Is Jordan Peterson Right About Activism?

 

Jordan Peterson is not a fan of most contemporary activism – he thinks it’s "appalling" and "almost the lowest calling." He certainly has a point. This is because, as many have rightly pointed out (including yours truly 7 years ago - see my placard theory blog post), it often serves as a form of prideful narcissism and performative social virtue for individuals who should instead be spending most of their time getting their own house in order first.

Of course, for balance, some historical activism has been worthwhile. The Civil Rights Movement, women's suffrage, and labour laws are three prime examples, where people fought to challenge systemic injustice and helped make society a better place. But just because an activity has a few successes, it does not mean the whole thing or even the majority of it is successful. Because the massive increase of narcissism in our society has meant that most activism now functions, less as a pursuit of justice, and more as a stage for personal attention-seeking, tribal signalling and finding a sense of belonging within the in-group.

And the easiest thing about these curated, self-flattering public personas is that the incentives reward virtue-signalling, but require no real intellectual effort, discipline or institutional work behind the stage door. You just turn up, make your symbolic gestures, while privately remaining unable to understand complex scenarios and be the force for good you pretend to be. In fact, I see it as one of the great ironies in modern society that those shouting the loudest about their own virtue are frequently the ones least able to do much social good, and most in need of taking more personal responsibility for their own lives. From getting to know some of these young activists myself, there is an outside chance that they attach themselves to grand political crusades to avoid fixing their own immediate, personal shortcomings.😉

And don’t forget the other psychological trick that goes alongside it; if you make the enemy something abstract enough to defy proper examination (capitalism, the patriarchy, fossil fuels, Israel, immigrants, etc) you further distance yourself from personal accountability, because you fix yourself on the side of a fabricated black vs. white war that has never been adequately defined or understood by pretty much anyone on your side. To that end, most modern day activism comprises some of the most squalid social conduct out there.

The Four Types of Electorate

 

When it comes to the electorate, there are four types of people.

First, there are those who submit themselves to authority with an almost childlike trust. They imagine - often quite sincerely - that those who govern them must also have their best interests at heart, and that wisdom and benevolence naturally accompany power.

Second, there are those who obey not from trust or confidence but from fear or apprehension. They are riddled with internal doubt, yet they consent in order to avoid the repercussions.

These two kinds of people - though they seldom intend it - have, at best, furnished every government with top-down inefficiencies, and, at worst, furnished every tyranny in history with its power and control. That is, no political party has ever ruled by its own competence or strength alone; it is encouraged and carried along by the sub-critical persuasions of group one and the compliance of group two.

But third and fourth consist of two very different groups. Those who will look authority in the face, reject it, and challenge it. Those who say “I see what you're doing, but I'm not having it,” are either a force for good or for bad, depending on the individuals in question. Some reactionary groups - who we’ll call category three - are rather toxic and unwholesome, and in many cases comprise individuals as bad as, or worse than, groups one and two.

But some - who we’ll call group four - have the hearts, minds and wisdom to resist, hold politicians to account, and be a force for good and positive change. 

Try to be in group four, dear reader, because it’s only group four types who give this nation genuine hope - the ones who, when they reach critical mass, see to it that authoritarian systems lose the compliance necessary to sustain themselves, and become disempowered.

On Monothinking

 

The reason it’s hard to take seriously people like Richard Dawkins on religion, Owen Jones on economics, Jermy Corbyn on politics, Naomi Klein on climate change, Afua Hirsch on discrimination, Paul Mason on geopolitics, to name a few examples, is because on that subject they are monothinkers; that is, someone who can only process ideas through a single worldview or framework. Their demand for explanation exceeds their supply, producing the intellectual equivalent of a mispriced asset.

As a consequence, they draw inadequate conclusions because they don’t know what they don’t know. On these subjects, they operate in a permanent state of cognitive overdraft, where they can offer only a single explanation for the thing they oppose: Religious belief = ignorance; wealth = exploitation; inequality = injustice; climate change = doom, discrimination = oppression, and so forth.

This works alongside the slightly more subtle phenomenon of what’s called ‘belief-clustering’, whereby the probability of an individual believing x increases the probability that one could predict their belief on y and z. Like, if I know where you stand on inequality, I can probably predict where you stand on Israel; if I know where you stand on they/them pronouns, I can probably predict where you stand on climate change (interestingly, though, probably not so much if you reverse that); if I know where you stand on feminism, I can probably predict where you stand on welfare and state intervention; if I know where you stand on abortion, I can probably predict where you stand on chastity and homosexuality; that sort of thing.

Don’t be a monothinker, because it gives strong indication that your beliefs have been imprudently implanted, not carefully thought through.

The Psychology of Comfort Recalibration

I’ve noticed a psychological trap that people employ on themselves for consolation when they need the solace of not being all they have the potential to be. Let’s give it a name…..er….let’s call it comfort recalibration. I’d say comfort recalibration is basically like this. If an individual cannot attain some element of the subset of all they have the potential to be – like, say, creatively, morally, vocationally, in discipline, in effort, in treatment of others, in goodness, in intellectual progress, in taking responsibility, etc – they prime themselves not to desire or value it. Like a striving cat that wants the mouse in the shed but forgoes the effort to find it by teaching itself that it’s not really hungry. Cats don’t really do that, by the way, it’s just an illustration.

And in human behaviour, it’s not just priming yourself to believe you don’t really desire what you do, or what you should, at the same time it’s priming yourself to be satisfied with what you can easily obtain. Like if the cat can’t catch the mouse he’s desperate to eat, he pretends that insects and grass are what he really desires (a bad medium to long term strategy, as he’ll soon be malnourished).

Observe people in life and you’ll see how frequently they behave like this, often beneath their own conscious inspection. They can’t get the girl they want, so they tell themselves ‘she’s not all that’ anyway. They can’t get any girl, so they tell themselves that relationships are more hassle than they’re worth. They lack the motivation for health and fitness training, so they tell themselves everyone in the gym is just a performative egoist. They can’t obtain the status they crave, so they denounce it all as a tyranny of unjust inequality. They don’t have the combination of will and skill to think through a complex matter proficiently, so they tell themselves their over-simplified opinion is sufficient to state their case.

