Terence Corcoran: You are not you, and other truths of the new world

Financial Post
"Wanderer above the sea of fog", by Caspar David Friedrich Financial Post | James Alexander Michie

"Wanderer above the sea of fog", by Caspar David Friedrich, circa 1817.

The effort to sideline individualism and associated economic ideas is being propelled by journalists, academics and political forces in the name of fighting racism and other isms

The storm has been moving in for some time, building up over decades of political and academic activism fuelled by the ideological advocacy of a long line of leftist intellectuals and writers, from Karl Marx through Herbert Marcuse’s New Left celebrations of the ’60s and ’70s to the Occupy Movement to Naomi Klein. After half a century of torch-passing from one anti-liberal theorist to another, North America and other Western nations have settled on a final truth: You are not an individual.

In the new world, people are slotted into assorted collective categories: white or Black, oppressed or oppressor, straight or LGBQ, steeped in inequality, male or female or other, green or a denier, young sidelined millennial or aging privileged colonialist, a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian. From now on, these are the primary labels that define and describe your role in life and shape the content of your mind and character. Forget and submerge your individual capacities and abilities, your intellectual independence, your personal perspectives, ambitions and failures.

Individualism is dead. In its place is a new political environment in which all people are supposedly driven by and classified according to their membership in one of dozens of collective categories that determine each person’s world view and behaviour that is controlled by ingrained collective bias and beliefs. You may or may not even be conscious of your motivations. In this new era, people are said to be motivated by “unconscious bias” rather than their own thinking.

To reach this new era of anti-individualism, the greatest political and philosophical achievements of the last few centuries are being deliberately eroded. Classical liberalism and other core political and philosophical foundations supporting individualism are being turfed and replaced by a new world order: systemic collectivism.

The core elements of the Enlightenment, the 300-year-old philosophical breakthrough founded by the greatest minds in history — from Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes and later by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others — created the ideological foundation for a prosperous world: individualism, capitalism, the scientific method, reason, logic, objectivity, liberty, globalization, secularism, free markets, the pursuit of happiness and well being, free speech, optimism and hope.

The overthrow of these core concepts is not a secret or clandestine campaign but a calculated and highly public effort to destroy the great fundamental principles that have lifted human beings from ignorance and servitude into a three-century explosion of freedom, growth, human progress and achievement.

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Source: Terence Corcoran | Financial Post

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