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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Therapeutic Caliphate

Against the dictatorship of the controllers who will bring us universal well being

While I was in Lustenau and far eastern Switzerland, I met Giuseppe Gracia, the media spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Chur. He is very much a fellow traveler of Your Working Boy. One of his Austrian readers told me about his book The Therapeutic Caliphate (only published in German, alas). It sounded so much like the book I’m working on now, about “soft totalitarianism,” that I reached out to him online and asked if we might meet to talk about it. He generously came over to Lustenau, where we talked for over an hour.

It was all off the record (for now), but he did send me a link to this Swiss German newspaper column (in Neue Zürcher Zeitung) that he wrote about his idea. Here it is, via Google Translate:

In Western Europe, we have created a “therapeutic caliphate.” The term comes from the Swiss philosopher Michael Rüegg, meaning a new form of rule: not in the name of a god or a state power, but in the sense of a social therapy. The therapy of an elite, which cuts off the Jewish-Christian roots of the West and wants to liberate us in the course of globalization from the stumbling block of outdated religious or national identities.

Every society needs a good elite that can take a leadership role for the general public through special talents. However, this is an elite that confuses its political mandate with pedagogical-moral authority over voters. Examples would be the style of government in Sweden or Germany, but there are also politicians in Switzerland who act as curative teachers of social cohesion. “The world is changing, but we can do it. We are not afraid of the open borders of our solidarity.” These are typical messages of this policy. “We are not seduced by populists. We fight for a better global climate, against fake news, nationalism and hate crime” These messages are no longer aimed at dealing with reality.

Political correctness is an effective drug. In public debates, it ensures that the contest of ideas must give way to a moralistic beauty contest: the participants in the discourse are divided into good, progressive and dubious, reactionary people. This treatment includes the cleansing of public life; for example we have to embrace “non-violent language” — a language that does not hurt anyone’s feelings, which means that nobody says anything authentic anymore, because someone can always feel hurt. The opposite does not appear like a mature, resilient person, but like an emotional treadmill.

This fits in with the so-called “Safe Space”. This is a spiritual shelter built for students, in which all may remain in their ideological harmony. The potentially discriminating filth of uncontrolled voices of opinion will disappear. By the way, also from classics of literature, such as the word “Negro” from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Huckleberry Finn”. It is a purge that can meet the ancient Roman poet Ovid as well as the Berlin contemporary poet Eugen Gomringer , who dared to compare the beauty of women in a poem with flowers. In addition, “Snow White” should no longer be kissed awake by a man, because that cemented false gender roles.

This is how we experience an intellectual infantilization of public space. Instead of maturity for conflict, hypersensitivity and sentimental dogmatism dominate. Instead of freedom of expression Duckmäusertum. The medial, therapy-sensitive filtering of numbers and studies is especially true for topics such as migration and Islam. For example, in Sweden, the comparative figures or statistics that could disturb or “divide” the people are not even published, such as figures on migrants’ rape or other crimes. Or dealing in Germany with the Cologne New Year’s Eve of 2015, when about 800 women by men from Africa and the Middle East were harassed, robbed and abused.

It is interesting that Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw such a policy as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the book “Democracy In America”: “There is a considerable guardianship of the citizens, which is responsible for ensuring the well-being of all citizens and watch over their prosperity. This guardianship is absolutely, in detail, punctual, forward-looking and mild. ”

Here the danger of a pedagogization and therapeuticization of the society for democracy becomes clear. It lies in an ultimately discouraged or even depressive thinking that no longer expects man’s maturity. We risk forgetting that the design of living together, the freedom of thinking and speaking, is not a leading task of the elite, but that no one may take this away from another. We forget that the dignity of the individual always means the right to be taken for full, uninformed, uninterested or stupid as a person may be. Stupidity is not a license for state paternalism – and freedom is not the prerogative of the clever.

Giuseppe Gracia
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