The New Age of Uniformity
23rd January 2023
We live in a new age of enforced uniformity, prosecuted in the name of preserving “our democracy” and keeping “disinformation” and “far right lies” at bay. The Harvard intellectual historian James Hankins has aptly spoken of an “information oligarchy” that is committed to maintaining and enforcing its monopoly on the truth. In this surreal world of “democratic” uniformity, certain “truths” are beyond challenge or question. To challenge them with evidence, logic, and a more faithful regard for the truth is to risk being dismissed as an extremist or conspiracy theorist. The independent-minded, those who refuse to bow before what George Orwell so memorably called “smelly little orthodoxies,” are candidates to be cancelled and confined to the category of those beyond the pale. The Left has a preferred name for this: those who resist the pressure of intellectual conformity, of stifling political correctness, are “enemies of democracy.”