A controversial news item here in Belgium: nine teachers of a Belgian sports school suspended because they exchanged homophobic, sexist and racist messages in a private WhatsApp group. 'Whistleblowers' had complained to the school's management that they shared such messages about colleagues and students. The teachers were immediately preventively suspended and an investigation into inappropriate behavior was launched.
I immediately frowned. I don't really know how sexist and how racist those teachers truly are. If the headlines are to be believed, they are quite some monsters. Anyway, if I read the newspapers, then I myself am also a far-right ideologue of anti-government extremism. I didn't know that myself until I read it in the papers. This aside.
But what made me particularly frown is that I'm not entirely sure whether what those teachers say in a private WhatsApp group should actually be made the subject of scrutiny by anyone. People say quite a lot in private. And in the depths of our minds, we may all be God, but we're all a little bit scum, too.
We sometimes even dream, in the depths of our minds, of spying on others in their private lives and punishing them for the things they do in the depths of their minds. I hear some thinking: “That is why Big Government must be so vigilant. And besides, we don't blame those bastards in the end. The filth is simply in their brain biochemistry. In fact, they just need help. We still have to wait a bit for the right pill, but we do already have something in the pharmacy that can give them a nudge in the right direction”.
A few days later, I frowned even more. I then read in the newspapers that the police had visited some of those teachers to confiscate their mobile phones. Apparently, the public prosecutor's office had also launched an investigation. That makes perfect sense of course. Once you have decided as a society that someone is an outright danger to the New Morality based on what he says in a private WhatsApp group, then the judiciary and police cannot stay behind.
And there are plenty of people applauding enthusiastically. Scum must be eradicated. No safe spaces or closed WhatsApp groups for that. The New Morality is one hundred percent correct – it should not be less ambitious. And the people who are satisfied that a gang of bastards have been exposed are, of course, pure to the core of their biochemistry.
But I would just like to point out something: the dynamics that are going on now ultimately spare no one. No one has control over it. Not even those who enthusiastically go along with it. Before they know it, these people sometimes discover to their own astonishment, with or without some help from the police, that they themselves are a bit of scum in the depths of their own minds.
And also at their public execution, a mass of pure New Citizens will clap their hands in approval. The enthusiasm about the New Morality eventually becomes so great that anyone can bring anyone to the scaffold.
That is precisely the key characteristic of mass formation: it sucks all solidarity out of the bond between people and injects it all into the bond between man and collective (i.e., the state). In the long run, that process impoverishes even the most intimate of human bonds, the bond between mother and child, and mothers feel more solidarity with the masses than with their own flesh and blood. Because if you brought a little immoral bastard into the world, it's your responsibility to cure him of his lack of biochemical pureness too. That's a New Mother's job, isn't it, to make sure her offspring follow the rules of the New Morality?
And this can be taken literally. In a conversation I had with the Iranian writer Shohreh Feshtali, she tells how she experienced it from the front row in Iran, as a witness at the executions of children who were denounced by their parents during Ayatollah Khomeini’s reign of terror. I know, of course, that we are miles away from that. Besides the fact that family members reported each other to the police during the coronavirus crisis if they believed that someone was not following the rules correctly and that the number of citizens who snitch on each other is also increasing rapidly in general, there is no trace of that, right?
This development has taken place in the run-up to all totalitarian systems. They all start from an excessive identification with an ideology in which a hyper-strict morality and a new "purity" are central, and with which part of the population fanatically goes along. In other words, they all go through the same process of mass formation. And it always ends the same way.
I also know, of course, that it is dangerous nonsense to suggest that there is a process of totalitarization going on here. Making a comparison with the paranoid atmosphere that slowly emerged in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the first half of the twentieth century makes no sense. People who make such comparisons should be immediately re-educated. Preferably in a camp.
What I’m writing here, is not new of course. I have already described all of this in the book The Psychology of Totalitarianism. That book has since been banned in the course “Critique of Society and Culture” at Ghent University. Correction: According to a fellow professor, my book is not banned - it's just not allowed to be used anymore. Correct. Forgive my misunderstanding. I promise to immediately enroll in a doublethink course. I'm still not good enough at that to participate in the New Society.
As Solzhenitsyn wrote:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil."
The primary danger lies in those who invert this truth. They take it to mean that the job of good people is root out that "small corner of evil" in their neighbors, in order to perfect the world. That they even believe that such a Police Planet would be livable in the long run, or even endurable for an hour, speaks to an almost breathtaking inner blindness, and perhaps to some illusion that holds them in its thrall.
We once used words like "captivated" and "spellbound" literally, meaning that the victim was the target of an attack that was difficult to see, the way we'd see a .punch or kick. While I accept the basic proposition that some of this activity signals mass hysteria, we also must consider who profits from it, and what kinds of techniques may be used to generate and expand its effects. We know those kinds of techniques and illusions exist, but we often let the illusionists off the hook because their masters are well armed.
I don’t care if they are homophobic, bigots, or racists. They are entitled to their thoughts and they ought to be free to share them within a “private” space. They do not pose a threat to my freedom, as despicable they may be; what threatens me is the state which is free to spy on us and then use that information against us in a court of law.
This brings us to the issue of privacy. Are we not to expect our privacy? Isn’t our privacy directly related to our freedom? How come a critical mass of people don’t seem to grasp this? We are a millimeter away from losing all our freedoms, including our freedom to live, and most of us act nonchalantly as if what is being done to us has no bearing to our future. When did so many become so obsequious?