The phoney war on 'privilege'

That does not mean that every professed follower of the identity ideology is a true believer. Knowing that resistance to the reality of widespread re-education (AKA "diversity and inclusivity training") can be career-ending, employees will understandably avoid being bullied, shamed, oppressed, embarrassed, harassed, intimidated, or driven out as dissenters, and will submit to what has become a social Darwinian imperative. Employers face a similar dilemma. Succumb, go through the motions and your business is more likely to escape Puritanical retribution.

And then there is the money-making potential of the structural religiosity of identity ideology in the claims it makes for systemic control of the lives of all Australians. From cradle to grave, daily activity is increasingly being forced through a lens of one or more of the mind-numbing abstract ideas about approved and disapproved "identity" attributes so as to isolate and silence the dissenters. The word "dissent" has been banished from the human rights lexicon.

The ideology is suffocating what was once normal public debate. If the controversy besetting the Australian Curriculum Review Consultation is any guide, it is open to infer that today's Australian schoolchildren do not have the faintest idea of, and will be kept "safe" from accepting the historical systemic concept of, dissent in a free and open representative democracy.

Freedom of expression is not worth a cracker unless the right to dissent is at the forefront of individual liberty. Nowadays, we are being talked down to by people who will only tolerate "conversation" and then only when it is "respectful" within the rigid ideological prescriptions of identity politics.

The ideological demonizing of disfavoured ideas, groups and attributes is the latest manifestation of the age-old idea of a monopoly on the correct Utopian yearning of humankind for a perfect, right-thinking socially just society.

Not so long ago, the application of the word "privilege" to skin colour as an allegedly indefensible inherent group attribute would have been denounced for the very bad idea which history has shown it to be.

The inevitable outcome of using a racial lens as the primary means through which every aspect of human endeavour is to be analyzed and spoken about in approved language has been that no idea is too ridiculous or deplorable to embrace in the ideological quest for those very malleable abstractions, "equity", "inclusion" and "diversity" – the modern gospel of compelled conformity.

Australians are now being selectively manipulated by the huckster element of identity politics merchandising to introduce self-flagellation into their daily lives to atone for a particular original racial sin. The extent to which this authoritarianism continues to succeed is to be seen in the sheep-like willingness of some of the outcasts to engage in pitiful acts of public, collective self-abasement including acknowledging their crippling "privilege".

The fact that race/ethnicity has come to be the primary focus of the ideologues is well beyond mere postmodern irony. At the risk of dignifying the imported craze of denouncing "Whiteness", it is enough to mention in passing the uniquely preposterous claim of its leading ideologues that for a Person of "Whiteness" to deny being a racist is, itself, proof positive of that allegedly inherited and lifelong irredeemable stigma.

It is appropriate to adapt the famous aphorism of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v Ohio(1964) concerning the meaning of the shorthand description "hard-core pornography". Thus, attempting further to define the kinds of material we understand to be embraced within the shorthand description "hate speech", and perhaps we could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But we know it when we see it in the authoritarian newspeak of identity politics ideology.