By Niall McCrae & Robert Oulds:
As Michael Young warned in his dystopian fiction, meritocracy may be a worthy ideal, but instead of equality of opportunity it produces a self-serving elite. In the past the affluent signified their status materially, but in today’s consumer society such assets are less distinguishable. Instead, moral superiority is expressed. The values of the middle class are packaged as emancipatory concern, but they are really a performance that gains all kinds of reward.
Not everyone can climb the greasy pole, and the younger generations who have been brainwashed with progressive ideology will struggle to get a secure job or emulate the family comforts of their own upbringing. Their causes are counterproductive: open borders, carbon-free living and the grievances of identity politics. Why support mass immigration when it increases competition for work, and on graduating with £50k student debt you cannot afford the tiniest one-bedroom flat?
The mildest criticism of this apparently unsustainable ideology draws outrage. But this is a contrived and displaced anger. While the mainstream media describe a polarised society, with open-minded cosmopolitans versus insular and dull traditionalists, in reality the former are not as numerous as portrayed. Identified by David Goodhart as ‘Anywheres’, they account for no more than a quarter of the population, but have disproportionate power and privilege. Bien pensants dominate our institutions, the BBC, police, the professions, the arts and universities. They used their influence to frustrate the democratic decision for Brexit, and to invoke a draconian lockdown of the great unwashed in the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet the concept of polarisation is false, because only one side has become extreme. The ordinary people, with their disposition for faith, flag and family, have not changed much: their views are relatively moderate. Furthermore, there are signs that Generation Z may be more conservative than millennials. Nonetheless, clearly a large proportion of younger people have been swept along on the wave of wokeness.
The idealism of youth has been harnessed by progressive ideologues in the middle class. Last year this energy was channelled into the Extinction Rebellion climate alarmists. Now it’s Black Lives Matter, with a campaign that has gone well beyond reacting to an instance of police brutality in the USA. Statues are toppled, and systemic racism is claimed to pervade every aspect of our lives. It seems that the less overt racism or sexism in society, the more it is perceived.
The fervour is beginning to resemble the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Chairman Mao to quash his rivals. Mao turned students against their professors, who were paraded on campus wearing a dunce’s hat, and forced into self-denunciation. He created the Red Guards, a zealous force of young puritans who terrorised their neighbourhoods. Today in the West, truth is being subverted by earnest but delusional narrative. Mass hysteria is stoked.
We are witnessing an acute outbreak of a cultural virus, in which a proliferation of moralistic dogma causes people to act irrationally and often hatefully to others. These ideas propagate in the form of memes, which were first described by Richard Dawkins as units of cultural transmission.
We named this illness MORALITIS. Its symptoms are: –
- Virtue-signalling at every opportunity
- Parroting of phrases and slogans
- Declaration of cultural guilt
- Rejection of national identity and Judeo-Christian heritage
- Hostility to any contrary opinion
- Simplistic dichotomising of debate by labelling people as good or bad
Most of the afflicted are mere carriers of the disease: they have little impact alone but are readily enticed into collective action, as in Twitter storms. The contagious cases are people whose lives are consumed by social justice and identity politics. These are the people who become student union officers, and who develop a CV of righteous activism; they ascend the ranks in public sector institutions and (increasingly) in commercial organisations.
The middle class is keen to endorse the latest causes. But there is a sinister force driving woke ideology, which cannot be fully controlled. The revolutionary activism of Black Lives Matter appears virtuous but its neo-Marxist prospectus includes abolishing the police and ending capitalism. Similar themes are evident in Extinction Rebellion.
The long march through the institutions will never be completed, because Marxist revolution is never done. Politically correct virtue-signallers should be careful in what they wish for. In the French and Russian revolutions, the heads of the intellectual class were first on the block.
However, ask any woke person about critical theory and the Frankfurt School and you will probably get a quizzical response. Look on Google and you will find that ‘cultural Marxism’ is a right-wing conspiracy theory. This is despite its proponents using the term, and its strategy of regressive tolerance (conservative ideas, and anyone who expresses them, are denied a platform).
As any cult leader knows, the best way to manipulate followers is to deprive them of their reason. Moralitis shows how cultural Marxism has succeeded in this. But increasing numbers of lesser mortals are realising that something dreadful is happening to society: an education system that teaches schoolchildren and students to be ashamed of their own country; a public service broadcaster that insults our intelligence with its blatant bias; a politicised police who allow left-wing rioters to deface our history while patriots are defined as ‘far right’; a government too afraid of divisive activists to preserve law and order.
No society can thrive on extremism. Proceeding with the nihilistic tenets of Marxism is like building a house on quicksand. It deprives people of their critical thinking, liberty and their very humanity. Such moral hegemony will eventually collapse under the weight of its contradictions.
We are nearing a turning point. Moralitis is a sickness from which society can recover and grow stronger. Our book is a combination of epidemiology, diagnostic assessment and a vaccine. As readers, you will be the antigens.
Get your copy of Moralitis:
To buy the printed book – http://www.brugesgroup.com/
E-book- https://www.amazon.co.
Robert Oulds is the director of the Bruges Group.
Niall McCrae is a senior lecturer at King’s College London.
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