The problem is, with enough people like this in society opting out and resorting to their own extension of Wittgensteinian games, not only do the truth narratives get bent all out of shape, but the shared values and standards that can make humanity thrive begin to dissolve. I think this is one of the most prominent assaults on our society and our language, where so many people are rewriting the rules to protect their comfort and their ego. We’ve sleepwalked into becoming a culture that normalises comfort recalibration, and I think that’s why truthseeking and truthtelling are becoming like endangered species. 

See The Individual By Seeing The Group

 

You can tell a lot about the credibility of many views in public discourse by analysing the groups of people who subscribe to them. You can't always tell everything - and obviously you should also draw from further analysis of the propositions - but a good subsidiary way to consider which group is right is to consider the type of people in each group, and work outwards from there. You also get indication, as I've stated before, of what else they are predicted to believe, and then you can start to join the dots and understand that the structure and bad logic of one belief is connected to structure and bad logic of another, and so forth.

Let's take the example of a matter I raised recently in this Blog post, and expand on the psychology even further:

Opinion A: Israel is committing genocide in the Middle East.

Opinion B: Israel is not committing genocide in the Middle East.

Swathes of people are firmly convinced of Opinion A, and swathes of people, myself included, are firmly convinced of Opinion B. Those who hold Opinion A are unlikely to be convinced otherwise, and ditto those who hold Opinion B.

So how do we tackle such a subject, when it causes so much irreconcilable division, so much animosity (even between people with whom we otherwise get on well and like), and evokes so many painful emotions, given the near-inevitable continued bifurcation between Opinion A and B folk?

Even if you knew nothing about the particular propositions at hand, you can get some idea of the likely credibility of the claims by observing the individuals at the group level. I will give you my impression of both groups, from my experience of hearing comprehensively from both sides, and from knowing quite a few people, including extended family, who are based in the Middle East, and have openly shared their perspective. While there are always exceptions, the individuals in Group B (Israel is not committing genocide in the Middle East) tend to be much more balanced, objective and thoughtful in their analysis, while allowing for fair criticism of Israel's handling of some situations. They are also a much broader and more diverse group of people, whose views on other matters would be much harder to predict.

The upshot is, when I look at individual beliefs people have, I try to discern the character and tendencies of the groups behind particular opinions, because it offers a subtle but powerful lens through which to evaluate the driving forces behind those beliefs. Obviously, careful examination of evidence and argument should always take primacy, but knowing the patterns in individuals’ broader beliefs can illuminate potential biases, inconsistencies, and blind spots, and confer high degrees of predictability on what else they are likely to believe.

One final point regarding the claim that Israel is committing genocide: Israel possesses overwhelming military superiority and, if its objective were simply the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, it has the capability to inflict vastly greater casualties than it has. That alone should at least give reasonable observers pause before assuming genocidal intent.

Christians Need To Rise Up

I think it’s high time that Christians spoke more confidently about politics from a Christian perspective, because currently too many Christians are being co-opted by the cultural manipulations and tribal impulses of political parties on both the left and right, who are anti-Christian in their ethos, and corrosive in their influences. 

Some of them are even able to seduce by offering the sort of policies and calls to action that simulate the kind of things one might expect Christians to say, which is why it’s good to remember that darkness often masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). One of the most salutary lessons you can learn about what comes from most of our political parties is that anti-Christian beliefs often try to imitate goodness by counterfeiting it.

Therefore, Christians really shouldn’t keep maintaining a circumspect faith as they nervously dance around a political landscape that seeks to dominate the narrative on subjects over which Christ has given us authority. Too many believers approach political discourse with hesitation, as though their deepest commitments are liabilities rather than sources of truth, justice, clarity and courage. Christian belief is not something that must be cautiously justified before it can be proclaimed. The convictions Christians hold (or should hold) about truth, justice, human dignity, goodness, compassion, etc, should be confidently leading the way in politics, not taking a back seat to party-political ideology and virtue-signalling that’s anti-Christian at source, and hollow in substance.

I don’t, of course, mean that Christian political conviction should always be voiced like a minister delivering a sermon. But there’s no bigger political truth than this: At its best, Christian belief provides the most coherent moral framework for the social considerations of the dignity of every person, the reality of sin, the call to justice, the priority of the vulnerable, the hope of redemption, and the limits of earthly power.

It is time for Christians to recover their voice in a nation that so badly needs to hear it.

The Symmetry of the Extremes

 

The extreme left and extreme right who continue to dominate the headlines may be extremely opposed in viewpoints, but they are highly alike in terms of instincts, temperament, and having the same blind spots. They may hate each other, but they are similar in their underlying psychological style and the way they process social reality.

To think of one or two examples off the top of my head, the extreme right displays a hugely disproportionate hostility towards immigration, whereas the extreme left is too soft, and in denial, refusing to acknowledge any challenges or trade‑offs at all. Another one, the extreme left tends to trivialise or overlook the complex structural and personal factors that leave people struggling financially, while the extreme right frequently lacks the empathy and attentiveness needed to understand the genuine pressures those same people face. And another, the extreme right tends to idealise tradition by demanding conformity, and trivialising diversity in ethnicity, culture and identity, whereas the extreme left tends to idealise equality by demanding conformity, and trivialising diversity in skill, talent, effort, competence, and risk. It would be easy to think of many more examples.

The upshot is that neither side is a healthy one to be on, because both approaches misunderstand more things than they illuminate. Both overlook the complex structural and personal factors that shape people’s circumstances and constrain their choices; both misunderstand the complexity of how people reveal their preferences, and form meaning and belonging; and both extremes build their politics on half‑truths, oversimplifications and extremities that don’t map onto the highly complex, multifaceted lived reality of society

Beneath the bluster, each extreme is animated by the same moral certainty and ideological intransigence, leaving little room for humility, revision, or the possibility that the world is more complicated than their beliefs, policies and slogans allow. And any politics that forgets that will always get the world more wrong than it does right.

