Cultural Revolution in New Zealand

Cultural Revolution in New Zealand

New Zealanders have wonderful lives by comparison to what used to be and is still the lot for many in the wider world.

We have health (life expectancy above 80 years), peace (no conscription for three generations), and prosperity (lifestyles that only a tiny elite anywhere enjoyed even 100 years ago).

All of these good things have come from values that coalesced during the 18th and 19th century enlightenment and became firmly established.

Before then, life for most was Hobbesian: nasty brutal and short.

As it will be for our descendants if present trends continue because these values are under assault.   Specifically, they are:

That there is such a thing as objective truth.  Evidence-based understanding and the scientific method stand above faith-based beliefs and cultural imperatives.

That rewards and status should be based on ability rather than class, race, or gender.

 That everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.

That open debate of alternative views informs our choices.

Objective truth stopped witch burnings and gave us modern evidence-based medicine- amongst many other good things.

Then 20th century post modernists worked themselves into a philosophical corner where all belief systems have equal validity, a typical bit of French nonsense.  This was seized on as justification by every activist promoting a destructive ideology.  Women can now be men; men can be women and children are identifying as cats or even as inanimate objects.  M?ori cultural beliefs are to be given equal weight to science in school curricula and math is labelled as racist because it doesn't align with indigenous ways of thinking.  Delusion is not a strong enough word to describe this.

Merit based rewards opened every occupation to the entire talent pool, driving improvements in productivity and an accompanying surge in prosperity.

Now it's increasingly held that all employment differences that don't favour women or selected ethnic minorities can only be because of discrimination.  When the balance is the other way- like female domination of teaching professions and university degrees in many disciplines, this is somehow not discrimination.  DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), an organisational concept that businesses and institutions are increasingly required to follow, demands the hiring and promotion of people to fit various identity categories rather than for their work ethic or ability.  And yet, DEI's expressed purpose is to stop discrimination. It's Orwellian.

Equality in Law. That justice is based on rules rather than the whim of rulers, and that everyone shall be treated the same regardless of class, race or gender protects minorities and is our bulwark against tyranny.  

This is increasingly undermined.  It's never been total anyway- young people, the mentally ill and women in circumstances where male strength disadvantages them, have always been treated differently- and should be.  But now in NZ even compos mentis adults are increasingly subject to different laws based entirely on their ancestry.  I count some 20 laws that advantage those with some Maori ancestry over everyone else- there are probably many more.  Some of these cut to the very heart of representative democracy's one person one vote principle.  

Open debate allows ideas to be canvased that were previously supressed (like that homosexuality is innate not an illness or deviance) and informs ongoing attempts to find an optimal balance between the collective and the individual. Debate on many subjects is now shut down.  Raising even the possibility that a difference in outcome could be because of some difference in ability or behaviour is declared to be racist and/or misogynist.  Those who hold dissenting views on just about anything worth holding a view on- education, vaccination, taxation, welfare, climate change, transsexuality, role of the state, ethnicity, culture, are 'cancelled' and 'denied a platform'.  Just like for Hitler Youth and Mao's Red Guards, these doctrinal imperatives override family.  

But am I just a reactionary conservative? 

What if enlightenment principles have been standing in the way of making a fairer more prosperous and safer world and need to be discarded?

Well no.

Not one of the trends developing as we move away from objective truth, merit-based rewards, one law for all, and open debate are improving our lot.  On the contrary they are pushing us back to poverty, injustice, and insecurity, to a world ruled by intolerance, and dogmatic ideology.

There is such a thing as objective truth, some beliefs are more supportive of health, wealth, and security. 

Some cultures do a better job of bringing up their children than others, some are more enterprising, and some have better governments.  We should emulate those cultures that do things better (as the Scots did in the late 18th century and the Irish didn't), rather than excusing bad behaviour and insisting that the world supports our failures.

Women and men are innately different, physically, and behaviourally (after more than a billion years evolving as separate sexes this could not be otherwise).  Trying to make men into mothers and women into warriors when they don't want to be is poor use of talent, destroys relationships and weakens society.

People are differently abled; some are lazy and then there's luck.  If exact equality was established by redistributing wealth and income tomorrow, how long would it then take for familiar levels of disparity to re-establish?

NZ is falling apart, but it's not just because of incompetence (though there's plenty of that), nor is it just for power and money (though there's some of that too).  Rather, those driving this destruction believe that they are making the world a better place.  Having put aside the hard-won values that gave us the health, prosperity, and peace we currently enjoy, they are destroying all of these in pursuit of chimeric and often zero-sum social outcomes that even if achieved will- and are- creating more injustices than they alleviate.  

