Two Minutes of Hate. When I first read George Orwell’s 1984 as a kid, I was confused by the scene in the movie theater, where the masses are watching video clips of military helicopters destroying boats full of unarmed refugees, and then projecting their hatred onto the regime’s worst enemy, Goldstein. Why show the army mowing down defenseless people? Wouldn’t it make more sense to show them doing something heroic? That’s because I didn’t understand the Two Minutes of Hate, and it’s possibly one of the most important and accurate points Orwell made about authoritarian regimes.
Resembling the premise of 1984, western liberals live under an extremely violent and authoritarian system that’s unforgiving of social gaffs. If citizens of the regime make a rude or de-humanizing joke on social media about another group of people, they are fired from their jobs and publicly ostracized by their peers. And depending on the country they live in, might face criminal charges as well. This is commonly referred to as “cancel culture,” when someone who says something socially inappropriate is forced to undergo a pseudo-Maoist struggle session when he is stripped of of his livelihood, publicly humiliated, and forced to grovel for forgiveness (which is not given, and he already knows this before he begs).
Like all forms of morality policing, modern “cancel culture” started innocently enough. After the Boston Marathon bombing, there was a social media scandal after a woman dressed up as a victim for her 2013 Halloween costume. Okay, I get it – she was trying to be edgy and clever and went too far. It was right to chastize her. But the mob wasn’t satisfied until she was fired from her job as a dental hygienist. “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” the mob always liked to chant. Even at the time I thought it was a crazy overreaction to make some private citizen lose her income and potentially face severe problems for the rest of her life because of a tasteless Facebook post. The problem here was that proportionality of these proposed “consequences” was never considered. The offender had to always be crucified in a ritualistic struggle session no matter how trivial her offense was.
Under such a regime, everyone had to start playing it safe through silent consent. For example, a person might not like his place of employment hanging a giant BLM or LGBT banner over the entrance, but complaining isn’t worth the risk of getting fired. Silent consent.
But after a while, even silent consent was no longer enough. Everyone needed to give affirmative consent, and anything less than enthusiastic affirmative consent was an offense, punishable by being fired and put through a struggle session. A good example of affirmative consent is a company requiring all employees to put their pronouns in their email signatures. If an employee refuses, this is bigotry in violation of corporate policy for which he can be written up, and possibly fired if his disobedience continues.
Another good example of affirmative consent is painting a giant LGBT flag on a road or city steps. This is actually an odd practice at first glance. Typically, a regime doesn’t paint their own flag and symbols on the ground, as walking on it is a sign of disrespect. In fact, deliberately stepping on a flag is a form of protest and is meant to anger people who revere what that flag represents. So why paint LGBT flags on the ground? Well, it’s quite simple, actually. It’s so simple a mischievous teenage boy could have thought of it. “You’re touching the gаy flag, so that makes you gаy too, haha.” By painting the LGBT flag on major car and pedestrian paths, it’s actually almost impossible to not touch it as you’re going about your life. Affirmative consent, and failure to give affirmative consent means being deprived of basic life necessities, like using the major roadway you need to get to work.
Do you remember the story of Swiss folk hero William Tell refusing to salute the Austrian governor’s hat, and as punishment was forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head? It’s not just a classic tale of disobedience, but a blueprint on how authoritarian regimes work. It wasn’t enough to just put up the governor’s hat on a pole, it was necessary to require everyone to salute it, actively affirming their submission to his authority.
The USA has a similar requirement to the governor’s hat, the pledge of allegiance to the flag, literally a loyalty oath that school children are obligated to take. The irony here is that liberals today embraced the opposite idea – kneeling in protest against the flag, because black lives matter, or something. It’s supposed to be an act of protest but is actually the opposite. Athletes who don’t kneel are ostracized. Why is it borderline fascism to force people to stand for the flag, but not fascism to force them to kneel? Both are acts of affirmative consent and serve the same authoritarian purpose.
Recently an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts put two nude people in the entrance, so there was no way to get in except to squeeze between them. This is a liberal affirmative consent ritual. If you want to get into the exhibition for any reason, no matter what your business is, you have to undergo this humiliating and invasive bisexual initiation ritual. If you’re unwilling, then you just can’t enter. Affirmative consent.
I mean really, look at the woman visitor in this photo, she’s clearly not happy.
