I recently read about the Four Olds of the Chinese Cultural Revolution which were Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits. The campaign by the Red Guard against these took place because they are pre-communist ideas and so they needed to be replaced with other things more in line with communist thought.
I wonder if the current culture wars going on, mainly in social media and predominantly in the USA, are analogous to the campaign against the Four Olds. There are some very vocal minority groups (the new Red Guard?) attempting to make the Olds of western culture unacceptable ways of expression, even unacceptable ways of thought.
Where I live, freedom of opinion is written into the national constitution. People are legally allowed to have racist opinions, homophobic opinions, xenophobic opinions. Opinions are free and freedom of opinion is protected by law. Of course there are some restrictions on certain actions, such as discrimination in hiring processes, and there are some restrictions on expression of certain extreme opinions in the media. Recently there was a referendum intended to tighten up restrictions on “hate speech”; however constitutional freedom of opinion was left untouched.
I wonder sometimes if social-media obsessed youngsters will one day vote to overturn freedom of opinion in the Swiss constitution and in doing so apply their own Cultural Revolution / Cancel Culture to eliminate the Old in favour of the “Social Justice” of the successors of the Red Guard. I hope not. If only certain opinions and thoughts are permissible, we too would then be living in a totalitarian society. I would rather overhear the occasional right-wing crazy spouting xenophobic nonsense in public transport or in a bar or restaurant than live in a country where only “acceptable” thoughts and opinions are permitted by law. Totalitarianism is being rebranded but totalitarianism it is nonetheless.
Liam Mor's Blog