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The power that controls our world
If there is anyone reading this site who still doubts my idea that non-discrimination is the ruling—and in its essence totalitarian—principle of the West, crushing everything that is not in conformity with itself, see this, from the Daily Mail (be sure to go to the original page to see the photos of the claimant and the respondent):
A Muslim woman has been awarded 4,000 pounds for “injury to feelings” after a hair salon owner refused to employ her because she wears a headscarf.
Bushra Noah accused Sarah Desrosiers, owner of a trendy central London hair salon, of religious discrimination after she failed to offer her a job in May last year.
A panel sitting at the central London employment tribunal dismissed her claim of direct discrimination but upheld her complaint of indirect discrimination.
Mrs Noah, of Acton, west London, applied for a job as a junior assistant at the Wedge salon in King’s Cross.
Giving its judgment, the tribunal said it accepted that Ms Desrosiers said that Mrs Noah lived too far away but was persuaded to give her an interview.
But when the 19-year-old applicant arrived at the salon she claimed that the Canadian salon owner was clearly shocked by the fact she wore a headscarf.
Ms Desrosiers told the tribunal she was surprised that the younger woman had not mentioned it earlier.
She said she needed stylists to reflect the “funky, urban” image of her salon and showcase alternative hairstyles.
If an applicant had a conventional hairstyle she would insist that it was re-styled in a more “alternative” way, she said.
After a 15-minute meeting she and Mrs Noah parted and both parties told the tribunal it was obvious that the 19-year-old would not be offered the job.
The panel refused an application by Mrs Noah for aggravated damages and rejected her claims that the episode had put her off hairdressing, finding that she applied for further salon jobs before deciding to retrain in tourism.
But they did find that she had been badly upset by the 15-minute interview and awarded Mrs Noah 4,000 pounds damages for “injury to feelings”.
In their judgment, the panel stated: “We were satisfied by the respondent’s evidence that the claimant was not treated less favourably than the respondent would have treated a woman who, whether Muslim or not, for a reason other than religious belief wears a hair covering at all times when at work.”
But they also concluded: “There was no specific evidence before us as to what would (for sure) have been the actual impact of the claimant working in her salon with her head covered at all times.
“We concluded that, on a critical and balanced assessment, the degree of risk, while real, should not be assumed to be as great at the respondent believed.”
Ms Desrosiers, 32, said: “I feel it is a bit steep for what actually happened. It’s really scary for a small business.
“I never in a million years dreamt that somebody would be completely against the display of hair and be in this industry. I don’t feel I deserve it.”
She said she still had not appointed someone to the job and had decided to “leave it for a while”.
Mrs Noah’s legal representatives were not available for comment.
How many times have I said that liberalism is against the existence of any particular and distinct thing, because as long as that thing exists in its particularity, it is maintaining its distinctness from—and hence is discriminating against and is excluding—all that is not like itself? Here is a hair dressing salon. It is devoted to “alternative, funky” hairstyles. Yet it is punished, with a very large fine, for not hiring an individual whose very presence in the salon as a hair dresser would contradict the very nature of that salon.
Under liberalism, nothing (if it is of the West) is allowed to be itself.
- end of initial entry -
A. Zarkov writes:
The award of 4,000 pounds for “injury to feelings” would be paltry compared to attorney fees in the U.S. Unless of course it involves a violation of the Civil Rights Act which explicitly provides for attorney fee awards. It would be interesting to know who the lawyers were in this case and how they were compensated. It’s also possible the UK government paid the plaintiff’s attorney fees or even provided the attorney. The article referred to a “Tribunal,” which might mean it was a administrative law proceeding. It’s also possible that Muslim money supported Noah’s action.
Steve D. writes:
Regarding non-discrimination as the ruling principle of liberalism: it might seem like nit picking, but I would say rather that equality is the real ruling principle; non-discrimination is more of an ethical tactic to enforce equality. Where inequality is deemed to have occurred, after all, liberals are all in favor of discrimination—against whatever group is seen to be on top.
But I’d take it further than that. I believe that the ruling principle of liberalism is actually sheer, freaking lunacy. Four thousand pounds for hurting someone’s feelings?! Why aren’t the English up in arms yet? Is there estrogen in the water supply?
LA replies:
Steve has given us two distinct theories of liberalism.
As for equality, I would say that equality is not the most exact description, because equality has a range of meanings, which includes, e.g., economic equality, the classless society, and so on. But today’s liberals/leftists are not aiming at the old Marxist type of equality. They accept a certain amount of free enterprise and economic inequality. The particular form that equality takes in our time is non-discrimination. It is non-discrimination that is being used to break down every institution, to dissolve the nation and its identity, to Islamize Europe, to crush the most basic liberties of free association, to stun people’s minds (as the owner of the hair salon was stunned by this, see Mark B.’s comment below) so that they become disoriented and demoralized and incapable of resisting the leftist state. It is the systematic destruction of everything that is. The Comprehensive Immigration Act that was stopped last year and that both McCain and Obama are determined to pass was a subset of the real, though unknown, master law of our time: the Comprehensive Non-Discrimination Act.
