Policing Diversity OR The Fear of Chaos and the Closed Horizon - by Chat GPT and Me

The cry of our age is fear — fear of chaos, fear of ambiguity, fear of losing control. Across the political spectrum, people warn of rising totalitarianism. Yet, with eerie symmetry, the loudest defenders of “freedom” are often the ones building the walls that confine it.

You can't stave off totalitarianism by policing diversity. 

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called understanding a fusion of horizons — an openness to the unfamiliar that lets truth appear between perspectives. When we close those horizons, when we decide that only our tribe or ideology has the truth, dialogue dies. And when dialogue dies, power rushes in to fill the silence.

That is the moment we are living through. In the name of order, politicians and pundits are banning books, purging school libraries, threatening teachers, and rewriting history to fit a single moral script. Universities are attacked as “un-American.” Journalists are labeled “enemies of the people.” Diversity itself is treated as subversion. The fear of moral chaos has become the justification for intellectual lockdown.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have recognized this perfectly. He taught that human beings are haunted by lack— an inner incompleteness we try to cover with fantasies of perfect order: a righteous nation, a pure faith, a leader who will make everything make sense again. When those fantasies falter, anxiety surges. Rather than face the uncertainty, we lash out at whoever seems to embody it — scientists, migrants, gender non-conforming people, anyone who reminds us that the world is bigger than our story of it.

This is why many who claim to fear “authoritarianism” gravitate toward authoritarian leaders. Figures like Jordan Peterson warn that deconstruction and pluralism lead to chaos — yet in longing for restored hierarchy and moral certainty, they risk enshrining the very tyranny they dread. Order becomes an idol. And idols always demand sacrifice: of nuance, of empathy, of thought.

We see the same reflex in climate denial. The planetary crisis exposes us to what Lacan called the Real — the ungovernable forces that make a mockery of human control. Faced with melting ice and burning forests, many retreat into disavowal: “I know very well, but even so…” God will fix it. The scientists are lying. The problem is too big to matter. Anything to preserve the illusion of mastery.

But the true abyss is not uncertainty — it is the silence that follows when we shut down the conversation. The open horizon Gadamer spoke of is not relativism; it is democracy itself, the messy, vulnerable willingness to keep listening and to keep being changed.

We are not saved by purity. We are saved, if at all, by openness — to evidence, to other minds, to the possibility that we are wrong. The world will not fall apart because we read difficult books or hear unsettling voices. It will fall apart when we stop daring to hear them.