Imagine you came across a group of little men playing ninepins, who hexed you into an enchanted sleep. Upon waking, and finding yourself with a long, gray beard, you explored the strange country around you.
The new nation is called the Twenty First Century. It looks somewhat like the country from which you had been exiled, but that similarity makes the strangeness all the more galling.
That is precisely what happened to me. And I curse the little men, not merely because they took from me so much I loved, but imposed upon me exile into a place whose language is strange, whose manners are barbaric, and whose customs are abhorrent, not just to decency, but to sanity itself.
The Twenty Firsters speak what sounds like English, but there are many nonsense words, or words that mean the opposite of English words. For example, instead of saying ‘sex’ they say gender, which is a part of speech. Instead of dating the calendar from by the year A.D., which means Anno Domini, they date it from C.E., which means nothing. Instead of saying ‘man’ to refer to human beings, and using ‘he’ in the correct grammatical form (unless the antecedent is or must be female, he is used) Twenty Firsters use ‘they’ or ‘he/she’ or ‘ae’ or some other circumlocution.
They are afraid of something called ‘hate speech’, which is nowhere defined or explained. Nothing is defined or explained in this new nation called the Twenty First Century. Under the theory that words expressing dispraise or discontent with any special, protected group will cause spontaneous physical violence to manifest from nowhere against that group, the Twenty-Firsters have made not the violence illegal, but the speech.
A man from my country would realize, of course, that this is the same argument once used by the pro-totalitarian monarchist Thomas Hobbes to justify censorship. A man from my country would be aware of centuries of political philosophy since the time of Hobbes’ writing which had thoroughly exploded and discredited the Hobbesian theory.
But the Twenty-Firsters neither read Hobbes nor any philosophy.
Intellectual effort requires precision and diligence of thought, and they are a spontaneous and unthinking peoples, trained by four years or more of higher education to despise all attempts at thinking as sinister, or vainglorious, or futile, or all of the above.
The strangeness of the strange new country for a long while hides, beneath its harlequin face-paint, a truly hideous visage, akin to the malefic vision of the face of hell. One does not see how bad it is at first glance, because a natural decency and sense of goodwill makes it hard to believe the lunatics mean their lunacy to be taken at face value.
Let us pause to reflect upon a few examples, taken in no particular order.
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