How institutional capture happened

Transing from slow corrosion to clearly dysfunctional.

I was chatting online with friends, contemplating how the evil—that a proper response to a gender non-conforming child is to hormonally and surgically mutilate and sterilise them—and preposterous—that someone with a penis could be a woman—nonsense of Trans genderwoo had captured so many institutions so quickly.

Alex Au Yang on Unsplash.

As the friend asked:

I was fighting this mad identitarian crap in 1995 and yet the institutional takeover stunned even me—the sheer speed of it.

How so?, how so quickly?, how so pervasively? All are excellent questions. The Trans genderwoo is particularly egregious but is part of a larger pattern of institutional dysfunction—for example, the way that elite US universities continue to flagrantly violate the law so as to racially bias their student intake and hiring practices.

There is a long story of institutional failure here. One example is how “pinkwashed” American schooling is. As YouTuber Rudyard Lynch observes:

0:40 When I was growing up, they would say, "Oh, we stopped teaching history around dates and facts. We teach it about themes and values and that stuff." And that was just used to rationalize teaching propaganda and not actually teaching history.

A remarkable series of claims have in recent years been markers of what “good people” believe, of moral and intellectual respectability. To just take some Trans-relevant ones:

A person with a penis can be a woman.

There is no problem having someone who has gone through male puberty competing in women’s sports. (Why, pray tell, is there a category of “women’s sports” in the first place?)

The surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors for gender non-conforming behaviour represents care and compassion.

Comedian and commentator Dave Rubin and psychologist Jordan Peterson recently wrestled with this in a YT clip—specifically, why so many “good liberals” either put up so little resistance or actively facilitated what became a flood of self-righteous nonsense. Jordan Peterson made the following observation:

0:28 I've come to understand something over the last 8 years that I didn't understand in the beginning—as certainly not as well anyways—is that liberal individualism only works when the collective is so well established that you can take it for granted.

A lot of what went on is the result of both liberals and conservatives trusting institutions to behave appropriately, to continue to do their job competently. This faith has proved to be grotesquely misplaced.

Very little of this flood was endorsed by voters, had wide popular support or any strong evidentiary basis: this was especially so with the Trans genderwoo (aka the Transcult). It is striking how successful the non-electoral politics of institutional capture has been: indeed, that success is what has to be explained. Clearly, the mechanisms of accountability in key institutions did not work anywhere near well enough: at least not to resist the pressures they were placed under.

So, the short answer to how? is: some mix of inadequate mechanisms of accountability and/or the decay of such mechanisms. This means we have to look at social—particularly institutional—dynamics.

Social dynamics

I have previously discussed the notion of an institutional commons. An institutional commons is:

interacting institutions¹ within a territory that covers conflicts between institutions, or other individuals or groups, by having default arbitrators (such as rulers, councils and courts) and rules with remedies (law).²

To function, an institutional commons requires effective social infrastructure—patterns of norms, expectations and social connections that sustain cooperative behaviour, including pro-social institutions. Together, they create a social commons.

Like any common resource, a social commons can be built up and maintained by people investing in it and it can be degraded by extractive, or otherwise socially destructive, behaviour that undermines its functioning—especially if that behaviour alienates others within the society. We can see an extreme version of such debauching of the social commons in South Africa and a milder version in the United Kingdom, one that is generating plenty of voter alienation.

Economists have got migration so badly wrong by treating countries as if they are just places where transactions happen and playing little or no attention to the problems of social commons and of social resilience. Most of the potential costs of migration are thereby excluded from their analysis.

The capture of institutions by Trans genderwoo, and other unpopular moral novelties, involved shifts in norms and expectations. This has included the policing of social connections to enforce conformity to said moral novelties. Poet Jenny Lindsay’s book Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars provides examples of how viciously that works: as does this article.

This capture of institutions has involved the spread of new cultural schemas (social framings) and scripts (patterns of action) concentrated in social networks and milieus with disproportionate power over and within institutions. It has used, as we shall see, the mechanisms and patterns—status, norms, imitation—that make us Homo sapiens so much the cultural species.

It matters that we are talking about networks, as networks have a tendency towards monopoly—the bigger the network, the larger the benefit in belonging to it and the cheaper it is to add a new member. It turns out, creating shared status games—markers of what make you a good person—can generate powerful conformity pressures within social networks: especially if those social connections are then policed by the stigmatisation of dissent.

Slow factors

What we are looking at in these patterns of institutional dysfunction, epitomised by the adoption of Trans genderwoo, is boiling frog institutional failure—it happened slowly, then all of a sudden. The slowly was various gradually developing factors. The all of a sudden was the surge in social media around 2012-2014.

There were a wide range of slowly developing factors:

• The expansion in the size and reach of bureaucracies: government, corporate, non-profit and international.

• The expansion in higher education.

Both of these trends meant a continuing increase in the scale and reach of the unaccountable classes (those paid to turn up). As I noted in a recent post, the replication crisis tells us that the claims academics make—particularly about how the world should be ordered—should be subject to massive discounting, precisely because the accountability and reality-tests within academe are so patently inadequate.

The unaccountable classes have an interest in blocking accountability and in controlling discourse to defend and increase their status, authority and access to resources. Because they are paid to turn up, they are insulated from the effects on—so the concerns of—the wider society from whatever beliefs they come to adopt.

Even if they are not entirely insulated from adverse practical effects, their sense of what makes them a good person can insulate them from adjusting their world view. This is especially so if their income is not affected by failing to so adjust, or even worse, adversely affected if they do.

That we evolved to be a normative species also meant that we have also evolved to game norms. We can be very good at moralising and rationalising our self-interest. That our consciousness is only a (small) part of our cognition means that we can be as self-deceptive as needed to do so. The Charlie Munger principle—show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome—applies.

Adopting moral projects that encourage conformity within institutions by investing in shared sense of moralised status while justifying rejecting concerns of “unrighteous” citizens clearly works for networks within the unaccountable classes. There has been selection for ideas that create sharp distinctions between the righteous—who accept the various markers of virtue, of being a good person—and the “deplorable” unrighteous—typically construed as morally malevolent—who dissent.

