No pure form of totalitarian government has ever existed.
— Anonymous Commenter on Quora.com
“When dividing a pie, first determine your fair share. Then, take less.”
— My mother
Back before I ever experienced a government-ordered covid lockdown, I used to tell my kids that in our family, we were members of the counterculture. I explained that while it is important to be kind to everyone, and that all people should have the same basic rights, it’s especially important to notice when systemic inequities exist and work to level the playing field of Basic Opportunity: consider always the needs of others (and those less fortunate), in addition to the needs of yourself.
Other keywords I used to define our political orientation included “liberal,” “left-wing” and “progressive.” I am including some definitions for these and similar terms throughout this essay, because after using them for a couple of decades of my adult life, I wasn’t precisely sure what they all meant.
American Heritage Dictionary: “liberal - favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded.”
Prior to 2020, I liked to tell my kids: if you follow your curiosity (thanks, Elizabeth Gilbert!), and do good work, you will meet people with similar values. You will make friends who are concerned about economic injustice, hold important minority political perspectives, and possess ultra high levels of uniqueness, highly-educated brains, alternative education ideals, and idealism to spare: “likeminded” people. When you work to remedy ignorance, you put the Progress in Progressive!
I also believed, and told my kids, that the way to avoid the worst public policy atrocities of our time - totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany during the Holocaust - is to ensure that ones own society is peopled by kind, empathetic, unique, compassionate, and most of all, intelligent persons. These are the sort of people, I told my children, whom we should surround ourselves with and aspire to be.
Freedictionary.com: “conservative - a political philosophy advocating the preservation of the best of the established order in society and opposing radical change.”
Wikipedia: “The term right wing can generally refer to the section of a political party or system that advocates free enterprise and private ownership, and typically favors socially traditional ideas.”
There was one specific part of my political ideology that was crumbling even prior to 2020: I was meeting conservatives, libertarians, populists, religious persons, and even (gasp) republicans who were kind, empathetic, unique, compassionate, and extremely intelligent. At first this kept surprising me, because there’s a pretty strong progressive Message that anyone with non-progressive views can be identified by their lack of smarts, their anti-social biases, and their inability to listen. But I had to admit, once I started befriending people outside of my liberal bubble, that this generalization was not actually true. I could no longer tell my children that progressives were the only smart, kind folks on the block.
Merriam Webster: “populist - a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people.”
Surely though, I reasoned, and told my kids, since progressives had come up with really superior values to begin with, one would be _more likely_ to meet progressives (as compared with standard-issue Other People) who embodied all the compassion and braininess that will eventually make the world a better place for as many people as possible. Already, people who called themselves left wing and progressive were gaining political clout, and time would only tell how they would best use their power in government: Enacting universal healthcare? Making polluters actually clean up their devastating disasters?? Eliminating subsidies for dangerous, toxic, and unhealthy industry??? Bringing an end to foreign wars???? The possibilities were endless, and surely the future would be brighter now that the progressives were in town!
For a long time, I had parroted a common sentiment in democratic circles: If you’re not with us, you’re against us. But now I was starting to realize how many people on the left seemed to have their terminology confused, and had therefore erroneously concluded that all conservatives, religious people, and Those Holding Differences of Opinions were raging racists, bigots, and homophobes who wished to chain women to the kitchen stove. It turns out that there are a few of these crazy people out there, but they are known as extremists, not republicans.
It took me until 2020 to further realize that the existence of extremism is not at all limited by political party affiliation.
Merriam Webster: “extremism - the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism.”
When the covid response came online in 2020, I sought individuals and organizations setting an example I could proudly share with my kids. Surely, especially within the ranks of progressive, counterculture homeschoolers and conscious-of-social-justice persons like us, there would be a collective outcry. Curfews?! In the United States of America?!?! Surely in this fragmenting landscape, those standing at my political home base would be some of the first to fight back against restrictions that were incredibly drastic, which would surely be especially devastating to the poorest persons in society.
