In the following 5-minute excerpt, Melanie Phillips explains how it is that ideologies destroy reason.
“Melanie Phillips unpacks the thought processes of those who seek to silence viewpoints opposing their own. She points out that cancellation movements share several characteristics: absolutism, resolute hostility to dissent and a blind adherence to ideology.”
Video points:
- Ideology is substituted for knowledge
- An ideology holds absolute sway and cannot be challenged
- The ideas of the left are believed and embraced as the embodiment of goodness, virtue that will contribute to the betterment of humanity
- If you oppose any of their ideas, then you are not only wrongheaded, but you are evil
- You are so vile that you cannot be argued against, you must be stopped; you must have no platform; no one must hear what you have to say
- What are these ideologies?
- For example, multi-culturalism: no culture is better than any other
- Lifestyle choice: you cannot say that any kind of family or household choice is better or worse than any other
- The ideology is absolute, it cannot admit to any dissent, any challenge whatsoever
- An ideology is hostile to reason itself: if you come along side it with a set of facts and challenge or that contradict the governing idea of the ideology, you are told, “We cannot have this;” “you must be lying…;” and they refuse to hear those facts
- You cannot have reason without evidence, and without the idea of truth and lies being different from each other
- What is so terrifying is that those who are in charge of the universities; with thinking great thoughts…; are themselves advocating a culture which has become adverse to reason itself; while they believe they stand for reason and tell anyone who objects to their ideas that they are stupid, or are an imbecile
- Then they point at the imbecile and believe that his standing for objective truth demonstrates their point in calling him an imbecile
- They have made the universities into crucibles for the destruction of reason itself
- What we are living through in Britain and the west is even worse than the potential destruction of political liberty – we’re living through the destruction of reason
- All around us we find that rational discourse is gone and it has been replaced with insult, designed to silence, to shut down argument
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. Her weekly column, which currently appears in The Times of London, has been published over the years in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News Syndicate.
Her best-selling book Londonistan, about the British establishment’s capitulation to Islamist aggression, was published in 2006. She followed this in 2010 with The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, and in 2018 with her first novel, The Legacy.
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