Grab your favourite hot beverage and watch Carl Benjamin interview Brendan O’Neill:
In the 23rd minute is this insightful gem:
Benjamin: “I can’t help but hear Friedrich Hayek whenever we’re talking about a subject like this because he was very concerned with the concept of social planning, the idea that society should be managed and planned to ensure certain kinds of outcomes. When, in his opinion obviously, he thought people should be left to their own devices and trusted to be responsible adults and manage the society in their own personal way, productively. And this is exactly the problem that he was predicting almost 100 years ago now that we are actually genuinely seeing coming to fruition: a kind of technocratic, highly educated … so many middle class people, who have gone to university, got their degree in something quite asinine and you end up creating a bureaucratic class of technocrats who think they can actually manage the world to their liking.”
O’Neill: “Yes, which is terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. I mean, they genuinely think they can socially re-engineer people. They genuinely think that it’s their role to make us healthier, to make us more PC, to change our attitudes, to change what we think, to change how we speak. They really believe that! I mean, it’s astonishing. Can you imagine being so colossally arrogant that you would go out into the world and think, ‘Oh I have to correct the way these people think.'”
Benjamin: “Especially in your mid-twenties.”
O’Neill: “In your mid-twenties! It’s astonishing! It speaks to an extravagant sense of entitlement.”
Benjamin: “It’s messianic, isn’t it?!”
O’Neill: “I find it chilling. I would far rather live in a world in which there were dodgy opinions, and even a few racists, and people with difficult points of view than in a world where I presumed the moral authority to tell people what to think. I find that such a horrific idea.”
For historians, 20+ years in the future, this is an important interview that clearly documents the current state of oppressive Leftists around the world in 2018.
When a reporter calls someone “far right” I stop listening. That reporter is too lazy to waste any more of my time.
“If there’s to be a new fascism, it won’t come from the punks and skinheads. It will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.” – Brian Eno, 1985
I love granola especially in a yogurt parfait.
I am not a fascist.
Brian Eno, in 1985 at least, was full of sheet.
It is curious that every creed promises a Paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone with civilized taste.
Evelyn Waugh
She may have not had which creeds being implied, yet these are the creeds of PC, social engineering.
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, though given the clearly identifiable male name “Arthur” by his parents, nonetheless, decided to go by the gender ambiguous “Evelyn” condemning future readers to confusion. At least Marion Mitchell Morrison had the good sense to change his name to John Wayne. 😉
Too soyboy-ish for me.
I’ll say what I want, to who.
, ….”As I Please” ( Orwell reference).
BTW, I first met Antifa in 2004 in Amsterdamn at a free speach rally. If I had known, I would of thrown the punch the Dutch policewoman warned me not to. The police were protecting Antifa that was breaking up the legal, peaceful protest.
Later it was explained that the mayor needed the burgeoning muslim vote. Left + islam.
“They genuinely think that it’s their role to make us healthier, to make us more PC, to change our attitudes, to change what we think, to change how we speak.” If that was only all they wanted to re-engineer. They want a kindlier, gentler Soviet Union clone. The end result, slavery, is the same.
Hayek knew what he was talking about in “The Road to Serfdom”.
It is sad to think that the Marxists of today did not learn and reject from the failures of those, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, et al, that tried all of that before.
Want to see the real purpose of social sciences, watch Joe Rogan’s podcast with two academics – both humorous and insightful!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg
The left are in favor of freedom of speech, liberty and democracy when they aren’t in control. When they are, not so much.
further on this subject, i cant believe how easy those same people demonized cigarette smoking and made alcohol and marijuana mainstream. If the elites can do that,they will try to put us back in caves but it may not be pretty when the deplorables resist and resist they will, I know not when but it will come.
I only saw the first 3-4 minutes.
Too many people misunderstand this left-right thing.
Think of a plane with one wing: one left wing.
Communism is on the tip of that left wing.
Fascism is near the fuselage. Both are left wing.
So fascism is the extreme right … of the left wing.
Commies hated fascists as competitors on the far left, the former favoring state ownership, the latter favoring nominally private ownership, rendered moot due to extreme state control. Essentially the same thing. Total control = ownership really.
Commies are left totalitarians, fascists are right totalitarians.
Left = collectivism. Right: individualsim.
We would be better off referring to ourselves as individualists fighting rear-guard action again the prevailing collectivist ethos. All politicians are collectivists, in practice if not intellectually.