Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

"Is Government the New God?" - The Religion of Totalitarianism (Academy of Ideas)

This is an excellent 13 minute video! 

Transcript:

THE PATH TO TOTALITARIAN AMERICA - WE ARE WELL ON THE WAY

Rod Dreher has been doing yeoman work tracing the conditions that gave rise to the totalitarian Communist and Nazi regimes.  He is studying the social and ideological conditions that incubated and fostered these movements.  In September Dreher will publish the results of his research in a new book, Live Not By Lies.  [Note:  Many will recall Dreher's 2018 book that stirred great interest, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.]

In a current blog post, Dreher writes:  Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. . . .   This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:  [my emphases]

I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed. I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.

 

This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track. What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma. Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive. But the younger generation actually believes it all. Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating. I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried. Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.

 

The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.