But the biggest of all affirmative consent rituals was COVID. If you wanted to work, buy groceries, ride public transportation, go outside, do literally anything at all, you had to wear a mask. When the jabs became available, you had to get those too, and prove it by carrying your jab card at all times. “Show me ze papers, bigot!” Affirmative consent. And it wasn’t enough to give affirmative consent once, it had to be continuous. Take the booster, you bigot. Then the second booster, then the third, and so on.
Along the way, not only were people getting cancelled for doing or saying something inappropriate, it started to become enough of a violation just to be related or married to someone who said something inappropriate. It’s a classic carrot/stick method. The stick is the threat of a cancellation struggle session if you don’t report your spouse for being a bigot. The carrot is the power and social validation of getting other people in trouble, which encourages the masses to police each other. So a family member made a tasteless joke at dinner? Better report him to the authorities, as this will spare you from being cancelled with him, and make you a hero of the hour.
There’s another relevant scene in 1984 when the main character’s interrogator tells him 2 + 2 = 5. It’s an “Emperor has no clothes” moment that’s important to authoritarian regimes. It’s great to force people to agree with obviously untrue statements, because that just means the truth is whatever the regime wants it to be. For this purpose, transgender ideology comes into play. A man with a penis can be a woman if he says so, and anyone who disagrees is a hateful bigot. And like everything else under the regime, like that museum exhibit, this belief requires affirmative consent. If a woman does not agree that a man with a penis can be a woman, then there’s nothing she can do but isolate herself from society. She can’t join a public gym or a sports team, or even use public restrooms and showers without consenting to possibly sharing them with a guy who says he’s a woman.
And this system works. Consider this blog post by a woman who went to Disneyland in 2017:
I was at Disneyland with my son, my friend and her son. We were over in California Adventure in the food court area. We’d just finished eating and decided to pee before we headed out to The Little Mermaid. I went to the bathroom while she watched our boys in their strollers, and then I did the same….
I was off to the side waiting with the two boys, when I noticed a man walk into the restroom. My first thought was “Oh sh*t, he’s walked in the wrong restroom by mistake. lol” He took a few more steps, at which point he would’ve definitely noticed all the women lined up and still kept walking. My next thought was, “Maybe he’s looking for his wife…or child and they’ve been in here a while.” But he didn’t call out any names or look around. He just stood off to the side and leaned up against the wall. At this point I’m like, “WTF? Ok there is definitely a very manly hispanic man in a Lakers jersey who just walked in here. Am I the only one seeing this?” I surveyed the room and saw roughly 12 women, children in tow…staring at him with the exact same look on their faces. Everyone was visibly uncomfortable. We were all trading looks and motioning our eyes over to him…like “what is he doing in here?” Yet every single one of us was silent. And this is the reason I wrote this blog.
If this had been 5 years ago, you bet you’re a*s every woman in there would’ve been like, “Ummm what are you doing in here?”, but in 2017? the mood has shifted. We had been culturally bullied into silenced. Women were mid-changing their baby’s diapers on the changing tables and I could see them shifting to block his view. But they remained silent. I stayed silent. We all did. Every woman who exited a stall and immediately zeroed right in on him…said nothing. And why? B/c I…and I’m sure all the others were scared of that “what if”. What if I say something and he says he “identifies as a woman” and then I come off as the intolerant a*shole….? So we all stood there, shifting in our uncomfortableness…trading looks. I saw two women leave the line with their children. Still nothing was said. An older lady said to me out loud, “What is he doing in here?” I’m ashamed to admit I silently shrugged and mouthed, “I don’t know.” She immediately walked out…from a bathroom she had every right to use without fear.
This is the type of fearful compliance that history’s most ruthless dictators all aspired to achieve, but their tactics were primitive and ineffective in comparison.
What does all this have to do with Two Minutes of Hate? Now I will explain. There are consequences to penning up a whole population of people into a giant zoo or concentration camp. Being a prisoner will drive people mad unless they have an outlet for their frustration. If there’s no outlet for people’s aggressive tendencies, there is a danger of them expressing it in an unapproved way, and that is where the Two Minutes of Hate comes into play.
The regime selects an approved enemy, and it is okay to hate them. You can say whatever nasty thing you want about this group without fear of punishment, and you’re actually encouraged to do this. Russians are orcs who live on troll farms, blah blah blah. And as always, there is affirmative consent. If you decline to your hatred of this group, you are treated as one of them. A Russian lover is just as bad as a Russian.