As for the “sheer, freaking lunacy” that Steve also says is the ruling principle of liberalism, the lunacy is simply the logic of non-discrimination, comprehensively applied.
Bill Carpenter writes:
I beg leave to doubt that anti-discrimination is the ruling passion of contemporary liberalism because of its inconsistency and opportunism. It is a means to an end, which is the destruction of our inherited societies. I question whether that is the ultimate end. Perhaps the ultimate end is just rebellion against reality. That is consistent with your perception they will let nothing remain what it is.
Our society is all they know of reality, hence it comes in for the brunt of their resentment.
LA replies:
But WHY do they want to destroy it? What is BAD about reality that makes them want to destroy it? For my answer I return to the traditionalist analysis that I have advanced in various formulations: the rejection of God, the transcendent, the higher, the notion of an inherent structure in existence. Once the higher or the sense of being part of a larger whole is rejected, then the world is reduced to selves and their desires, with nothing above them, no “holarchy” (to use Arthur Koestler’s term) of which they are a part. Therefore all selves and their respective desires are equal, therefore any distinction between selves is a horrible attack on the worth of the “less equal” or excluded self and must be banned.
However, as I’m thinking about this, I don’t know that the non-discrimination and the destruction can be separated. Since the structure of the world consists of distinct things, each of which has its internal order or structure (even an alternative hair salon has its internal order), to ban discrimination is to destroy each individual thing and its order. Non-discrimination is destruction, perhaps the most efficient and thorough-going destruction ever known to man.
Robert C. from Missouri writes:
Why would an observant Muslim woman want to work in a place such as this anyway? See this photo and this.
I guess to show that she can, and further bend British society to Islam’s will.
Mark B. writes:
This is a marvelous example how liberalism is actively using cognitive dissonance to destroy the will of the population to resist human authority. It is intuitive to well adjusted people that refusing to hire an unqualified worker is the correct course of action. The liberal state, however, finds any available pretext, in this case indirect discrimination as evidenced by injury to feelings, to change the social encounter from one that is right and just into one that is unfair and wrong.
As these experiences become more frequent and part of the common knowledge, the population increasingly stops trying to do what is right by moral standards and adapts to behaving as they are instructed to behave by their human masters. The reason atheism has come to dominate elite liberals is precisely because the goal of liberalism is rule by human authority and human authority alone.
Steve D. writes:
If I understand your thinking correctly, you would regard an act of discrimination by a liberal to be an unprincipled exception to the doctrine of non-discrimination. Whereas using discrimination to advance radical equality would be principled and rational, using discrimination to advance non-discrimination would be unprincipled, inconsistent, and irrational.
Judging on probability alone, and taking into account that liberals can’t be considered to be outstandingly principled or rational, I would say that you may very well be correct after all. And the end in view (to the extent that they even understand it) is not equality, but simply destruction.
I was being facetious when I suggested that lunacy was the motivating force behind liberalism. I stand corrected.
LA replies:
Ahh, but I took your lunacy theory seriously!
However, your first paragraph brings out that it is equality, not anti-discrimination, that is the ruling principle after all. So I have to modify what I said to you before.
Liberals use non-discrimination when that helps achieve equality, and they use discrimination when that helps achieve equality. So using discrimination to help bring about racial equality is not an unprincipled exception to liberalism. It is principled, as it is in accord with the single goal of liberalism, which is to tear down the existing, Western society, because it’s in the “superior,” “dominant” position, and raise up the all the alternatives—Muslims, Hispanics, homosexuals, homosexual “marriage,” etc.—because they are in the inferior, excluded position. As I’ve said many times, this is not a double standard, as conservatives are always complaining, but a single standard. It’s the single, liberal standard of dragging down the West, because it’s superior to other cultures; dragging down the good, because it’s superior to the bad; eliminating beauty, because it’s superior to ugliness, and so on.
Now, based on the above remarks, one could say that the goal of liberalism is not equality in some abstract sense but simply the destruction of the West. But that would leave unanswered the question, WHY do liberals seek to destroy the West. And the answer is that they seek to destroy it because (1) it is objectively better than other civilizations (which includes being better off than them), and (2) it aspires to and expresses higher truth in a way that other civilizations do not.
So the primary aim of liberalism is indeed the elimination of inequality—particularly the inequality of values. This in turn means the elimination of all “vertical” distinctions of values, that is, of any values, truths, or standards above ourselves, and the elimination of all “horizontal” distinctions of values, that is, distinctions between our culture and other cultures.