Any normative structure based on righteous beliefs—beliefs whose affirmation marks you as a good person—is naturally censorious, for it is only righteous to affirm X if it is unrighteous to affirm not-X, and the more righteous it is to affirm X, the more unrighteous it is to affirm not-X. Hence the stigmatising of dissent in networks enforcing conformity to the dominant moralised status-game: status games based on propriety (norm-adherence enforced by stigmatisation) rather than prestige (conspicuous competence). This stigmatising conformity can be deeply corrosive to institutions ability to act in ways positive to human flourishing because what’s right becomes subordinated to who’s right: even worse, to who is pre-defined as right.

We Homo sapiens are a highly imitative species. This is not some weird quirk, it is fundamental to our learning strategies and to us being so much a cultural and normative species. This imitative (so conformist) tendency is all the stronger if there are significant costs to being an outlier.

Commerce has developed extensive mechanisms for actively managing risk, along with potentially large benefits for those who mobilise new practicalities. Yet even commerce displays strong flocking or herding tendencies in the face of (Knightian) uncertainty, as that minimises outlier risk³ and uses imitation to respond to new information coming from the (information boundaries) of the social herd. In situations where people either receive little or no personal benefit from exploration of new possibilities (bureaucracy) or where the judgement of others has strong conformist effects (academe), the power of our imitative tendencies to encourage conformity is all the stronger.

The shift in social and institutional dynamics that resulted in so much institutional capture not only pushed new norms (and new sins), it also meant supplanting previous norms and claims about the world—especially those entailing strong sense of service to, and respect for the concerns of, the national citizenry—in favour of new framings and patterns of action supporting the new, trumping moral projects: most obviously Trans and, far more consequentially, mass migration. Factors that facilitated this included:

• Technological change fostering the idea that past practices and norms had been rendered inappropriate.

• Multiculturalism (repackaged as “diversity is our strength”) corroding commitment to previous norms.

• Mass migration breaking up local connections and fraying previously shared expectations and norms.

• Affirmative action and other anti-discrimination measures corroding commitment to merit appointments and creating networks to morally police the citizenry, particularly when hate speech laws are added in.

• Feminisation of institutions, particularly schooling and higher education.

A lot of the previous trust in institutions had been based on them operating according to accepted norms of cultural custodianship and service to the citizenry. Those norms were embedded in, and sustained by, specific cultural and institutional heritages.

That we live in societies which have been so continually transformed by technological change has made it easier to dismiss past practices and norms as inherently outdated. This has proved to be wildly over-stated—just because something is new does not make it better and we remain the same species, we remain Homo sapiens.

Nevertheless, technological change is a significant background factor for rejecting the idea that we should be custodians of a heritage that represents embedded learning. Instead, it facilitated shifts in norms and the adoption of new framings and patterns of action.

Multiculturalism requires the residents to adjust to the newcomers. (Assimilation requires the newcomers to adjust to the residents.) Multiculturalism undermines the cultural and institutional heritage that generates and sustains norms that institutions have been presumed to uphold. It also enables the unaccountable classes to game such changes in norms in their own interest. This includes replacing genuine moral constraints—a sense of service to the citizenry of the country; careful attention to evidence; a sense of custodianship—with performative affirmations of correct belief righteousness used to engage in shared status games that differentiate the affirming righteous from the dissenting unrighteous citizenry.

Mass migration breaks up local connections. It also frays previously shared expectations and norms, doing so the more that culturally divergent immigrants come and in larger numbers. “Big lumps” of migrants have very different consequences than lots of “small groups” migration. This divergence in norms and expectations corrodes the social infrastructure—the patterns of norms, expectations and connections—that creates and sustains a robust society and resilient social order, including a resilient institutional order.

Affirmative action and other anti-discrimination measures has shifted institutions away from merit and capacity as criteria for selecting people to criteria based on norms that expand the social reach of those “up to date” with the new moral gradings, the new schemas and social scripts. This includes mechanisms of presumptive grievance for members of “marginalised” groups that manipulative personalities from those groups—and those allegedly speaking on their behalf—can and do game, corroding the functioning of organisations, particularly in upholding standards and norms. If calling out bad behaviour or poor performance by someone can be readily construed as “racism” or “misogyny” or whatever, the effect can be highly corrosive of the functioning of that organisation.

Moreover, anti-discrimination measures create networks of people operating on the basis that the general citizenry is constantly hovering on the edge of wrong-think and wrong-act, so have to be policed by their—by implication—moral and cognitive superiors, who are armed with the correct, empowering, righteous knowledge. Hate speech laws further undermine the authority and standing of the general citizenry.

Such networks of normative policing have powerful incentives to constantly expand what counts as wrong-think, wrong-act and “hate” (micro-aggressions anyone?). It naturally tends to support a structure of righteous beliefs. For anyone paying attention, is it obvious that “our inclusive values” is about stigmatising exclusion of the dissenting unrighteous.

That Transactivism has been so pervasive in its language claims—birthing persons, menstruating persons, and so on—has made it a particularly strong signal of righteousness. Fussing over pronouns becomes a ritual of affirmation of righteousness—as land acknowledgements also are—but much more personally and socially pervasive.

Transactivism has also benefited from belief in progress as something that is all encompassing and never stops. That the Sexual Revolution, civil rights, and so on, must continue into ever-new moral frontiers.

Particularly in the case of Transactivism, this is a deeply fraudulent claim. The non-electoral politics of institutional capture that has been such a feature of Transactivism is not at all how the various civil rights struggles proceeded. The African-American civil rights movement, Women’s Lib, gay and lesbian rights movements argued their cases openly, seeking to persuade the voting public. The censorship, and stigmatisation of dissent, that we see with the non-electoral politics of institutional capture—especially with “No Debate” Transactivism—is very much the politics of the socially and institutionally advantaged using “marginalised” mascots as props in their moralised status games and claims on resources.

Trans ideology having a whole litany of new sins—misgendering, deadnaming, etc. to has provided signals of righteousness via novel stigmatisations that is “progressive” in precisely this way. Trans genderwoo was also a godsend to all the self-righteous scolds employed in “anti-discrimination” as it created new sins and expanded language policing for them to enforce.

