Recently I was listening to a lecture, the essence of which was the following: the opposite of addiction is connection. No matter what a person is addicted to – drugs, tobacco, alcohol, the internet, political or religious toxic ideas – the effective “cure” for it is not to isolate the person, which can put them in a “deeper” condition, but on the contrary, the widest possible communication. Addiction, according to this theory, is the result of a sense of loneliness that people try to overcome by clinging to a bad habit or a harmful group. If there is a desire to help these unfortunate people, they should not be silenced or rejected. Instead, we should try to communicate with them.
In recent years, a culture of so-called “rejection” and “boycott” has spread in the West, where those who profess “liberal” ideas ostracize all those who, in their opinion, go beyond certain “political correctness.” For example, the Black Lives Matter movement fights racism. The struggle against this extremely reprehensible, I would even say disgusting phenomenon, pushes some of those in the movement to display the same reprehensible behavior, including the restriction of freedom of speech, where, for example, it is in fact forbidden to discuss certain topics.
Activists of the movement not only reject the current “bad ideas,” but also dig into the past of their countries and judge historical figures by today’s standards. According to the movement, activists see racist tendencies in George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and King Leopold II of Belgium, and demand the demolition of their statues and the renaming of their schools. According to them, Christopher Columbus also owes his share of guilt: who asked him to discover America? He should have sat quietly in his Genoa, and thousands of Indians would not have been annihilated. Last year, the issue became so acute that a number of prominent intellectuals, including writer JK Rowling, sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, and linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, wrote an open letter stating that “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”
This is not just about racist and anti-racist sects in the West. As it is known, there are sects in Armenia as well. Moreover, the “anti-vaccination” sect has recently joined religious and political sects. The problem is that an aggressive, denialist struggle against the factions will not only destroy them, but will also turn the fighters into sectarians. Thus, the number of sects will increase.
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Aram Abrahamyan
