In the University of Barcelona in 1941, a professor of geography told his students not to use the words “orientation” and “oriented” because “this is Spain, and Spain is in the Occident, so let’s not use this orientalist vocabulary.”
This was a terrible post-war time. Many real professors had either died or gone into exile, so the university had to hire a lot of ideologically sound yet intellectually deficient quacks.
We are now doing the same kind of thing but without the excuse of a war or a dictatorship. We have gladly and eagerly assumed every insane ideological hangup of every possible authoritarian regime. Too much freedom sends people looking for boundaries, and in the absence of any real ones, they surround themselves with walls of superstition, quackery and self-policing. Our “pronouns: he, him” is the “touch wood” of a pre-industrial peasant.
Too much and too little freedom lead to the same place of great anxiety and generalized superstitious stupidity.
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