Much of Transactivism’s organised advocacy has come from gay and lesbian non-profits—such as Stonewall UK—pivoting to Trans to keep the donor money flowing, as ordinary lesbians and gays went off to live their lives, leaving the advocacy field to zealots, sexual fetishists and grifters. Those non-profits should have been forced to wind up after their original cause had been achieved, rather than being left to fecklessly search for new flows of donor money.

Helen Joyce, from Sex Matters, points out the grim truth that parents who have Transed their child—who have hormonally and surgically mutilated and sterilised their child—likely will never be able to face what they have done, so will keep pushing this evil ideology forever in whatever organisation they are active in.

Transactivism was able to use moralised propriety through righteous belief to get folk to “buy in”. As Helen Joyce says:

Loads of people who have no skin in the game are very supportive of Trans ideology have no particular skin in this game. They have just decided it is the latest virtue signal, it is the latest way to be a good person. They might be very attached to an idea of themself as a person who, back in the day, would have been part of the civil rights movement, would have fought for women’s suffrage, would have really campaigned for same-sex marriage. But those things are done, so, you want something to do, so you become quite attached to this.

So if anyone says “but if you allow men to be women over here, you are going to have rapists in women’s gaols over there, and you will ruin women’s sport” you get really angry, and you must silence such people. It’s the only way to maintain the lie.

So, that’s why it’s totalitarian. You have to control the language. You have to keep people silent. You have to cancel anyone who says anything about it in order that other people are too scared to speak about it. That’s why, because it’s a lie.

But precisely because the claim that someone with a penis is a woman is false all the way down, Trans ideology is particularly intensively censorious, in particularly insistent on No Debate.

If the point is to differentiate the righteous from the unrighteous by affirming correct beliefs, then the more toxic and untrue a claim is, the better it works to differentiate the affirming believers from the unrighteous unbelievers. Pro-social truths anyone can readily agree to. The greater the rationalisations required to affirm a belief, the better such beliefs thereby work as shared status games to differentiate the righteous from the unrighteous.

In the absence (or weakness) of reality-testing, bullshit—statements made for rhetorical effect without regard for their accuracy—wins. The larger the unaccountable classes, the larger is bureaucracy and academe, the larger the realm of bullshit, of toxic untruth.

The more institutions are colonised by networks invested in differentiation by rationalisation, and the less people’s income depends on consequences for those outside such networks, the more inconvenient feedback can be ignored. Western academe has become remarkably proficient at generating such moral-status protecting rationalisations.

The entire history of Communism demonstrates that toxic untruths—false beliefs deeply hostile to human flourishing—can operate as excellent differentiation, coordination and motivation devices: consider all the Western intellectuals down the years who told us that Lenin, that Stalin, that Mao, represented the noble future of social liberation. Moreover, much of the new markers of righteous belief came out of various forms of Critical Theory—Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, etc—so from derivatives of Marxism.

Trans genderwoo turned out to be excellent for such differentiation into righteous and unrighteous precisely because it required rationalisation of untrue claims with particular intensity—such as the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors is “care and compassion”. As with the history of Communism, the Transcult takeover of institutions shows that we Homo sapiens are every bit capable of engaging in whatever self-deception is required to differentiate the motivated righteous by affirmation of toxic untruths and to do whatever level of vile things folk can get away with in doing so.

This is salvationist politics: politics based on an organising myth of the heroic struggle against oppression that requires presenting the least oppressive societies in history as riddled with structures of oppression. (If constraint is defined as oppression—such as the constraint of biological sex—then oppression will always be found.)

Such politics is not utopian, except as a supporting prop for the motivating fighting-and-ending oppression myth. It makes the motivating myth of struggles against oppression—riffing fraudulently off struggles for civil rights—to be the highest level of politics, so that activism on its behalf trumps the “ordinary” politics of what voters want.

Various constraints are simply built into the structure of reality while others are necessary consequences of achieving any usefully functioning social order. Defining constraint—such as the constraints of biological sex—as oppression is thus destructive nonsense. Unfortunately, precisely because the level of untruth requires such intense rationalisation and not-noticing, constraint-as-oppression has proved to be an excellent mechanism for networking conformity via motivating righteous differentiation from the designated unrighteous. Defining constraint as oppression also ensures that the motivating Sorellian myth of struggling against oppression on behalf of the marginalised can always be invoked.

Equality as destroyer of order and freedom

That so much of all this is based on rhetorics of equality—based around the language of oppression and marginalisation—is not remotely an accident. One of the consequence of the civil rights movements is that Western liberalism dramatically elevated concern for equality as a moral marker. As a consequence, Western liberalism was colonised by the tradition that most ostentatiously cares about equality.

Not by socialism as such; not by concern for ownership of the means of production, as OG Marxism was in full retreat in the academy and the expanding failure of command economics was increasingly obvious. Western liberalism was instead colonised by the Marxist template repackaged to cultural and group identity concerns: that is by Critical Theory and its offshoots—Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, and so on—based on race, sexuality and gender. The shift away from economics also meant a shift into social realms where feedbacks were considerably weaker.

The concern was no longer bourgeois property but patriarchy, white supremacy, cis-heteronormativity, settler-colonialism, … This mix came to dominate the academy, and the views of graduates, way more than OG Marxism ever had.⁴ It was able to turn various molehills of truth—bad male behaviour is noxious; US States had differentiated, including viciously, on the basis of continental ancestry; people often do find gender non-conforming children confronting—into mountains of bullshit that operated as markers of righteousness. Such markers include:

Biological evolution is clearly true, yet humans are blank slates, so there are no differences in cognitive patterns between men and women and no genetic factors in human differences.

Nazism is beyond the pale but Communism is not.

Moralising racial differences is outrageous if you put whites on top but morally laudable if you put whites on bottom.

It is outrageous to preference men but morally laudable to preference women.

If you criticise men it’s feminism but if you criticise women it’s misogyny.

Words are violence but silence is also violence.

Using equality as a supreme value turns ostentatious commitment to equality into a marker of righteousness—so disparity becomes inequity—thereby stigmatising those who do not worship equality enough, or in the right way. Ostentatious commitment to equality thus becomes the vehicle for intense moral inequality.⁵ Hence “our inclusive values” being about stigmatising exclusion of the dissenting unrighteous.

