By Aleksey Bashtavenko

“And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew, 18:13

“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

In the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, America was in for a drastic change. In stark contrast to the 1940s and 50s that were characterized by order and respect for authority, the cultural revolution raged on through the 1960s. Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded Kennedy and energetically responded to the public demand for social change by legislating the Civil Rights of 1964, effectively de-legalizing segregation. Galvanized by Martin Luther King’s fiery oratory, the Black community aggressively challenged institutions they viewed as racist and oppressive. College students rallied against the Vietnam war and the authoritarian formalism of campus administrators.

Echoing the tumultuous spirit of the times, student activist Mario Savio urged his peers to put their bodies upon “the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus” and “to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”. Contemporaneously, the seditious spirit reigned in Eastern Europe as Soviet forces quelled the Prague Spring and less than a decade ago, the Warsaw Pact subdued the Hungarian uprising. Even the USSR underwent a period of “De-Stalinization” under Kruschev’s leadership.

The American free speech movement swept across campuses questioning the status-quo of the academic establishment. For good reasons, they believed that the culture of philistinism pervaded academic life and scholarly institutions stood systematically opposed to creative expressions of intellectual individuality. In stark contrast to the modern collegial environment, students of the 50s were expected to dress professionally and to converse with their superiors in a formal manner. Educators stressed the importance of building a comprehensive background of knowledge and left very little room for autonomous thought, especially if it led students to question the establishment.

Today, the academic establishment promotes conformity and obedience to authority just as much as it did in the 1940s. Savio and his followers fought for freedom of expression in the name of egalitarian causes. Yet, they have succeeded only in very limited respects. The collegiate milieu embraced the progressive ideals of the Free Speech movement, yet the moral ideal of their campaign has been discarded. As recently as 1994, Savio denounced senator Jesse Helms as a “crypto-fascist”, yet it did not occur to him that this epithet should be applied to the modern university administrators and their allies in the Democratic Party.

To their credit, Savio’s cohort were willing to fight for their beliefs and that is what they had in common with their contemporaries who fought despotic regimes abroad. However, the same cannot be said about the Social Justice warriors, their modern-day successors. Far from continuing the original fight for free speech, these students are looking to silence professors, visiting lecturers and peers alike. With every passing generation, the standard for what counts as offensive changes and this sharply reflects on the overall mental health of students. The evidence clearly shows that newer students are more likely to be politically engaged.  Moreover, the most active of demonstrators are the most likely to display various traits of mental instability.

When the PC movement was first beginning to gain traction on campuses, comments prominently featuring derogatory views about minorities were deemed unacceptable. Yet slowly but surely, the trend shifted away from excoriating people who make comments that clearly seem racist and toward those who simply appear to think poorly of minorities. In this sense, the inculpation targets not only those who do things that are deemed inappropriate, but also those who seem to be thinking problematic thoughts. There is a manifest similarity between this position of the Social Justice Warriors and that of Christian preachers who teach that hating another person is just as sinful as murdering them. With these considerations in perspective, a new code of thought-control emerged known as “micro-aggressions”.

By definition, people who are guilty of such thought crimes, do not intend to do any harm to the person they have offended. In other words, they are racist, homophobic, ableist or transphobic; but they simply are not aware of that. In the eyes of the Social Justice Warriors, this does not make their transgressions any less severe. To the contrary, those who unintentionally ruffle people’s feathers must have morally corrupt minds in the same sense that Christians who fantasize about committing adultery are deemed to have unwholesome souls. Similarly; Christians may admit that devout believers may act out of character, the Social Justice warriors will also concede that good people sometimes fail to live up to their values. Consistently with the doctrine of the original sin, most Christians believe that man is depraved by nature and because of that, he will always be tempted to do evil. Consistently with this position, professor Noel Ignatiev holds that “whiteness” is to be defined as a social construct that serves the sole purpose of persecuting people of color.

Therefore, it is completely understandable that white people are racist by nature and they seem to have a biological imperative to victimize colored people. Thus, it is to be expected that even the most devoted of white “anti-racism” activists will sometimes slip up and display tears in an “inappropriate manner”, thereby implying that white people are somehow more deserving of sympathy than their exotically colored neighbors .  Such activists are more than willing to forgive their collaborators who simply slip up on occasion.  However, if an individual is guilty of a micro-aggression, it is not the case that he simply acted out of character on one occasion. Instead, it is to be assumed that he is so deeply sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic and transphobic that he does not even realize it. Entertaining thoughts that offend protected groups must come as easily to him as breathing does.

Therefore, he deserves the severest censure and excoriation. In the event where such a person is invited to campus, the student activists will strive to sabotage the speaking event in any way possible. If that does not work, they will create safe spaces to ensure that no “gentle souls” are harmed by what may be said there.  In light of the recent escalations concerning what counts as a micro-aggression, students have been developing increasingly more refined sensitivities to what can be construed as offensive. Now, even the appearance of an effeminate homosexual speaker such as Milo Yiannopoulos causes an uproar on campus, sending hundreds of students scurrying away to “safe spaces”.

