Impossible to Commit Thought Crime

By Andrew Brons. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” So boasted Syme, the ultra-orthodox party member who had been assigned to effect changes in the dictionary, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

People are well aware of headline political correctness that seeks to substitute absurd euphemisms for original words that were as unambiguous as they were, perhaps, a little insensitive.

Of much greater significance (and infinitely more insidious) than the value-laden words of political correctness is the assumption-laden language that is used uniformly by members of the political class and its associates among the chattering classes. It has replaced, and consigned to oblivion, language that would permit other assumptions or facilitate the arrival at other conclusions.

The term, multi-racial society has disappeared from political debate and has been replaced by the term multi-cultural society. Indeed, the host population of this country – the indigenous population – has been programmed to refer to people of other races as people of other cultures.

Whilst race connotes indelible characteristics that are transmitted with little change to future generations, culture suggests a transient covering that can be acquired by the country in which one has been born or brought up, gained from one’s immediate associates or learnt from educational experience or perhaps the professional entertainment industry.

A change in the country of birth (in the case of second or third generation immigrants) will, it is assumed, produce a fundamental change in the people. The sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of African and Asian immigrants become black or brown Britons, who are simply of African or Asian origin.

Even to pose the hypothesis that Africans remain Africans or Asians remain Asians, however long they might have been here, becomes not so much heretical, as impossible to say and difficult to think.

It is by such means that the insiders among the political class control those that are its mere functionaries.

Any debate on the problem of crime becomes, by a sort of verbal prestidigitation, a debate about the causes of crime. By causes of crime, the participants in any debate, are constrained to remember, are meant causes that are external to the person committing it.

These causes might be identified as features of the society that the perpetrator inhabits: inequality of income or wealth; unemployment; or aspects of the criminal’s early childhood.

To articulate the hypothesis that some individuals might be born with psychopathic personalities that predispose them to crime, becomes impossible within the terms of the debate.

In education, the debate is not simply about ensuring that each individual achieves his own potential. It has become a debate about the causes of failure, of whole sections of the population to achieve the same or a minimum potential.

Educational institutions are given targets for retention and achievement of their pupils and students, as though whether or not a particular individual remained on a course or achieved a specified standard were a simple function of what the institution did or did not do to or for that person.

All pupils and students are considered to have the same potential to reach a minimum standard and institutions are judged by whether or not they ensure the success of their charges. Pupils and students are described as not being yet ready for a particular educational level, when they are inherently incapable of ever reaching it.

People cannot be judged to be failures on account of their ability or rather lack of it. They are designated as ‘under-achievers’, which can be considerably more demoralising than being identified as insufficiently able.

Whilst much of this nonsense was conceived by the political left and accepted tamely by the so-called political right, the setting of educational targets was spawned by the Thatcher administration with its league tables of results.

How has this happened? The acceptance by the general population has been ensured by the repetition of absurd falsities and debates between two sides of the same coin.

This is sometimes dressed up as occupational ‘diversity training’, in the public sector. However, apparatchiks of the state and communications apparatus have been softened up with a diet of sociology with everything. Whatever academic meal might be chosen by or for students of the system, they can be sure that sociology in some form will be its staple ingredient or compulsory condiment.

The subject is predicated on social influences and on the falsity that individuals are the product of those influences. Heredity, when it is mentioned at all, is dismissed as insignificant.

Students of the subject are taught to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and accept the doctored data of luminaries such as the ‘Social Anthropologists’, Margaret Mead.

Margaret Mead was recently quoted with approval by the first and current High Representative of the European Union, who reported Mead to have said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has”. I could not have expressed it more clearly myself.