You are not extreme. But someone needs you to think you are.
...
I have experienced that moment myself.
Meant something - something quite ordinary, something I had meant for years, something that aligned with what the vast majority of people in this country think, when they are honest - and been told it was extreme.
When that word fell, something happened inside me in the same instant. Something small and almost imperceptible. An uncertainty, a kind of inner withdrawal. Doubt.
"What? Maybe it is me who has slipped into something? Maybe I have, without knowing it, moved out toward the edge of something?"
I know that moment from the inside.
And I know I am not the only one.
Let us talk about that moment.
The word "extreme" is in its origin geometrical. It describes a position - something that is located far from the centre, from the average, from what most people actually think and live with. It is not a moral concept, it is a DISTANCE CONCEPT. Like "periphery" or "outer point".
It does not say right or wrong.
It says - out here on the edge, far from the centre.
The simplest question, which is actually the most obvious thing in the world to ask, is therefore this in our time, where the concept is thrown around every single day.
If a view is shared by the majority of a population - what then is the distance to the centre? What geometry are we talking about, when the view is the centre? It cannot make sense to call a majority opinion extreme, unless one has quietly allowed the word to mean something other than what it has always meant.
But that is precisely what has happened.
"Extreme" no longer measures what people actually think. It measures what certain institutions, media and political environments have decided it is acceptable to think. The two things are not the same. And they have begun to diverge markedly - and in that distance, in that void, something has arisen that resembles censorship, just without a censorship authority. It is not because anyone is forbidding anything. That is unnecessary. People edit themselves, lower their voices, withdraw - not because they have slipped out toward a fringe, but because they have been convinced that it looks like it.
And it is so important to understand, in the current period where we live inside a true bombardment of an information war - where actors want something with us. Nonstop around the clock. So read the next sentence a few times until it sits firmly.
A psychological mechanism does not need to be visible to work.
It only needs to sit in us.
Take the view on immigration. Opinion polls have shown the same thing for twenty years - a clear majority wants a markedly stricter policy. That view has in the same twenty years been systematically described as xenophobia, nationalism, right-wing extremism or what was worse. Not because it was marginal. But because it was uncomfortable for those who held the definition.
Take the view on biological sex. The majority of Danes believe that biological sex is real and relevant. In media, parts of political life, cultural and academic institutions, that view has been called reactionary and transphobic - not by a majority, but by those with the microphone.
Two subjects. Very different. Same mechanism.
And the list of subjects this has been done with is endless.
And the pattern reaches deeper than our own decade, our generation or last century. Let me give just one example.
Every single society we know of, across cultures and millennia, has organised itself around a form of transcendence - a sense that existence contains more than the measurable. That is not superstition. It is a pattern so consistent and pervasive that it tells us something about Man's structure, not about its unenlightened past. Take for example New Atheism that stepped onto the scene some 20 years ago - which presented itself as the rational centre, the self-evident standpoint all modern thinking people should adopt - is in historical context one of the most marginal views any human has ever held. A small blip in a single cultural epoch, which convinced itself that everyone who had gone before had merely been searching for comfort in chaos. It is already fading. And held against 200,000 years of human history with faith and transcendence, new atheism is a phenomenon that did not even survive a generation as cultural dominance. That is how "normal" it was. Or rather. How abnormal and extreme it was.
For the mechanism works in both directions. It calls the centre extreme. And it calls the outer point self-evident.
The question to ask - now and going forward, every single time one encounters the word - is the simplest conceivable -
Extreme in relation to what? In relation to what people actually think? Or in relation to what certain voices - The Man on Television - "The Experts" - The Machine - The Programme - have decided that one may think?
For the two questions are not the same.
That small movement from within - that withdrawal you know, that uncertainty that arises when someone points at you with that word - extreme - it is not an answer to what you actually are.
It is an answer to what you have been told you are. And that, my friend - that is absolutely not given that it is the same thing.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Sunday evening, friends.
Enjoy the sun the next week. ☀️