Such politics—based, as it is, on extreme claims of morality inequality and cognitive superiority and using an ostentatious commitment to equality to divide society into those being equalised and those doing the equalising—creates a huge imbalance in moral, and cognitive, status and social power.⁶ It is intrinsically hostile to equality before the law and to political equality as it is the politics of moralised cognitive dominance—we can decide that you cannot dissent; we can decide that this group should be favoured, that group disfavoured.

Such politics rejects the notion of no-one having inherently superior political authority, that simply being a citizen gives one the authority to speak. On the contrary, intrinsic authority via righteous belief is precisely what the righteous have over the unrighteous and what is needed to prosecute their ennobling moral projects. The ostentatious commitment to equality is an excellent way to repackage and hide—including from themselves—the monstrous and destructive inequality of their politics.

All this makes such ideas catnip for the managerial and professional class, especially those in the unaccountable classes. It gives them endless moral projects justifying their control of resources on the basis of their superior knowing, their Theory, greatly aided by stigmatising those who demur. The Activist’s Fallacy:

We are doing X to achieve Y,

You are criticising X,

Therefore,

You are against Y,

can be mobilised to defend almost any action by the moral-project managers and professionals—no matter how incompetent, destructive, dysfunctional or wasteful—if any criticism becomes immoral, a marker of unrighteousness, because of the splendour of the moral project. This is especially so in an age of sound-bites, where quick and easy terms of moral abuse, and ostentatious good intentions, so readily short-circuit any critique.

Homo sapiens—both individuals and groups—vary across so many dimensions that worship of (group) equality as the prime moral benchmark, so that any disparity between groups becomes inequity, must always be based on lies, on bending reality to metaphysical delusions. It specifically creates a massive basis in favour of (false) blank slate views of human nature, for otherwise such disparities might come from differences within groups.

Ostentatious commitment to equality is thus an excellent generator of toxic untruths whose rationalisation provides such effective moral differentiators. It does so via a simplistic moral grandeur where the lack of equality across any social dimension becomes a marker of profound moral failure. Issues such as cultural differences in life strategies, differences in the distribution of traits, tail effects—even elementary demographic patterns such as differing age profiles—gets dissolved in the simplistic acid-bath of equality worship.

Equality along specific, politicised—even sacralised—dimensions of race, gender and sexuality is what gets elevated. Class inequality well and truly got dropped when OG Marxism was replaced by Critical Theory and its derivatives. Though, as every Communist state demonstrated, ostentatious commitment to class equality was the vehicle for profound power and authority inequalities between those to be equalised and those doing equalised.

The more prosperous and egalitarian a society becomes, the further into over-blown claims the worship of group equality has to go. The more the therapeutic model of harm prevention is appealed to, the greater the salience of alleged emotional harms justifying stigmatisation of dissent become: especially such alleged emotional harms on the behalf of the moral mascots of the marginalised.

Worshipping equality means de-legitimising distinctions—especially distinctions that imply differences in capacity, worth, or effectiveness. This is why its adherents are so bad at thinking seriously about the problems of social order—except how to fray social order and expand the institutional reach of their networks—and so hostile to any concept of custodianship and embedded learning in institutions.

What makes all this even more pernicious, however, is that the stigmatisation of dissent, especially by terms of moral abuse, actively sabotages the ability of the wider society to think intelligently about the problems of social order. This is starkly obvious regarding migration and in the lack of debate about bad female-typical behaviour and its institutional and social consequences.

It is clear, for example, that one reason why social mobility is persistently low across human societies is that executive function is highly heritable. One of the things that creates the people unlike me problem that so bedevils social science, social commentary and public policy is that the dynamics of social milieus where most people have high levels of executive function are very different from those where significant numbers of people have weak executive function. The analytical acid-bath of group-equality worship drives folk away from even considering such wrong-think.

Feminisation

The feminisation of institutions has aided the shift in norms, not least because women often base their connections around a comforting sense of equality and a discomfort with conspicuous achievement. Women tend to be strongly drawn to propriety as a protective measure rather than status through differing-by-achievement-and-risk prestige.

Feminisation is not, however, the same as gender-egalitarianism. Gender-egalitarian societies and firms can better harness the talents of women. This may well include suppressing the more destructive aspects of male behaviour.

Feminisation is the shift towards more female-typical patterns of norms and behaviour: including destructive patterns that undermined resistance to the above shifts in norms. This is more likely to occur in institutions and organisations with weaker feedback constraints. To grapple with such feminisation and its effects, we need to take a detour into differences between male-typical and female-typical patterns of behaviour (yes, such differences exist).

As women are the physically weaker sex who get pregnant and breast-feed babies and toddlers, they are particularly inclined to engage in aggression that passes itself off—including to themselves—not as aggression but as moral concern, as social concern, as that is a much safer way to engage in aggression. So, in the interests of their own safety—and to make such aggression more effective—they are particularly inclined to be self-deceptive about their own aggression. Social media has hugely enabled such relational aggression paraded as social and moral concern based on new forms of propriety.

Moreover, women and girls simply do not teams as well as do men and boys. That is why teams of teenage boys regularly defeat national women’s sport teams.

In our relatively recent past, there was brutal selection in the male expression of genes for effective teamwork. This has never been true for the female expression of genes in Homo sapiens.

Institutions are formalised teams. As institutions become more feminised—so more dominated by patterns of behaviour not conducive to well-functioning teams—institutions become more dysfunctional, with cliques, shaming and shunning behaviour, and trust-destroying relational aggression and tone-enforcing conformity becoming more pervasive.

Conversely, men often rib each other, and say outrageous things, as a trust-building device: will you fold under pressure?, will you still support me? The less trust folk have in each other, the easier it is for aggression parading as social concern, as moral concern, to isolate people and enforce conformity.

When coaching girls for a team sport, one has to work at stopping them evaluating themselves against their fellow team members (colleagues) instead of the other team (competitors). A friend who consults with various firms reports that you meet a lot of female executives who are very good at playing internal politics but poor at thinking strategically for the organisation as a whole. They are good at social cues, less good at thinking in terms of systems and shared goals. (Smart lesbians are often something of an exception, as their thinking tends to be more male-coded, without the pitfalls of male sexuality.)