And intrinsic to this elimination of inequality is the prohibition of discrimination—not of all discrimination, but discrimination by the existing, normal, Western society and its peoples and institutions—discrimination without which those peoples and institutions must go out of existence.
The elimination of inequality, the elimination of discrimination, and the destruction of the West, this is the three-in-one principle of liberalism. Three principles, but one principle.
Lazar writes (June 18):
Rather than describing them as a trinity of co-equal principles, I think your own comment lays out a better formulation for the relationship between non-discrimination, equality, and the destruction of the West: Equality is the principle, non-discrimination is the means, and the destruction of the West is the end.
LA replies:
That’s good.
Alan E. writes:
Here is a related interview with Miss Desrosiers regarding her plight after dealing with this abominable Moslem woman and the ridiculous British courts. At least the tone of the article is one of incredulity and outrage. God save us.
The world is upside down, and so many people I know, regular God-fearing Americans, are drenched in negativity and disillusionment over what is happening to our beautiful West. It’s getting to the point where one has to fear debating whether breathing the air is normal or natural.
I greatly enjoy your site. It is an inspiration to me, and I read it daily.
Jeff W. writes:
Are you sure that liberalism’s agenda is to eliminate inequality? For instance liberals always praise the Castro regime in Cuba for providing all Cubans with free housing, education and medical care. But what could be more unequal than Cuban society? It consists of a corrupt ruling oligarchy—which owns the whole island, including all the people—and a tyrannized population of serfs. What is equal about that? The serfs are perhaps equal with each other, but they are not the equals of Raoul.
Would it not be more accurate to say that liberalism seeks to eliminate inequality among the serfs in a liberal-dominated totalitarian oligarchy?
LA replies:
I’ve said the same many times. The ultimate practical object of liberalism is a world consisting of equal individuals who have been liberated from all traditional cultures and nations and whose equality is ensured by an unaccountable global elite. But that’s not a contradiction. Since equality requires the elimination of all normal institutions and societies, there must be some ruling regime. But this regime is not seen as possessing “power,” which is bad and unequal. Since it directs mankind in the name of the equal rights of all, it is simply identical with goodness.
Of course, in reality it IS a superior power—and a totalitarian one. But I’m describing the way the liberals see it. Liberals like an unaccountable global elite because such an elite is “pure,” not representing any traditional, national, patriarchal oppressor, not representing any democratic majority (which is also unequal), but representing all mankind in its equality and its freedom.
Whether the liberal West ends up under such a regime, or under a Caliphate of the West as I’ve also hypothesized, is anyone’s guess. But if the liberal West does surrender to a Caliphate of the West, the Caliphate would serve the same function in the liberal dialectic as the liberal global elite: its rule would be welcome, because it would be relieving liberal Westerners from the responsibility of running their own, unequal, guilty civilization. In fact, the willing submission of liberal Westerners to Islam may be an even more consistent outcome of liberalism than if they submitted themselves to an EU-type global liberal elite.
Alan Levine writes:
I suspect it is increasingly clear that it would be tough to improve on James Burnham’s formulation in “Suicide of the West” that liberalism, or what passes for it, is the ideology of Western suicide—at least in terms of consequences! The problem of whether that is the motivation behind liberalism is the real question. My own suspicion is that the destruction of the West is neither the simple motive nor the unintended consequence of some alleged belief in equality or a principle of non-discrimination but rather a conviction that truth and morality lie in the inversion of traditional ideas about morality. It seems to me that if you posit that liberals, or more precisely the modern left, are convinced that traditional ideas of good and evil are inverted—and allow for the fact that their historical and other knowledge is not too good, so that they sometimes confuse quite modern phenomena for things dating from time immemorial, and vice versa—you get a more consistent and accurate result than if you posit that they are propelled by some “positive” ideology, whether equality or non-discrimination. That they bellow about the latter unendingly I would not contest, but the amount of energy they expend in justifying unequal treatment of people and “reverse discrimination” of various sorts has always made it difficult for me to accept your thesis about the centrality of the non-discrimination principle. One can also argue, I think, that a very large element on the left is now, subconsciously, at least, doing evil things just because they are evil. The humanitarian ideals are “cover,” nothing more.
I recall, in this connection, the remark of Stanislav Andreski, about 20 years ago, that “liberalism” no longer meant anything but the justification of anti-social behavior.
Steve D. writes:
James M. writes, “What else can you call liberalism but a suicide cult?” That is certainly the logical end of liberalism, which is based upon despair.
People who have hope for the future—whether hope for their civilization in general, for their children in particular, or for their own spiritual future—do not behave as though heaven must be made on Earth NOW. They work for the future, not the millennial present, and they are satisfied with the scale of progress proper to a single human life.