Dodgy Lookalike Beliefs

Criticisms of one misjudged thing often mirror the properties of criticisms for other misjudged things. Think of the critique of socialism as a mirror for the critique of identity politics, climate alarmism, cult membership, and groups of that nature. We are critical of socialism, but a key part of that criticism involves a natural critiquing of the motives, intentions and psychological biases that underpin this dubious economics. It’s not like we are saying socialism is flawed because its proponents are of a dodgy ethical and intellectual disposition – it’s that its flaws are based on bad and myopic economics, but also that the bad and myopic economics doesn’t come from nowhere – it is bound up in a whole host of complex psychological, tribal and emotional factors that cannot be divorced from the viewpoints.

The other thing that is clear about extreme left wingers is that what often masquerades as care for the poor is largely a product of intense dislike towards other people’s successes. That is a complex matter that probably deserves a blog of its own (although people like Orwell have made the point before) – but suffice to say here, the inner animus, bitterness, resentment and narcissism that boils up in extreme lefties complaining about the economy and damaging our society is a key driver in the formation of their opinions, and remains a psychological factor that cannot reasonably be divorced from the professed beliefs being espoused.

Similarly, to have a proper understanding of dodgy lookalike groups like the aforementioned, one needs to understand the mental manifold that drives the beliefs, and the cultural patterns that give rise to this kind of conditioning. Certain people who are ideally psychologically primed make good candidates for extremism and cultism. The main thing to keep at the forefront of your mind is that those involved in extreme religious or political fundamentalism are not really concerned about the information they are peddling. They write as though the content is everything - but really it isn't - they are just groups of people who have the kind of psychological disposition that is best fed by a 'my way or the wrong way' kind of mentality.

And, as ever, the old chicken and egg question looms large: does predisposition to ungrace cause a gravitation to fundamentalism, or does assent to fundamentalism cause consequent ungrace? And we can no doubt add many other variables to that structural model.

 

The Economics of Exaggerated Victimhood

 

We keep hearing about increased anxiety in young people, and an increase in perceived victimhood. This might not be so strange except for the fact that there’s a good argument to be made that, negative social media influences aside, young Brits have been brought up in one of, if not the most, privileged, safest, most prosperous, most peaceable societies that’s ever been created. So, on the surface, you might think it strange that there is increased anxiety in young people, and an increase in perceived victimhood. But I have a theory that probably explains at least some of it.

This current society is one in which material risk and genuine adversity are relatively scarce - so in economic terms, you could say that the demand for meaningful challenges has begun to exceed the available supply. This imbalance creates a kind of market distortion in which individuals, unable to compete effectively in the constrained market for competence, shift toward the effectively more elastic market for perceived victimhood. In other words, because competence is constrained by reality (inelastic) while victimhood claims are effectively limitless (elastic) – the dynamic creates an effect whereby, because claims of harm can be produced at near‑zero marginal cost and yield high and often unjustified social returns in the form of various signalling effects, the result is inflation.

On top of that, there is another tactic employed to expand the supply of available victimhood claims – just keep broadening the definition of a problem until it applies to you. For example, in a society where racism, sexism or other forms of unfair discrimination become less frequent, the incentive emerges to stretch those categories to capture ever‑smaller offences or affronts, effectively increasing the pool of actions or events that can be framed as unfair discrimination.

It’s perhaps to be expected, therefore, that when genuine crises are diminished, synthetic ones emerge to satisfy unmet demand, allowing individuals to capitalise, and help create a market supply that caters for needs that have been exaggerated or fabricated. 

I say all this, not because I’m insensitive to genuine need, victimhood, and harm – because I’m really not. I’m actually highly sensitive and attuned to other people’s pain and suffering. No, I’m saying it because cultivated or courted victimhood is actually a malady for people’s well-being, because it makes them easy to manipulate. In a hyper-connected world, there is no shortage of bad actors who are looking to invoke your outrage, provocation and disharmony – and in the many exaggerated or fabricated cases, this not only diminishes your well-being, it also distracts you from primary responsibilities, and is highly likely to keep you perennially anxious, unsettled, ungrateful and resentful.

Cutting The Psychological Root Of False Beliefs

It’s strange that so many people believe so many obviously false things (which includes excessive over-interpretations). Let me offer you a hopefully useful way to think about the nature of false beliefs in a more expansive way. When people believe so many false things, you’ll find that those individual false beliefs are often trojan horses for other beliefs, which at their root are usually rationalisations for self-serving interests. If false belief x is really a proxy for false belief y, which is really a justification for self-serving interest z, then you can expect that when people try to justify false belief x they will produce all kinds of auxiliary defences which support x, y, and z.

Let’s take …. I don’t know……rent controls as an example. Rent controls are often defended as a straightforward way to make housing affordable. Yet this surface belief clearly functions as a proxy for a deeper socialist mindset that wants to believe markets are morally suspect and cannot be trusted to allocate essential goods. Beneath that, in turn, lies a self-serving interest in expanding political control over prices while virtue-signalling compassion at low personal cost.

Another example - climate alarmism commonly presents itself as genuine concern for the planet (also ticking the box for virtue-signalling), but in its more extreme forms it also often operates as a vehicle for the belief that only centralised governance can manage society’s problems. That belief then serves an interest in enlarging the scope, budget, and moral authority of the state, while fostering a sense of belonging for those involved in the cause.

A third example - cancel culture is often justified by the claim that certain speech causes direct harm and therefore must be curtailed. But this claim frequently masks a broader belief that some ideas are illegitimate and should not be heard at all, which itself supports a self-serving interest in status and power through moral gatekeeping. Hence the rapid escalation of rhetoric in which disagreement becomes “hate speech”, offence becomes “harm”, and enforcement is applied selectively to protect the gatekeepers’ own norms.

