Sometimes it’s a single sentence that suddenly makes seemingly separate phenomena click into place—and in doing so proves more powerful than reading long, academic treatises in the social sciences.
In this case, it’s a line that John Cleese quoted on Twitter in November 2020. He was referring to his friend and collaborator Robin Skynner, a British psychiatrist with whom he also wrote two books: “If you can’t control your own emotions, you’re forced to control other people’s behavior”.
“If you can’t control your own emotions, you’re forced to control other people’s behavior” – Robin Skynner
With this, Cleese neatly captures a mode of operation employed by two ideological groupings that, at first glance, appear quite different. On the one hand, there is the “woke”, postcolonialist (Western) left in the tradition of the anti-racist political correctness movement. And on the other, the modus operandi of Islam.
In the case of the former in particular, it becomes clear that harmful phenomena often arise from good intentions that have been absolutized—and thereby distorted. The skeptical seeker of God and Jansenist Blaise Pascal already knew as much: “One never does evil so completely and so calmly as when one does it with a clear conscience”.
“One never does evil so completely and so calmly as when one does it with a clear conscience” – Pascal
As early as 1924, the German philosopher Helmuth Plessner pointedly highlighted this connection in his work Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism. Inverting the famous Mephistophelean line from Goethe’s Faust, he warned of the “threatening force that always wills the good and yet always creates evil”.
Like Carl Schmitt, Plessner was keenly aware of a darker anthropological truth: that the most brutal wars are those fought in the name of the good—indeed, even in the name of pacifism. For within such a “final, ultimate war of humanity”, as Schmitt writes in The Concept of the Political (1932), the aim is no longer merely to repel the enemy, but to annihilate him.
The malaise lies in the fact that communities require images of the enemy, since only these can create and stabilize an internal sense of cohesion. The French cultural anthropologist René Girard elaborated in his scapegoat theory how constitutive the production of an enemy is for the cohesion—and at least temporary pacification—of a community.
The remark attributed to Laozi, celebrated for his pacifist Taoism, fits here perfectly: “No calamity is greater than to be without an enemy”.
The Western Left and the Triumph of Victimhood
Let us begin, briefly, with the Western left. After the working class famously dropped out as the revolutionary subject, the left turned its gaze instead to a wide array of disenfranchised, humiliated, offended, or otherwise “marginalized” victim groups.
Membership in one of the many orders of the dispossessed is, these days, socially rewarded. It promises university posts, affirmative action, quotas, and positions in public broadcasting. Under the conditions of an identitarian left-wing cultural hegemony, this gives rise to a veritable trauma Olympics.
In the pre-political sphere, a full-fledged victim industry has emerged. Like any industry, it is invested in its own perpetuation and growth. There is thus little reason to fear that the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency will ever run out of evidence of discrimination—or that its current commissioner, Ferda Ataman, might one day say: “I’ve done a good job; at present, no discrimination can be measured any longer. I therefore propose the abolition of my own office”. One should also be reminded that a world completely devoid of discrimination, resentment even, is unthinkable.
There is little reason to fear that the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency will ever run out of evidence of discrimination.
In fact, case numbers have been rising for years across all anti-discrimination institutions—equal opportunity offices, commissariats for the “queer”, the many reporting portals set up to combat “hate and incitement”. Almost anything can count as discrimination today, as the goalposts are constantly moving. And although progress in terms of minority equality and egalitarianism has never been greater than in Western societies today, the state-funded seismographers of linguistic sin are bound to keep finding what they seek—if only because the sensitivity to potential injury is continually dialed up.
Mission creep, in other words, is inevitable.
Top Marks in Math: A Telltale Sign of the Fascist
Under the Argus-eyed gaze of hypersensitivity, even mathematical ability comes to be read as evidence of Eurocentric supremacism, indeed of a proto-fascist white privilege.
Thus, in late 2022, the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education called for the decolonization of the mathematics curriculum at universities, a year after the U.S. education initiative The Education Trust had already warned of discrimination against Black students: owing to structural white supremacy, they were said to be disadvantaged in algebra, geometry, and arithmetic compared to their white classmates.
Here, as in other domains, the Tocqueville paradox is enjoying something of a revival. According to the theorem set out in Democracy in America (1835/1840), complaints about inequality increase in proportion to its actual disappearance in society.
