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"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Marcusean Intolerance

Posted on | February 7, 2015 | 22 Comments

Students of radicalism know that “political correctness” is not a joke, but is a totalitarian tactic of Cultural Marxism, which originated with the theoretician Georg Lukacs, but is especially associated with intellectuals of the Frankfurt School including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse has sometimes been called the “Father of the New Left,” his books Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) credited with inspiring the so-called “counterculture” of radical youth in the 1960s. However, it may be that Marcuse’s most lasting contribution to progressive politics was his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” in which he sneered at “abstract tolerance and spurious objectivity” and coined the phrase “totalitarian democracy” to describe Western society. Marcuse claimed that “the concentration of economic and political power . . . in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination” means that “effective dissent is blocked.” He claimed that it was possible to determine “the most rational ways of using [economic] resources and distributing the social product,” that “it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements” to accomplish this goal. However, he insisted, it would be necessary to suppress opposition to these “rational” socialist policies:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

This was plainly a call to suppress dissent. Marcuse insisted that “progress” — i.e., a socialist policy to redistribute “resources”– required silencing opponents of such policies. Marcuse was arguing for tyranny in the name of liberation.

Marcuse’s influence still echoes half a century later, even influencing awards in the field of science fiction and fantasy:

Even if social-justice radicals were only a threat to right-wingers, that would still be a problem in need of a solution. The breadth of perspectives accommodated by sci-fi has historically been one of its greatest strengths, allowing it to reach ever-wider audiences throughout the decades. The great dystopian writers of the early-to-mid twentieth-century included socialists like George Orwell, liberals like Aldous Huxley, and of course the objectivist libertarian Ayn Rand. . . .
Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way.

Read the whole thing at Breitbart.com.

 

Category: Culture, History, Intellectuals

Comments

22 Responses to “Marcusean Intolerance”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    February 7th, 2015 @ 7:14 pm

    Can we be rid of this plague?

  2. Gahrie
    February 7th, 2015 @ 7:20 pm

    The beauty of Baen Books is that they will publish anybody if they are a good writer. I would bet that they easily have the most diverse line up of authors. Much of the opposition to the SJWs in SciFi comes from people published by Baen, but they publish plenty of Lefties too.

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  4. Fail Burton
    February 7th, 2015 @ 7:48 pm

    I think you’re putting too fine a face on it. In the case of the SFF community, I’ve seen nothing to lead me to believe social justice warriors are capable of the least subtlety. In fact they cannot keep their mouths shut about what it is they want. SJWs seem to be an alliance of mentally addled bigots and some of the most brutally stupid people I’ve ever encountered.

    I understand concepts can be mainstreamed into a public consciousness but in this case it’s hard to tell whether the receptacle is worse than the source. There are no easy answers there but one can make easy answers out of it by simply distinguishing between what is hate speech and what is politics and that’s pretty damn easy.

    When “politics” amazingly involves the mass defamation of millions of people at a time based on their sex and ethnicity, that is nothing more than old hatreds in new guises. In 1984 Orwell had a more timeless, humanitarian and classic response to that sort of perceptual trap, and it is as old as the Greeks.

  5. Isa
    February 7th, 2015 @ 7:56 pm

    i’ve heard it on this site a few times that the SJWs have invaded the science fiction circle. could i get some elaboration on how that happened?

  6. Adobe_Walls
    February 7th, 2015 @ 8:04 pm

    The Breitbart article offers some measure of hope regarding SFF and the Gamer communities. This is largely because these smaller communities rose up in their own defense and counter attacked the SJWs. The success of these counter attacks is mainly due to the fact that the enemy had little actual power other than their shrieking, and when exposed, revealed how small a minority they actually are.
    It would be interesting to know how many of the participants in these attacks on Duck Dynasty and Brendan Eich for instance are tweet generators. The battle against these slags in institutions of ”Higher Learning” will be much more difficult as the forces arrayed against humanity have actual power of position.

