It is common among many people who see themselves as being politically “Left” as—due to their politics—upholding the morally superior political position to those who they see as being on the political “Right”. (We will leave aside the problems of defining either Left or Right, this is about self-identification.) It is so common among people who identify as being politically Left that it may well be that a majority of those who so identify regard being politically Left as being sufficient in itself to be the morally superior option.
There is a huge problem with this. Such folk are claiming that being on the same side of politics as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu, etc.—as an appalling series of mass murdering tyrants—makes one morally superior to, for example, someone who identifies as a Western conservative. For whatever else the listed individuals were, they were very clearly politically Left.
Any such claim of moral superiority from being within the same set of political traditions as these mass murdering tyrants is obviously a complete moral nonsense. If you make such a claim, either you think that mass murder and tyranny is fine in pursuit of your politics—in which case you are in the grip of thoroughly evil ideas—or you are being self-servingly delusional.
In the latter case, you are editing reality in order to feel better about yourself and your politics. You are, moreover, editing out of relevant reality horrific human suffering on a vast scale: the mass murders of tens of millions of people, and the oppressions of a couple of dozen tyrannies. You are doing so at the most basic level of your politics. Such politics is then based—quite fundamentally—on epistemic closure, an extreme version of confirmation bias.
This has a series of very bad consequences. The first is you have given yourself license to not wrestle at all with how your political tradition goes bad. You end up with a position whereby, implicitly or explicitly, everyone on the declared-Right is—to a greater or lesser extent—Hitler-adjacent while folk on the Left are never Pol Pot-adjacent.
This is obviously dangerous, self-serving, nonsense. The dysfunctions of your political tradition—dysfunctions that can be extraordinarily murderous and tyrannical—will be edited out of your view of reality.
It is how we end up with Western societies that have networked versions of mechanisms of social control that such tyrannies pioneered. We end up with commissars—they are called DEI officers; bias response teams; sensitivity readers; intimacy consultants or whatever—who ideologically police workplaces on the basis of moralised identity categories and whose “training” often involves little more than struggle sessions. We end up with Zhdanovism—intense politicised conformity in the arts and literature. This is usefully discussed here, while writer Jenny Lindsay writes about her experience of a much wider pattern of blacklisting of actors and others who refuse to bow the knee to the politicised cultural orthodoxy. We end up with genderwoo and “social justice” Lysenkoism—censorious conformity in science and science publishing (see, for example). Then there is the expanding censorship that was originally paraded as barring “hate speech”, now being purveyed as blocking anti-dis/mis/mal-information, as apparently there are blessed folk who can reliably determine truth (or perhaps wrongthink). All justified via derivatives of Critical Theory which itself is derivative of Marxism.
This is the same self-serving delusion that claims to be against “hate speech” while all too ready to declare those who disagree as racist, sexist, xenophobic, or whatever. Such readiness to engage in moral abuse is clearly intended to incite hatred against those targeted. This pattern also includes people who demand the right to control what pronouns you use for them while they remain entitled to be as abusive to you as they like.
These are social dominance plays. One can point out the hypocrisy forever, it has no effect, as the mere act of being critical of such political worthiness shows that one is not “sound”, one is not committed to the shared status plays.
The HR/DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) regime has created a moral caste system, one that puts heterosexual “white” males at the bottom of the moral heap. Such moral caste systems are very apparent in the precursors to DEI: the Soviet Union’s Korenizatsiya program; Mao’s Black and Red identities; the Kim Family Regime’s Songbun system. (A short outline of the full horror of the last is here.)
The historical and intellectual lineage, and patterns, are obvious with those with the eyes to see. But they become invisible if you have edited-out horrific failures on the Left, so are blind to how your political tradition metastasises. Indeed, in a real sense, it becomes unthinkable that your political tradition does ever metastasise.
If you have ever wondered how utterly blind so many seem to be to the aforementioned parallels, and the threats they pose, this is why. That simple act of editing out of reality millions of death and a couple of dozen tyrannies in order to feel one’s politics are morally superior to the alternative “side” of politics leads directly to this morally and institutionally catastrophic cognitive failure; this failure to notice; this refusal to notice, and so to learn from inconvenient human experience.
This is, however, not nearly the limit of the negative consequences of the aforementioned editing of reality to provide tickets on oneself. An editing of reality that is right at the base of such politics.
