A hitchhiker’s guide to decolonization
PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS ARE IN A SELF-HATING DEATH SPIRAL. — JOHN ROBSON
In space no one can hear you decolonize. Or laugh while reading Tristin Hopper’s takedown of our resource-strapped DND blowing $32K on Hidden Harms: Human (In)security in Outer Space about the voyages of patriarchy to explore strange new worlds to commit racism and oppression. But imagine if someone tried to run an entire government on such antimatter.
Oh, wait. You don’t have to. Here, on our own home planet, the Canadian state appears to have increasing difficulty performing basic functions other than plundering and bullying citizens because such out-of-thisworld thinking appears to have crawled out of universities and clamped onto its face, injecting its loathsome spawn which then erupted from its belly wreaking havoc. From Chinese spies in Parliament to productivity to the once-mighty Liberal electoral machine, nothing touched by these theories seems to work anymore.
Superficially, (De)construction-ism/ity is all fun and games, lucrative for its perpetrators and pure comedy for the rest of us. Among the theory’s chief complaints — space exploration is “masculine, militarized and statebased,” and deplorably fails to credit “spirituality, astrology, and cosmology, the last of which views celestial bodies in space as animated beings and not mere objects.” It’s hard to believe anyone would pay for this gibberish, let alone our resource-strapped DND.
Hilarious. The moon might be alive, and moan or hit back if we probe it. Or be made of green cheese so astronauts can ditch those nasty dehydrated meals and splurge on dairy. Or maybe there’s an atmosphere, as in the The First Men in the Moon (men, boo patriarchy), so no need for space suits.
Former National Post editor Jonathan Kay once tweeted, “OK so who wants to go up on the first Oral Tradition-powered rocket?” But of course, the occupants of such a rocket would not be these authors, sitting safely at their computers trying desperately to prove that everything male and western is evil and colonial and nothing in front of our own eyes actually exists. For instance, this Darth-vaderesque venture “normalize(s) violence and exploitation” by describing “outer space as a hostile and desolate environment that is unpeopled/inhuman.” Oh, so there are aliens? No, they’d be inhuman too. It’s um, uh, whatever.
Such buzzword bingo where, “Leadership is needed to normalize inclusion of different perspectives” wins you money, sounds like parody. But it’s a paradigm — a system of thought with rules, narrow, childish, and destructive. As Chesterton warned of this sort of madness in Orthodoxy, its “most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.… always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.… If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do.”
Ditto all men that deny they are patriarchs must be patriarchs. Next grant please. But the fiction that is rewarded in academia and consulting, where you deny the validity of language except in your contract, right down to the reserved parking space, paralyzes any practical institution or system.
Like putting a person on the moon, or in the office, when the federal government finally told national capital bureaucrats to come to work, prompting a nihilistic threat to boycott local businesses, there wasn’t room for them because there’s been this massive hiring spree of people with no apparent function other than to nurse resentments at getting cushy jobs on demographic grounds, frightening management with complaints and frustrating co-workers into sullen passivity.
A withering passage in Neil Postman’s 1999 Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, when it was still possible to be indignant and incredulous about “the devilish spell of what is vaguely called ‘postmodernism,’” and in particular a subdivision of it sometimes called ‘deconstructionism,’ ” denounced French academics in particular for claiming “that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. (Perhaps this explains the indifferent French resistance to the German invasion of their country in the Second World War: They didn’t believe it was real.)
Miaou. But also touché. Now we are governed by people who don’t believe the vacuum of space is real but are certain patriarchy has infested it. Water mains erupt, terrorists pour in, debt accumulates, and they deconstruct it and everything else into nonsensical oblivion. Hilarious. But also disturbing.
From defence procurement to the Phoenix pay system to CRA phone banks, a chant of “fight patriarchy to infinity and beyond” drowns out any mumbled “there’s work to be done.” Bob Rae’s Ontario cabinet reputedly struggled to order food during meetings lest someone feel marginalized by the dietary choices, reducing their governance to a profligate shambles. And that was 30 long years ago, before these homegrown Ceti eels wrapped themselves tightly around the chattering classes’ “cerebral cortex … rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion” followed by “madness and death.” It’s far worse now.
Today, our public institutions are in a self-hating death spiral where Hamas blocks our streets while elites babble nonsense about a postmodern nation with no identity or core values passing every policy through an opaque GBA Plus lens that claims to generate “transparent, informed, inclusive and equitable decision-making” where nothing gets accomplished, everyone hates everyone, and moons are alive.