The Tocqueville paradox is enjoying something of a revival: complaints about inequality increase in proportion to its actual disappearance in society.
As hierarchies erode, the eye grows sharper—and more subtle—in detecting whatever inequalities remain. The observer’s zoom magnifies the observed to immeasurable proportions. It’s like the joke about the philistine who complains about nude bathers he can see from his window—and, after the nudists have left, tells the police he can still see them, urging the officers to look through his binoculars.
By contrast, in times past—or in other cultures today—when women were the property of men and their legal status lay somewhere between animal and full human being, there was simply no room for disputes over unequal treatment. That space only opens up with the principle of equality itself.
The serf does not feel unjustly slighted because he is not king. Conversely, the king does not debate his policies with the serf; if he does, he will not remain sovereign for long.
Contrary to a familiar narrative on the left, then, it is not only inequality but also—and especially—equality that contains social explosives. It sows violence by expanding the field of competition into a rivalry of all against all.
Contrary to a familiar narrative on the left, then, it is not only inequality but also—and especially—equality that contains social explosives.
What these discourses of victimhood share is a drift into paternalism. The victim is denied any capacity—and here we return to Skynner —to control their own emotions.
Yet the development of a stable, mature, and conflict-capable self on the part of the victim would be a perfectly viable way of confronting the verbal discrimination everyone refers to as the most damaging kind of discrimination today (because, thankfully, at least in the West, actual discrimination on the basis of religious belief or sex is no longer a thing). The response to potential verbal injury cannot consist in avoiding exposure to potentially threatening experiences altogether.
If one can tolerate only the views circulating within the discourse community of one’s own affected group, and one retreats—trigger-warned—into safe spaces in the face of dissenting opinions, one merely increases one’s own vulnerability. Reciprocal control of behavior may still be possible in protected environments. But in a civic public sphere—let alone one increasingly articulated through social media—it is not, regardless of all the linguistic rules directed at potential offenders.
We live in a post-heroic and pain-phobic society, which is at the same time marked by hyper-attentiveness to pain. And while shedding authoritarian character masks and the armored subjectivities of someone like Ernst Jünger may be counted as a civilizational gain, the answer to hypersensitivity cannot lie in ever more neurotic avoidance, but only in resilience.
Reading Kant in the Camp
Despite all their romantic Rousseauisms and unacknowledged elements of redemptive religion, today’s left are children of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment movement promised emancipation from religious authorities, social prejudices, and a baseless morality born of status defense.
That the “emancipation of man from his self-imposed immaturity”, which Immanuel Kant defined as Enlightenment in 1784, would not be so easily accomplished must have dawned on the Königsberg thinker fairly early. For in the same year he noted: “From crooked timber, as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be fashioned”.
One need not derive a pessimistic anthropology from this thought, nor—like Carl Schmitt, icy in his reasoning—twist Thomas Hobbes’s notorious maxim into Homo homini homo, so as to defend the wolf as a pack animal with strong group solidarity which compares favourably with human cruelty. Nonetheless Kant is pointing to humanity’s lack of perfectibility and civilizability.
The course of the French Revolution, fueled by Enlightenment philosophy, demonstrated dramatically within Kant’s lifetime that those who drive out inquisitors are themselves highly likely to become inquisitors.
The course of the French Revolution demonstrated dramatically within Kant’s lifetime that those who drive out inquisitors are themselves highly likely to become inquisitors.
Liberation can turn into tyranny and terror, Enlightenment into bloody dialectic, if it does not in turn become self-critical and instead absolutizes reason with rigor. This is the crux of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in 1944.
The sleep of reason produces monsters—but its sleepless vigilance does as well. That pure reason can also be used to commit mass atrocities was demonstrated theoretically by the Marquis de Sade and practically by the Nazis. Both understood themselves, no differently than dialectical-materialist Karl Marx, as proud proponents of scientific rationalism, and not as anti-humanists smashing reason.
Against the insights of eugenics and racial biology regarding the alleged inferiority of Jewish blood, no remedy was found—yet the Germans, alas, had plenty of remedies for themselves.
Part 2 on Islam will be published on April 17.