These developments leave one with a question as to why academic administrators continue to aid and abet these developments in juvenile delinquency. One obvious answer is that universities desire to collect greater revenue by accepting hordes of students who have neither the intellectual ability nor emotional maturity to withstand the rigors of genuine education. The other more ominous reason rests in the Grand Inquisitor problem. In Dostoevsky’s Opus Magnum, Ivan Karamazov composed a play describing the resurrection of Christ in the 17^th century Sevilla. At the heyday of the Inquisitions, He appeared at the funeral of a little girl and resurrected her, cured the sick, and performed various miracles described in the New Testament. Christ was immediately apprehended by the head of the Catholic Church and incarcerated in the tower where “the vilest of heretics” are burned. Therein, the Grand Inquisitor demanded to know how “He dared to disturb us”. Christ remained silent throughout the interrogation as the patriarch of the clergy lectured him on how “man does live on bread alone” and that is why people prefer security to freedom.

Despite his brusque manner of treating those who “disturbed” the religious institutions, he clearly was guided by benevolent motives. Likewise; the university administrators are like the Grand Inquisitor who wanted to shield his followers from risk, unwittingly depriving them of the opportunity to fulfill the responsibilities that they must honor in order to live in a free society. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ preached that people are to become like children and to that end, the university system continues to infantilize their minds. It is difficult to judge the character of the Grand Inquisitor without suspecting that his actions have also been inspired by ulterior motives. It is clear that he demanded absolute servitude from his subjects and in return, he seized tremendous wealth and power. The same can be said about the elites of the Ivory Tower whose social position is deeply embedded within the highest echelons of the American politico-economic hierarchy. Just as the Grand Inquisitor provided his subjects with a predictable and secure life, the university colludes with the public sector to ensure that ideologically obedient graduates continue to serve government expansion upon graduation.  As these students graduate from college, completely bereft of practical or intellectual skills useful to society, they will have little choice but to seek employment with non-profit organizations championing the causes they have been “educated” to fight for.

Indoctrination is never an end in itself, but a means to the end of radically reshaping the collective consciousness of society. Once students are taught that any inkling of a notion that is incompatible with the PC left’s position is a micro-aggression, they will never even entertain the idea of questioning what they were taught. At any rate, they were never taught to think for themselves, and the schooling they received ensured that every last vestige of intellectual individuality has been banished from their minds. They reflexively assume that anyone who criticizes plans for the expansion of government must be guided by sinister motives; or as Stalin would have it, they must be “the enemy of the people”.

In a recent speech, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban declared that “freedom starts with speaking the truth” and that the “enemies of freedom no longer send dissidents to concentration camps”, but institute rigid thought control policies punishing those who stand for anything national, historical, traditional or individualistic. Orban’s speech received a predictable reaction, yet his criticisms apply widely to cultural milieus across the “free world”. John Stuart Mill defined liberty in a strictly negative sense to mean “freedom from coercion” and this has been the cornerstone of individual rights across Western civilization. The British philosophers were the first to describe a doctrine where people were free to do as they wished, provided only that they did not inflict harm upon others. Mill strictly adhered to the distinction between offense and harm, maintaining that in order to remain truly free; a society must never punish those who merely offend others. Clearly, this lesson has been lost upon the modern academic establishment and their coterie of cronies who are rapidly eroding the roots of Western society.

Jeremy Bentham developed the concept of panopticism referring to a prison where the inmate is under constant observation of the guard. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault applied the concept of panopticism in a socio-cultural context. At the time of his writing, it seemed that citizens were under constant scrutiny from their superiors in factories, schools, courthouses, and all other public institutions. People were under pressure to “think properly” or risk having their reputations ruined, which could potentially bar them from polite society and destroy their livelihood. Since then, this phenomenon has been taken to its vicious extremes to the point where not even the most distinguished academics are safe from their own brand of McCarthyism.

There is no shortage of stories regarding professors who incurred devastating professional consequences because of their heterodox ideological views. Recently, Duke University placed professor Jerry Hough on administrative leave because he repeatedly criticized the pervasive climate of political correctness on college campuses. While Hough was a senior instructor with over 40 years of teaching experience, he was not a renowned scholar. Nonetheless, even the most distinguished of academics are not immune to such treatment. Despite that Dr. James Watson made enormous contributions to the discovery of DNA, his enormous academic stature was jeopardized by comments that the left judged to be racist. In reality, Watson merely contended that foreign aid to Africa is not sufficiently effective because the average IQ of Africans is substantially lower than that of Caucasians. Far from being bizarre speculation of a racist, Watson’s claim is amply corroborated by a wealth of empirical studies in psychometrics. Academics cannot procure the freedom to be intellectually honest about topics that the left deems heretical, even if they reached the highest echelons of the collegiate institution. Professor Lawrence Summers was not only a distinguished scholar but also president of Harvard when the establishment forced him to resign because some of his speeches allegedly promoted sexism. In reality, he merely cited a well-documented fact that the IQs of women tend to be average while men tend toward extremes on both ends of the spectrum. Nowhere did he say that men had superior intelligence to women; his only contention was that men are more likely to be exceptionally bright or quite dull.

The political correctness ideologues are not only the grave-diggers of academic freedom who create a pervasive culture of censorship across every sphere of society; they have no use for the concept of negative liberty or individual rights. Although they call themselves “liberal”, the Jacobins and the Leninists are their true intellectual predecessors. In the strictest sense of the term, they are the enemies of free speech and their objectives are fundamentally opposed to that of Savio’s movement. They have traded their freedom of thought for security and they expect the rest of society to follow suit because the prevailing zeitgeist exhorts us to do so. Although academics are growing wary of the creeping authoritarianism of the PC movement, many are powerless to resist.  Casualties continue to mount as careers and livelihoods of academics are destroyed for thought crimes.