The Politically Incorrect Show - 10/07/2001

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Tuesday July 10, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

Frank Haden wrote a telling column in last weekend's Sunday Star-Times. It was a chilling reminder of the pressure to conform in our heavily collectivised society. Frank was prompted to write it by his experience at the All Blacks-France rugby test, where he was dismayed by the mindless chanting & booing by a crowd intent on intimidating the French & the referee.

"It vividly recalled my primary school days," he writes, "when the least sign of differing from the majority opinion produced instant herd punishment. The children would isolate the dissenter with a chanted chorus: 'Michael's a smartie, Michael's a smartie!', crushing & humiliating poor Michael under mob disapproval. The mob instinctively had social skills. Michael didn't. He even lacked the skill to keep his mouth shut. Every time the little monsters seized on a large lumpy boy named Peter ... making him lie down on the wet grass to serve as their seat, I was inwardly horrified. I said & did nothing, however. I didn't want to be a stand-out. ... The children then were no different from children today. Children of all eras quickly sort out the truth about survival in the playground. You must go with the herd, echo the majority opinion, never express a contrary view no matter what your own private feelings are. Social skills are a lot more than shouting abuse at people who don't fit in. To be socially acceptable you have to go along with all sorts of half-witted popular judgements on the right way to talk, dress, behave, eat, drink & play."

Frank is right, by & large - but one doesn't HAVE to strive to be "socially acceptable" in such a culture. It IS possible to speak out against little monsters using a larger boy as a seat, to dissent from majority opinion if one genuinely disagrees with it, not to be a "stand-out" for its own sake but because one DOES disapprove or disagree. Brave souls have done so throughout history, in all fields - & we have the advance of civilisation to thank them for as a result.

"Civilisation," says Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, is the process of setting man free from men. Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander & the second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose & is running amok. It has brought men to a level of intellectual indecency never equalled on earth."

Roark, too, is right. But it doesn't have to be. We are creatures of free will. To break free from the chains of the mindless, mediocre mobocracy Frank Haden writes about, man - EACH man - must reclaim his mind. In Leonard Peikoff's words, "To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think."

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