{"id":28503,"date":"2015-11-12T01:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T06:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28503"},"modified":"2015-11-02T06:46:51","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T11:46:51","slug":"qotd-what-repression-looks-like-from-the-inside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/12\/qotd-what-repression-looks-like-from-the-inside\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: What repression looks like from the inside"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reaction isn\u2019t a conspiracy theory; it\u2019s not suggesting there\u2019s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it\u2019s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn\u2019t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It\u2019s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.<\/p>\n

And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don\u2019t like. Having only things you don\u2019t like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.<\/p>\n

The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn\u2019t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be \u2013 oh, and thank goodness someone\u2019s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell. We medieval Spaniards are way too smart to fall for the balance fallacy<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Wait, You Mean The Invisible Multi-Tentacled Monster That Has Taken Over All Our Information Sources Might Be Trying To Mislead<\/em> Us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since you are a citizen of a repressive society, you should be extremely skeptical of all the information you get from schools, the media, and popular books on any topic related to the areas where active repression is occurring. That means at least<\/em> politics, history, economics, race, and gender. You should be especially<\/em> skeptical of any book that\u2019s praised as \u201ca breath of fresh air\u201d or \u201ca good counter to the prevailing bias\u201d, as books that garner praise in the media are probably of the \u201cWe need fifty Stalins!\u201d variety.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2013-03-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reaction isn\u2019t a conspiracy theory; it\u2019s not suggesting there\u2019s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it\u2019s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn\u2019t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It\u2019s just that when lots of people share […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,10,28,53,41],"tags":[459,86,186,810],"class_list":["post-28503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-censorship","tag-criticism","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-skepticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7pJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28504,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28503\/revisions\/28504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}