Nowadays, although it is fashionable to be feministic, anti-racist, pro-LGBT, eco-friendly, vegan, and Islamophilic while mocking white males, it is even trendier to show it, i.e. to proclaim it loud and clear. This behaviour is typically a form of ostentatious virtue, which Molière portrayed in his Tartuffe, otherwise known as The Impostor. The Anglo-Saxons have recently revived the idea by speaking of ‘virtue signalling’ to describe the propensity of progressives to openly express their opinions or sentiments. This phenomenon, which affects both the elite and the average urban bourgeoisie, has been significantly exacerbated by social media, through which bobos can signal their virtue to the rest of the world, regardless of whether it’s sincere or hypocritical!
The Chinese have a word for progressive whites who seek to flaunt their moral virtue. They call them the baizuo, which means ‘white leftist’ or ‘white progressive’. They are arrogant and condescending, regarding themselves as morally superior and, as such, in a position to lecture the entire world: the baizuo is the archetypal metrosexual bobo on an electric scooter, who proclaims himself left-wing without being particularly militant. If de-colonialists and woke activists are now spearheading the war against white privilege, the baizuo, whether Hollywood jet setters or junior service sector executives full of xeno-oestrogens, are the bulk of the troops that follow without questioning.
Georges Bernanos25 had already denounced them in La liberté, pour quoi faire?26 : ‘Their submission to progress is matched only by their submission to the State [...], and progress exempts them from ever straying from the path followed by everyone else.’ The Chinese media portray the baizuo as people who only care about issues such as minorities, LGBT rights, and the environment, with no grasp of the real problems affecting the majority of their own people. They promote peace and equality to satisfy their sense of moral superiority, while reamining so obsessed with political correctness that they tolerate the backward values of Islam in order to preserve multiculturalism.
When mentioning this last trait, it’s hard not to recall the scandal surrounding Muslim grooming gangs, most of which are of Pakistani origin and have been operating in the United Kingdom since the early 1980s. Despite the numerous testimonies and evidence, neither the police and social services, nor the political authorities have shown any willingness to act, for fear of coming across as racist. A journalist investigating these rapes was forced to undergo a workshop on racism and diversity. Tens of thousands of young white women have suffered the worst possible abuses in Rochdale, Telford, and Rotherham, all in the name of multiculturalism and political correctness, and the show biz sphere has failed to mobilise and defend them. How many networks of this kind still exist?
Virtue signalling is not just a way for people to boast. Often involving unconscious mechanisms, it is also a strategy that allows one to acquire social capital by making themselves look good and showing off that they champion just causes. Moreover, being ‘on the right side of history’ allows one to join the side of the winners, that of the dominant ones. Denigrating white privilege is fully in line with such social and psychological comfort.
It’s a simple and risk-free way to acquire social prestige. A white leftist that denounces white supremacy and structural racism — how brave! It is nothing more than elitist moralisation worthy of poodles. One fights against oppressive windmills to give themselves the impression of standing out from the crowd, just like a billionaire that promotes ecology and cycling while actually owning a private jet. As Philippe Muray27 once said, the right-thinking ones never slip, because they are actually the ice.
In addition, conformity is also a sexual strategy: indeed, woke issues resonate particularly well with left-leaning women. Since they tend to be more sexually open and to marry or have children later in life, they represent a larger pool of potential sexual partners. And since you have to sell yourself to bourgeois women steeped in anti-racist feminism, you proceed to signal your virtue… That’s progressive courtship for you. Peacocks show off, deer bray, frogs croak, and metropolitan soybean men make it known that they find the gender pay gap scandalous or that they cried upon learning of the death of George Floyd.
Political correctness is a powerful mechanism. If you repeat something over and over again, you end up adhering to it. Often acting on pure conformism so as not to stand out, professions of faith are eventually internalised and become genuine beliefs. During the Korean War, many American prisoners in the hands of the Chinese communists underwent such a psychological process: instead of torturing them, their captors demanded small political concessions. In exchange for small rewards — food, cigarettes, walks — they made them say or write that ‘the United States was not perfect’. They also asked them to list some of the problems plaguing capitalist societies. The prisoners thus made small, harmless, and sometimes even sincere compromises with the enemy. In doing so, they entered into a mental pattern of collaboration, harmless at first but destined to grow further.
A New Moral Order
Once you’ve put your finger in the cogs, you’re often permanently trapped. And to resolve the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, that of things one does not believe in, the human brain ends up wanting to believe. When one experiences themselves saying or doing something, their mental image of themselves is changed and they end up wanting to conform to how they now perceive themselves. It’s mentally more comfortable and easier to live with.