  7. Fail Burton
    February 7th, 2015 @ 8:09 pm

    That is a long and complicated story. The short version is that about 5 years ago a racialized version of lesbian radical feminism came in with guns blazing and elbows flying about how SFF was and had always been women-hating, racist and homophobic. Many do-gooders bought into that and smoothed the way. No. 1 on that list was author and former SFWA president John Scalzi, who was dumb enough to write what amounted to a lesbian racist manifesto about “white privilege.” He opened the gates and made a bunch of mentally challenged bigots seem like poor little lost sheep who would be all better if not for the straight white man. Currently the old core of SFF is a forbidden zone of mutant morons but which even apes don’t want. We are setting up a quarantine zone to mute the hate speech so we can read in peace. Once that window is closed all you’ll hear is dogs barking in the distance.

  8. Adobe_Walls
    February 7th, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

    Francis W Porretto often writes on this subject. As he writes SFF, his solution is to self publish. His blog Liberties Torch is well worth visiting a couple times a week. He comments on a wide variety of topics and always has something interesting if not necessarily important to say.

    http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/

  9. Kirby McCain
    February 7th, 2015 @ 10:53 pm

    We must hold in the utmost reverence a woman’s right to choose. Respect the beliefs of conscientious objectors. But you let a pastor refuse to officiate a gay wedding or a baker refuse to bake a Bruce and Bill cake, SNAP call out the palace guards!

  10. DeadMessenger
    February 8th, 2015 @ 1:19 am

    And by exhibiting intolerance, they complain about intolerance. The stupidity of this argument should be obvious even to the stupid.

  11. concern00
    February 8th, 2015 @ 2:08 am

    I love Rand; she had a particularly tough childhood and experienced first hand the delights of the progressive Bolsheviks. She tends to be pretty black and white, but you can forgive that for the purity of her ideals.

  12. Daniel Freeman
    February 8th, 2015 @ 6:33 am

    Off-topic, I would like to thank the mods for letting us deal with certain individuals ourselves. It was cathartic.

  13. Jeanette Victoria
    February 8th, 2015 @ 8:47 am

    One only need to look p the names of the “conservative ” leaning writers in the misnamed “RationalWiki” http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale to see the venom progressives throw at anyone who doesn’t tow the liberal tolerance line

  14. PeterP
    February 8th, 2015 @ 8:52 am

    The goal of all radical left-wing movements is to do what the leaders of Orwell’s Oceania did: “Make all other modes of thought impossible.”

  15. Jim R
    February 8th, 2015 @ 9:45 am

    How is it that a country that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that has had citizens like Washington (his letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport should be required reading in our schools), Jefferson, Lincoln, King and every other man and women who has spoken up – died – for liberty and equality, could produce this sort of rubbish??? How could any person with an IQ above that of an amoeba buy into it? How is it even the slightest bit different from naziism or any other loathesome, repressive, hateful ideology?

    And what does “distributing the social product” even mean???

  16. Al Isson
    February 8th, 2015 @ 9:57 am

    Liberals are very effective at dividing people into groups and then manipulating the emotions of each group. If you look at the groups they’re focused on – it’s mainly black people, women, and younger people.

    I do give them some credit – they’re very good at this divide-and-conquer tactic that they use.

    It’s hard to comprehend by the rest of us because it’s even something we would ever think of doing; it’s not our nature.

    But different people have different natures and we need to be aware of various tactics used.

  17. Al Isson
    February 8th, 2015 @ 9:58 am

    Not without the elimination of liberals, no. Since it’s not going away, we need to be more aggressive in countering it through education by aggressively pointing out the tactics that liberals use, then discrediting those tactics.

    It’s not an easy task, but it can be achieved.

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  19. Matt_SE
    February 8th, 2015 @ 8:38 pm

    Notice the a priori assumption that everything liberal/leftist is good, or a benefit to mankind. Armed with that article of faith, anything opposed to the movement is automatically bad.
    Conservatism proceeds from a position of humility, liberalism proceeds from a position of hubris.

  20. Adjoran
    February 8th, 2015 @ 9:56 pm

    Repressing dissent was hardly original with Marcuse. Lenin first outlined its necessity to socialist victory.

    Seems the “raw facts” do “confuse the public” – so Journolist and Vox are right, according to Lenin.

  21. M. Thompson
    February 9th, 2015 @ 2:08 am

    Notably honestly Trostkyite Eric Flint.

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