It's astonishing how quickly change instituted by narrowly focussed zealots incapable of considering wider consequences has swept through and laid waste to our society.  Foreign policy, which is very hard to screw up for a country as geographically isolated as NZ, being about the only exception.  In every other sector, housing, roads, productivity, cost of living, debt, child poverty, health, climate change, education, crime, race relations, outcomes have become worse not better.

Climate Change.  I won't be surprised if NZ's virtue signalling climate change policies to date have resulted in a nett increase in global emissions- while also significantly hurting our standard of living.  If we'd done nothing, the planet would have been better served and we'd be wealthier.  With the developing world prioritising standards of living while adding more emissions every month than NZ's total emissions, we should be building strength, and planning how best to adapt, not cutting our own throats as some pyrrhic gesture.

Education. Educationalists know that students have widely different scholastic talents but their emotional desire for equality of outcome has over-ridden sense.  When mid-20th century attempts to lift the underperformers failed, attention shifted to supressing differences by eliminating streaming, discouraging academic competition, closing charter schools (where students achieved better academic results) and replacing external examinations with internal assessments that are easier to fudge.  Their final solution is to replace hard subjects with easy subjects that are subjectively assessed and that no-one fails- equity at last.  Unfortunately, NZ's international ranking is plummeting- and education is the strongest predictor of a country's future.

Crime.  M?ori are incarcerated at a higher rate than average and at a higher rate than other minority groups. To suggest that this may be because of more criminal behaviour is racist and grounds for cancelation as it can only be because of racism and colonialist oppression.  That immigrants from Asia who have suffered more recent and violent trauma than most M?ori have ever been subjected to- and at least equal racism- have lower offending rates than even pakeha NZers, is somehow ignored.  The solution?  Reduce the prison population (by 20% since 2017), not by reducing crime but by not prosecuting some offences and reducing sentences served for others.  We are told that this is 'the right thing to do' and that it's for 'social justice'.  Unfortunately, violent crime is skyrocketing.

Race relations: Without this ever having been put to the people, NZ is in the process of ceding significant control to an unelected racial minority.  This is already happening at local government level and with the He Paupau template, appears to be only one election away from extending to the national level as well.   I know of NO country substantially controlled by a racial minority that has survived for more than a few generations without violent revolution.  Even if brake-checked by this year's election, raised Maori expectations will leave a legacy that probably can't now be peacefully resolved.  I was a stalwart of the '70's and '80's anti-apartheid movement and never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd ever be fighting against the same evil here in NZ.

Nor does any of this seem to be just another social hiccup that will soon fade and be forgotten.  What's occurring seems more like a cultural revolution than a short-term social fashion.  It will eventually fail because wishful thinking and ideologies not based on a realistic model of human behaviour always do- but at what cost in human suffering?  A very bad sign is that intimidation has now extended to compelled speech- not only are dissenters cancelled and denied a voice but in some circumstances are required, Galileo like, to publicly state as truth that which they believe is not- losing jobs and careers if they refuse. 

Countries that fail from internal causes like is happening here, generally take a long time doing so- Argentina for example, or more recently, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Venezuela.  But once underway the process seems inexorable.  When the downward spiral establishes, those with get up and go get up and leave and this is almost impossible to recover from.  Is it already too late for New Zealand?  Possibly, an exodus has started.  We could still be saved by external events- if conditions in the rest of the world also deteriorate sharply, but the situation is pretty grim when survival has to depend on other people's ill fortune.

I wonder how the perpetrators of our fall and their many enablers will explain themselves to future generations?

                                                   Peter Lynn, July 2023

PS.  For the record (pretty sure, but nothing set in concrete):

Yes, the world is warming- maybe catastrophically, and yes, a significant part of this is almost certainly anthropogenic (human caused). 

Covid 19 mRNA vaccinations did provide substantial protection against severity of infection and transmission- but risks outweighed benefits for young people.

I can imagine pandemics that would require making vaccinations mandatory.  Covid 19 was not one of these.

Women are as intelligent as men on average but there are a few more highly intelligent men, balanced out by really dumb ones.

Homosexuality is innate, homosexuals contribute abundantly to human society.    

Conditionally available abortion is sensible social policy at present.

The current explosion of young people identifying as transsexual almost certainly includes an element of social contagion- which makes surgical and hormone interventions for young people likely to do harm.

If there are genetically determined difference in intelligence across ethnicities, then these are obscured by differences in education and cultural biases in testing.

There are differences in cultures that profoundly affect outcomes).

Almost all conspiracy theories are bunkum.