This new moral order also benefits from a psycho-physiological mechanism openly exploited by social media: popular posts generate notifications, which in turn trigger endorphin rushes, creating a feeling of pleasure. As with a drug, the user is driven to always want more. There are, in fact, two effective ways to receive such physiological gratification on social media. The first, which particularly affects teenage girls and delights predators, is to adopt hyper-sexualised behaviour in order to gain virtual attention. More accessible to left-leaning white adults, the second consists in conforming to the dominant ideology. This interaction between virtue signalling and its reward (on the one hand, in the shape of social prestige, and on the other, through hormonal and moral remuneration) fosters woke indoctrination.
As a dominant ideology, political correctness also has another weapon: shaming. Psychologists use the term ‘socialisation’ to refer to the process through which children are encouraged to think and act the way society demands. This education is carried out through a shaming game whenever they make comments or behave in ways that go against our society’s moral code. This moral code weighs so heavily on people today, especially when one is a left-leaning white person, a baizuo ashamed of their own race and ancestors, that it becomes difficult to avoid a constant feeling of guilt.
American anti-racist activists have even coined the expression ‘white guilt’ to encourage white people to blame themselves for the ‘sins’ of their ancestors. Those who criticise white privilege readily rely on this aspect of guilt to impose their discourse and demands more effectively. Foreign agents such as Al Jazeera (Qatar) and Anadolu (Turkey) even exploit this guilt as a soft power tool. In this regard, Mathieu Bock-Côté28 speaks of neo-Maoism, referring to the ‘self-flagellation sessions of artists and other socialites who accuse themselves of being improper allies in an increasingly ostentatious expiatory ritual’.
White progressives are now beating their breast and indulging in self-criticism so as to stay on the side of the good guys, the ‘allies’ of minorities, rather than give the impression of being part of the racist camp. This subservience will, however, do them no good, as submission never pays and they will be asked for more and more contrition. In Un coupable presque parfait. La construction du bouc-émissaire blanc,29 Pascal Bruckner30 reminds us that ‘nothing arouses more rage than a man who has fallen to the ground. Already hated for its past domination, the West is now despised for its decline’.
Acceptance of the various aspects of progressivism and the above-mentioned white guilt, including the dogmas of critical race theory, is, in fact, a process of power and structural domination, which is exactly what white privilege is criticised for. Should one publicly reject even one of the precepts of wokeness, the result may very well be ostracisation and marginalisation from one’s ‘good’ society, as already seen with cancel culture.
Beyond the abuses of woke revolutionary guardians, however, the dominant ideology perniciously imposes itself on everyone: while social media act as an amplifier for social gratification in the name of virtue signalling, it also encourages self-censorship, since discussing sensitive topics carries the risk of public humiliation. Progressives can live their lives with unconcealed faces, whereas their opponents risk being pilloried if they reveal themselves. Digital anonymity is thus the last bastion that protects what little remains of freedom of expression in the West.
Those who do not particularly seek to defend ideas also suffer from this social pressure and moral domination. Even if they are not fully aware of it, they have no choice but to adhere to the dominant discourse or, at least, say nothing against it, thus allowing it to spread without any opposition. In 1987, the deconstructionist Gilles Deleuze anticipated the advent of what he called ‘societies of control’: ‘We are not even being asked to believe, but rather to behave as if we did.’ Is allowing people to say that a cross-dressing man should be able to play rugby on a women’s team (genital ablation is no longer even necessary in this respect) or that non-whites are victims of systemic racism such a high price to pay when what is at stake is a person’s ability to keep the job that allows them to feed a family? Conversely, default acceptance, ever palpable in the apathy of the masses that mechanically embrace fashionable ideas and influencer trends, is often rewarding and costs nothing.
In no way is this soft liberal-progressive totalitarianism a deliberate social engineering project. The conditioning of minds that it induces is simply the result of social and psychological mechanisms that exert intense socialisation pressure on individuals. So much so that on 6 January 2021, American teenagers denounced their own parents for marching outside the Capitol in support of Donald Trump, resembling George Orwell’s 1984 or the heyday of Russian communism.
Initially a mere amalgamation of liberalism and anti-racism, the ideology of diversity was long limited to the dogmas of the individual — ‘There is no such thing as society’, said Thatcher — and multiculturalism. Possessing real institutional power, it is now spurred on by critical race theory, which permeates the political class, the media, culture, and academia. The dominant ideology imposes its precepts; the fact that it does so while denouncing an alleged white supremacy that is clearly struggling to resist it is nothing but cruel irony.
White Privilege
Georges Guiscard
No comments:
Post a Comment