In all the above cases, you’ll notice too that justifications are offered by depicting challenges as unvirtuous, and they treat the economic and social costs of intervention as negligible or non-existent. At the same time, the short-term psychological benefits (but longer term psychological harm) are that these beliefs and causes stabilise identity, elevates status, and legitimise control to lessen anxiety - while allowing all of this to be experienced as perceived moral virtue. And it should be blindingly obvious now why most politicians jump on board with this – it serves the majority of their interests and conveniently aligns with what much of the electorate believes and seeks comfort in.

It’s much the same with protectionism too (political, economic and intellectual protectionism) - it is commonly defended as a way of saving domestic jobs, and protecting belief systems, yet this belief frequently substitutes for the assumption that exchange of goods, services and ideas is zero-sum and that external gain must imply internal loss. And, of course, that assumption conveniently serves political interests and intellectual grifters tied to protected industries or organisations. And you’ll probably notice too that political, economic and intellectual protectionism all present competition (of goods, services or ideas) as predation rather than cooperation.

You can see this too, of course, in young earth creationism - which is usually expressed as a claim about the age of the Earth based on the hyper literal interpretation of Genesis – but, of course, it frequently acts as a trojan horse for a deeper need for worldly things to remain subordinate to their particular theological reading to assuage fear and insecurity (see here). That, in turn, serves the preservation of group identity, perceived moral and spiritual superiority, and theological and communal authority.

Naturally, we could go on and on with further examples, but suffice to say, I think all the above is an important thing to understand in critical thinking. In each case of false beliefs, the surface belief attracts intense defensive pleading against all reason and evidence because it is psychologically, socially and culturally load-bearing. To abandon it would not merely concede an error; it would threaten the deeper beliefs, identity and interests it surreptitiously supports.

And consequently, to be rescued from false beliefs in the x and y category really means addressing the deeper interests in z that they protect. It requires more than correcting facts or pointing out errors of reasoning or interpretation; it requires lowering the psychological, social, and moral costs of abandoning those beliefs, and offering alternative ways for people to secure identity, meaning, and status without having to defend what is demonstrably false. Because the reality is, until the need for status, power, identity, belonging or moral superiority is met by the proper means - that of truth, competence and authentic virtue - and until the underlying psychological and social payoffs are removed or replaced, the false beliefs that pervade our society will continue to be defended with ever-greater ingenuity, precisely because so much else depends on them.

Betraying The Rules Of Truth & Reason

 

Many dodgy belief systems are based on accepting propositions that are so obviously not true or factual, it really is remarkable to me how and why people assent to such beliefs. What I find most remarkable (and disturbing) is how so many people who believe these things appear to have zero chance of budging from their folly, or exhibiting even a flicker of curiosity towards the opposing (and truthful) propositions. It's one of the strangest things about human beings, but many have become inured to it by its ability to become so commonplace.

The main reason it's so utterly strange is because it wantonly betrays what I call the rules of truth and reason - the rules that most humans ordinarily act as though they value most of the time. You have to think of the rules of truth and reason as being a bit like a language game to which we all know the rules. The reason the world of beliefs has become so muddied is quite a bit to do with the fact that most humans are not willing to pay the full costs of truthseeking, but perhaps even more to do with the fact that language has been so readily transposed and distorted. 

Think of the rules of truth and reason as being a bit like a game of snooker. The rules of snooker include procedures about how and when you should take your shots - like potting a red and then a colour, like how each colour is worth a different number of points, like how only one player can be playing at the table on any given shot, and so forth. If you depart from these rules, then you are no longer playing snooker. If you play by those rules, but cheat when your opponent isn't looking, you are no longer playing a fair game.

The same applies to the rules of truth and reason - they are fairly well fixed in a way that makes language meaningful, in a way that makes arguments logical, and in a way that makes the rational and the empirical essential tools for discovery - but they are only the explicit ones. There are implicit rules that are more like obligations - like the obligation to be open to learning from more informed sources, like the obligation to consent to rational persuasion, like the obligation to change your mind when the counter-arguments are compelling, and like the obligation to embrace facts and truths over convenient and expedient falsehoods. These are duties and responsibilities that have been widely compromised by the many who attempt to create the illusion that they are playing by the same language game, but are really not.

The Most Shocking Changes Your Old Self Wouldn't Have Believed

 

Imagine if you were a child of the 1970s or 80s in Britain, and you went into a coma, and then awoke in 2025. I’m sure lots would startle you about how things have changed, especially technologically. But I doubt there’d be much that would shock you more than the following four things: 

1)     The absurd phenomenon of men competing in women’s sports, using women’s toilets, and being incarcerated in women’s prisons, where a significant proportion of the nation’s population is actively encouraging it, and witch hunting those who actually stand up for real women’s rights and oppose it. 😠

2)     That so many people have become so insane and hysterical about climate change and alarmist environmentalism, and can’t see through the scam artists at the top who are pushing this for their own ideological and financial agenda. 😠

3)     The severe undermining of robust debate and free speech in mainstream institutions, but especially in universities. Universities, once bastions of learning, free enquiry and spirited debate, are now havens of woke, supine, censorious cancel culture, almost unrecognisable from the institutions of academic excellence that once defined them.  😠

4)     Or on a lighter note, that the writer of the blog you're currently reading has been churning out posts of such scintillating quality, unflagging wit and unbroken consistency for so many years - and yet still walks among the unfamous, with no viral YouTube channel to his name. 😀

How We Made a Nation Too Fragile to Cope

 

You’ve probably noticed it’s hard to state tough and unpleasant truths without sounding unsympathetic; but that is quite strange when you think about it - for it’s quite easy to be sympathetic to genuine cases of x but also speak frankly about false claims or instances of x that cause mass harm (see my blog post here for further commentary on this phenomenon).   

