You write that accusing people of thought crime is a coercive dominance move that is used when one cannot convince someone voluntarily.
However, the goal is not to convince someone at all. I really don't think that anyone is interested in persuading Steve Sailer (or even Steven Pinker) to change his mind.
Theodore Dalrymple's famous quote comes to mind:
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
Yes, the primary purpose of thought crime is to highlight your dominance over the other party. In the current US climate people who say the wrong thing often apologize and then are fired anyway. This is backwards if the purpose is to bring them into the fold and convince them of the error of their ways, but is the obvious route if you want to demonstrate how much power you have over them. They say they are sorry to you, ask your forgiveness and you fire them- social emasculation.
This also explains why they stop going after people who don't apologize fairly quickly. The number of hit pieces on Jordan Peterson spiked and then dried up to a trickle- even though since then he has admitting to becoming dependent on medication, going through a terrible withdrawal and goes around saying more 'provocative' things than ever- because reminding people that he is out there makes their weakness more obvious.
The fact that so many thoughtcrimes start with “trust the science” leads me to believe your theory about elite insecurity has some merit. True science doesn’t require trust, and so we often find that in practice, people who say “trust the science” are really saying “trust the scientist”.
This is spot on, as far as it goes. But usually the point of punishing dissident speech is preventive.
For instance, when several forums banned all links to the Post's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the months before election day 2020, that did not directly make anyone disbelieve the story. But it prevented millions of potential voters from hearing about it in time to do anything about it. Couple that with the continued refusal of most media outlets to mention it, and the result is they're still managing to deny most of the voting public needed information.
All major media have become Pravda. "Thoughtcrime" (or more often, "misinformation" and "disinformation") is just code for anyone trying to evade the embargo of information that would embarrass a member of the elite, or would discourage people from obeying their demands..
Dr. Kling's elite-insecurity explanation of the thoughtcrime phenomenon seems to explain some, but not all—perhaps not even the majority of cases.
Consider, for instance, the belief that "The law should not prohibit boys aged 10 and up from engaging in sex acts, including sex acts with much older adults." A great majority of the population from most of political and ideological space would regard this as a thoughtcrime, condemning and taking concrete action against someone who expressed the belief. This, however, doesn't seem to be a situation in which an elite is defending itself against popular disrespect. For this case, at least, Huemer's explanation seems to serve better than Kling's.
Dr. Kling's explanation also suggest that the function of thoughtcrime is to defend the elite against outsiders who don't share their beliefs. I'd suggest that another purpose is to restrict and to police the membership of the group itself, by ostracizing those who're insufficiently willing to abide by its most arbitrary standards. By loudly condemning those who fail to profess a certain belief, I demonstrate my commitment to the group; by failing to do so, I show myself unworthy of membership therein. The dubiety of the belief is an advantage for this: professing something whose truth has been plainly demonstrated shows nothing about the strength of my attachment to a group, whereas professing something that's dubious or even plainly absurd shows that I'm willing to support the group even at the cost of my own reason and self-respect.
I started to post something about how "are not the French in some fashion the undisputed elite of the world"? - and the cradle of so many bad ideas - but I realize the idea you're referring to has been taken up by some Germans, and earlier, English, notably - so it wasn't really fair and you're right that it's certainly not widely held, or ever contemplated, elite or no.
Still it seemed once commonplace that a gay kid would "find" or "be found by" an older man - and this was not especially controversial. "Is what it is". And if outside conventional moral norms, certainly, not thought quite so permanently traumatizing.
Now, to say that in words is controversial, but meantime sexual mores have grown so much looser that there can scarcely be greater prohibition on such now.
In a way, prudishness on a particular point can be fixation, and fixation is not necessarily a sign of moral cleanliness, whether personal or societal.
The elite have made the rules. A lot of this stuff is just gamesmanship, designed to keep everyone off balance, or keep some things in the foreground so others won't be questioned.
I'm sorry if this is cryptic, I can't always express the ways things seem "off" to me.
"We have a natural, genetically based tendency to share our beliefs with each other". There is a distortion here....some of the 'we' are far more likely to be stridently opinionated than others. Most well-adjusted people are not forever at it (spouting their beliefs) because it can get tiresome. And the age of mass media has massively amplified this asymmetry. It has afforded the one-track-minded, obsessive malcontent (grievance-filled gender dysphoric or race hustler etc) a hugely over-sized influence on our 'democracy'. And these are the same people who have brought Orwell's thought crime concept to our '2023' dystopia.
3) That its falsity can't be proven, it will be believed anyway
Then you would want to censor.
Saying "elite insecurity" is basically a dispute over #1 (if the elites are secure in their control, the idea will not be harmful).
Note that elite insecurity doesn't have to relate to whether the idea is actually false, actually harmful, or actually unprovable.
