The cruel streak in progressivism has become
dominant
A New York psychiatrist tells an audience at Yale School of Medicine of
her fantasies of “unloading a revolver in the head of any white person that got
in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away
relatively guiltless, with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favour.”
She later prays for the rapper DMX, who died of an overdose.
One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion boasts that he wouldn’t let an ambulance through if
he was blocking the road, even at the cost of a patient’s life.
A biological male with criminal convictions for kidnap and attempted
murder says at a Trans Pride rally: “If you see a Terf, punch
them in the fucking face.” The crowd, holding placards about love, kindness and
human rights, cheer and applaud.
Students at California State University glorify a Hamas
terrorist paragliding into Israel to slaughter the innocent, while Harvard
students write an open letter
blaming Jews for their own execution. They grieve the “slow and sudden” deaths
of Palestinians.
Acts of kindness bear witness to our shared suffering. But when kindness
becomes pathological, it is cruel and divisive — as with these examples. And it
is on the rise. In the West today, there are people whose suffering is deemed
to be non-existent or of little value, and so judgement takes the place of
understanding, punishment that of mercy. The result is a purity spiral whereby
extreme kindness towards an in-group gives unlimited licence to act with
cruelty towards an out-group. It’s this licence that gives progressive
activists permission to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism.
Following the Hamas massacre, a lecturer at Stanford
University used “identity-based
targeting” to force three Jewish students to stand in a corner so they could
feel “what Israel does to Palestinians”. He asked them how many Jews died in
the Holocaust. One of the students said “six million” and the lecturer replied
that “colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer”. In New
York, activists tore down posters pleading for
the safe release of Jewish hostages, many of them women and children, while
London saw a 1,353% increase in antisemitic
attacks.
In the intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, kindness for the
“oppressed” legitimises unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. For normal
people, whose instincts are not numbed by ideology, the dissonance of cruelty
clothed in kindness is disorientating. In 2021, Milli Hill, founder of
the Positive Birth Movement, challenged use of the
phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman. Fellow birthing
professionals denounced her — in the name of kindness. As the attacks
intensified and the language became increasingly violent, Milli lost her sense
of reality, telling an interviewer: “Am I the person I think I am? Do I have
this dark side that’s violent and hateful and toxic and all the things they say
I am?”
Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, who spent his early life under
Nazi occupation, analysed the political and psychological processes that generate
this loss of reality. He called it ponerology, or the “the study of the origin
of evil”. Collaborating, in secret, with a number of dissidents in post-war
communist Poland, he sought to explain the “pathological inversion of a normal
social hierarchy” in which “psychological deviants” take power and create a
“pathocracy…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society
of normal people”.
This minority is the “pathological underbelly” present in every society,
about 6% of the population, of which a tenth are psychopathic — characterised
by grandiosity, narcissism, personal charisma, impaired moral and psychological
reasoning, a systemic incapacity for self-criticism and the sadistic pursuit of
pleasure. Under communist rule, Lobaczewski witnessed such people, riven with
mediocrity and oblivious to their incompetence, become leading members of the
party. As their grip on power tightened, one malignancy bred another, until
academics, scientists and psychologists succumbed to communist ideology. They
acted as if in possession “of some secret knowledge; in their eyes we became
their former colleagues, still believing what the ‘professors
of old’ had taught us”.
From Mao’s attack on the Four Olds — old ideas, old
customs, old habits and old culture — to the assault by critical race theorists
on the universalism of the civil rights movement and the sublimation of
antisemitism into support for Hamas atrocities, a defining factor of
pathocracies is historical amnesia and psychological naievety. This allows for
the separation of the “Old” from the “New”, and the metastatic transformation
of what Lobaczewski called the “pathological underbelly” of society into the
ruling elite.
In the West, progressive activists are denying their cultural dominance,
despite using this dominance to shame, de-bank and destroy
their enemies. They compete for status by aligning themselves with
intersectional destitution to manufacture a world in which discrimination,
inequality and climate deaths are increasing, when the evidence shows the
opposite is true. Ultimately, elite pathocrats become totally isolated from the
world of normal people. Their language becomes esoteric and they speak only to
each other. The Polish philosopher Angnieszka Kolakowska described this descent
into unintelligibility among Communist Party members as a defence mechanism:
when they “feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist
jargon”, she wrote. “Their words simply fail to refer and the result is
gibberish.”