The female-typical focus on social cues extends to things such as judging attractiveness. Men judge women by their physical attractiveness regardless of what they are wearing—so cues of fertility. Women judge men far more according to what they are wearing—so cues of status and resource provision. This makes perfect evolutionary sense, but the continuing pervasiveness in academe of (false) blank slate theories of human action generates a need to de-legitimise, to not notice, such inconvenient differences.

Female tone-policing can be a protective measure—as the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, of course they find negative emotions more threatening—but is not good for robust discussion and easily becomes an exercise in conformity-imposing moralised policing of social connections. Parading anything inconvenient to various narratives of righteousness as being emotionally threatening (“make unsafe”), and/or morally improper (racist, sexist, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc.), encourages women to invest into the relational aggression of righteous censoriousness, of conformity-enforcing stigmatisation, aiding the shift in norms. That there are allegedly lots of problems from men running things, but somehow no problems from women running things, is nonsense, but it is righteous nonsense.

Women, not being the team sex, are also not the social solidarity sex. Women are much less likely to have friends of lower socio-economic status than are men. Female friendships are based on emotional commitment, and lower-socioeconomic status women are unlikely to be worth the investment. With men, on the other hand, you never know when you might want/need them to be on your team.

As institutions become more feminised, they became more disconnected from the interests of the wider society, so more driven by norms and concerns specific to networks within such institutions—and their social cues—and far less by the concerns of the wider citizenry. The dramatic lack of concern among Britain’s feminised, and ostentatiously feminist, elite for the—overwhelming lower class—female victims of Muslim gangs is a case in point. But so is the lack of concern for women in prison, in rape shelters and so on being forced to share their facilities with men who claim to identify as women. Taking such claims seriously obviously opened the door to the most manipulative predators, yet the role of Trans genderwoo as a signal of righteousness in shared moralised status games was patently more important than concern for vulnerable lower-class women.

The NHS Fife case over hostile treatment of an experienced nurse who treated sex as real is almost a parody of such anti-social solidarity class arrogance, with very posh folk parading their righteousness to justify contemptuous treatment of a working class nurse.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) very much empowers feminisation of institutions via mechanisms of righteous beliefs. DEI readily ramps up the use of shaming and shunning—hence various DEI training turn into struggle sessions. DEI empowers relational aggression based on a moralised caste-system (female over male; person of colour over “white”; gay and lesbian over straight; trans over cis).

Given the colonisation of Western liberalism in the name of equality by the Critical Theory derivatives of Marxism, it is hardly surprising that DEI had Soviet (the Korenizatsiya program), Maoist (the Black and Red identities) and North Korean (the Songbun system) precursors.

DEI becomes a way for organisations to break up their teams, and their sense of solidarity within the organisation, and with the wider society—so, feminisation on steroids. The UK police provide a salutary example of these patterns—including destruction of trust by openly encouraging police to dob on each other over mere words—with seriously deleterious effects on their performance and public trust.

Various embedded corrallings of discourse have built up over time that aid the shift to norms based on righteous beliefs. A pervasive one is: if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny. Getting folk used to such discouragements of discourse, to shifting and policing the Overton Window, policing discourse, was another background factor in the shift in institutional norms.

Decay of accountability

These shifts in norms operated in social networks full of university graduates, where much of the status-point was to differentiated believers from the unrighteous: so from the bulk of the citizenry. If mechanisms of accountability to the general public were operating effectively in our institutions, such capture by elite status-games would not have happened.

A major factor in this failure of accountability is how much mechanisms of accountability in a democracy rely on the media to provide feedback; to test, to probe, to question. A very large part of the story in how pervasive institutional capture became is journalism shifting from being a substantially working-class profession—with journalists who identified with the wider citizenry—to becoming a profession of university graduates who identify with elite concerns and regard much of the citizenry as requiring moral and other education by their superiors (such as, of course, themselves).

Digital intensification

So, there were a range of slow-burn factors. Then social media was added to the mix and all these patterns took off far more intensively from around 2012-2014.

Source.

Notice the upward tick in scholarly abstracts using terms of moral abuse—so norm enforcement based on stigmatisation of unrighteous belief—in the early 1990s, then the surge as social media takes off. There was no change in the wider society underpinning this, just in the narratives of righteousness and norm enforcement dynamics within academic and media networks.

Source.

Critics’ and popular ratings of films diverge at the same time media and scholarly abstracts surge. The general populace continued to judge things by whether they liked it or not. Critics shifted towards following the current markers of righteousness.

Social media intensified the 24/7 news cycle that cable TV let loose. The 24/7 news cycle meant that many politicians—including many centre-right politicians—became focused on operating within the narratives of righteousness that journalists purveyed. Especially as one of the ways those narratives were upheld was highly negative—i.e., stigmatising—coverage given to those who broke with the narratives of righteousness.

As previously noted, sound-bite media encourages the quick-and-easy discourse of ostentatious good intentions backed up by stigmatising moral abuse. It is surely not an accident that long-form podcasts that enable people to develop and explain dissenting critiques have become such a feature of alternative media.

Nor is it an accident that those who practice the politics of ostentatious good intentions, backed by stigmatising moral abuse, are so reluctant to go on long-form podcasts. Turning ideas into moralised “harm”, and markers of unrighteousness, creates so many potential norm-breaking traps. As Jordan Peterson notes:

We invited, by we I mean a group of major podcasters. We’ve invited Democrats to speak with us. We’ve offered formal invitations repeatedly for eight years, and we mediated those invitations through one of the Democrats central political messengers, and they got the invite, and we couldn’t find one who would do it. Not one … a Democrat won’t say anything that hasn’t been workshopped. And the reason for that is they don’t want to offend anyone. Well, if you’re not going to offend anyone, you’re going to say the most anodyne things. … But there is this additional element of the absolute inability of the Democrats to say anything that would, say, offend their most sensitive progressive junior staffer. … Podcasts brutally punish people who won’t speak freely.

Mainstream media coverage is often precise—in that individual statements are correct—but inaccurate, as things that are relevant but inconvenient are ignored, belittled or framed away (“far right”). This creates media coverage that is functionally untruthful and increasingly hopeless in forcing accountability on institutions. On the contrary, mainstream media actively facilitates the taking over of institutions by righteous narratives.