Communism was false, harmful, and while you and I think we can prove that it's certainly not a mathematical proof. The goal of communist was to win and then shut down debate forever, so not letting them into the public sphere had some merits.
Meanwhile, I think we all agree recent elite woke histeria is mostly false and a lot more harmful than the alternative. We could put COVID in the same category.
Seems to me that one of the rationales for official thoughtcrime is the assumption and belief that the bad thoughts -can- be proven false, that all right thinking people know and accept that, and that there is something -deeply wrong- with anyone who persistently refuses you acknowledge that 'fact'. As with any crime, there is a whole spectrum of culpability from innocent-from-incompetence because mentally ill or immature, to hateful intent, to active malice and knowledge of falseness but with intent to brainwash masses of people into the false thought for exploitative purposes. If what you are saying and doing falls at the far end of the spectrum, it's crime-ish enough.
There are lots of things where I believe 1,2 and 3 but wouldn't want to censor the idea. Because I think coming between a person who wants to express an idea and someone who voluntarily wants to listen to what they have to say is a violation of those people's autonomy.
“ When an elite group feels it is getting the deference it deserves, it will allow you to question its beliefs.”
I am reminded of a story about King Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was an absolute monarch but was very tolerant of free speech and criticism in his kingdom. When asked about this he said “My people and I have an agreement that satisfies us both; they can say whatever they want, and I can do whatever I want.”
Our elites are very insecure. They almost act as if they stole an election.
In any free country, of free people, there will be no thought crimes, only action/ result crimes. But before a conscious action, there was the thought - one idea of having thought crimes is to brainwash folks into not thinking about the crime, rather than teaching the person to rationally choose not to commit the crime. Very much domination.
Communism is an evil ideology -- this is true, even if there were anti-free speech committees persecuting many who had not committed actual crimes for having and stating these beliefs.
Top women score lower in math tests than top men (thus fewer top physicists) -- true. But Larry Summers was fired from Harvard for expressing this thought crime.
Avg Black IQ scores are lower than avg White IQ scores - true, and
IQ scores have a significant heritability % (many think more than 50%) - true. But Charles Murray, among others, has been attacked for expressing this thought crime.
It's not just elite insecurity, there are Woke faith-based beliefs which are both falsifiable and false yet which they believe and base various policies on. If their belief was true, their policy might work, but it certainly doesn't when they start with false beliefs. The thought crime dominance is partly so as to continue their desired policy despite it not working and despite it being based on false beliefs.
We need a society which gives higher status to women who spend time raising kids - and we need more explicit work support for low IQ folk (of all ethnicities). Fighting against the thought crime police avoid improving society in these ways.
I can't think of a good (singular) example at the moment - beyond, in a way, everything - but a striking thing is the way you wake up to some news or other, and find that "people" (of enough influence to be prominent on social media, and some number of them beyond that) *have already decided* what to think about it. It's uncanny. Like there's a separate social media universe, where these establishment takes are disseminated at the speed of light, before the rest of us have even had our coffee.
Sometimes these things even turn out to be all wrong, even laughably so - but they are revealed to be all wrong slowly, whereas their initial "correct" uniformity was instantaneous, without any period of discovery.
I admit when people mention the Deep State - this crosses my mind, vaguely.
I got to see Amartya Sen speak once and the subject was terrorism, which was important at the time being 2003 or 2004. I believe he had a fairly substantive intellectual beef throughout this period with Samuel Huntington about Huntington's idea that terrorism was all about a clash of civilizations. So Sen's talk was about identity. How we all have multiple identities. How the same person can be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a runner, a scientist, a lesbian, etc. This is fairly close to the example he gave. He posited that those who are fundamentalist Islamic terrorists take one single identity and attempt to make it superior to all the other identities and subsume everything else under this umbrella. This was his explanation for an extreme individual ideology that is ripe for the Huemer described mind virus that will persecute the thought criminals who do not conform to their semantic reality. So it isn't so much belief in X, but when the belief becomes a form of internal extremism that is a problem that the individual or groups then take out into the world to subject others to.
Great contribution to the discussion. Standing by for a new round of "Covid-protective" measures and unsure whether I am willing to bear the anticipated consequences of acting out my understanding of related truth claims.
Not all thought crimes are arguable in the way Huemer suggests. Believing in Pizzagate is also a thought crime, even though in that case the reasons against it are decisive to anyone who looks at the question objectively.
You write that accusing people of thought crime is a coercive dominance move that is used when one cannot convince someone voluntarily.
However, the goal is not to convince someone at all. I really don't think that anyone is interested in persuading Steve Sailer (or even Steven Pinker) to change his mind.