Gibberish, in the mouths of elite pathocrats, becomes wisdom, creating a
utopia of nonsense, detectable in sentences like this, from the activist Rosa
Lee: “By remembering the metaphorical character of any scientific model, we can
draw out the insights of the theory of performativity while putting it into
conversation with our other Marxist metaphors.” The end point is
“communisation, the transition to new communist selves”. The mystique of this
language cements the separation of ideology from reality and pathological
elites from the “normal man”. Faced with struggle sessions, shaming, bullying
and violence — and fearing for their sanity — normal people lapse into silence,
unable to comprehend the pathocratic trauma unleashed upon them. When an
individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an
ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration.
When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to
substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological
disintegration. Such a spectacle is a source of pleasure to the dominant elites
for whom “forcing others…to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal
necessity, a ruling concept”. This “necessity” can never be satiated. No level
of deindustrialisation can cleanse the West of its “abuse” of Mother Earth, no
ritualistic recitation of pronouns can redeem the “sins of the cis” and no
atonement can ever be sufficient to repay the debt owed by the Jews for their
“crimes”.
This impossibility of salvation makes sadism eternal.
This process is viscerally described in Juliette, a novel
written by the Marquis de Sade. In it, the eponymous heroine meets Pope Pius VI
and demands that he offer up a dissertation on murder. The Pope obliges,
arguing that to commit murder is in accordance with Nature:
“from time immemorial, man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of
his fellow man and to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion
under a cloak of justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let
there be no doubt, his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing
pleasure killing procures him.”
Ideology, in other words, is used to conceal the sadistic desires of the
libertines, to legitimise the raw exercise of power. Normal, virtuous people
are imprisoned, tortured, brutalised and killed by aristocrats, priests and
popes — purely for the pleasure of it.
Pathocrats who seek the collapse of open societies do everything they
can to conceal the “astonishing pleasure” they get from having the power to
punish. They do so by redefining concepts like “justice”, “safety” and
“kindness” in a language accessible only to the elite. Like contemporary
identitarian progressives, Sade’s libertines speak only to each other. This
enables them to hide the sadistic psychology that drives them.
And because it is impossible to prove that people are thinking
“correctly”, the elite’s desire can never be satisfied. Pathocrats and
libertines cannot be appeased. In a futile attempt to appease her
attackers, Milli Hill offered her online platform to a Bame birthing
expert. For this, her accusers amplified her guilt by adding racism to the
accusation of transphobia. They shamed her for not paying the Bame woman for
her work, and accused her of being a “white saviour”. The simple fact of Hill’s
continued existence was an irresistible invitation to degrade her further. But
still, they cloaked their cruelty in the language of kindness. Lacking the
courage of the Sadean libertine, her tormentors clung to their progressive
ideology, for fear, as Lobaczewski observed, that without it “nothing would
remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive”.
It’s that nakedness we see when a mob is implored to “punch a fucking
Terf” or a Hamas terrorist decapitates a dying Jew with a garden hoe.
Yet those who raise their fists in support are, without doubt, on “the right side of history” —
that is, the winning side. Pathocrats almost always win, the few silencing the
many, because it’s easier to be kind than to love.
If we are to survive this cruelty in the name of kindness, we need to
separate what’s benign and beautiful in progressive ideologies from the
pathological underbelly that’s overwhelmed them. We need to salvage tolerance
and inclusion for all trans people from the attack on science and single-sex
spaces undertaken in their name. We need to rescue the universalism of the
civil rights movement from an anti-racism that reverses the terms of a
malevolent racial hierarchy in the name of justice. We need to protect present
and future generations from the consequences of environmental degradation
without sacrificing the poor to gratify an apocalyptic vanity. And we need to
seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.
Lobaczewski concluded that normal people protest against pathocrats
“from the depths of their own souls and their human nature”. They protest
against the evisceration of their language,
the denigration of their values and the unjustified status of the elites who
govern them. If we allow pathocrats to control our institutions and
corporations, the future will #BeKind.
We must remember that it’s their weakness, not their strength, that
compels the pathocrats to silence dissent. As the anti-apartheid campaigner
Nadine Gordimer wrote: “No social system in which a tiny minority must govern
without consent over a vast majority can afford to submit any part of control
of communication.” To break their power means isolating the minority within the
minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion
and opportunism. In this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies.
Having been one of the last prisoners in the Bastille when it was
stormed in July 1789, the Marquis de Sade later found himself in the improbable
position of a revolutionary judge. When the family of his estranged wife,
responsible for his long years of incarceration, were brought before him for
judgement, he chose mercy and spared them from the guillotine, saying: “Such is
the revenge I take upon them.”
