A Fictional Struggle Session that's All Too Real

Netflix's new series, 3 Body Problem, opens with a breathtaking scene that has contemporary resonance.

UPDATE: You can listen to me read this article, and read more about it, here.

If you have access to Netflix, go and watch the first five minutes of 3 Body Problem.

It’s the new series from the creators of Game of Thrones, adapted from a celebrated Chinese sci-fi book series about a scientific arms race between the world’s best physicists and a technologically advanced alien civilization on a course to colonize our planet.

But I don’t need to get into all that right now; I just want to talk about the opening scene, set in Beijing, in 1966.

(If you don’t have Netflix, you can see most of the clip here on this YouTube video, which at the time of this writing hasn’t yet been taken down over copyright.)

A physics professor, hands tied behind his back, is hauled by Maoist Red Guards onto a stage before a crowd of revolutionaries, angrily shouting and brandishing their Little Red Books.

“You can’t deny you lectured on the counterrevolutionary Big Bang Theory,” says the poor physicist’s wife, brought out from backstage to denounce her husband.

A Red Guard explains that the Big Bang Theory contradicts Communist teachings, because it doesn’t explicitly disprove the theoretical possibility that something could exist before the Big Bang, and could therefore be more godlike than Mao.

The physicist solemnly declines to renounce the science. “It is the most plausible explanation for the origin of the universe.”

The frenzied crowd chants “Down with academic authorities! Rebellion is just! Revolution is righteous!” The guards then beat the scientist to death while his daughter cries in anguish from the crowd below.

Real-life scenes like this were common during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the late ‘60s — violent and sometimes deadly denunciation rallies which they called struggle sessions, in reference to the Communist “class struggle” they purportedly benefited.

It gave me chills to watch that scene, because like most rational observers of today’s gender wars, I’ve felt growing alarm as I’ve watched factions on the left become increasingly extremist and violent in their denunciation of people who state scientific facts — specifically, the biological fact that all humans are unalterably fixed at conception as one of the two mammalian sexes, male or female.

I’m especially struck by that scene, because it captures the sheer strangeness that ensues when activists get their cultural/social/ideological ideas tangled up with the hard, immutable facts of science.

It’s downright bizarre to see a mob of communist proles turn murderous over an abstract cosmological theory about the origins of space and time.

And yet, it happened. It used to happen all the time.

It’s likewise downright bizarre many of the things we’re seeing today in the West, such as angry, rioting gender activists throwing smoke bombs at gatherings of medical doctors who discuss the facts of biological sex.

Far too many bystanders at the sidelines of the gender wars fail to recognize how literally the trans movement takes its mantra — trans women are women — to be true. And that such a radical rejection of biology, of basic science, isn’t just bizarre, but extremely dangerous.

Academic departments have begun systematically pulling references to biological sex from their course materials, censoring the facts of biological sex out of fear of repercussions from trans activists. Left wing politicans across the West are removing references to sex from the law books, even laws designed to protect women — human females — against discrimination. Police departments are issuing statements that characterize biological sex realists as thought criminals. Mainstream news and media outlets including the BBC, the New York Times, and the CBC now routinely describe biological sex as a mere belief, and they sometimes imply it’s an old, outdated belief held only by eccentric old feminists and out-of-touch conservatives.

Well-meaning liberals see all of this playing out right in front of them, and even the ones who know that the science of biological sex is true and accurate convince themselves that these developments are just a minor, temporary misunderstanding.

This is all just about being nice to a persecuted class of gender benders. Sure, a few of their facts might be off, but their intentions are good, which means it’ll surely work out fine in the end.

I’d like to remind these liberal excuse-makers what happened the last time activists turned against the science of biology in pursuit of their ostensibly progressive ideals: over 50 million people died.

Trofim Lysenko was an idealistic Communist whose pseudoscientific ideas about biology led to the deaths of tens of millions of Soviets and Chinese.

The Three-Body Problem (the book as well as the Netflix adaptation with the slightly-tweaked title, “3 Body Problem”) is about, among other things, the civilization-changing effects of the suppression of scientific truth. At the outset of the saga, modern-day activists assassinate scientists to further a grand ideological objective. Questions about science, belief, and the human condition are central themes throughout the book series.

It’s not a coincidence that the books’ author, Liu Cixin, is Chinese, because the path of China’s recent and bloody history was conspicuously shaped by the purges of scientists at the hands of the Communist Revolutionaries.

