Rest In Peace, Milan.
One thing I learned from the COVID lockdowns - we’re surrounded by millions of humorless scolds.
Brilliant. I hope everyone understands that Mark Steyn has no education beyond high school. Which means he learned how to learn in high school - which just happened to be the same school that JRR Tolkein also attended.
Kundera described cancel culture decades before it has manifested itself worldwide.
Thanks for posting this. I forgot what a prolific writer he was. Time for some re-reading of:
The Joke
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Immortality
...to name just a few! :)
And the effects of a “politically incorrect” statement will follow you for a lifetime, forever branded and ostracized from the wider society, isolated and friendless.
Milan Kundera has provided a truly deep insight here, a side of human nature that has always stood in the shadows. Authoritarian minds simply cannot stand ridicule or mocking in any way, shape, form, manner, or fashion. Laughter at their expense is intolerable, and will be met with the most severe of consequences.
bfl
Ludvic forgot the /s...
“Authoritarian minds simply cannot stand ridicule or mocking in any way, shape, form, manner, or fashion.”
During the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) hearings, that identified hundreds of communists who had infiltrated the US government, investigators learned a very useful fact about fanatical communists, or really, any form of fanatic.
They have such a small, sealed mindset that they cannot take a joke. And this is deadly serious.
In a normal person, a jo+ke creates a state of imbalance that, as a defense, elicits laughter as a protective mechanism. However, a fanatic’s mindset only accepts thoughts within his belief system. Other ideas are discarded as irrational.
Importantly, this closed mindset is both brittle and fragile. So such people, when forced to take in a new idea, may experience a collapse of their mindset, which can propel them into schizophrenia.
In any event, the HUAC investigators would tell the suspected communist a joke. If they were ignored, while not conclusive, it was a good indicator that the suspect was a fanatic.
And this still applies today. The left is filled with any number of fanatics, and if you hit one of their trigger issues, they launch into an attack against you. And it lacks any proportionality, because the issue doesn’t really matter. You have “attacked” their entire worldview. Any all such attacks they treat with deadly seriousness.
And if you shatter their worldview, what remains to them is madness.
“No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion.”
They didn’t want end up in the same place.
A couple of morals from this story...
1. Terrorism works
2. There are very few heroes in this world