A while back, I read a great book by Douglas Murray called The Madness of Crowds. In it, he discusses the strange history of cultural conflict in four areas: race, gender, sexuality, and the trans movement.
His theme is that in all four areas, Western culture used to be hugely bigoted and biased, discriminating in unkind and unfair ways against non-whites, women, homosexuals, and those we used to call “trannies”.
Then, slowly over time, our society got over such dumb and hateful nonsense, and got much much better.
Bigotry and bias reduced and reduced and reduced, until it was almost completely gone. And then, bizarrely, very loud and very active “social justice” activists for all these groups went insane and ruined anything.
Look around you. His thesis is compelling.
He visualizes his point brilliantly: It’s as if a train were just reaching its desired destination, but instead of stopping “it suddenly picked up steam and went crashing off down the tracks in the distance.”
It’s a great visual. And as I look around me in early 2024, I really think he’s on to something. We are at each other’s throats more than we ever have before - at least on social media and television.
And that’s before we even broach the subject of our enormous political divide. We fight and we fight and we fight.
And then we stop, catch our breath, and fight some more.
Meanwhile, the crony politicians, banksters, pharmaceutical companies, and weapons manufacturers continue to rake in the cash while we… well… don’t.
Remember that brief moment when the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements had the populace hopping mad at our corrupt political and financial class? Both the left and the right were furious about the wars and the bailouts and the overall corruption that was obvious to all.
Then, poof! Identity politics political tribalism reared its ugly head and now we all fight each other instead.
A cynical and conspiracy-minded person could be forgiven for concluding that it’s not an accident.
Naturally,
Adam
It's like the minimum wage story. By the time the activists summon the support to fix the problem, the problem is (largely) fixed... by the same support that they had just summoned. It looks like most of the activists are following that support rather than leading it.