Has everyone gone fucking crazy?

In my last attempt to reason with some Greens apparatchiks, I was reminded that absolute certainty, no matter that is dressed in morality, is always totalitarianism.

I could not get through at all that bourgeois claims by middle class kids for special privilege is not about rights unless you can demonstrate how it might apply to all people, not some favoured sub-set.

Instead I got the Stalinism about my attitudes and words being not correct in their preferred sense.  Lenin, straight out of the textbook, turned to purges and assassinations (cancellations?) under Stalin.

I failed to make any impression because these kids (20s-30s) are completely ignorant of history, but of a mind to demand that history is whatever they tell me it is.  I didn’t bother mentioning Orwell; none of them has the attention span to read anything longer than a slogan.

I could not convince them that the last people who told me about moral certainty were all clergy later exposed as child rapists and confidence tricksters.  Possibly again because the apparatchiks’ grasp on history, and reality, is quite tenuous.

Changing direction to tell them that they are no better than the fascists on the political right first got me incredulous blank faces as they tried to process clichés—their sole grasp on reality—with failed attempts to locate concrete experience of jackboots and swastika armbands.  And then polite smiles of incomprehension.

Is it remotely possible that an entire generation is too thick to understand anything that doesn’t come with literal interpretations?  Isn’t that fundamentalist Christofascism in a bamboo sweater with a vegetarian hot dog in hand?

My last effort was to try to explain how ethics is not that if morality is always imposed as a set of rules.  Rules mean obedience, ethics mean judgement about what’s right.  One of those twinkies actually said to me: ‘But that would mean anyone could anything’.

Just in case you missed it, this was LITERALLY the same response of the Catholic Church to French existentialism in the 1950s.  The Stalinist response, of course, was a bullet to the neck.  A quite emphatic ‘cancellation’.

When I was leaving, one of the apparatchiks tried to tell me she thought I meant well, but I was just conditioned by prejudice and hatred.  I responded by asking what she thought was different about HER prejudices and hatred.

She paused long enough to show me her earnest face.  ‘We’re right,’ she said.  Smiling that born-again smile you get from people only when sanity has left the building.

Let that sink in: ‘We’re right’.

These kids are worse than the timid fascists on the right.  It's like a born-again version of Stalinism without any need for understanding what Stalinism was, or what history means.