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.

On Tribe and Discourse

On Tribe and Discourse Earlier blog entries in this space (Culture is Geologic [gone - eaten by former blog host], Tribalization and the Global Economy and Relativism [below], Populism and Power [also eaten]) expressed the view that industrialism, by disrupting awareness of a direct relation to nature, dislodged the web of discourse that integrated tribe and ecosystem and replaced the integrating mythos with a place holder that Lacan referred to as the Name-of-the-Father.  This place holder can now be filled, the sentiments of "tribe" artificially but all the more zealously aroused, by any number of banners.  One's sense of personal identity is wrapped up in some kind of tribal membership. I say all the more zealously because in a globalized economy, tribal connections, especially among urban or modern people, are likely to be reaction formations to some degree.  Believers of myths today believe them literally and historically, rather than heuristically or metaphorically; fans idolize teams and do battle over loyalties; patriots die for nations that never supported them; gangs fight over territories; people are relieved to be identified as belonging to a market segment.  Reaction formation is characterized by overly intense beliefs; overly intense to sustain the lie to oneself.   A little reflection and anyone can see that intense tribal loyalties are artificial yet deadly in a global economy.  The organic integrity of pre-literate tribes has long decayed, as we can see directly in the aboriginal peoples of the world whose ways have been sideswiped by globalization.  Today, the tribe as a social-psychological form is decadent.  A true way of renewal needs to be found.  Tribalization and the Global Economy Historically, tribe is a set of economic relationships between people that direct their relation to local nature; i.e., a socio-economic system.  An attendant mythology embedded in linguistic structures models the world for members of the tribe. The mythology institutionalizes kinship relations, the rites and rules of reproduction and life events in patriarchal terms.  Tribe is circumscribed by a set of proprieties and shameful transgressions (especially reproductive) that literally define its membership and its members’ sense of identity. What happens to tribe in the global economy?  In a global economy, the tribe resides in an alienated nostalgia.  There is an empty place-holder for what should be a meaningful socially-integrating force (that makes us feel at home in the world and explains our connection to nature in mythological terms), but the place-holder embodies the same amount of energy and urgency as any locally based socio-economic system.  In an unrooted global economic system, any banner can galvanize a group in the time it takes to score a goal , shout “death to infidels” or prefer one popular music genre over another.  Why? Psychologist Jacques Lacan had the brilliance to realize three things:  One, that the sense of personal identity one has is necessary for basic sanity; Two, that this sense of identity does not self-subsist in individuals but is a product of one’s linguistic place in the patriarchal-tribal system of meanings; and Three, it is necessary for there to be an integrating but intrinsically undefinable locus of navigation to this system of meanings, which he facetiously but accurately called “the name of the father.”  So the answer to the question as to why tribe can galvanize with such astounding force is that a linguistic community is deeply necessary for sanity.  There are obvious exceptions, but unfortunately until Lacan is wrong, and Carol Gilligan is right …  2016-06-08 Note: Name of the father "as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention", not the phallus as per Freud. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2c There are probably better sources out there. I was reading Malcolm Bowie 11 years ago in 2005 if anyone's interested.