This is not only journalists buying into the patterns of righteous beliefs, there have also been institutional factors. As social media collapsed the ad revenues that legacy media had relied upon, the legacy media—especially the “quality” media—increasingly sold itself by providing narratives whose acceptance marked one as being of the smart and the good, seeking committed subscribers and viewers rather than broad readerships. They became morally condescending purveyors of glib righteousness.

Nevertheless, while social media collapsing the old media business model through loss of classified advertising revenue was part of the story, that public broadcasters—very much part of the unaccountable classes—became so much purveyors of narratives of glib righteousness shows that more was going on than the collapse of the former media business model.

Purveying the narratives of performative righteousness—even if such naratives are based on toxic (hostile to human flourishing) untruths—guts the media’s role as a mechanism for accountability. The more they become purveyors of narratives of performative righteousness, the less they are vehicles for scepticism and correction inconvenient for such narratives.

Consider some of the gems of recent media coverage:

Russiagate was accurate reporting and was absolutely not QAnon for the college-educated nor the weaponising by the Obama Administration of the national-security state against its political opponents.

The lab-leak hypothesis was a racist conspiracy theory so we ignore or deny systematic suppression of the evidence of a lab leak.

The Hunter Biden laptop was likely a Russian misinformation op.

There was no issue with President Biden’s cognitive capacity.

Defunding the police and anti-police activism would have no effect on homicide rates.

A disease whose risks were overwhelmingly concentrated among the metabolically compromised demanded general lockdowns and closed schools.

There was no such thing as natural immunity from having caught Covid. (What are vaccines designed to replicate again?)

“My body, my choice” except it was fine to make compulsory a very new medical intervention if you call them vaccines (when we don’t make actual vaccines compulsory, as past experience shows that backfires).

Migration is such that marginal benefits exceed marginal costs for everyone in society.

Requiring a photo ID for voting is outrageous voter suppression but it is absolutely fine to demand proof of vaccination (or rather “vaccination”) to go about the ordinary business of life.

It was perfectly fine—indeed defending democracy—to knock Donald Trump off the ballot for something he had neither been charged with nor convicted of (so legally outrageous that SCOTUS squished that 9-0).

All this also encouraged creation of separate information environments—that is, media siloing. For instance, inconvenient books would get the silent, no reviews, treatment in mainstream media.

Social media greatly enables mobbing, signalling and networking. Online mobbing becomes a mechanism for enforcing conformity and increasing the benefit of conforming (and the risks of not doing so). Social media thus empowers networks and makes it so much easier for them to mechanisms of conformity, of opinion monopoly around affirmation righteous beliefs and stigmatisation of the unrighteous.

The corrosion of broad social connections that accept different opinions is central to the decay of institutions and their shift to the new norms of righteous belief that require the denigration of the unrighteous. Once affirmation of beliefs become markers of righteousness, the good faith defence for holding differing views evaporates: dissent becomes wilful unrighteousness and feedback mechanisms are crippled. People increasingly simply do not say what they think, creating organisations of fearful silences and preference falsification.

Organised-malice activism

What Josh Burns MP blandly refers to as letter writing campaigns are campaigns of organised malice—parading as moral and social concern—to get people sacked for their opinions. Social media meant that campaigns of organised malice that had previously taken considerable effort and capacity to put together become way easier to do so.

Such campaigns are campaigns of extreme relational aggression, as they seek to separate people from their careers, their friendship networks, even their families. By licensing bad—i.e. not bound by normal constraints—behaviour, such activism also attracts folk with Cluster B personality disorders.

That people are attacked for mere words—including works of fiction—is bad enough. That they are often attacked even more intensely for stating inconvenient truths—as those are particularly dangerous to the cause being defended by such relational aggression—is even more corrosive of public discourse and civil order.

The resignation of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla in March 2014 over a 2008 donation to the campaign against same-sex marriage and the Shirtgate blow-up in November 2014—when a rocket scientist was publicly humiliated over his choice of shirt—showed how much the campaigns of malice against dissenters and transgressors against “inclusion”, so affirmative righteousness, could be easily generated via social media. This included generating new sins to be stigmatised—or, more commonly, spread into wider public discourse sins that had previously been confined to particular social milieus (such as academe). Thanks to social media, zealots could mob without central direction.

Social media lowered the barriers to entry that previously had required a high level of social infrastructure, allied to motivated skill, to organise. What activists operating on behalf of Jewish causes had been able to generate and maintain—but few other groups had—now became much more widely available.

Where Anti-Semitism had had pride of place as the most stigmatised belief, now there was a much wider—indeed, ever expanding—parade of righteous beliefs and so of stigmatised wrong-think beliefs. Where the Holocaust had been used to portray Jews as the Ultimate Victims—entitled to use malice activism to control how other people spoke of them anywhere in public (or even in private)—now the ever greater parade of victim groups were able to use malice activism to mob dissenters.

Social media lowering barriers to entry for campaigns of organised malice parading as moral and social concern not only hugely expanded the operation of such campaigns of public humiliation and sacking, it eventually rebounded against Jews, who found the tactics of activists on behalf of Jews being turned against Jews, while Jewish complaints-activism stopped working, so that the anger and contempt it had been building up could find more expression. In Australia, occasional broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf successfully taking the main public broadcaster (the ABC) to court over ABC management caving to such complaints-activism not only publicly exposed such activism, it also established that an employer could be legally liable if they caved into it.

Activists on behalf of the Jewish community had spent decades crying “Wolf!” over mere words only to find themselves in the same pickle as the boy who cried “Wolf!” when the Wolf of organised Jew-hatred—under the rubric of the Oppessor/Oppressed dichotomy and particularly settler-colonial Theory—became a serious thing. The insistence that the Holocaust was the Great Unparalleled Historical Crime had helped along the “pinkwashing” exclusion or downgrading in schooling and discourse of Communist mass murders, making it easier for derivatives of Marxism to penetrate education and academe.

Malice-activism on behalf of Jews corroded norms of freedom of speech and discourse—especially in supporting hate speech laws that had failed so egregiously in Weimar Germany—in ways that came to strip protections from Jews, now branded as an inconveniently successful (so “oppressive”) minority. The Oppressed/Oppressor dichotomy always ends up looking for kulaks. Hence we get such gems of righteousness as:

Jews are not indigenous to Israel, so can be treated as settler-colonialists, even if they are refugees from Muslim countries.

