There is a particular sensation that has spread in recent years, which most people feel, but few find words for. It is the sensation that the pressure comes from two sides, and that it is always oneself who must yield. It is the sensation that reality is becoming smaller, while one stands in it. It is the sensation that one has done something wrong, without knowing what, and that one is expected to apologise.
If you recognise yourself in this, you are not alone. There are patterns beneath this, and once you have spotted them, the world stops feeling random.
Because it is not just a sensation. It is a reality.
There are two movements in time that do not resemble each other, but which share the same pulse. One comes from the Islamic world, not from Muslims as people, but from Islam as political theology, from a social-order schema that does not know the separation between religion, law and politics. The other comes from within ourselves, from the universities, the media, the NGOs, the HR departments, from a more than century-old intellectual tradition that has (rather comically) learned to read all human experience as struggle between oppressor and oppressed, and which has expanded the category "oppressed" until it covers EVERYTHING.
The two movements hate each other in principle.
If you placed an Islamic social order and a queer-progressive social order in the same room without the modern state as intermediary, one would exterminate the other within a decade. On gender, family, hierarchy, authority, concept of truth, view of the body, understanding of freedom - they stand for two almost exactly opposite worldviews and outlooks. And yet they meet. Not because they love each other. But because they have the same enemy.
What they share is not content. It is structure.
First, the demand for asymmetric adaptation. It is always the host who must move. Never the newcomer. Never the offended. Never the marginalised. The one who carries the culture, the ordinary, the common, is asked to renounce, dilute, reformulate, apologise. The other is never asked for anything. The guest need not adapt to the house. The house must adapt to the guest. And when the house has adapted, a new demand comes, because adaptation was never the goal, only the method.
Second, offence as currency. A word, a drawing, a glance, a Bible passage, a national anthem, a flag, a candle procession, a prayer, EVERYTHING can become a violation. And as some may have noticed - when the concept of harm is expanded without limit, tolerance becomes a one-way quantity. The one who experiences the harm is ALWAYS right. The one who has caused it, often without knowing, is ALWAYS wrong.
Third, language as battlefield. Both movements know that whoever controls the words controls reality. Therefore it is never only about a case. It is about what the case should be called. "Islamophobia" is not a description, but an immunisation against criticism. "Inclusion" does not mean embracing more, but redefining the norm. "Tolerance" does not mean letting others be, but moving for them. When language tips, everything else tips.
Fourth, no equilibrium. There exists no point where either of the two movements says thank you. No point where they announce that now the space is large enough. Islamic political theology imagines a final ummah under one order. Progressive identity politics imagines a final dissolution of all norms and hierarchies. Both are totalitarian projects. And both regard the present condition as temporary.
And fifth, the most cunning of all - the weapon is your own inner voice of Conscience.
The West has a very particular moral structure, a universalist, Christian-shaped conscience that places an unusual weight on the protection of the weak, on compassion for the stranger, on the will toward consistent and eternal self-criticism. It is a rare and precious inheritance. But both movements have learned to turn it against ourselves.
They know that if they present themselves as weak, the West will comply. If they present themselves as victims, the West will apologise. If they cry violation, the West will withdraw. It is not an accident. It is a technique.
And this is where it feels like a violation. Because. It is a violation. Human beings are reciprocal creatures. We move when others move. It is not culture. It is anthropology. It lies beneath culture. When a demand is made asymmetrically, the body reacts before the mind arrives. It is not an opinion. It is an organism sensing that something does not follow the rules of the game.
A civilisation is a Common. Language, calendar, songs, holidays, streets, churches, bells, names, symbols. When a group demands that the common be reshaped according to THEIR particularity, then the common is no longer Common.
It is occupied.
The occupation need not be military. It can be linguistic, symbolic or administrative. Or all three. But the space changes from being "Ours" to being "Theirs-in-Ours".
And you are not only asked to make room. You are asked to assent to statements that do not accord with Reality.
Like that sharia can coexist with liberal democracy without displacing it. That mass immigration from non-integrable cultures is an enrichment without consequences. That gender has no biological foundation. That language is violence. That the past was evil. That your own civilisation is the root of all that is wrong.
When you are pressed to say what you cannot see, it is not your inner opinion that resists. It is not your political position. It is not your upbringing. It is not your culture, your background or your temperament.
It is reality itself that refuses to bend.
The resistance you feel is not a position you have chosen. It is your capacity to see, asserting itself. It is truth itself refusing to be said otherwise.
And that is why it is worth saying quite clearly, once, so it stands -
It is not you who is wrong!
It is not you who is phobic because you wonder at a parallel structure spreading in your city. It is not you who is hateful because you think biological sex is real. It is not you who is reactionary because you want to live in the civilisation you were born into. It is not you who is evil because you protect your children's language and your forefathers' holy days. You are not what is wrong with the picture.
You are what the picture once proceeded from.
What you are experiencing is two movements that hate each other, but meet in the same demand of you - change yourself, so that I can feel good about myself. And that demand is asymmetric, unlimited and devouring.
And yes. It feels like an attack on something true and natural. And it does - because it IS an attack on something true and natural.
The true is the civilisation we have inherited. The natural is Man's need to be at home in himself.
What the two movements have in common, across their irreconcilable content, is that they both expect that the home is not allowed to say no.
But.
The home is allowed to say no.
And it is time - peacefully but firmly - to say it outright.
There is someone home in the home.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Saturday evening, friends.
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LOVE NEVER ENDS
"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends."
- 1 Corinthians 13:7–8