Meanwhile …
In the post-1945 period, such editing-out has not been—at least until recently—a problem on the liberal-conservative side of politics, who were forced to grapple with how “Right” politics can metastasise; from traditionalist authoritarianism of the Horthy, Salazar, Franco, Pinochet variety to the quasi-totalitarianism of Fascism and the exterminationist totalitarianism of Nazism.
As an aside, claims that Nazism are not Right are as tedious as the claim that the National Socialists were not socialists when they called themselves socialists, argued in socialist ways and did socialist things, which Hitler says in his Table Talk he will do more of after victory. Nazis are right-progressives, revelling in a deeply hierarchical conception of humanity, an atavistic traditionalism, and heroic striving as both marking, and creating, the superior human. Nazism, and arguably Fascism (with its idolatry of the state), are the only Western political ideologies that are in no sense Christian heresies, which is why Hitler makes such an excellent secular Satan.
Policing-out the genuinely extreme Right became a strong feature of post-1945 Western liberal-conservative politics. American conservative William Buckley was very strong on it, for example. One of the consequences of the failure of conventional liberal-conservative politics—due to its faith that institutions could be trusted to run themselves turning out to be catastrophically misplaced—has been to discredit such policing. We are seeing a return to the pattern of, when left-progressivism becomes sufficiently corrosively threatening, a countervailing surge of people who seek to use the methods of left-progressives for very different ends.
The failure of conventional centre-right politics to push back against straight white males being dumped at the bottom of a moral hierarchy; the shifting of the housing markets against younger folk; the refusal to provide them with a sense of a heritage they can be proud of—or even feel positively a part of—provides the very understandable context for the sudden outbreak of pro-Anakin memes by Zoomers.
Habitual not noticing
Returning to the patterns among the self-identified Left, precisely because it is at the base of one’s politics, the editing of reality to give moral (and cognitive) tickets on oneself becomes a habitual pattern. For what is this claim of moral superiority? It is claim of moral superiority over one’s fellow citizens based on what beliefs one affirms. This is politics-as-status game, and a pretty thin status game at that.
For claiming that one is morally superior because one’s politics are Left is, very clearly, false. Even simply claiming that such politics are inherently morally superior is false. It becomes very easy to fall into the politics of preferring a congenial falsehood to an inconvenient fact. To become committed to a politicised status game of strategic not noticing. Particularly when such not noticing becomes a signal of commitment to a shared status game.
You end up with politics that prefers a falsehood—even a lie—that supports the shared status game to a fact that undermines it. This has at least two consequences. First, it is profoundly hostile to politics as open discourse. If reality is subordinated to your shared status game, then operating on a shared understanding of reality with those with different politics becomes increasingly impossible. For if believing X makes you a good person, believing not-X makes you a bad one, and clearly one must shame and shun such bad people, not treat their concerns as potentially legitimate.
Second, you will support policies more or less guaranteed to fail. If falsehoods that support the shared status game are systematically preferred to facts that undermine it, then your preferred policies will not be grounded in reality—in how the world actually works—but be a shared delusion about reality. The failure of such policies is thereby more or less guaranteed.
While “go woke go broke” has been oversold, it is clear that playing to the “woke” status game of preaching at your customers and audience—of telling them what they should think—loses customers and audience. There is a clear financial cost to such status plays. Yet, we see the same preaching-at rather than accepting the inherent logics of story and persuasion occur again and again in advertising, entertainment, fiction, gaming, comics, etc,, despite the adverse impact on sales. But if you are already committed to editing reality to bolster your self-image—and this is a shared identity, a shared status game, within your social milieu based on a sense of superiority over your fellow citizens—changing course can be very hard. You have already set your face against inconvenient—nay, immoral—learning.
For it is also very revealing that there can be such hostility to fans pushing back against changing entertainment franchise to override established canon, established lore, or even what is explicitly in the source material, so as to engage in this self-righteous preaching, of telling people what to think. The concept of “toxic fans” is very much part of the status game. “We are so morally superior, so much more perceptive, than you retrograde bigots.” The claim at the basis of all this that you and yours own morality, so are able to collectively decide what is, or is very much not, morally legitimate.
This becomes games of social dominance. The push is to impose these moralised status games on every aspect of life: on comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies.
The True Believers, the activists, seek to either take over the thing or destroy it. Either is a win for them, for either they have expanded their values into a new realm or they have destroyed that thing for failing to express their values. As they own morality—so their values are the entirety of the moral—nothing must be permitted to propagate “false” values, for such are immoral.