Arabs are indigenous to Palestine, despite arriving centuries later than Jews originally did.

Organised-malice activism corrodes civil order and the protections thereof. Of course it ended up rebounding against a minority whose entire history shows what a precious achievement a free and protective civil order is.

Embracing censorship

Shared righteousness-through-affirmative-belief was something that people within online media companies also bought into. If you are busy “doing” the tech that transforms society in various ways, this provides extra encouragement for adopting moral gradings paraded as superior to those of an outdated past.

Patterns of censorship of unrighteous opinion—both direct and indirect—developed within online media. Partly this was from, we learnt from the Twitter files, pressure from governments but it also came through internal processes.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter—breaking what had become a righteous-opinion cartel among major online media companies—the extent of this opinion-management became clear. Comedian and commentator Dave Rubin was given a direct insight into this:

4:15 I got a call one day from someone at Twitter basically saying Elon wants to meet you can you get here tonight. … 5:19 I sat there the next day with a whole bunch of Engineers who open the hood of the thing and the entire system, the entire Twitter system, was built to Shadow-ban. That's it. Everything on under the hood of Twitter was built to put filters and tags: you said this so now you can't see this or you connected with that person, so now you can't connect with this person. The entire system was built that way so Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO for much of it, he testified under oath that they do not Shadow ban. But the whole freaking system was built that way. Now, he probably legally didn't get in trouble because Shadow ban is not a technical term and … was just playing with the words there. But the point is there was an entire system basically built to silence a certain set of people and promote another set of people and and it didn't work. So, how cool is that and that's where we're at right now.

The way social media empowered the righteous grading of opinion meant that conformity pressures from shared moralised righteous-belief status games took off. There was selection for ideas and narratives that served such status games.

The signalling of what the latest narratives of righteousness also enabled mobbing against those who failed to affirm or conform to such narratives. Policing of social networks became much more intense. Mainstream media abetted, and participated in, all this rather than quizzing these processes.

Historian Stephen Kotkin provides a sharp definition of totalitarianism:

47:45 This is what totalitarianism is. [Stalin] galvanized people's agency and those people, using their agency, destroyed their own agency. They dis-empowered themselves by taking up his call. …

59:20 [Foucault] showed me was how power works, not in terms of bureaucracy, not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance, like a secret police, but how all of that is enforced and acted through daily life. In other words, the micro versions of power and so it's connected to the big structures but it's little people doing this. That's why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency; and that means denouncing your neighbors, being encouraged to denounce your neighbors for heresies, and participating in that culture of denunciation, which loosens all social trust and social bonds, and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state. So you're a gung-ho activist using your agency and the next thing you know you have no power whatsoever.

We live in an age where there can be purges, where folk are hunted down by ideology-enforcing mobs and sacked, without a secret police or labour camps—we call such cancel culture. (One of the narratives of righteousness is that cancel culture does not exist—it is just moral or social concern—but is also a good thing—it is just moral or social concern.)

There can be commissars and inquisitors pushing, even enforcing, Righteous Belief, without such being centrally appointed—we call them DEI officers, bias response teams, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants and so on. They all operate on the basis that errors has no rights and they can determine error, so the principle of the Inquisitor.

There can be Lysenkoism—the corruption of science by ideology—where people are punished and excluded for their dissent, without central direction. There can be Zhdanovism, where entertainment—from film to games—is required to conform to set messages and narratives, with dissenters being punished and excluded, without central direction.

There can be censorship—based error has no rights and they can determine error—with some central direction but much enforcement of shared status-through-righteous-belief plays, on the grounds of stopping “hate” and mis/dis/mal-information.

All that is needed is readily created and accessed networks of conformity, using the signalling, selection and mobbing mechanisms that social media provides. The consequent empowering of such networks of conformity is a pattern that we see in comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies …

In order to be members of the righteous, to be good people, people go along with conformity games that trap themselves. As Stephen Kotkin points out, they use their agency to deprive themselves of agency. The more a profession selects for agreeableness, the stronger the patterns: the more it selects for disagreeableness, the weaker. Women have higher agreeableness than men.

This led to another deleterious effect of DEI, and shaming and shunning culture: organisations who go along end up selecting against independent and critical thinkers. As journalist and podcaster Tanya de Grunwald notes:

1:07:23 I've also been worried for a long time about this movement … which means that lots of sensible people have actually been leaving the workforce within the last few years. And so at moments like this, you look around and see, how many critical thinkers have we got left? Are those exactly the people that we've got rid of by shaming them and shouting them down? They've all left, and you've kind of got all your nodding dogs are still there.

This is also not good for the health of organisations and institutions. It was especially not good for standing up for accountability to the wider society against the moral projects of performative righteousness.

Academe as origin

The defection of so much of the media from sceptical accountability to narrative enforcement is a central part of the story of institutional capture and decay of accountability. This was abetted by journalism became more dominated by university graduates.

Thus, what is going on in higher education is very much central to this breaking of mechanisms of accountability. Helen Joyce, from Sex Matters, identifies what leads organisations to be captured by performative righteousness:

So which industries are most captured? Ones where there are lots of young people, ones where you have to attract young people, so universities are both of those, and publishing is a very bad one; ones where there are lots of freelancers, because as a freelancer, you have fewer employment protections, and your reputation is basically it you just say a word out of out of step, and people just won't come to you again. All the creative industries, because the people who are big in creative industries tend to be absolutely massive fashion victims and jump on the latest fashion whatever it is.

Academe is notoriously prone to intellectual fashions as it is so driven by reputation and “the right sort” of career-building novelty; it has lots of sessional tutors and lecturers particularly easily punished for non-conformity; is full of young people, and seeks to attract them; has become the most feminised of major institutions apart from publishing; has become increasingly bureaucratic; provides training without bearing the consequences for any problems with that training. Academics can spout any number of untrue claims and Theory, provided they accord with the conformity pressures within their particular discipline or field.