When you have no hope in the future, either for yourself or anyone else, you very reasonably demand satisfaction now, since now is the only time available to you. And you tend to be very, very impatient. That explains a lot: it explains why liberals tend to be humorless (outside of satire directed at tradition); it explains why “progressives” are never satisfied with “progress”; it explains why liberals seem to flounder from one bizarre “solution”—like importing Somalis (Somali cats would be a different matter) to another; it even helps explain liberals’ positive attitude toward (you could almost say obsession with) suicide—because once you follow liberalism to its logical dead-end, and find that you have only arrived at the place where all the despair comes from, there is no place left to go but out.
Which brings up an intriguing question: is it possible that liberalism will destroy itself before it destroys the West?
LA replies:
That is our only hope. Either liberalism will destroy the West, and with the West, itself; or liberalism will destroy itself before it destroys the West, in which case there is hope for a reborn West. Either way, liberalism is doomed, just as a cancerous tumor is doomed, even though, at the moment, the cancer is spreading.
Jonathan Silber writes:
I sometimes think that liberals are motivated by nothing more than the desire to spit in the face, so to speak, of normal, ordinary people; to oppose, and destroy, what these people value, just because they value it; and to thwart them, step by step and at every turn, in their pursuit of their values, for the sheer pleasure of thwarting them.
If tomorrow normal, ordinary Americans rose up one and all to declare their support for abortion, on demand and without conditions, liberals would contrive to oppose them, and come out in support of the right to life. Liberals hold no principles, only motives, and those are malice, envy, spite, and hate.
Ayn Rand wrote, of these leftists, that they hate the good because it is the good. That, in my eyes, explains what otherwise is inexplicable.
LA replies:
Jonathan’s theory is not far from mine, since I say that liberalism begins in rejection of God, truth, and the good.
Josh F. writes:
In the entry you say, “However, your first paragraph brings out that it is equality, not anti-discrimination, that is the ruling principle after all.”
But what are liberals attempting to equate? I say they are attempting to equate homosexuality to heterosexuality. Heterosexuality, being the primary framework in which we all exist, is being challenged by homosexuality and heterosexuality is relenting and therefore Western man is dying, literally.
And earlier in the entry you say, “Once the higher or the sense of being part of a larger whole is rejected, then the world is reduced to selves and their desires…”
And so we have homosexuals, advocating the “liberal” idea that their orientation is biological as opposed to behavioral, believing that God has rejected them and left them outside the chain of life. Homosexuals, by definition, are repulsed by and reject heterosexuality (God) and therefore have and feel no explicit link to the future. It is them and then death. It is self and desire.
Liberalism, it seems, is the political manifestation of the homosexual nature. Nondiscrimination serves as a mechanism to equate homosexuality with heterosexuality while simultaneously exemplifying the fluid sexual “nature” of the homosexual. Autonomy, what Mark Richardson believes underpins modern liberalism, is really non-loyalty or total detachment from our heterosexual (God’s) framework.
The liberal destruction we see is the destruction brought about by the homosexual nature and its great battle with God and his heterosexual framework. But there is also the perversity of homosexuality that requires death, destruction, denigration and degradation. In this we see the introduction of hyper-heterosexual Third World cultures. That hyper-heterosexuality culture no longer exists in the Western world outside pockets of ghetto/Third World enclaves. This has created a vacuum for homosexuals who have triumphed in the Western World over native hyper-heterosexuality. These Third-World dopes represent the next great clash within our civilization while the rest of us look on, wondering whether we choose our fellow homosexuals over the hyper-heterosexual Third-Worlders.
LA replies:
Josh seems to be working toward a “grand theory” of liberalism based on homosexuality. While I don’t yet fully get what he’s saying, I am leery of any attempt to reduce liberalism to a single cause, such as civil rights, or feminism, or homosexual liberation, or whatever. At the same time, each of these factors plays its part in the whole picture and it is worthwhile to focus on it, so long as we remember that it is not the whole explanation.
Josh F. writes:
You intimated that modern liberalism may have several causes as opposed to a singular one. This made me wonder whether this was logical. Could multiple “intelligences” randomly dispersed throughout Western civilization bring forward a highly irrational ideology that leads us to death and destruction?
LA replies:
Good question. Let’s say the answer is probably no. In that case there is a single underlying cause which have plural manifestations, one of which is civil rights, one of which is sexual liberation, one of which is feminism, one of which is open borders, and on and on … and one of which may be the homosexualist syndrome you describe.
And the underlying cause for all of these manifestations would be something like: the demand for equality; or the rejection of the transcendent structure of existence, because it places limits on the self; or the loss of belief in God, period.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 17, 2008 07:08 PM | Send
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