You are not extreme. But someone needs you to believe 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's me who has slipped into something? Maybe I have moved out toward the edge of something without knowing it?"
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 geometric. It describes a position - something that is located far from the centre, far from the average, far from what most people actually mean and live with.
It is not a moral concept, it is a CONCEPT OF DISTANCE. Like "periphery" or "outer point".
It does not say right or wrong.
It says - out here at 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 always has.
But that is precisely what has happened.
"Extreme" no longer measures what people actually mean. It measures what certain institutions, media and political environments have decided it is acceptable to mean. 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. It is unnecessary. People edit themselves, lower their voices, withdraw - not because they have slipped out toward an outer wing, 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 from us. Nonstop around the clock. So read the next sentence a couple of times until it sits fast.
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 those same twenty years been systematically described as xenophobia, nationalism, right-wing extremism or what have you. 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 backward and transphobic - not by a majority, but by those with the microphone.
Two topics. Very different. Same mechanism.
And the list of topics 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. It is not superstition. It is a pattern so consistent and pervasive that it tells us something about Man's structure, not about his 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 ought to adopt - is in historical context one of the most marginal views any human being has ever taken. A small blip in a single cultural epoch, which convinced itself that all who had gone before had merely been searching for comfort in chaos. It is already fading. And held up 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 meets the word - is the simplest conceivable -
Extreme in relation to what? In relation to what people actually mean? Or in relation to what certain voices - the Man on Television - "the Experts" - the Machine - the Programme - have decided one may mean?
For the two questions are not the same.
That small movement from within - the withdrawal you know, the 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.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Sunday evening, friends.
Enjoy the sun next week. ☀️