Academe is the epicentre of the unaccountable classes, where the stronger the rationalisation required to maintain a claim, the better a signal of loyalty and commitment such rationalised belief is. Also, the more grandiose the moral pretensions involved, the better it operates as a shared status game—especially against the wider citizenry. As previously noted, it is very clear that academe increasingly trains its graduates to despise their fellow citizens and their cultural heritage.

Research grants, publication metrics and peer review have all turned out to be mechanisms for conformity. Academe provided lots of methods to launder ideas, including toxic untruths. So have various UN bodies. Internationalisation via the EU, but especially the UN, has proved to be a gift to the unaccountable classes.

The way to best mobilise within academe is to engage in activist scholarship, as that provides the necessary combination of moral grandiosity, righteous rationalisations, and justifications for moralised malice against the “unrighteous”. The judgement in the case of Jo Phoenix versus the Open University provides a field work report on how that works. The mixture of vicious zealotry and moral cowardice revealed was an insight into the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of so much of contemporary academe.

Feminism fed Trans

Feminists who found themselves on the wrong side of righteousness-through-Trans often did not think through how much Transactivism riffed off Feminist themes. In her 1991 book Backlash, feminist author Susan Faludi writes:

Feminism’s agenda is basic: it asks that women not be forced to “choose” between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves – instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

What in that statement would any Transactivist disagree with? How free do feminists want men to be “to define themselves”? Transactivism says men should be free to define themselves as women.

Seminal feminist Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. (On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.)

Transactivism and Queer Theory—the basis of Gender (Identity) Theory—takes her at her word. Feminists buying into the nonsense that hook-up culture was liberating for women helped along the intense sexualising of the culture that confused adolescents later used Trans to take refuge from. The notion that there were no cognitive differences between men and women, and that any disparity in (positive) social outcomes between men and women was a sign of inequity, helped along “blank slate” biological denialism and the analytical acid-bath of group-equality worship.

When Transactivists attack women’s freedom of association, they follow in the footsteps of feminists who attacked men’s freedom of association. Indeed, it is clear that at least some of the male support for Transactivism was a form of revenge for precisely those feminist campaigns against male freedom of association. Campaigns that continue.

Conclusion

The a priori commitments and moralised malice of righteousness activism degrades every realm of human action it invades because activism will not allow such realms to be themselves. Hence spilling out—via the social media mobbing and conformist graduate networks—into comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, across university disciplines, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies …

So, why the rampant, fast, institutional capture and accountability failures? Because social media allowed all the ways we as a society had permitted corrosive patterns to fester in our institutions to be supercharged and to surge by multiplication. There are so many reasons our institutions and societies became increasingly over-run with righteous nonsense.

The United Kingdom has become the worst case example among developed democracies because of Blairism, of how the Blair-Brown Government (1997-2010), degraded mechanisms of accountability within the UK by pushing policy formulation into quangoes—public bodies not subject to direct Ministerial supervision—and up to the EU. That made the UK far more subject than it would otherwise have been to the degradations of activism, institutional capture by moral-project networks and the pathologies of bureaucracy. It is generating plenty of voter alienation and startling levels of distrust, even contempt, for politicians and journalists (and major corporations).

Source: Shattered Britain, by More in Common UK.

Why did the vileness of Transactivism—its hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors; its abusive stigmatisation of dissenters; its abuse of language; its No Debate censoriousness; its use of the monstrous moral bullying lie of “dead child or Transed child”; its exploitation of confused adolescents seeking refuge from a highly sexualised society; its legitimating of schools actively subverting parental authority; its subverting of medical licensing, regulation and practices; its corruption of science journals—become so successful in capturing institutions? Not despite being vile in so many ways, but because it is vile in so many way. The more enormous the rationalisations it required, the greater the marker of righteousness it became.

The entire history of Communism, of Revolutionary Marxism, shows how this can work to morally differentiate, to motivate and to coordinate. (So, of course, does the brief history of Nazism.)

Transactivism paraded as repeating and extending the civil rights struggles. In reality, Transactivism drew from the same intellectual wells as Communism, via the sequence of Marxism —> Critical Theory —> Queer Theory —> Gender Identity Theory —> Transactivism. Rage against the bourgeoisie was transmuted into revolting against cis-heteronormativity by exploiting the confusions of adolescence in a highly sexualised society.

If taxpayer funding of activist scholarship had been banned from the start, a great deal of this could have been avoided. So, stripping taxpayer funding from all activist scholarship should be one of the first things to do, if we wish to recover the institutional health of our societies and democracies.

The simplest way to do that? Well, the Dissolution of the Monasteries provides a demonstrably effective example.

Yes, most academics did not buy into this toxic nonsense. But they proved utterly unwilling to do anything effective to stop it, so we should pay them no heed.

The expansion of the unaccountable classes through the expansion of bureaucracy and higher education, crystallising in the expansion of the moral-project state, interacting with the rise of social media and shift in mainstream media towards purveying narratives of glib righteousness, is how the Trans takeover happened.

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1. An institution is any complex social form that reproduces itself, such as legal systems. They are sets of rules and supporting norms used by a population to organise repeated activities.

2. Civilisations with law arbitrated by religious scholars—typically based on revelation—can have a civilisational-wide institutional commons, as we see with Islam and in Brahmin (“Hindu”) civilisation, up to the imposition of British law.

3. If one has insufficient information to calculate the risks for an independent strategy, then social calculations will dominate and being “within the herd” means that one will not lose relative status.

4. A key continuing feature is the use of the imagined future as a benchmark of judgement and the sacralisation of oppressed/marginalised groups. As there is no information from the future, the transformative future becomes the realm of divine authority that cannot be challenged by information from within it—and generates motivating Sorelian myth—while claims on behalf of oppressed/marginalised groups cannot be traded-off against (i.e. are in the realm of the sacred). It therefore operates as a political religion.

5. This integrates James Lindsay’s analysis of “Woke Marxism” with Eric Kaufmann’s analysis of wokery as making sacred marginalised groups and with Bishop Barron’s analysis of wokery as the popularisation of Critical Theory. Wokery is the politics—the authoritative claims on resources—of the unaccountable classes operating through ostentatious commitment to equality justifying stigmatisation of dissent.

6. This, btw, is quite clear in what The Communist Manifesto (1848) says about the role of the Communist Party in bringing about social transformation of society.