Consider a society that celebrates demographic diversity in ever-increasing granularity but decries intellectual diversity in an ever-more-restrictive manner. Even as gender, now deemed a construct rather than a biological characteristic, has been diversified from two to sixty-three or more, and as twenty-five or more dimensions of diversity have been determined, opinion has been reduced to a very stark, binary, Manichean right-wrong, correct-incorrect, good-evil duality. In the places we expect to find the highest levels of thought and discourse, we instead find conformity of thought that borders on the fanatical.
This puzzling dissonance suddenly made sense when I came across an interesting observation in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park. The book, set in Soviet Russia in the 1970s, included this tidbit:
In an unjust society a man may violate laws for valid social or economic reasons. In a just society there are no valid reasons except mental illness.
The statement was part of a presentation made by a psychiatrist to police investigators, in which the psychiatrist discussed a fictional mental illness he dubbed Pathoheterodoxy Syndrome.
There it is, in a nutshell. The premise that those who stray from the “correct” (or woke, to use the term of the moment) worldview and mindset are mentally ill explains everything. It explains why the only diversity that’s not tolerated is diversity of thought. It explains why contrary opinions are not only given no quarter, they are denounced as the product of inferior or defective minds (although the term “defective” itself might make the angry snowflakes squirm a bit). It explains the anger and rage.
Treating dissent as mental illness means the dissent doesn’t have to be challenged intellectually, on equal footing and with due consideration for its logic or factuality. It can simply be dismissed. Given the socialistic predilections of those who believe in all-diversity-but-one, it makes perfect sense that a phenomenon conjured up in a Socialist society (even fictionally) aptly explains the mentality of today’s politically correct and our society’s social justice warriors.
Golden-rule reciprocity is the great irony that this crowd doesn’t seem to grasp. If they dismiss those who don’t acquiesce to their way of thinking as mentally ill inferiors, they invite everyone else to dismiss them on similar grounds. I’ve seen “liberalism is a mental disease” or its equivalent written by conservatives more times than I can count.
Nothing good can come of this. When orthodoxy is defended in this fashion, there can be no free exchange of ideas. Once a group of sufficient size, power, and visibility goes down the dogmatic path, it guarantees that other groups will follow suit, justifying their own recalcitrant homogeneity as a necessary defense. Sometimes, they’ll gang up in order to advance themselves over groups deemed common enemies, but eventually internecine fights will break out and they’ll “eat their own,” as it were.
It’s only when there is a mutual tolerance for differing opinions and worldviews that we can learn from each other and either bring others to our way of thinking or evolve our way of thinking based on new (to us) ideas and logic. This is the way of liberty. Deeming dissenters as mentally ill is the way of totalitarianism.
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