Last week, I mentioned a horrible problem to solve, as we hear that Britain is sliding 'into economic crisis' over our £85bn sickness bill. I’ve touched on what I think are some of the problems and solutions in a previous blog post (see here). And I take absolutely zero pleasure in saying that I’ve been warning about this danger for years - especially how we’ve coddled young minds in a way that’s left many of them ill-equipped to face life head on, much less pursue the adventure that life offers all who pursue her courageously and truthfully. And this plight is especially bad for weak young men, because there is nothing good at all about being a weak man (either for men or women). And let me remind you, being strong here doesn’t mean aggressive, excessively dominant, or hard - it means the strength to endure, to be brave, to take responsibility, to be vulnerable, secure, and grounded.

What underlies the UK’s rise in sickness-related economic inactivity, increased anxiety, and a lack of strength, perspective, resilience and responsibility is a crisis that will be very hard to peel back. Hard, but absolutely necessary, as we simply cannot go on like this. The UK has been beset by a culture of dependency and avoidance - where personal responsibility and resilience have been eroded by a system that over-pathologises normal life struggles, and tells too many people they are sick or hopeless when they are really struggling to function adequately or simply unmotivated (the type 1 and type 2 error problem I discussed in the blog linked above).

Everyone knows the positive effects of our becoming more aware and accommodating of illness and mental health (reducing stigma, encouraging people to seek help, increasing understanding, etc). But I think few can deny now that in the past decade and a half the pendulum has swung too far toward medicalising ordinary life challenges, lowering expectations of resilience and responsibility, creating a culture of dependency and over-reliance on the state, and in some cases even producing systemic incentives against work.

Alas, I actually doubt whether there is an easily manageable solution to this - we’ve let things get too out of hand - and there are certain impediments to reversal. One of which is that the people who superficially find advantage from this dependency culture reap most of the benefits while the rest shoulder most of the costs (although the ‘benefits’ enjoyed by the former group are, of course, a poisoned chalice). Second is that the politicians, media and institutions have deliberately orchestrated this to secure compliance and control, and feather their own nests, so it’s unlikely that they will willingly unwind it or champion virtues that undermine it, for fear of compromising their own careers, and of a backlash from the wokerati.

The task of restoring shared responsibility and purpose, while balancing it with compassion and expectation, is hard to achieve at the best of times. But given that the culture has shifted so deeply, it feels prohibitively difficult. But not impossible, because, as with most things, I think the erosion of personal responsibility, resilience, virtue and a more strongly integrated shared moral framework coincides with the decline of Christianity in this country. And plenty of great writers, many before most of us were born, warned societies that a lack of Christianity means the decline of a narrative of meaning, moral duty, and transcendent purpose. It’s one of the many ways in which the decline of Christianity has left a vacuum that secular institutions haven’t filled well.

Picking Sides

People love to pick sides. What's astonishing is how often they choose not just the wrong side - but the one that's completely opposed to what's right. It’s also surprising this happens so often, as picking sides is usually a lot easier than many people make it look. To show how easy it is - and in a way that should be blindingly obvious - let’s identify some of the big topics that flood our news and media, and see how easy it is to pick the right side.

In the battle over free speech, pick the side that authentically champions free speech and cares about individual liberty with responsibility, not the people trying to suppress it for their own perverse agenda. Regarding economics, pick the side that understands why an economy is less efficient when controlled through politically motivated short-sighted central planning, and favour free markets except in cases where a more top-down organisational structure is more effective than bottom-up. At the same time, be sympathetic to a socialistic mindset in terms of community, mutual help and support, and shared social responsibility outside of the market economy. And always pick the side that understands the price system and knows the harmful effects of price fixing.

On climate alarmism, side with reason over hysteria. Acknowledge that climate change needs addressing with intelligence, but reject the doomsday cult that insists we have only ten years left, every decade, forever. Understand that real solutions come from innovation, adaptation, and pragmatic policy - not panic-driven demands to dismantle modern civilisation.

On the issue of biological sex, side with biological reality: men cannot become women. A man identifying as a woman does not make him one, no matter how sincerely he believes it or how loudly others demand agreement. Don’t let men in women’s sports, prisons or toilets - it’s absurd.

Champion equality of opportunity, and reject both overt racism and unfair discrimination, but also reject the modern mutation that sees racism and unfair discrimination in everything. And pick the side that rewards competence and effort, not one that dilutes excellence in the name of equality of outcome. At the same time, be mindful and sympathetic to individuals who genuinely need a helping hand through no fault of their own – and even show grace when it is their fault. Regarding the messy victimhood culture, pick the side that encourages sympathy, compassion, resilience and personal responsibility, not the one that weaponises suffering and compassion, elevates grievance to a virtue and turns fragility into power.

Regarding immigration, be a global citizen - be tolerant, and acknowledge the immense benefits of immigration, but understand that there will be serious problems if it’s uncontrolled or out of control and excessively concentrated in certain socio-economically challenged areas of the UK, especially with groups who have many values we find, at best, challenging and, at worst, abhorrent.

In the debate between evolution and young earth creationism, side with the overwhelming evidence for evolution while retaining your faith in God. Don’t fall in with those who reject science because it threatens their narrow interpretation of scripture. At the same time, see the obvious compatibility between Christianity and science, because it’s easy to understand why we shouldn’t look for scientific truths in the Bible.

And while this last one is more complex (see here, here, here and here), in the Middle Eastern conflict, don’t side with malevolent forces working against God’s chosen people, Israel. If you’re siding with fanatical Islamists who rape and behead women and who proudly want to wipe Israel off the map, consider that you’re going drastically wrong in your analysis somewhere. At the same time, realise that Israel has been under immense existential threat for decades, and because of that (among other factors), it isn’t behaving well in every situation, and have deep sympathy for all the citizens of every nation involved who are the main victims of their government’s military actions.