“We don’t know how bad the virus is!” friends kept saying anxiously. But we all had access to the same news reports that were ostensibly the only information that existed at that time, and I couldn’t see how the actual stated numbers could possibly justify the sudden tightening of government control. I had never noticed the government to be especially interested in public health at all, up till now, especially during my countless unsuccessful attempts over the years to obtain affordable health insurance for my family. And curfews: mostly in the evening, but with some exceptions, and it was okay for liquor stores to remain open…to combat a respiratory virus?? It just didn’t add up.
But it would be okay, I reasoned. Progressives would soon point out how little actual evidence pointed toward covid having a high CFR or IFR in the first place, not to mention the ways (I discovered during my research in mid March, 2020) successful treatments for other respiratory viruses were already showing great success the moment doctors began to repurpose them for covid.
No need for panic here, we would point out, and we progressives would soothe the collective soul while helping to prevent excess deaths due to the virus.
Wikipedia: “progressivism - holds that it is possible for human societies to improve through political action. As a political movement, progressivism seeks to advance the human condition through social reform based on purported advancements in science, technology, economic development, and social organization.”
Historicalindex.org, concerning left wing politics - “…In most cases, the left wing of political ideology represents a belief in a strong central government, which uses its power to help create economic and social equality. People on the left generally believe in taking income from the wealthiest and redistributing it among the poorer part of the population. They also generally believe in enforcing social equality through governmental regulation.
“…In American politics, the left wing is generally represented by the Democratic Party, while the right wing is represented by the Republican Party. For some countries, both of these parties might be considered right wing or left wing, and this is because the definitions can be quite variable depending on the politics in a particular place. As a country moves to the left or right over many years, the dividing line between the two political sides will generally move along with the philosophical shift.
And from something I wrote a friend today, which just happens to be on your topic:
...
[Our son’s] 12-year-old intellect can only accept a limited amount of information that is contrary to the messages that he receives from his Japanese peer group,
and from the Japanese gov’t schools,
and from the dysfunctional Japanese popular culture,
BUT he actually ***believes*** his parents, who truly do raise all the children in a home environment that is properly centered on the children’s developmental needs.
Plus, he is repulsed by the odor & taste of processed foods. He has retained a Mother Natural sense of taste & smell because he was raised on only Real Food; we successfully avoided training him onto the pop cultural food source.
So, at 12 years old, [our son’s] faith in his parents is transitioning from a wholly childishly unreasoned faith to an adolescently reasoned faith that is grounded in observable causes-and-effects.
Although Ancestral Eating is antithetical to the religious world view, in this particular way, I relate to the US’s religious cultural conservatives who are fighting pop culture every G.d. step of the way:
at the K-12 gov’t indoctrination camps and at the TV/ msm indoctrination.
It’s just that I’m indoctrinating my children in Human Evolutionary Biology instead of in Copper Age & Iron Age religious philosophical misunderstandings about the physiological & psychological nature of our species 👍🙂
But I admire the churchgoers in many respects (even as they would hate me plus feel sorry for my children being raised in an “atheistic” home environment, which they would consider child abuse, literally).
But I admire them for being counter-cultural; today’s counter-cultural “Cool Kids” & “Rebels” are the churchgoers, the sexually modest, & non-divorced people who, furthermore, do NOT trust the gov’t.
Oddly, the 1960’s counter-cultural types have turned into proponents of the Status Quo, including apologists for Censorship & the War Machine & for the Intelligence Agencies (i.e. the American KGB).
In a strange kind of role reversal, today’s cultural conservatives & Red voters & churchgoers are nowadays the USA’s genuine social justice warriors + countercultural movement.
I’m a scientist, so I’m not aligned with them, whom I consider “scientifically illiterate” and “functionally innumerate,” but I value their existence as counter-cultural types. I esteem their moral codes, despite many shortcomings in those moral codes, as superior the majority’s moral codes, liberal though I am, like the majority is liberal.
Anyways, making myself geographically isolated in the fringe-rural Tokyo metro really doesn’t change my emotional isolation from the US (& Anglosphere & Western) pop culture nowadays, not really 😂😂😂
Thanks,
Gerald
I live in the progressive Bay area California and was stunned by the shift to authoritarianism, and many of my friends and acquaintances falling in line.