Negative reinforcement involves punishing/disciplining a person until he acts and speaks in the correct way. The correct way is determined by the punisher/disciplinarian—the person who possesses power, the controller. For example, a DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) training program requires that an employee adopt the conclusions and the practices taught in the program. At least this is the metric of a successful reeducation program. The conclusions and practices advance the agenda and an ideology. The training program is unpleasant because it’s full of ideas that the individual does not share; he is moreover made to feel responsible for things he could not possibly have done; he is told he believes things that he doesn’t even know he believes. He’s gaslighted. The employee knows he will repeat the program until he complies. He may even be positively reinforced for adopting the punisher/disciplinarian’s standpoint. On the other hand, he may not get a raise if he doesn’t. He may be punished with a damning professional report in his permanent record. Worse, his employment may be terminated.
Today, employees are being punished/disciplined for believing and affirming such basic truths as, for example, that men cannot be women, i.e., an objective fact of the biological world. He may on this basis refuse to misgender colleagues, i.e., by refusing to use the preferred pronouns he knows are wrong. He may lose his career if he does not comply with demands that he believe, or at least says he believes, in a falsehood. He may be ordered to enroll in a specialized training program—a struggle session—to teach him how to address men as women and women as men or as both genders or as no genders at all, all of which are material falsehoods. He will taught not just how to use the wrong pronouns, but he will also learn about neopronouns. His superiors may encourage him to put his pronouns in his email signature. His speech will be compelled in a myriad of ways.
Authorities tell us that these struggle sessions are necessary to produce a more “inclusive” and “equitable” workplace, one that values “diversity.” The employees of an inclusive and equitable workplace are happy and thus more productive and the firm is more likely to retain them. This might alienate other employees, but if the estranged are white and cis gendered then their emotional and psychological experiences are rather unimportant (they’re privileged). What is important is diversity, and diversity means a workplace with ever fewer white and cis gendered people in it—with those remaining serving as allies to concrete personifications of abstract categories, some of whom are simulacra. To keep their jobs and avoid constant harassment and shaming by managers and other employees, white and cis gendered workers have to avoid saying true things; it’s almost guaranteed that there is an employee who believes something else is true, and his beliefs must be affirmed and everybody else required to suspend her or his disbelief. The individual who believes in true things will have to either convince himself that what is true is wrong, and that what is wrong is good—or he will at least have to act in bad faith.
Punishing/disciplining people for telling the truth, or punishing/disciplining them until they lie, is the beating heart of totalitarianism. Progressives are already, in the institutions they control, which are all the major institutions to some or near total degree (corporate firms, cultural and educational organizations, government, and media), significantly modifying behavior and belief by making truth telling a punishable offense or subject to discipline and punishment/discipline an acceptable means to compel lying. The younger generations are far more compliant in this regard because their educational experiences have been compromised of a comprehensive indoctrination program designed to condition them to be obedient to corporate control. Progressivism is an authoritarian praxis, and if the elders of western civilization don’t resist it soon, there may be no generations left who can.
freedom and reason 