Dall-E 3
Social media is inundated these days with mournful missives from a small but powerful elite. “Woe is me” write the thought police, “we’re now suffering backlash from a public which for some reason doesn’t like it when we muzzle them!” Before you wonder aloud why they expect us to sympathize with our own censors, read on.
“Nobody has been fired for wrongthink” they write, before then writing “alright maybe a few have, but they deserved it, we’re the real victims” followed by “if you’d simply obey, we wouldn’t have to do this to you” in a textbook DARVO that would make the most sinister caricature of a narcissist either blush, or take notes. It’s the same game they play when they deny they have an ideology, what it’s called, or that certain criminal scenarios have indeed taken place (if rarely).
“If you don’t believe as I tell you, I’ll kill myself and it will be your fault!” cry the thought police, not doing a great job of convincing us they aren’t narcissist manipulators. Or perhaps just Christians, as their proposition comes perilously close to being menaced with a Hell we’re said to deserve if we fail to believe as Christians tell us we must. And for the sake of a man we’ve never met, who purportedly died for our sins!
Why are ostensibly class conscious people intentionally creating a steady supply of new homeless, for the crime of blasphemy against their doctrines? How are we meant to believe what goes against the evidence of our senses? Can you choose to believe what’s true?
When the thought police share their evidence, and it merely confirms the reality of a rare medical condition, but not the sweeping conclusions about humanity they extrapolate from it, do they feel shame as they censor you? Rather than attempt to defend reasoning they know to be indefensible?
Is it any different for the Christians who rightly observes the universe had a beginning, only to then treat it as a foregone conclusion that therefore, the cause was the specific creator from their religion, served by an army of angels, betrayed by a legion of demons and embodied once as a Galilean carpenter?
That’s not the only rhetorical trick up their sleeve, either. If you dispute their claims, you’re denying that they exist. In reality, these two things in no way correlate of course. It’s plain that they exist, just not as they conceive of themselves.
The essence of newspeak is controlling thought by controlling definitions: Either you see them as they wish to be seen, or you’re not seeing them. When they say dissent is violence, it is likewise code; for if your unwanted speech is violence, then it unties their hands to retaliate with actual violence.
“My existence is not up for debate!” cry the thought police, once again using “existence” as a code word for “beliefs”. You are not equal to the thought police! If they dispute your beliefs, no matter how central to your identity they may be, they aren’t erasing you. But the reverse isn’t true. It’s a one-way street, by design.
How do the thought police suppose they ought to inhabit the center of everyone’s world, because they’re at the center of theirs? Are they self aware about the profound selfishness of their worldview, wherein they occupy the leading role, and the rest of us exist only as supporting characters to affirm their self-perception? Such that they even must sometimes be in the presence of your naked body as you dress or undress in order to absorb validity from it?
Could there possibly be anything more atrocious than intentionally impoverishing honest hard working people, in a recession, during or following a pandemic, because they won’t humor you? Because they won’t bow to their own censors? To the architects of their poverty? How is it possible for someone to behave this egregiously, and not collapse into a singularity of guilt and self loathing?
How do the thought police fancy themselves marginalized when they dominate content curator roles on every major social media platform, exerting absolute control over speech? Which they make full use of, or rather, abuse of. Abruptly, brutally silencing even the mildest, most politely framed challenge to their beliefs? Pitching an absolute fit, proclaiming the imminent apocalypse when they lose censorial control over a single such platform?
It isn’t enough merely to obey them! Even if you repeat the exact words they put into your mouth, if they detect that you don’t truly believe those words, then you haven’t satisfied them. Until you not only proclaim that there are five lights, but actually see that many before you, there’s no escaping their wrath.
“Why does everyone hate us??” the thought police desperately inquire as they nail a dead rat to the door of a women’s shelter and threaten to mail pipe bombs to a children’s author. Why should we not hate you? What do you do, that anyone should love you? Should we love being silenced? Should we love being impoverished? Should we love being coerced into bed, by the implication of prejudice if we decline your advances? Or even tricked into intimacy under false pretenses, then gaslit about it?
What did you expect would happen when you imposed yourself as far as you possibly could, then took everybody’s voices away so that we couldn’t object? So long as everyone may speak, we may air our grievances. If we may not, they accumulate, pressure building until our anger boils over. What is the natural last resort of someone with no other means to be heard? Will the thought police have the audacity, once again, to be surprised?
At last, our dear thought police simultaneously reach the apex of irony and the nadir of self awareness as they censor you…for referring to them as thought police. Not because that’s what they call themselves, as it isn’t. Rather, because they recognize themselves in your descriptions, and don’t like it.