Stanford's Flying Monkeys

Proving for the umpteen millionth time that there is no such thing as "peak woke," a passel of geniuses (genii?) over at Stanford University (where $78,898 will buy you the privilege of a year’s worth of indoctrination) in the epicenter of all things leftism (aka California's Bay Area) have helpfully offered us a new list of problematic words. Problematic, that is, if you're among those who angrily twist their brains in constant efforts to root out the hidden bigotry in everything their sensoria detect. As in, 'what's more racist, whole milk, skim milk, or chocolate milk?'

Yes, I made that question up, but when I pasted it into a Google search, I was rewarded with:

Milk new symbol of hate? - Daily Forty-Niner

Is our obsession with dairy rooted in violence and racism?

Yes, everything is racist, if only you try hard enough.

Stanford's list runs twelve pages, and includes some true farce amongst the eyeballs. As in "seminal" should not be used because it reinforces male-dominated language. And, of course, my favorite - the substitution of "they" (which has for its entire existence been a plural) for "he" or "she." The rationale - it's better to muck up the language we all speak than risk misgendering someone. The arrogant geocentrism of this (many languages are far more "gendered" than English, which makes this bit even more farcical) is lost on the arrogant solipsists who come up with this garbage.

That was my favorite until now. My new favorite is "submit." We are told that "depending on the context, the term can imply allowing others to have power over you," and that we should say or write "process" instead.

I can't decide here between "OFFS" and "LOOK IN THE MIRROR, YOU INSANE CONTROL FREAKS!!!"

‘Insane,’ by the way, is also verboten/kinjiru/zakazany/prohibito/απαγορευμένο, because it's "ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions." "Experiences," not "plight" or "suffering" or "adversity," because mental illness (can't even call it that) should apparently not be presumed to be a bad thing (moral relativism, meet reductio ad absurdum).

Once the fog of high dudgeon clears away, something else becomes clear. This is Orwell's Newspeak:

a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will.

If a word for a concept is removed from one's vocabulary, that concept becomes difficult to articulate or even conceptualize. Orwell's Oceania sought to structure a society where dissent was literally impossible, because the language with which to formulate it didn't exist. The leftist drive to sterilize our language serves a similar goal, while also conditioning us to a default state of submission and submissiveness. We aren't good enough to manage our own lives, speak for ourselves, and interact with each other absent hall monitors, proctors, curators, zookeepers, supervisors, managers, and yardstick-wielding nuns.

The inclusion of "submit" in Stanford's list could be considered a Kinsley Gaffe, an unintentional revelation of truth and hidden motive. It suggests there are two types of woke in our world: the true believers, who only manage to come up with this nonsense because they are surrounded by their own, in a cocooned and cotton-balled echo chamber; and the power-seekers who exploit the true believers' successes for their own cynical ends.

Most of us have seen The Wizard of Oz, and will remember the wicked witch's flying monkeys. Fewer know that the term "flying monkey" has been adopted by the psychology community. In Oz, the flying monkeys did the witch's dirty work. In psych terms, flying monkeys do the "dirty work" for narcissists:

Flying monkeys get caught up in a narcissist’s plan — often to damage the life of another person. The narcissist may use their flying monkeys as piggy in the middle, carrying information from party to party. The flying monkey may use gaslighting tactics, open aggression, and guilt-tripping in order to make another person feel bad and weak, whilst shoring up the narcissist. And they’re often involved in pleading the case of the narcissist. Narcissists love having at least one flying monkey, as it makes them feel important and means they can appear to be above the people below them (on both sides) who are caught up in the messy parts of the drama.

Is there a more obvious example of narcissism out there? Our Best-and-Brightest working endlessly to make the rest of us bend the knee to the increasingly ludicrous demands they make in pursuit of their vision of how society should be, all to feed their egos. Thomas Sowell told us, a quarter century ago, that progressivism is "Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy."

When we don't comply voluntarily, coercion, hard or soft, enters the picture. As someone once quipped (that I cannot find the quote is a tell-tale of the search industry's co-opting by certain cultural arbiters), woke without cancel culture is not a problem. If I meet you, and you ask me to call you by a name or refer to you by certain pronouns, I should be free to agree to do so or not. That's not the case, however. In Norway, someone who misgendered another was convicted of "hate speech." In Canada, a father got in trouble for refusing to comply with a court order to to misgender his child, who was born female but declared as transgender at age 11.

I pass no judgment on the trans individuals in these stories, though I do remain very skeptical of minors transitioning (or, more accurately, the “affirmation” industry that pushes transition rather than helping kids figure themselves out). Find your own way in life - not my place to tell you otherwise. And, if you want me to talk to you a certain way, ask and I will consider it.

This is how a free society should work.

However…

When "hate speech" became a thing, many moons ago, who among us predicted that it'd go wrong, that it'd expand beyond the N-word and similarly blatant epithets? Yes, it was the libertarians, and while misgendering is not (yet) a crime in America, there are way too many people who would flush the First Amendment down the toilet so that they can grant a few the power to punish anyone who doesn't speak as they demand. Stanford's flying monkeys may see their list as "suggestions," or something that should be voluntarily complied with by good people, but we've seen, time and again, how "suggestions" often result in punishment for those who do not go along. If not by the monkeys themselves, then by the people who see the enormous utility in leveraging, exploiting, and corrupting the social justice movement to advance their power-grabs and socialistic dreams.

As for “submit,” at first I figured they outwitted themselves. But, if the concept is removed from the language, how are we to act otherwise? If the behavior is conditioned as default without naming it, those of us who’d argue against it will have that much harder a time explaining what it is.

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Peter.