal democracy everyone knows—and only a fool or a fanatic can deny—that sooner or later a family will have to liberalize of democratize, which means that the parental authority has to crumble, the children will quickly liberate themselves from the parental tutelage, and family relationships will increasingly become more negotiatory and less authoritarian. These are the inevitable consequences of the civilizational and political development, giving people more and more opportunities for independence; moreover, these processes are essentially beneficial because they enhance equality and freedom in the world. Thus there is no legitimate reason to defend the traditional family—the very name evokes the smell of mothballs—and whoever does it is self-condemned to a losing proposition and in addition perpetrates harm by delaying the old despotism: with its demise the despotic system loses its base. The liberalism and democratization of the familiar therefore to be supported—wholeheartedly and energetically—mainly be appropriate legislation that will give children more power: for example, allowing increasingly younger girls to have abortions without parental consent, or providing children with legal instruments to combat their claims against their parents, or depriving parents of their rights and transferring those rights to the government and the courts. …

In a liberal democracy everyone knows—and only a fool or a fanatic can deny—that schools have to become more and more liberal and democratic for the same reasons. Again, this inevitable process requires that the state, the law, and public opinion harshly counteract against all stragglers—those who are trying to put a stick in the spokes of progress, dreamers who imagine that in the twenty-first century we can return to the school as it existed in the nineteenth, pests who want to build an old-time museum in the forward-rushing world. And so on, and so forth. Similar reasoning can be applied to churches, communities, associations.

As a result, liberal democracy has become an all-permeating system. … Whatever happens in school must follow the same pattern as in politics, in politics the same pattern as in art, and in art the same pattern as in the economy: the same language, the same habits. Just as in real socialism, so in real democracy it is difficult to find some nondoctrinal slice of the world, a nondoctrinal image, narrative, tone, or thought.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 21-22

The Political Desires of the Left

In their view, today also consciously or unconsciously professed by millions, the political system should permeate every section of public and private life, analogously to the view of the erstwhile accoucheurs of the communist system. Not only should the state and the economy be liberal, democratic, or liberal-democratic, but the entire society as well, including ethics and mores, family, churches, schools, universities, community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations. The people, structures, thoughts that exist outside the liberal-democratic pattern are deemed outdated, backward-looking, useless, but at the same time extremely dangerous as preserving the remnants of old authoritarianisms. Some may still be tolerated for some time, but as anyone with a minimum of intelligence is believed to know, sooner or later they will end up in the dustbin of history. Their continued existent will most likely threaten the liberal-democratic progress and therefore they should be treated with the harshness they deserve.

Once one sends one’s opponents to the dustbin of history, any debate with them becomes superfluous. Why waste time, they think, arguing with someone whom the march of history condemned to nothingness and oblivion? Why should anyone seriously enter into a debate with the opponent who represents what is historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish? People who are not liberal democrats are to be condemned, laughed at, and repelled, not debated. Debating with them is like debating with alchemists or geocentrists.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg. 20-21.

Nothing True About Evolution

Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, anything that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence.  I tried it on members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and eventually one person said, “I do know one thing—it ought not be taught in high school.”

Colon Patterson (Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History), keynote address to the American Museum of Natural History, 11/5/81.

Socialist “Modernization”

Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change for the better. They are—to use the current jargon—modernization projects. Both are nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly and—so to speak—impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by “modernizing” it.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.5-6

Liberal Democracy Is Like Communism

[H]e is able to demonstrate that liberal democracy, as it has developed in recent decades, shares a number of alarming features with communism. Both are utopian and look forward to “an end of history” where their systems will prevail as a permanent status quo. Both are historicist and insist that history is inevitably moving in their directions. Both therefore require that all social institutions—family, churches, private associations—must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning. Because that is not so at present, both are devoted to social engineering to bring about this transformation. And because such engineering is naturally resisted, albeit slowly and in a confused way, both are engaged in a never-ending struggle against enemies of society (superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc., etc). In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement.

John O’Sullivan, Forward to Ryszard Legutko’s book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. 

The Punishment of God

That rabble had a mighty power over minds, for when the Lord God sends punishment on a nation he first deprives its citizens of reason. And so the wiser heads dared not resist the fops, and the whole nation feared them as some pestilence, for within itself it already felt the germs of the disease. They cried out against the dandies but took pattern by them; they changed faith, speech, laws, and costumes. That was a masquerade, the license of the Carnival season, after which was soon to follow the Lent of slavery.

Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz