The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

by Ryszard Legutko

I have found from many observations that our liberals are incapable of allowing anyone to have his own convictions and immediately answer their opponent with abuse or something worse. FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE IDIOT

Liberal democracy is a set of rules designed to ensure that government rests on the consent of the governed. Except within the broadest limits, it does not inherently dictate what policies should emerge from government or what social arrangements should be tolerated or prohibited. It is open to a wide range of policy outcomes and willing to accept a genuine diversity of social arrangements, including traditional ones. Here the people rule both as voters and as citizens making free choices. Liberal-democracy, however, has policies and prohibitions built into its ideological structure. It is not really open to institutions and policies that run counter to its “liberationist” instincts. It increasingly restricts their freedom to maneuver on anything from parental rights to national sovereignty. It is even hostile to some fundamental values of liberalism such as free speech. Accordingly it sometimes comes up against the wishes of the voters expressed in elections and referenda.

At the beginning of the Nineties I discovered something that was not particularly difficult to discover at the time: namely, that the nascent liberal democracy significantly narrowed the area of what was permissible. Incredible as it may seem, the final year of the decline of communism had more of the spirit of freedom than the period after the establishment of the new order, which immediately put a stop to something that many felt strongly at that time and that, despite its elusiveness, is known to everybody who has an experience of freedom—a sense of having many doors open and many possibilities to pursue. Soon this sense evaporated, subdued by the new rhetoric of necessity that the liberal-democratic system brought with itself. It did not take me long to make another, more depressing discovery: that this unifying tendency was not limited to the postcommunist world, and did not result from its peculiarities. Its adverse effects one could see throughout western civilization.

If the European Parliament is supposed to be the emanation of the spirit of today’s liberal democracy, then this spirit is certainly neither good nor beautiful: it has many bad and ugly features, some of which, unfortunately, it shares with the spirit of communism. Even a preliminary contact with the EU institutions allows one to feel a stifling atmosphere typical of a political monopoly, to see the destruction of language turning into a new form of Newspeak, to observe the creation of a surreality, mostly ideological, that obfuscates the real world, to witness an uncompromising hostility against all dissidents, and to perceive many other things only too familiar to anyone who remembers the world governed by the Communist Party.

Whatever fundamental differences exist between the two systems, it is perfectly legitimate to ask why there are also some similarities, and why they are so profound and becoming more so. One cannot dismiss them with an argument that because the liberal-democratic system as such is clearly superior to communism, the existing similarities are absolved or explained away by the mere fact of this superiority. Because the liberal democrats are so fond of warning against all sorts of dangers that might undermine their political order, even if these are only suspected and felt rather than actually perceived (xenophobia, nationalism, intolerance, bigotry), one wonders why these same people completely ignore dangers that are easy to spot, namely, the increasing presence of developments similar to those that existed in the communist societies. Why do so few sound the alarm, even a bit prematurely, while trumpeting thousands of other dangers that are indiscernible even to the most trained eye?

The creators of modernity—Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Bacon—saw themselves as pioneers of the new who boldly turned their backs on the past. Toward that past they felt, on the one hand, contempt of the kind one feels toward something both foolish and harmful, and on the other hand, sympathy mixed with the condescension one may feel toward something that had once, perhaps, some nobility and charm, but which disappeared, never to return. Even if some of the modernizers took advantage of the old—and many did—they, like Descartes, did so without admitting it, and did all they could to obliterate any traces of inspiration. Modernitas thus inevitably involves conscious detachment, passing over the border, crossing the Rubicon, severing the umbilical cord, growing up and leaving adolescence behind, and doing other similar things denoted by dozens of other more or less platitudinous metaphors.

When we look at communism and liberal democracy from this point of view, we can see that they are both fuelled by the idea of modernization. In both systems a cult of technology translates itself into acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society, changing human behavior, and solving existing social problems. This engineering may have a different scope and dynamics in each case, but the society and the world at large are regarded as undergoing a continuous process of construction and reconstruction. In one system this meant reversing the current of Siberia’s rivers, in the other, a formation of alternative family models; invariably, however, it was the constant improvement of nature, which turns out to be barely a substrate to be molded into a desired form. Although today’s ideology of environmentalism fashioned idolatrous reverence for the earth and its fauna and flora, it did not change the enthusiasm for treating human nature and society in a dangerously technological manner.

The favorite expressions of condemnation always point to the old: “superstition,” “medieval,” “backward,” and “anachronistic”; the favorite adulatory term is, of course, “modern.” It goes without saying that everything—in both communism and liberal democracy—should be modern: thinking, family, school, literature, and philosophy. If a thing, a quality, an attitude, an idea is not modern, it should be modernized or will end up in the dustbin of history (an unforgettable expression having as much relevance for the communist ideology as for the liberal-democratic).

In a famous essay, Immanuel Kant wrote about the advent of the era of “perpetual peace” among the republics. What is interesting, however, is that, according to Kant, this blessed era could and actually should be preceded by a phase of enlightened absolutism. Authors such as Spinoza, who wrote favorably about democracy, made their praise conditional on people’s first meeting high intellectual and moral requirements. They believed—and it was a fairly widespread view at the time—that tyranny, despotism, and other anachronistic regimes hindered the development of human capacity, stopping it at the early stages of dependency and helplessness. Following the removal of such regimes, work was to begin—partly resulting from spontaneous internal desire for self-improvement of the mind and partly imposed by the enlightened rulers—that in the end would generate an improved society composed of better and more rational individuals.

Of course, few people talk of the laws of history today, mainly because this quasi-scientific language lost its appeal in an age when the concept of science changed. Nevertheless, both the communists and liberal democrats have always upheld and continue to uphold the view that history is on their side. Whoever thought that the collapse of the Soviet system should have done away with the belief in the inevitability of socialism was disappointed. This belief is as strong as ever and the past practices of socialism—whether Soviet or Western—are well-appreciated, not because they were beneficial in themselves, but because they are still believed to have represented the correct direction of social change. One can observe a similar mindset among the liberal democrats, who are also deeply convinced that they represent both the inherent dynamics of social development and a natural tendency in human aspirations.

Both speak fondly of “the people” and large social movements, while at the same time—like the Enlightenment philosophers—have no qualms in ruthlessly breaking social spontaneity in order to accelerate social reconstruction.

Once one sends one’s opponents to the dustbin of history, any debate with them becomes superfluous. Why waste time, they think, arguing with someone whom the march of history condemned to nothingness and oblivion? Why should anyone seriously enter into a debate with the opponent who represents what is historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish? People who are not liberal democrats are to be condemned, laughed at, and repelled, not debated. Debating with them is like debating with alchemists or geocentrists.

As a result, liberal democracy has become an all-permeating system. There is no, or in any case, cannot be, any segment of reality that would be arguably and acceptably non-liberal democratic. Whatever happens in school must follow the same pattern as in politics, in politics the same pattern as in art, and in art the same pattern as in the economy: the same problems, the same mechanisms, the same type of thinking, the same language, the same habits. Just as in real socialism, so in real democracy it is difficult to find some nondoctrinal slice of the world, a nondoctrinal image, narrative, tone, or thought.

Forty years ago, at the time when the period of liberal-democratic monopoly was fast approaching, Daniel Bell, one of the popular social writers, set forth the thesis that a modern society is characterized by the disjunction of three realms: social, economic, and political. They develop—so he claimed—at different rates, have different dynamics and purposes, and are subject to different mechanisms and influences. This image of structural diversity that Bell saw coming was attractive, or rather would have been attractive if true. But the opposite happened. No disjunction occurred. Rather, everything came to be joined under the liberal-democratic formula: the economy, politics and society, and—as it turns out—culture.

It seems that the idolatry of liberal democracy, which nowadays we observe among the same groups that so easily succumbed to a totalitarian temptation—their angry rejection of even the slightest criticism, their inadvertent acceptance of the obvious maladies of the system, their silencing of dissenters, their absolute support for the monopoly of one ideology and one political system—are part of the same disease to which, apparently, intellectuals and artists are particularly susceptible. It thus seems that the mental enslavement described by Miłosz was not a single occurrence occasioned by a short-lived infatuation with communism, but an inherent handicap of the modern mind.

Moving with the flow—the socialist and liberal-democratic—gives an intellectual more power, or at least an illusion of it. He feels like a part of a powerful global machine of transformation. He not only understands the process of change better than others and knows how to organize the world, but also—by looking at the surrounding reality—can easily diagnose which phenomena, communities, and institutions will disappear and, when resisting, will have to be eliminated for the sake of the future. Therefore he reacts with indignant pity toward anyone who wants to stop the unstoppable. He indulges in a favorite occupation of the youngster: to criticize what is in the name of what will be, but what a large part of humanity, less perceptive and less intelligent than himself, fails to see.

This youngster, however, fails to notice that at some point this system, or rather the arrangement of systems covering many variants, became haughty, dogmatic, and dedicated not so much to facilitating the resolution of political conflicts as to transforming society and human nature. It lost its prior restraint and caution, created powerful tools to influence every aspect of life, and set in motion institutions and laws, frequently yielding to the temptation to conduct ideological warfare against disobedient citizens and groups. Falling into a trap of increasing self-glorification, the system began to define itself more and more against its supposed opposition, i.e., all sorts of nonliberal and nondemocratic enemies whose elimination was considered a necessary condition to achieve the next level of ideological purity. The multiparty system was gradually losing its pluralistic character, parliamentarianism was becoming a vehicle of tyranny in the hands of ideologically constituted majority, and the rule of law was changing into judicial arbitrariness.

The antidote to commerce was—as evidenced by Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga—art as a pure, disinterested expression of imagination in pursuit of the beautiful and the sublime. But over time it became clear that commerce and capitalism had been blamed somewhat hastily, and that the causes lay deeper. More perceptive thinkers soon realized that the very success of technology, productivity, and industry, that great achievement of the genius of modern man, was conducive, as José Ortega y Gasset persuasively argued, to the sterility of imagination and the triumph of self-satisfied pettiness. There was and still is something paradoxical in the fact that the historically unprecedented explosion of technology and industry, which brought wealth and security to millions of people and which would not have been possible without a high degree of creativity, was a major factor in reducing people’s aspirations and, astonishingly, giving mediocrity a touch of respectability.

The idea of human beings having inalienable rights is counterintuitive and extremely difficult to justify. It may make some philosophical sense if derived from a strong theory of human nature such as one finds in classical metaphysics. However, when we accept a weak theory, attributing to human beings only elementary qualities, and deliberately disregarding strong metaphysical assumptions, then the idea of rights loses its plausibility. It may, of course, be sanctioned as a mere product of legislation through a Parliamentary or court ruling, which entitles people to make various claims called “rights,” but these claims will be no more than arbitrary decisions by particular groups of politicians or judges who choose to do this rather than that due to circumstances, ideology, or individual predilections or under pressure from interest groups. It would indeed be silly to call such claims “inalienable,” because inalienability by definition cannot be legislated.

This concept created an illusion of a strong view of human nature, and of endowing this nature with qualities nowhere explicitly specified but implying something noble, being an immortal soul, an innate desire for good, etc. But on the other hand, in using this concept, unaccompanied by other qualifications, the framers of the human rights documents apparently felt exempted from any need to present an explicit and serious philosophical interpretation of human nature and to explain the grounds and the conditions on which one could conceive of its dignity. This operation—or more precisely, sleight of hand, and not very fair to boot—led to a sudden revival of the concept of human dignity, but with a radically different meaning.

The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born without any moral achievement or effort.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities.

Weber’s analyses give us a good insight into why and how modern thinking justified the lowering of aspirations. A minimalistic view of human nature, initially apparent first and foremost in Protestantism but later on expanding to other areas of the Western world, had a specific nature. The basic cause of the change was purely religious: a new doctrine of predestination as well as a fundamental weight attributed to the original sin precluded any form of moral and spiritual perfectibility. Big plans for man were no longer feasible. But at the same time, the low level to which human aspirations were reduced acquired a noble, sometimes even heroic trait, which—let us add—completely disappeared together with the liberalization of the Protestant doctrine.

Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competitions, aspiring to honors-making careers, and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds slowly get used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one, and are lured by its attractions. The difference between Pascal’s divertissement and today’s entertainment—or, rather, having fun, as it has become customary to say—is that the modern man, no matter how much a desire to have fun has captured his soul, knows very well that it is an artificial construction, not the real thing.

It is interesting that both the conservatives defending the classic view of human nature and some of the socialists of the Frankfurt School, while having fundamental disagreements, described this new phenomenon in similar terms, and were equally alarmed by the extent to which the human mind was degraded and enslaved by what was claimed to be an extremely pleasant, unproblematic, but somehow superior form of freedom. Both groups feared that the hegemony and omnipresence of entertainment might effectively dilute a sense of the seriousness of existence as well as the type of mindset that gives this seriousness a proper role in thought and action.

It is therefore more than natural that both systems identified existing structures with human ideals. Communism was social justice, and social justice was communism. This marriage between the system and the ideal gave birth to a peculiar type of mentality, inadvertently prone to political moralizing. Living in such a system one could not simply describe facts or express one’s political persuasion because everything had to be entangled in the phraseology referring to the good of humanity, the liberation of peoples, the wickedness of imperialism, the blessings of a classless society, and the happiness of life under socialism.

Liberal democracy boasts of bestowing freedom on individuals and emancipation on groups, while simultaneously taking it for granted that freedom and emancipation are possible only in a liberal democracy, or rather, that freedom and emancipation are liberal democracy. Over time, the mind of a liberal democrat began to resemble that of a socialist, exhibiting the same tendency to combine the languages of morality and politics, as no other discourse could possibly do justice to the nature of the system. There are no topics, no matter how trivial, that the liberal democrat could raise or discuss without mentioning freedom, discrimination, equality, human rights, emancipation, authoritarianism, and other related notions. No other language is used or even accepted.

Liberal democrats circumvent this objection in such a way that they attribute the term “liberal” to everything they think succeeded in making a breakthrough in the walls of oppression and authority. This allows them to accept that Socrates was a “liberal” compared to Plato; the Sophists were liberals compared to Socrates; Ockham compared to St. Thomas; Erasmus compared to Luther; Luther compared to Calvin, and so on. In this somewhat bizarre view, liberalism—whether democratic or not yet democratic—existed in Western culture from the very beginning but only in the modern day did it gain momentum and finally triumph in recent times.

Even the most liberal of liberals displayed extraordinary softness against the Soviet Union and the Soviet communism and sometimes even actively supported the idea of unilateral disarmament of the West, as did libertarians—all in the name of freedom. Liberals also showed weakness against terrorism and the left-wing dictatorships in the Third World, but many of them reacted with noticeable self-restraint when it came to the anticommunist activities of groups in the Soviet bloc countries. Their freedom-related account is therefore not overly clean.

Initially, liberalism, especially in some economic versions, seemed anti-utopian because it precluded any perfect and ultimate form of economic order. Free-market economy was even called “the dismal science” to emphasize the gloomy aspect of its consequences. But there were also highly optimistic versions according to which the free market was a miraculous instrument to eliminate war and bring about the global brotherhood of humanity in a future era of commerce. Commerce, it will be recalled, was seen as the trademark of the new civilization of peace, wealth, and stability.

The ancient philosophers’ primary question was what makes the best regime. Democracy certainly did not qualify. Why not? The answer was simple. They thought democracy was a messy system, systematically undermining the rule of law, profoundly partisan, often hostile to the most prominent leaders and citizens. The famous defense of democratic Athens delivered by Pericles in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is in fact more a defense of Athens and Athenian imperialism than of the democratic political model. When Plato and Aristotle wrote their scathing remarks about the Athenian system, they thought it was already in decline and Athens might soon become a victim of the crisis from which it would not be able to recover. And this is exactly what happened.

When we take a look at each conclusion separately in the above reasoning, we can easily see that they in fact constitute a series of unsubstantiated claims. The sequence of the steps is as follows: 1. all systems other than democracy are worse than democracy; 2. democracy is the best political system; 3. democracy must not be criticized because such criticism may undermine something for which there is no better alternative; 4. only democracy is acceptable, and therefore all changes and adjustments in democracy can be performed by democratic means; 5. the remedy for the weaknesses of democracy is more democracy. Each subsequent step was made by adding more content to the previous one, which resulted in a gradual departure from the initial statement, which created—finally—a huge chasm between propositions (i) and (v).

