Commissar turns up the temperature in the culture wars
[March 3, 2017] According to popular legend, if you place a frog in boiling water it will immediately jump out, whereas if you put it in cold or tepid water and then gradually turn up the heat, it will stay until it is eventually boiled to death. Simmering Frog Syndrome is often used as an analogy to show how people react rather quickly to sudden change, whereas if you spread the change out over time they don’t notice.
The analogy is a good one, but the problem with it is that it isn’t strictly true. Yes, a frog placed suddenly in boiling water will immediately try to exit, and yes a frog that is gradually heated will stay put for some time. But apparently (although I must stress I’ve never experimented myself) at a certain point when the water is being heated, the frog will not just stay put, but its pain receptors will cause it to seek to get out.
It has been said that we in our society are like simmering frogs. If you were to gather all the social changes that have occurred over the last 50 years and imagine that they had been foisted on us overnight, it’s easy to see what would have followed. Revolution would have been met by resistance, which in turn may well have been met with force, and so on. Yet the Cultural Bolsheviks that have led the revolution in the West have been far more cunning, and have introduced their changes in dribs and drabs, bit by bit. By and large we’ve taken it lying down, so that what was once unthinkable has now become normal. This means that what is unthinkable today…well I’ll leave you to work that out. But if we’ve been like simmering frogs, at what point do we reach that ouch point where we feel compelled to get out of the pan? I’ll return to the frogs in a moment.