Like the beautiful strong woman with a penis, the “Russian troll farm” meme isn’t actually believed by anyone who says it. 2 + 2 = 5 because the regime said so, and that’s it. These brainwashed citizens don’t care or even think about what is true. They just wait for the next regime announcement for who should be hated next.
I had a particularly fascinating conversation with a young British liberal on Facebook about Azerbaijan’s sudden assault on the Armenians in Artsakh. I told him that since he feels so strongly about Russia’s “brutal and unprovoked aggression against Ukraine,” he should condemn Azerbaijan with the same enthusiasm. But he flatly refused to give a concrete opinion for or against Azerbaijan. I was actually surprised at the time, he wouldn’t condemn Azerbaijan, but didn’t praise them either. Only later after some thought I understood why. Simply, even after I provided news articles, he wouldn’t give an opinion because the BBC hadn’t told him what to think yet. But who can blame him? You’re supposed to wait until the regime establishes who the good guys are in that particular situation at that particular time, and who the bad guys are. “Doing your own research” is bad and you’re probably a nazi.
Sometimes, that regime announcement doesn’t come at all. After the Crocus City Hall attack, I was floored by how quiet western social media was. The incident was reported in news outlets, but in a muted way. The “normies” didn’t adapt a strong stance one way or the other, because they hadn’t been told to. That should be scary to anyone just to contemplate that the large majority of people in western countries are so well trained to not react to a news story until the regime rings the bell, literally like Pavlov’s dogs.
Ian Kummer
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This is your best post here in a long time, and if this is your only comment its because there is a lot to digest and thing about.
Keep in mind that in this post you described a totalitarian control system, aimed at what Orwell labeled as “inner party” members, run by insane people. I don’t think this came out of nowhere, but was constructed as one of many totalitarian control systems.
In the twenty first century, the West/ advanced world/ garden developed into a totalitarian society, but the ideology was that this was a liberal, more individualistic society on the lines of more earlier times. So the normal dictatorship stuff like the Maoist cultural revolution techniques were there, but features of the earlier liberal society were kept. All this was pushed to absurd levels with the COVID lockdowns and hygiene theater and vax passports, and then just memory holed.
Most political commentary since 2020 I’ve seen on the internet in English either ignore or defend this, but an American blogger under the name of “Anonymous Conservative” (https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/), after trying to produce a book about sociobiology in the first decade of the century, did encounter what was pretty much secret police and started blogging about the secret police gangstalking, not so much what prompted that. His site and commentators at least try to make sense of the post 2020 world, and I am not seeing many other attempts (your takes excepted).
Excellent article, Thank you for explaining why absurdity is the new norm.
Most of the population has embraced this nonsense as it tells them that they are unique and special in a society that restricts their individuality. They remind me of parrots that splurt out these phrases that the media has repeated to them over and over.
“Safe and effective”, “Putin is hitler”
A quick story to explain what the West has become.
About 45 years ago I met my wife in Europe. We started travelling together in Italy and after 3 months we ended up in Yugoslovia. When we were in Ljubljana one day we came across a movie theatre . It was playing Nighthawks which I had seen a couple of years earlier , but my one day wife had not seen.
I purchased 2 tickets and was told that it was assigned seating. When we entered the theatre their was no more than 6 people in it. It could easlily hold 300-400.
I picked seats at the back and we sat down. Twenty minutes later an usher asked told us we were in the wrong seats. I told him the theatre is empty, i see no harm in what we are doing.
He returned in 5 minutes with 3 security guards who threatened us if we wouldn’t move. My wife who is a very gentle soul touched my arm and said let’s just move as my fists were ready.
we moved and watched the movie.
Two weeks ago my wife told me she wanted to see Dune2 on a large screen even though we have it on our TV at home . We hadn’t been to a movie theatre in at least 10 years. As we went to purchase the seats the cashier informed me it was assigned seating.I was taken aback a bit and proceded inside where we found a half empty theatre . I did what I had done 45 years ago and found 2 seats at the back.The usher came up to me and told us we were in the wrong seats. I told him I was aware of this and asked him if he was vaccinated, he was stunned and said “What has that got to do with you being in the wrong seats.:I repied “EVERYTHING” If someone buys these seats I will move. until then I am sitting here. He did not return.
I said to my wife you know it’s time to leave Canada.