On Woolly-Mindedness

I just watched a TV programme about something serious. Never a good idea in itself, but this one in particular started me thinking about the sheer idiocy of liberals in general and TV producers in particular.

The programme was called 'Five Steps to Tyranny', and it was shown on BBC2 on Tuesday 19 December 2000. It set out to show how ordinary people end up performing the most evil of acts - what the great historian Gitta Sereny calls 'the banality of evil'. Step one: divide the world into Us and Them. Steps two to five: gradually downgrade Them to the point where those who think of themselves as Us no longer think of Them as human.

She pulled out all the usual examples, from Nazis to Kosovan Serbs and Rwandan Hutus, and gave the usual glib analysis of all of them - charismatic leaders, sheeplike people. Nothing original, nothing that we hadn't seen a dozen times before. And then, without the slightest trace of irony or self-awareness, she explained how the world can be divided into people who resist such a movement ("dissenters") and those who passively accept it ("followers").

And at no point, even for a second, did it seem to occur to her that she had just divided the world into Us and Them. We are the ones who care, who stand up against tyranny and evil; They just go along with the crowd. We dissent, They follow. We are caring, honest, well informed, educated, intelligent, broadminded, sceptical, generous; They are dull, conservative, mean, shortsighted, blinkered, selfish, sheeplike, gullible. We care about orang-utans and Yugoslavia and wheelchair access to public buildings; They care about their satellite TV, golfing handicap, week in Marbella.

And this earnest, liberal, mind-bendingly stupid biddy has already taken the first step on her own road to tyranny.

Don't get me wrong - I'm proud to call myself a liberal. A civilisation is measured, in my book, by its liberality. Yet I am constantly embarrassed by some of the phenomenal morons who claim to adopt a liberal cause, then pursue the most totalitarian agenda. And at least, when I divide the world into Us and Them - as I do, as everyone I've ever met or heard of does - I don't pretend that I'm doing Them a favour.

Liberalism means letting everyone make their own decisions. If people make decisions different from those you would have made, that's their right - the very right that you're supposed to be defending. To turn round then, and accuse them of "following" when they should "dissent", is the last word in hypocrisy.

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