Thought Control

In a column on his Substack page, Mike Mitchell argues that the current transgender obsession is a vehicle being used by the left to gain social control by controlling how we think. His whole column is worth reading but the crux of his argument draws a parallel with George Orwell's classic novel 1984.

Mitchell writes:

To demand that I refer to someone as a male who is self-evidently female is to demand that I deny my most fundamental capacity of perception and cognition. This is quite literally mind control—and all the more so when the willingness to use “preferred pronouns” is posed as a test of one’s moral character.

[It] brings to mind a passage toward the end of 1984 after Winston has been imprisoned and tortured for thoughtcrime and is trying to re-educate himself:

He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought…

He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered...How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it...Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense.

There's much else in his essay worth taking the time to read, but here's one other important point:

Language is the most basic way of expressing rational thought, and the very nature of language requires that people acknowledge shared, fixed definitions. When I say the word “house” I am not referring to something that has four wheels and a transmission.

And when I, and the entire mass of English-speaking people throughout history, say the word “woman” I am not talking about a human being who was born with male anatomy.

If I can choose my own unique definition of “house” or “woman” then these words are useless as words. I cannot use them to communicate with other people.

In this case I would be isolated to a world that exists only in my own mind, a world where my understanding of reality is purely a projection of my own imagination.

Among those for whom English functions as a common language, the word for this state of mind is “delusional.”

To make another literary reference, we're like the crowd in Hans Christian Anderson's famous tale watching the emperor strut by stark naked. Our senses tell us he wears no clothes, his senses tell him he's wearing no clothes, but all of us are expected to speak and act as if he's wearing the finest robes in the kingdom.

Peer pressure and intimidation produce in us a wish to conform to what we can plainly see is false.

As Mitchell asserts, this is the dictionary definition of "delusional."