Eerily foreshadowing today’s activism in the West, it was primarily biologists who were targeted in the Communist East — specifically, proponents of the then-nascent field of genetics.

The Communists of early 20th Century Russia and China couldn’t stand the idea of genes, because the mechanism of genetic propagation bore a superficial resemblance to the “bourgeois” social values of the elites they had just overthrown: our genetic traits — our biological strengths and weaknesses —can only be passed down from generation to generation through direct family ties. Communism might free people to share society’s resources according to Marx’s ideals, but we cannot change our genes through willpower or class struggle. Our genes (like our sex) are fixed at the moment of conception, and they do not change on the whims of the social environment we inhabit or the actions we take within it.

This enraged the Revolutionaries, so they rounded up and executed or exiled all the genetic realists, and they embraced an alternative gene theory that was superficially harmonious with Marxist teachings, named for its Soviet inventor, Trofim Lysenko. Lysenkoism insisted that we weren’t stuck with the genes we were born with; rather, through hard work and noble struggle we could improve the character of the genes we passed on to our offspring. They set off to prove this theory through agriculture: they planted delicate crops in harsh climates, which would supposedly “toughen up” their genes; they eschewed pesticides and fertilizers; and they planted the seeds too close together, as though to foster some kind of quasi-psychic botanical “class solidarity” between them.

These farming methods were disseminated throughout the Communist world, and they resulted in catastrophic famines. Tens of millions of Soviets and an estimated 30 million Chinese died of starvation.

It seems at first like a rather trivial mistake, to conflate the social domain that humans navigate in our daily lives — the rules we create out of abstract ideas and concepts and ideologies which govern our social existence — with the hardware of the human bodies we inhabit: the domain of the absolute and eternal laws of physics and biology. But the Great Chinese Famine showed just how serious such mistakes can become. The Communist revolutionaries failed to distinguish their ideas about how society should be organized from ideas about how human bodies reproduce, with disastrous consequences.

The parallels with modern-day gender identity ideology are almost too obvious to require spelling out. Here’s a fun exercise: let’s look at how few changes we need to make in order to take the preceding paragraphs about Marxist genetics pseudoscience and rework them for today’s gender fundamentalist pseudoscience:

Transgender fundamentalists can’t stand the fact that biological, physical sex is binary and immutable, because this fact superficially resembles the conservative social values about rigid gender roles they seek to overthrow. Social progress may allow men and women to dress and act how we please and to love whoever we want, but our sex (like our genes) is fixed at the moment of conception, and does not change on the whims of the social environment we inhabit or the actions we take within it.

This fact enrages the gender fundamentalists, so they’re attacking and discrediting the sex realists, and they’ve embraced an alternative theory of sex that is superficially harmonious with their gender fundamentalist beliefs, largely drawn from the writings of a postmodernist wackadoo named Judith Butler. Gender Identity Theory insists that we aren’t stuck with the sex we were born with; rather, through performativity and noble struggle we can truly embody whatever sex we feel we are: our sexed bodies are destined to match our gendered souls. The gender fundamentalists set off to prove this theory through medical gender clinics: they developed synthetic hormones and advanced surgical procedures to modify their bodies’ genitals and their external, superficial sex characteristics.

They set about targeting children and adolescents with increasingly drastic and experimental “sex change” treatments on younger and younger test subjects, which is resulting in a medical catastrophe. It’s too soon to tell the full extent of the irreversible physical and psychological damage thats been done to countless young, vulnerable people, but mounting evidence points to a medical scandal on a scale never before seen.

As you can see, 21st Century gender fanatic pseudoscience looks like boilerplate 20th Century Marxist genetic pseudoscience with sex swapped in and genes swapped out.

As the first led to catastrophic human suffering, so too will the second.

Anyways. To go back to the opening scene in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, and the murdered physicist’s daughter, who I mentioned was watching from the crowd…

Minor spoiler for the first couple episodes: she goes on to discover a radio signal from an advanced civilization on another planet. But the horrors of the Cultural Revolution have so utterly destroyed her faith in humanity that she sends the aliens a message, along the lines of: go ahead and conquer us; we’re not worth saving.

With the direction our current civilization is heading, I’m starting to think she might have a point.

I, for one, would welcome our new alien overlords.

UPDATE: I’ve added more writing about this topic, and I’ve recorded an audio version of this article for your listening pleasure. Click here to read and listen.