Here’s what you should know now - it took me just twelve minutes to think of those examples and write that blog post, and I only decided to write it literally ten minutes before that. And while each case is complex, and could be unpacked with more consideration - in my defence, I have done this repeatedly in past articles - the point is, it’s very easy to intuitively know which side is closer to being right then wrong, and it’s remarkably easy to land on the side that aligns with reason, decency, and basic reality - if you care about the right things, and haven't surrendered your intellect to nonsense, and your conscience to tribalism or fear.

Sexual Equality = More Domestic Violence?

I saw on Tyler Cowen's blog that he was a little perplexed by the fact that the Nordic countries are supposed to be the most sex-equal nation in the world (he says "gender-equal nations", but that's the wrong term), but yet alongside this, they also appear to have a disproportionately high rate of domestic violence against women.

Tyler, who from what I've seen doesn't get perplexed about very much, is perplexed because "logically violence against women would be expected to drop as women gained equal status in a society". To me, that expectation is far from obvious - so much so, in fact, that I'd even be inclined to expect the opposite: that as women gain equal status the likelihood of violence against them increases.

Don't get me wrong, I'd really love it not to be the case, and as male attitudes towards women hopefully continue to improve, then that societal betterment may well offset some of the aforementioned increased likelihood of violence. But given that men have equal status with other men and fight all the time, I wouldn't have thought the 'equal status' factor is the thing that reduces incidents of male violence against women.

A study from a few years back explored this contradiction - the so-called Nordic paradox. Why, after all, should it be perplexing? If a boy grows up being told that men are stronger than women, and that a “real man” never hits a woman, he’s learned a kind of protective chivalry rooted in hierarchy. But if that same boy is instead taught that men and women are equal in jut about every way - and that chivalry is patronising or patriarchal - then why wouldn’t we expect some men to treat women as physical equals, including in moments of conflict? That's not a defence of violence, obviously - it’s simply a reminder of the age-old economic wisdom of unintended side effects. Equality changes not just laws and opportunities, but also the cultural scripts that once governed restraint.

There may be other factors at play here, though - like, for example, perhaps people in the Nordic countries are more likely to report abuse. Often a society with lower reported rates have much lower reporting rates, and this may be true in reverse here, especially as Nordic women’s high economic independence might also mean they’re less financially trapped in abusive relationships, so abuse is more likely to be reported or result in prosecution.

There are many unintended consequences in life, and this might be one such case. 

Cloaked and Framed: The Twin Tactics of Deception

 

Let me ask you a question, first associated with the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann. This question is easy, and you should get it right in seconds. But it sounds harder than it is, and therefore many of you probably won’t get it right in seconds. Here it is:

Two trains are 20 miles apart, moving steadily toward one another on the same track. At the very front of one engine, a fly takes off and begins darting toward the other train. As soon as it reaches it, the fly instantly turns around and heads back to the first train - repeating this back-and-forth dash again and again. The little fly keeps this up without rest until the trains finally collide, crushing it in between. The fly maintains a speed of 15 miles per hour, while each train chugs forward at 10 miles per hour. How much ground does the fly cover before meeting its unfortunate end?

The answer is 15 miles. If it wasn’t immediately obvious to you, once I elaborate, you’ll see why it might have been. Each train is moving toward the other at 10 miles per hour, so their combined closing speed is 20 miles per hour. Since they start 20 miles apart, they will collide in 1 hour. That’s an easy calculation. An even easier one is that if the fly is constantly flying at 15 miles per hour, and the trains take 1 hour to collide, then the fly will have travelled a total distance of 15 miles before it gets squashed.

The answer being 15 miles is not tricky. But what interests me here is how an easy question can appear hard due to the way it is worded, where those considering the question become overwhelmed by the extraneous information, by how the question is phrased, and by how the style of the question appears to be asking the reader to sum the converging series of fly movements back and forth rather than just asking a simple mathematics question (see my blog post on the Wason selection task for a similar example).

I believe this observation - and its converse - has practical application in many areas of public discourse. It’s what I observe as cloaking in overcomplexity, and its converse, framing in oversimplicity.

Cloaked in overcomplexity
When people want to deceive you, they often cloak a narrative with unnecessary (but enticing) detail, encouraging the public to reach for a complex approach (e.g., summing an infinite series of fly trips) rather than recognising the simplicity of the situation. The ever-increasing bureaucracies (taxation, regulation, risk, health and safety, etc) are classic political examples of this. The media and its employment of propaganda is another; overwhelming people with irrelevant data, half-truths, or emotionally provocative content, are tools used to obscure what’s often actually a more straightforward set of truths. Likewise, in some branches of philosophy - especially moral philosophy and epistemology - people sometimes get bogged down in edge cases at the expense of a clearer conception of the fundamentals.

And, I think, by far the most harmful cases of this are when it comes to the Christian gospel - where the most straightforward message of God’s love and grace is frequently overcomplicated by intellectual gatekeeping and analytical abstraction. Don’t get me wrong, these deep dives into theological complexity can be fun and informative, but they are best understood when one has got a grip on the basics first, and accepted Christ as Lord, not as an in prospect game of mental gymnastics that seeks to undermine or obfuscate the faith.

At its core, the gospel is breathtakingly straightforward: God loves you. Jesus died and rose again to reconcile you to God. Trust in Him, and you are forgiven, free, and fully loved. We’re not called to dumb down the gospel - just to remove the unnecessary fog and let the light shine clearly. Like Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:2, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Ideally, the best gospel communication comes in simple, accessible and gentle form, before it gets so deep, profound and bold.

Framed in oversimplicity
Just as complexity can be fabricated through cloaking, oversimplicity can be misleading too. Over-simplification is perhaps in the top few human follies, where folk oversimplify intricate systems and lead to poorly thought-out policies or public reactions. And this is not only an interesting dynamic in relation to the cloaking in overcomplexity problem, it actually means that the public is getting misled at both ends. On the one hand, bad agents habitually cloak a narrative with unnecessary but enticing detail to ensure you miss the simplicity of what’s faulty about their claim. Yet often in the same speech, debate article or policy, they get you in the opposite way by using oversimplicity to mislead you in other direction. This means some propositions simultaneously sound logical on the surface, but fail under scrutiny, and sound reasonable under a cloaked narrative, but defective when the rhetorical smoke clears and the proposition is examined in the light of clear reasoning.

The upshot is, being aware of how presentation affects perception helps us evaluate arguments based on content, not just style. And it gives us the language - and hopefully the courage - to pull people up when they’re guilty of cloaking in overcomplexity and/or framing in oversimplicity. Once you recognise the pattern - whether it's unnecessary complication or deceptive simplification - you're harder to mislead.

Virtue Disguised In False Light

 

In case you haven’t noticed what’s been happening in the past few decades, regarding some of the most toxic things in society right now, I’ve developed a handy checklist: 

1) Victimhood ideology disguised as compassion 

2) Tyrannical ideology disguised as social justice 

3) Nanny-state ideology disguised as responsibility 

4) Authoritarian ideology disguised as leadership 

5) Censorship ideology disguised as safeguarding 

6) Conformist ideology disguised as unity 

7) Groupthink ideology disguised as empathy 

8) Intolerance ideology disguised as inclusivity 

9) Disintegration ideology disguised as tolerance 

All connected to and underpinned by the worst and most pervasive one: 

10) Anti-Christ ideologies disguised as virtue.

Remember, the term antichrist literally means something or someone that is "against Christ" or "opposed to Christ" - not to be confused with the specific figure of The Antichrist prophesied in scripture (although they are related, of course)

I hope you thought about each one carefully, and didn’t just whizz past them. These are a great many of the fundamental assaults on UK society right now. 

Now, I’m not one for conspiracy theories - because most things that sound like a conspiracy theory usually are. But what I’m now going to say might sound like a bit like conspiracy to the uninitiated, but it really isn’t. These ideologies are, in part, a deliberate, orchestrated attempt to undermine Christian truths and influences by people who seek to acquire or protect the self-serving power, authority and influence they have attained. And they are, in part, the results of a scrambled bottom-up attempt of individuals to present themselves as solutions to societal problems, but are in reality, distortions and dismantlement of the values that Christianity upholds.

The promotion of division, control, conformity, intolerance and the disintegration of the family unit under the guise of compassion and tolerance, is a combined deliberate and accidental attempt to undermine Christian principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, and the sanctity of the family unit. Christianity teaches the importance of personal accountability, love, and truth, while these ideologies distort those virtues to elevate the state, the collective or the powerful individuals in society over God.

In many of the bottom-up cases, this erosion is a passive shift, but in the top-down attempts, it is a deliberate Promethean re-engineering of societal norms aimed at replacing the Divine standards. And for those who study God’s word, the Bible gives many prophecies about this, and in addition to antichrist influences (especially in the letters of John), the Bible presents a vivid and alarming picture of the rise of The Antichrist; a deceptive end-times ruler who emerges onto the world stage through political cunningness and spiritual deceit.

For example, in Daniel 7 and 8, he is symbolised as a "little horn" who arises among ten kings, speaking boastfully and waging war against God’s people. Daniel 8 elaborates that this figure will be skilled in manipulation, will cause deceit to prosper, and will consider himself superior to others. These passages point to a political ascent marked by strategic conquest, rising from a coalition of nations - perhaps something that simulates a revived modern day version of the Roman Empire in the shape of a global alliance. The Antichrist is more than just one person, of course, it’s a form of dominance that is deeply political, and one which has the power to subdue others to consolidate its own authority.

In 2 Thessalonians 2:3-12, St. Paul echoes this warning, describing the Antichrist as the “man of lawlessness.” - which I take to mean someone who can exalt himself above all that is called God and will sit in the temple of God proclaiming himself to be divine. In a way that Nietzsche forewarned (although with a different perspective), he will use false signs and deceptive wonders to mislead those who have rejected the truth, blending political control with religious dominance. I know that tyrants who act as a counterfeit Messiah, and elicit spiritual/political/economic deception to unify and control the masses under his rule, are nothing new - but I think what’s more compelling about these prophecies is a matter of scale.

We now live in times in which mass global connectivity and worldwide attention is possible, and I think that is going to be one of the key elements in the fulfilment of these prophecies (this globalised factor is also true of prophecies like in Matthew 24:14, Revelation 11:9-10, Revelation 13:7, Revelation 13:14-18, Revelation 16:14-16, Revelation 18:11-17). For the Antichrist to appear as the beast from the sea, empowered by Satan, and rule over every tribe, language, and nation, we need a globalised world, and this is symbolised as a modern day fall of Babylon – which is a symbol of the world’s corrupt political and economic systems.

I’m not saying we live in the final part of end times (although I know many Christians who believe we do) - but it should be plain to see that at the heart of this contemporary transformation is a rejection of God’s authority, and a push to place ultimate power in human hands, whether through state control, ideological conformity, social engineering or simply masses of individuals acting on their own whims and desires unaware of the bigger picture or influence this is having. And it should also be plain to see that these are the same mechanisms that are foretold in those prophecies. They all work not only to undermine the individual’s relationship with God, but also to replace the Divine order with a gradual collapse of the moral and spiritual values that lead us all the way up to God’s Truth in Christ.

A Reflection

By and large, I don’t get heavily involved in much politics (and certainly not party politics) or mainstream media narratives. For years, I’ve got a strong sense of how things really work, with the narrative cartel’s hands behind the curtain, and that has only enhanced as I’ve got older, and the world has become even more under their thrall (see my blog The Maze and the Watchtower: Seeing Beyond the Illusion for an initial eye-opener). The world, for all its top-down pretences, is steered not by democracy, the perceived good for the electorate, or the supposed will of the people, but by a quiet, calculating network of manipulators who understand that the easiest way to control a population is not through overt tyranny, but through the careful engineering of ideas, beliefs and perception. I think the more we delve into it together, the clearer you’d see how things really are.

I understand how, for some, this can sound like conspiracy theory, but I can assure you it’s not. This narrative cartel really do understand that fear, anxiety and division are the most potent political currencies, and they mint them in national, and sometimes global quantities, with the primary aim of keeping the masses unapprised, disoriented, alienated, and perpetually in need of interventions that just happen to consolidate more power in the hands of the very people who either caused the problems or pretend they have the solutions to them.

And without being too much of a Cassandra figure (I prefer Jeremiah), I’ve long since come to conclude, often reluctantly, that with the continual acquiescence of the people, there is no realistic way to significantly change things or thwart the aims of this cabal of puppet masters. As well as seizing control of the narrative, they’ve convinced most people that they should be begging for more of it. They are doing the devil’s work for him. And like quicksand, I believe the more people struggle to get out of it through some opposing ideology, tribal loyalty, or even some well-meaning solutions, the more they are dragged under, and the faster they’re pulled into the suffocating depths - because division is a key part of the deception.

Consequently, I’ve resolved to live in a way that tries as best as I can to detach myself from it, knowing that the best life I can live is one that centres itself on God, scripture, on my loved ones, friends, family, private learning, and being servant-hearted in church.

Increasingly, detachment from the above has enabled even more devoted Christian living, and has enhanced my well-being even more, because the above merely distracts and draws us into situations that take the attention off the most valuable things. For me, detachment is not mere resignation - it is a conscious act of preserving my soul’s clarity - actively disassociating myself from the endless spectacle of the superficial maze-running narratives. I believe it’s the only way to find real exhilaration, freedom and peace.

Sure, I do partake in commentary on these matters, in the hope that it might help others detect the cheat and the sheer amount of emotional and intellectual resources it drains from the preoccupants, but I endeavour to not let it steal my gaze from the things of eternal value. 

Beliefs of Steel

 

Steel-manning is the opposite of straw-manning – it is the principle of presenting the strongest possible version of your opponent’s argument. I have frequently used steel-manning throughout my life, to understand opposing views more clearly, to sharpen my own reasoning, and to attempt to build the strongest arsenal of personal views and beliefs that I can. It’s an essential tool for intellectual honesty.

I have a theory that the harder it is to steelman a belief or proposition, the less likely that belief or proposition is to be true. It’s well within our ability to believe A over B - where if B has some merit or interesting tenets of consideration, but is still believed to be inferior to A – and yet still use the steel-manning technique to make a reasonable case for B. Out of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, I believe Charlotte is, by a small margin, the more accomplished novelist. But I could write a good steel-manning case for Emily being the better writer. I believe we have free will (to a certain degree), but I could write a steel-manning paper that convincingly argues that free will is not, in fact, built into the material substrate of a wholly deterministic universe. On interpretations of quantum theory, I believe that quantum collapse is an objective physical process, and that it occurs independently of human measurement. Still, I could steelman a defence of alternative interpretations - whether Copenhagen, decoherence, or many-worlds - and such an exercise would make for a stimulating discussion.

Now, when confronted with a belief or viewpoint that you find prohibitively difficult to steelman – where, even if you tried your very best, and made the most honest, rigorous attempt to argue for its case, you still found it’s not even possible to get off the ground - you probably have a very good reason to conclude that that idea is not just folly, but beyond even a reasonable defence of non-folly. For example, I find it prohibitively difficult to steelman young earth creationism – it is just so plain wrong that there isn’t a rational defence that can be made; the only defence occurs through lies, blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations of evidence. I know young earth creationism is wrong – not just because there is no evidence to believe it is right – but also because I find it impossible to steelman.

I find the same with Islam. While it isn’t built on the same kind of empirical lies, blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations of evidence as young earth creationism - as a Christian, I could steel man atheism a lot more easily than I could steelman Islam. There is just nothing about Islam that convinces me it’s anything other than a wholly man-made religion that has evolved into a very false dominant belief system through cultural contagion and hegemonic power structures. Where it speaks truths, its truths are already found in Judaism and Christianity, and where it speaks untruths or makes inaccurate deviations from better religions, it exposes itself as derivative and unreliable.

Sure, if you’re a Muslim young earth creationist you are probably not convinced (😊). But that’s only due to being wedded to the very falsities that steel-manning attempts to expose – it doesn’t undermine the efficacy of the proposition itself. Because you only need to pick something that does fall far from your intellectual purlieus – say, flat earth theory, holocaust denial, or astrology – and see why, to most people, they are just as un-steelmannable, because their claims have been tested and found wanting, and no rigorous defence can survive contact with empirical scrutiny.

So that’s my tip for today; the harder it is to steelman a belief or proposition, the less likely it is to be true. And if you are competent at steel-manning, and find something impossible to steelman, then that thing is almost certainly false.

On Positive Discrimination

Refusing to treat someone fairly because of their skin colour used to be the epitome of the racism we've tried so hard to weed out of society. It has always been so obviously wrong that it's shocking to learn anyone ever entertained the idea. If when reading that you pictured the person being discriminated against having black skin, I'm sure you will agree with me.

Remarkably, though, when some people make the same statement but with the signs reversed - that is, by saying that it's ok to refuse to treat white or Asian people fairly because of their skin colour by hiring people on the basis of their black skin, they don't feel as outraged, and simply call it positive discrimination.

It is peculiar to me that they can use the same type of reasoning and the same type of unfair prejudice as the racists of the past, but one gets deplored and the other gets lauded. Racism against black people is deplorable, whereas racism against white people and Asians is laudable if you just call it 'positive discrimination'.

Positive discrimination on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity is not only racist against white people and Asians, it's actually damaging to black people too. Suppose we have a university that practices positive discrimination. Among the black students there will be those who got in on merit and those who did not. Many of the latter group will be out of their depth, and many of the former group will have their achievements called into question, under the suspicion that they were chosen on the basis of skin colour not competence.