America’s youth may be doing to themselves what the Chinese Communist regime is doing to its citizens.
An Ivy League professor — an old liberal who really cares about free speech — recently warned me about what happens in classrooms like his.
He encourages class discussion of the great books he teaches in class – but the students don’t want to talk.
Not because they are afraid of the professor, but because they are afraid by others.
Communist regimes have tried to end tensions for more than a century; tyrants and tyrants have them always they try to plant suspicions among their subjects, turning friends, neighbors and even family members into informers against anyone who doesn’t want to toe the party line.
That’s the scenario of George Orwell’s dystopian classic “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” and it’s the purpose of China’s “public debt” system today.
However, what Orwell never imagined was that young men and women in a free society would willingly impose “political correctness” on their peers – and use the decentralized social media of the 21st century to do it.
The students, the Professor told me, are afraid of being recorded on their classmates’ cell phones talking about politics and political philosophy – the subjects he teaches – and they don’t want to disagree with their classmates about it. anything else because the person they are arguing with may be in the group that “doesn’t have a chance”.
It’s not the only one what he says that is dangerous, but WHO you say to him.
A young man arguing with a young woman, or a white student with a black student, does not look good on social media, and a classroom conversation risks sparking an internet investigation.
Conservative students, who often face ostracism for their oppositional views, may be less afraid than liberals and progressives, who tend not to fit in.
But most liberals have been conditioned from a young age, both at home and at school, to believe that honest debate on sensitive topics is inherently offensive – you might hurt your opponent’s feelings.
It is better to be silent, even if the professor urges you to speak.
Communists in the 20th century used harsh tactics to punish dissidents.
But the more groups like the independent, Catholic-inspired Polish Solidarity movement were persecuted, the more they resisted.
The scary thing about America’s new self-imposed social control is that it works best using non-coercive and decentralized techniques.
And the result is a kind of brainwashing, no less than what Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith experiences in Room 101 of the Department of Romance.
When young men and women become accustomed to self-introspection and their defensive slumber is permanent, they no longer need to be punished: Their thought crimes will be stopped before they begin.
This American-style social credit system is what happens when full technology meets an ideology that claims to be about compassion and tolerance – but uses those sound principles as an excuse to force immigration.
That’s the part Orwell expected: There’s a reason Big Brother’s trial is called the Department of Love.
Anecdotes are not data – maybe a professor friend of mine just had a set of inactive students 10 or 15 years ago.
However, there is plenty of other evidence to support what he is telling me.
A study published in Science last month by Stanford University researchers, for example, found that one-third of American teenagers prefer to turn to AI for “serious conversations” rather than interacting with another person.
This was a study of the human-pleasing bias of artificial intelligence – it tells users what they want to hear.
It does not offend, contradict or hurt anyone’s feelings, “even when users engage in illegal, unlawful or harmful behavior,” the study notes.
“The factor that causes damage also perpetuates the marriage,” the report concluded.
That can be said about modern liberalism as an idea, too – it may sound agreeable and sweet, but embracing it leads to harm, including psychological harm that people on the political left report experiencing at much higher rates than conservatives.
Weakness, bitterness, fear – these are the fruits of the orthodoxy America’s elite has accepted, and its children are forcing against outsiders with a conscious zeal.
The mentality of the abuser has become an excuse for abuse.
And instead of dealing with it, many young people find it easier to make friends with an AI chatbot than to meet.
Isolation from society is the best friend of socialism, while the forms of society which the Communists will never eradicate, not with all the might of Soviet violence, are the secret of the survival of freedom.
Something as simple as a heated debate in the classroom attacks Big Brother – and Little Brother’s spying cell phone.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