Theodore Dalrymple's famous quote comes to mind:
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
Yes, the primary purpose of thought crime is to highlight your dominance over the other party. In the current US climate people who say the wrong thing often apologize and then are fired anyway. This is backwards if the purpose is to bring them into the fold and convince them of the error of their ways, but is the obvious route if you want to demonstrate how much power you have over them. They say they are sorry to you, ask your forgiveness and you fire them- social emasculation.
This also explains why they stop going after people who don't apologize fairly quickly. The number of hit pieces on Jordan Peterson spiked and then dried up to a trickle- even though since then he has admitting to becoming dependent on medication, going through a terrible withdrawal and goes around saying more 'provocative' things than ever- because reminding people that he is out there makes their weakness more obvious.
I'm told there are no genders, or 81?
The fact that so many thoughtcrimes start with “trust the science” leads me to believe your theory about elite insecurity has some merit. True science doesn’t require trust, and so we often find that in practice, people who say “trust the science” are really saying “trust the scientist”.
This is spot on, as far as it goes. But usually the point of punishing dissident speech is preventive.
For instance, when several forums banned all links to the Post's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the months before election day 2020, that did not directly make anyone disbelieve the story. But it prevented millions of potential voters from hearing about it in time to do anything about it. Couple that with the continued refusal of most media outlets to mention it, and the result is they're still managing to deny most of the voting public needed information.
All major media have become Pravda. "Thoughtcrime" (or more often, "misinformation" and "disinformation") is just code for anyone trying to evade the embargo of information that would embarrass a member of the elite, or would discourage people from obeying their demands..
Dr. Kling's elite-insecurity explanation of the thoughtcrime phenomenon seems to explain some, but not all—perhaps not even the majority of cases.
Consider, for instance, the belief that "The law should not prohibit boys aged 10 and up from engaging in sex acts, including sex acts with much older adults." A great majority of the population from most of political and ideological space would regard this as a thoughtcrime, condemning and taking concrete action against someone who expressed the belief. This, however, doesn't seem to be a situation in which an elite is defending itself against popular disrespect. For this case, at least, Huemer's explanation seems to serve better than Kling's.
Dr. Kling's explanation also suggest that the function of thoughtcrime is to defend the elite against outsiders who don't share their beliefs. I'd suggest that another purpose is to restrict and to police the membership of the group itself, by ostracizing those who're insufficiently willing to abide by its most arbitrary standards. By loudly condemning those who fail to profess a certain belief, I demonstrate my commitment to the group; by failing to do so, I show myself unworthy of membership therein. The dubiety of the belief is an advantage for this: professing something whose truth has been plainly demonstrated shows nothing about the strength of my attachment to a group, whereas professing something that's dubious or even plainly absurd shows that I'm willing to support the group even at the cost of my own reason and self-respect.
I started to post something about how "are not the French in some fashion the undisputed elite of the world"? - and the cradle of so many bad ideas - but I realize the idea you're referring to has been taken up by some Germans, and earlier, English, notably - so it wasn't really fair and you're right that it's certainly not widely held, or ever contemplated, elite or no.
Still it seemed once commonplace that a gay kid would "find" or "be found by" an older man - and this was not especially controversial. "Is what it is". And if outside conventional moral norms, certainly, not thought quite so permanently traumatizing.
Now, to say that in words is controversial, but meantime sexual mores have grown so much looser that there can scarcely be greater prohibition on such now.
In a way, prudishness on a particular point can be fixation, and fixation is not necessarily a sign of moral cleanliness, whether personal or societal.
The elite have made the rules. A lot of this stuff is just gamesmanship, designed to keep everyone off balance, or keep some things in the foreground so others won't be questioned.
I'm sorry if this is cryptic, I can't always express the ways things seem "off" to me.
"We have a natural, genetically based tendency to share our beliefs with each other". There is a distortion here....some of the 'we' are far more likely to be stridently opinionated than others. Most well-adjusted people are not forever at it (spouting their beliefs) because it can get tiresome. And the age of mass media has massively amplified this asymmetry. It has afforded the one-track-minded, obsessive malcontent (grievance-filled gender dysphoric or race hustler etc) a hugely over-sized influence on our 'democracy'. And these are the same people who have brought Orwell's thought crime concept to our '2023' dystopia.
If you believe that:
1) An idea is harmful
2) It is false
3) That its falsity can't be proven, it will be believed anyway
Then you would want to censor.
Saying "elite insecurity" is basically a dispute over #1 (if the elites are secure in their control, the idea will not be harmful).
Note that elite insecurity doesn't have to relate to whether the idea is actually false, actually harmful, or actually unprovable.
Communism was false, harmful, and while you and I think we can prove that it's certainly not a mathematical proof. The goal of communist was to win and then shut down debate forever, so not letting them into the public sphere had some merits.
Meanwhile, I think we all agree recent elite woke histeria is mostly false and a lot more harmful than the alternative. We could put COVID in the same category.
