“Atomization of society” is a time-tested, highly effective communist, Nazi, and fascist tactic: break up every normal, natural connection in society: the family, the church, synagogue, temple; pervert everyday language; portray “the other” as a mortal enemy; and isolate people from each other and their communities—all in order to enable totalitarian control.
Ubiquitous technology—cell phones, tablets, inexpensive computers, and gaming consoles—drives this “atomization” to an unprecedented level. Look around you: everyone’s head is buried in some electronic device. We increasingly relate to others online, in cyberspace. Our “friends” are on Facebook. Our social status is measured by the number of our “followers”. The more clicks we get, the closer we inch to the coveted status of “influencer”. We can even create our own “virtual reality”—literally see the world completely differently from what it truly is. That’s exhilarating and, often, entertaining. Except that none of this is real. It’s a mass delusion—a “hallucination”—which is the original meaning of “cyber” per Norbert Weiner’s 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine .
In the digital realm, truth itself is erased because one can discover “facts” and “evidence” to fit literally any preconceived notion, any narrative, any worldview imaginable. There is no objective truth any longer. It’s all about “your truth”. We have access to unprecedented amounts of information, yet our knowledge, understanding, and intellectual discourse are more limited and impoverished than ever. There’s no “free market of ideas” any longer, as we congregate with like-minded people, sharing mutually reinforcing opinions in closed echo-chambers.
We know deep down that none of this is good; yet we continue to “educate ourselves” at WikipediaUniversity; “visit” Dr. Google; share our most intimate thoughts with anonymous strangers on Quora; spend time in “chat rooms”—instead of learning facts and ideas from great books, seeing real physicians, and sharing experiences in real rooms, with real loyal friends. Soon, we are no longer citizens of the greatest Republic on earth. We’re unmoored, atomized “Netizens”—citizens of the Internet. The path to treason is wide open. Just ask Private Bradley/Chelsea Manning or Airman Jack Teixeira.
To disorient the “atomized” individual still further, the government controls the language. “Politicalcorrectness” takes hold. Things which were OK to say or do yesterday will get you a reprimand in the work-place today. You’ll be censored online. So, you learn to avoid articulating what you really think because you need to keep your job, you don’t want to be “cancelled”, and, most of all, you dread being labeled “a racist”, “a homophobic bigot”, or “a Christian nationalist”. You start to obfuscate and self censor. Just like they did in the USSR. To quote Orwell again, “the sinister fact about literary censorship…is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”
Soon, an entirely new language takes hold. We learn that BLACK is spelled differently when referring to color (“black”) and race (“Black”). We’re told that “chair” doesn’t only mean the furniture we sit on, but also—depending on the all-important “context”—the person directing a board or leading a committee. We discover that not only your pets can be “groomed”; so can our children.
We start saying “he or she” to be “inclusive”—but, soon, that’s not enough, and we are told to ask people about “their preferred pronouns”. We learn entirely new words, like “cisgender”, “woke”, “micro-aggression”,“triggered,” and “CAUdacity”—the reprehensible audacity of whites, a cliche coined by Kelisa Wing, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity Officer at the Department of Defense Education Agency (DODEA).
We are also taught that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” and that “you must be antiracist to pursue justice.” (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist). And, thus, we learn that, just like in Animal Farm,“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” And, therefore, “this work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”
Yet we still cringe when we hear that the United States Air Force Academy promotes a program that bans “cisgender men”. (The academy sent an email on Sept. 14, 2022 informing cadets that the 2023 application for the Brooke Owens Fellowship for “undergraduate women and gender minorities interested in aerospace”. It clarified that: “If you are a cisgender woman, a transgender woman, non-binary, agender, bigender, two-spirit, demigender, genderfluid, genderqueer, or another form of gender minority, this program is for you.” If you’re a “cisgender man, this program isn’t for you.”)
We recoil because we know that the appeal to self is corrosive to unit cohesion. We also know that promoting individual identity and self-actualization—focusing on what is different among us—fostersdivision. And yet we are repeatedly told that it’s precisely such “diversity”—not of thought, but of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation—that makes our Nation prosperous and our military strong.
We try to reconcile this with our motto “E pluribus unum”—out of many, one—which we see daily, written in capital letters, on every coin and bill in our wallets, on our passports, and in every federal building. But, no matter how hard we try, we can’t reconcile the irreconcilable. That inevitably leads to cognitive dissonance, which is disorienting, disconcerting, and further “atomizing”.
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