Let us note that a similar rhetoric was used in communism. When faced with the notoriously recurring symptoms of the decay of the system, communist rulers and propagandists euphemistically called them “distortions,” always saying that these resulted from the deviation from socialism and that more genuine socialism was needed to set things right. No empirical experience could support this claim—in fact the opposite seemed truer and truer every day—but evidence usually has little value against a strong political faith. Both claims—that the cure for the problems of socialism is more socialism and that the cure for the deficiencies of democracy is more democracy—should be therefore treated not as propositions, but as manifestations of political piety and, to be more terse, of political sanctimoniousness.

The opposite is true: egalitarianism does not tolerate aristocratic and monarchical tendencies, not only in the political structures of the state (which might be understandable), but in any other area of public life. And yet liberal democracy, being the single most homogenizing force in the modern world, creates the illusion that it alone stands for social differentiation. A liberal-democratic man surrenders to the illusion: he believes—quite wrongly—that he has managed to make his inner self more and more intrinsically diversified and therefore while imprinting his ideas on the world around him, he cherishes a reassuring conviction that through him the world also becomes more diversified. But since in fact he himself dramatically loses his sensitivity to diversity, he is utterly unable to see how by his influence the world around him slowly submerges in an ever more stifling uniformity.

It can be considered a paradox that a liberal-democratic man expects more and more from the state that he values less and less. And yet, surprisingly, despite this somewhat cynical view of today’s politics and political institutions, the faith in the absolute superiority of liberal democracy remains unshaken. The coalescing of liberal and democratic institutions that we observe today, which contributes to the notion that liberal democracy has no alternative, is nowhere seen more clearly than in the European Union. The current EU doctrine explicitly states that it is the ultimate system, a culminating emanation of “European values,” a final stage of the history of the European peoples, worthy of absolute protection and praise. The countries that break loose of the process or the politicians who express reservations—no matter how timidly—are immediately subject to disproportionately harsh criticism.

What we have been observing over the last decades is an emergence of a kind of liberal-democratic general will. Whether the meaning of the term itself is identical with that used by Rousseau is of negligible significance. The fact is that we have been more and more exposed to an overwhelming liberal-democratic omnipresence, which seems independent of the will of individuals, to which they humbly submit, and which they perceive as compatible with their innermost feelings. This will permeates public and private lives, emanates from the media, advertising, films, theatre and visual arts, expresses itself through common wisdom and persistently brazen stereotypes, through educational curricula from kindergartens to universities, and through works of art.

Legislatures that are free, independent, and accountable only to the voters make laws in accordance with its requirements, and the judges, even more free, more independent, and accountable to no one, issue adjudications as its most faithful servants. The liberal-democratic general will reaches the area that Rousseau never dreamt of—language, gestures, and thoughts. Through people’s actions and minds this will ruthlessly imposes liberal-democratic patterns on everything and everyone, including those who should firmly stand for alternative proposals.

All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of these concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same clichés, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not the authors but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves.

If abortion means freedom, then we should raise the consciousness of those who think differently; force doctors to support this freedom and silence priests so they do not interfere with it. If same-sex marriage means freedom, we should then compel its opponents to accept it and silence fools who may have doubts about it. If political correctness is a necessity of life in the liberal-democratic society, then imposing it is, after all, nothing else but a measure of its emancipation for all. The groups that managed to capture this liberal phraseology and the logic that underlies it—such as homosexuals and feminists—have exerted a disproportionate influence on the government to the extent that the state institutions, including the courts, have taken upon themselves the task of breaking the resistance of less conscious and more stubborn groups—that is, of coercing them to freedom.

The universities are undergoing the same process, which is most unfortunate because they were regarded for centuries as free industries of the human mind. Today, any such belief is clearly in discord with reality. The entire education process has been systematically standardized to make it as close as possible to the liberal-democratic model, in which group rights are carefully watched, detailed verification and appeal procedures have been established, and the principle of equality is increasingly more influential in academic community relations.

Let us note here the disappearance of the academic eccentric, a well-known personality, for centuries almost inseparably associated with the academic tradition and its peculiar atmosphere of the freedom of inquiry and inimitable relations between teachers and students. It is not only the ominous presence of political correctness that makes the life of a dissident unbearable. The functioning of the university itself has become so heavily controlled by procedures, rules, and regulations that all deviations from the routine are strictly controlled. If the legendary professors of old, whose unconventional behavior persists in real or imaginary stories to this very day, suddenly, by some miracle, managed to find themselves at today’s universities, they would soon be coerced to submission or disposed of as unruly troublemakers.