Seems to me that one of the rationales for official thoughtcrime is the assumption and belief that the bad thoughts -can- be proven false, that all right thinking people know and accept that, and that there is something -deeply wrong- with anyone who persistently refuses you acknowledge that 'fact'. As with any crime, there is a whole spectrum of culpability from innocent-from-incompetence because mentally ill or immature, to hateful intent, to active malice and knowledge of falseness but with intent to brainwash masses of people into the false thought for exploitative purposes. If what you are saying and doing falls at the far end of the spectrum, it's crime-ish enough.
There are lots of things where I believe 1,2 and 3 but wouldn't want to censor the idea. Because I think coming between a person who wants to express an idea and someone who voluntarily wants to listen to what they have to say is a violation of those people's autonomy.
I'm of the same temperament I'm just trying to explain the logic of censorship.
“ When an elite group feels it is getting the deference it deserves, it will allow you to question its beliefs.”
I am reminded of a story about King Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was an absolute monarch but was very tolerant of free speech and criticism in his kingdom. When asked about this he said “My people and I have an agreement that satisfies us both; they can say whatever they want, and I can do whatever I want.”
Our elites are very insecure. They almost act as if they stole an election.
"An insecure elite makes makes unbelief a thought-crime."
Don't look now, but we really did find just enough postal ballots LOL
In any free country, of free people, there will be no thought crimes, only action/ result crimes. But before a conscious action, there was the thought - one idea of having thought crimes is to brainwash folks into not thinking about the crime, rather than teaching the person to rationally choose not to commit the crime. Very much domination.
Communism is an evil ideology -- this is true, even if there were anti-free speech committees persecuting many who had not committed actual crimes for having and stating these beliefs.
Top women score lower in math tests than top men (thus fewer top physicists) -- true. But Larry Summers was fired from Harvard for expressing this thought crime.
Avg Black IQ scores are lower than avg White IQ scores - true, and
IQ scores have a significant heritability % (many think more than 50%) - true. But Charles Murray, among others, has been attacked for expressing this thought crime.
It's not just elite insecurity, there are Woke faith-based beliefs which are both falsifiable and false yet which they believe and base various policies on. If their belief was true, their policy might work, but it certainly doesn't when they start with false beliefs. The thought crime dominance is partly so as to continue their desired policy despite it not working and despite it being based on false beliefs.
We need a society which gives higher status to women who spend time raising kids - and we need more explicit work support for low IQ folk (of all ethnicities). Fighting against the thought crime police avoid improving society in these ways.
I can't think of a good (singular) example at the moment - beyond, in a way, everything - but a striking thing is the way you wake up to some news or other, and find that "people" (of enough influence to be prominent on social media, and some number of them beyond that) *have already decided* what to think about it. It's uncanny. Like there's a separate social media universe, where these establishment takes are disseminated at the speed of light, before the rest of us have even had our coffee.
Sometimes these things even turn out to be all wrong, even laughably so - but they are revealed to be all wrong slowly, whereas their initial "correct" uniformity was instantaneous, without any period of discovery.
I admit when people mention the Deep State - this crosses my mind, vaguely.
“I think instead that thought-crimes emerge on the basis of elite insecurity.”
Could you present evidence for this opinion? Are you just informing us of your opinion, or do you wish to persuade?
"This leads to the question of why people come to believe ambiguous statements so strongly that they are willing to punish people who question them."
But you have already answered this question.
"Calling something a thought-crime is a dominance move."
"This leads to the question of why people come to believe ambiguous statements so strongly that they are willing to punish people who question them."
But you have already answered this question.
"Calling something a thought-crime is a dominance move."
I got to see Amartya Sen speak once and the subject was terrorism, which was important at the time being 2003 or 2004. I believe he had a fairly substantive intellectual beef throughout this period with Samuel Huntington about Huntington's idea that terrorism was all about a clash of civilizations. So Sen's talk was about identity. How we all have multiple identities. How the same person can be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a runner, a scientist, a lesbian, etc. This is fairly close to the example he gave. He posited that those who are fundamentalist Islamic terrorists take one single identity and attempt to make it superior to all the other identities and subsume everything else under this umbrella. This was his explanation for an extreme individual ideology that is ripe for the Huemer described mind virus that will persecute the thought criminals who do not conform to their semantic reality. So it isn't so much belief in X, but when the belief becomes a form of internal extremism that is a problem that the individual or groups then take out into the world to subject others to.
Great contribution to the discussion. Standing by for a new round of "Covid-protective" measures and unsure whether I am willing to bear the anticipated consequences of acting out my understanding of related truth claims.
Not all thought crimes are arguable in the way Huemer suggests. Believing in Pizzagate is also a thought crime, even though in that case the reasons against it are decisive to anyone who looks at the question objectively.
Arnold wrote "..if a person is selected of believing X, then that person should be punished." Should this be "suspected" rather than "selected"?