Reality versus Political Correctness: It’s all been Done Before. Confessions of a Nobel-Prize-winning Feminist and Communist. By Doris Lessing, via blogger Neo. Doris Lessing was a prolific British novelist, a committed communist, and lifelong feminist, who died in 2013. But, she had a load of talent and thought for herself.
Here is some of what she said in an interview in 1997:
Lessing: Capitalism was dead [postwar 40s and 50s in England]. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks — everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people.
Question: You call these beliefs a kind of mass hypnosis.
Lessing: I call it mass psychopathology. Because what we believed was rubbish. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the world.
Question: But it was such a heady kind of belief, wasn’t it? Was it truly all rubbish?
Lessing: Look, most of it was rubbish. But it had an enormous emotional charge behind it, which meant that people could achieve more if they believed this kind of thing. You know, if you are fueled by this pure belief, amazing things get done.
Question: You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.
Lessing: Well, that’s why socialism is, for our time, dead. … We were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on — this is another cliche, forgive me — progressive thinking of every kind. …
Question: You compare that kind of progressive thinking to today’s political correctness, to use another cliche. How true is that?
Lessing: I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.
Question: What are those attitudes?
Lessing: A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.
Then, about a talk she gave in 2001 to the Edinburgh Book Festival:
The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, “continually demeaned and insulted” by women without a whimper of protest.
Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a “lazy and insidious” culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.
Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.
“I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday…
“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?
“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.
“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”
Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.
She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.
“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.
“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.
“Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”
It seems only feminists are allowed to say the bleeding obvious about men’s issues.
IMO feminism has long ago ended up where all movements of the left inevitability lead: dogmatic, totalitarian, and far away from understanding human nature and a stupid belief in the arc of history. Leftists keep doing deja vu all over again as they create the new dystopia.
Geoffrey Britain nails it:
All isms of the left end up there because all isms of the left reject basic aspects of human nature and key operative principles that govern the external reality within which we all exist.
At base, they are at war with God and his creation.
No ideology in fundamental opposition to reality is sustainable. They are dogmatic because they cannot withstand factual contradiction, thus the first sacrifice upon the left’s ideological altar is… factual truth.
They end up totalitarian because an unsustainable ideology can only continue through coercion. The more evident the failure, the greater the coercion. See Venezuela, Cuba and N. Korea…