European institutions are supposed to represent European society, which, theoretically, seems quite understandable. The problem is that the EU institutions exist, whereas European society does not. Such a society will—we are told—come into existence some time in the future, but this belief is a part of the EU creed, for which evidence is, to say the least, shaky. But once we accept the basic premise that the existing institutions may act for, and in the name of, the society that is believed to emerge in the future, we give them extraordinary powers far exceeding those that are granted within the framework of an ordinary society.

A popular EU maxim that is striking in its stupidity but repeated as a sign of great wisdom is that integration is like riding a bicycle: you have to keep going, otherwise you will fall. It thus assumes that two groups exist in the EU: one that knows the final goal and that it is imperative for the whole process to be carried out, and one that is not cognizant of the final goal, does not understand it, and rejects it to the detriment of itself and others. This second group represents resistance and this resistance must be overcome for the sake of the whole, something the group will thoroughly understand over time when it gets over its own peculiarity and comprehends the full benefits of integration.

The European Union has become the guardian of all diseases of the supranational liberal democracy while itself being the most vivid illustration of these diseases. It has led its institutions, actions, and human minds to such a level of dogmatization that any future remedial movements aimed at restoring freedom and reason will have conflicted with it to a higher or lesser degree, in the course of which the EU itself will increasingly sentence itself to play the role of the ancien régime. It is hard to imagine that while producing so much regulatory power, the EU would suddenly dismantle it and come to the conclusion that integrational abstinence would better serve peace and cooperation than the coercion to freedom. The emergence of such beliefs in the EU spheres would encourage a European perestroika—something that the European Union might not survive.

Liberalism is primarily a doctrine of power, both self-regarding and other-regarding: it aims to limit the power of other agents, and at the same time grants enormous prerogatives for itself. In a sense it is a super-theory of society, logically prior to and—by its own declaration of self-importance—higher than any other. It attributes to itself the right to be more general, more spacious, and more universal than any of its rivals. Its goal is—as the liberals say—to create a general framework within which others will be able to cooperate. The liberals will never voluntarily give up this admittedly highest of political prerogatives to anyone and will never agree to share it.

Although such words as “dialogue” and “pluralism” appear among its favorite motifs, as do “tolerance” and other similarly hospitable notions, this overtly generous rhetorical orchestration covers up something entirely different. In its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity.

It is correct so far as it actually points to today’s persistent tendency to turn social groups into something like political parties, which, once they become parties, lose their communal character. Women, homosexuals, Muslims, ethnic groups are being perceived as and transformed into quasi-parties, organized from above by the political or ideological leadership and not possessing other characteristics than those resulting from the struggle for power against other groups and no other identity than that provided by this leadership, allowing no ideological dissent. Whoever is not a member of this quasi-party, even though for some reason—be it sex, birth, or color—he should be included, but stays outside its boundaries or sometimes even opposes it, is the enemy, a sellout, and a traitor.

Obviously, communities are not parties, and a society cannot be divided, like a democratically elected parliament, into parties playing political games and vying for power. The word “multiculturalism,” still used today despite numerous criticisms and ridicule, represents yet another hoax that liberal democracy created and that turned out to be surprisingly effective. Both parts of the word misrepresent reality. Multiculturalism is not about culture, but about politics.

Never before in human history did we see a similar phenomenon when millions of people, indistinguishable from each other, using the same patterns of thinking, politically homogeneous and oblivious to any other way of viewing the political world except according to the orthodox liberal-democratic version, are not only convinced of their own individual and group differences and proclaim the unchallenged superiority of pluralism, but also want to enforce the same simplistic and tediously predictable orthodoxy on the entire world as the ultimate embodiment of the idea of multiplicity.

Because the logic of this system turns on “dialogue,” “respect,” “equal rights,” “openness,” and “tolerance,” everything is by definition political, and nothing that relates, however remotely, to these notions is trivial, minor, or irrelevant. A slight offensive remark must always be always regarded as a manifestation of mortal sin. What seems a barely visible mark on the surface conceals underneath swirling currents of hatred, intolerance, racism, and hegemony. The body responsible for ensuring that these terrible things do not surface is the state, with all the instruments at its disposal.