Most of you aren’t Muslims, and I don’t court a Muslim audience. I’m not Muslim and have no love for the religion.
However, there are a couple ethical methods which Muslims use especially heavily when they are a minority in a non-Muslim country. They are especially alien to the people of Northern Europe, who have tended to be more forthright and honest than most other ethnic groups all over the planet.
The concepts are called taqiyya and kitman — they are just ethical justifications for lying to non-Muslims in a systematic way in order to advance the general interests of Muslims against that of the foreigners.
It’s very difficult for a lot of people from Northern Europe to empathize with that sort of mentality, which is partially why dopey democratic elites tend to try to universalize from their own limited experiences within their own ethno-religious group.
Progressives in part enjoy so much success because they can count on the honesty of the conservative opposition. For the left, the operating principle is the Satanic one — “nothing is true and everything is permitted.” The strength of our traditional culture has become a sort of weakness for us. We expect to speak the truth and expect the other people around us to speak truly, but our opponents are willing to drop all ethical restrictions on their behavior to achieve their goals.
This is really only a tentative suggestion, so I expect some push-back from it. There is an element of taqiyya in using a pen name and concealing one’s political opinions to the general public, especially in a time when we are supposed to expose ourselves to casual surveillance from everyone around us.
What I’d like to say is that it’s permissible to lie to progressives about what you believe. There should be little shame in it. You’re not obligated to go throw yourself into the fray, especially if you have to live around progressives owing to your profession or your family situation. You don’t have to tell everyone on Facebook that you think democracy is bad and that the protesters in Ferguson should be machine-gunned. It’s probably preferable that you keep a low profile.
You don’t necessarily have to go so far as to write a Facebook bot to post the most popular post on Upworthy every day to your wall, but it probably couldn’t hurt, either.
The advantage to this is that it helps to feed paranoia and cannibalization within the progressive sphere. You want them to be frightened and erratic. They should know that their are wreckers in their midst, but not know who they are. Success is when they harry or consume someone on their own side who is basically a moderate leftist. Sowing terror, leaking information, and generating confusion while minimizing personal risk is useful.
This is where conventional Republicans and other radicals with a democratic mentality tend to go badly wrong. They think that if they speak often and loud enough, they will get what they want. Depleting the controlled opposition (or eliminating it) dissipates an illusion and frees up a lot of energy for more productive projects.
If dissent is just going to be used to exact penalties on dissenters, then it’s really best to be more roundabout about it. This also damages the information quality available to progressive bureaucrats. Giving false information to pollsters is also possibly useful for certain efforts, as is the orchestration of mass misreporting of statistics.
When you stop thinking about it in terms of how many people you can get to repeat your slogans, an awfully large number of options start to open up for you.