So, yes, they are totalitarian shits, seeking to impose themselves and their values on every social realm. The answer to the question: why don’t they just make up their own stories, their own entertainment franchises? is that they literally cannot tolerate dissent, they cannot tolerate rival values and perspectives operating in their society, for they own morality, so all dissent is immoral. Hence, they do not content themselves in creating stories of their own but seek to colonise every single entertainment franchise and either control it or ruin it—or, as the pattern is, control it and then ruin it.
Leaving some realm uncolonised also means that they have not established their social dominance, they have not established that their values and perspectives are superior to all others. If you are a good person for affirming X, then you are a bad person for affirming not-X and so not-X must not be allowed to operate—still less propagate—anywhere.
Their politics of contempt for their fellow citizens applies even more virulently to the efforts of past citizens. This is why what the original creators actually wrote has no authority: on the contrary it has negative authority. Imposing their oh-so-wonderful values and perspectives on everything they can is them being both socially “heroic” and profoundly moral.
If a realm or thing is allowed to operate independently it also means that there are no jobs or resources in that area for them, for the righteous. There is nothing more colonial, more socially imperial, than “de-colonising the curriculum”: a self-righteous elite tells the locals that their heritage is appalling and has to be re-construed and replaced by their moral and cognitive betters (who, of course, will be paid to do so).
Following this logic, the entire push of such politics is to turn elections into legitimating rituals that are not allowed to touch whatever the owners of morality care about—and are absolutely not allowed to touch what gives them authority and resources. Hence all the concern with “far right” and how utterly democratically illegitimate, how undemocratic, how anti-democratic, people voting for the “wrong” political Party is.
“Our democracy” is democracy that never pushes back against their values, their authority, their resource and status plays. The operate in and from NGO-Administrative networks that not only seek to frustrate democratic accountability, they seek to frustrate any accountability except to the shared status games.
It has become very clear that they are so committed to their status games—and so the epistemic closure that those status games require—that they will preside over the corrosive destruction of their own societies rather than abandon their sense of moral superiority. Agreeing with their wrong-thinking fellow citizens becomes the worse thing imaginable. Along with the zealots, you get the morally-intimidated cowards who will preside over the expanding corrosion of their own societies to avoid being called racist (or Islamophobic).
The adoption of such elite status games means that the West generates historically illiterate elites engaged in systematic cognitive closure. One ends up with societies increasingly marked by broken feedbacks, where there is no legitimate way for citizens to push back even against the most patently destructive or corrosive policies, provided such policies are incorporated in elite status games where not noticing and rationalising away inconvenient facts is part of the social signalling of moral “soundness”.
This is most obvious with Muslim immigration. Islam has a 1400 year pattern:
Muslims are a small minority: peace and harmony. Hence the permanent minority Islamic groups—Ismailis, Alevis, Ibadis, Ahmmadis—are not a problem.
Muslims reach critical mass in a population so as to establish enclaves: increasing aggression (as we are currently seeing in Western Europe). This includes sexual aggression against “outsider” women.
Muslims are a majority in the society: everyone else is subordinated.
This pattern starts with Muhammad himself, who preached peace and harmony when his flock was a small minority. Upon taking over Medina, he killed the Jewish males and handed their women and children to his followers as slaves, then proceeded to conquer the rest of Arabia. Muhammad is Islam’s Exemplary Man and this structure is built into Islam at the ground level—for example, it is provision of Sharia that if a woman is captured by a Muslim man, her marriage (if any) is automatically annulled, while the Quran explicitly exempts “those thy right hand [i.e., sword hand] possesses” from the limits on the number of wives. Hence, rinse and repeat for the 14 centuries since.
How is this hard? But the more you have to not notice and rationalise away, the stronger the signal of moral “soundness”. (All that money spent on scholarship on Islam, and somehow no warning from universities about this clear pattern.)
In social milieus that do not have to make things work—which is most of academe—this status game will actively select for toxically corrosive ideas. There will be selection for largely or completely false ideas—creating mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth—as they require more not noticing and rationalising away, so are stronger signals of shared “soundness”. There will be selection for corrosive ideas, as asserting one self against the existing society, and its heritage, also provides a stronger signal of moral and cognitive superiority.
Hence, academe has become increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium, as it is a fundamental principle of Critical Theory, and its derivatives, that critique is superior to descriptive analysis. Even better, Critical Theory elevates critique while explicitly eschewing grappling with how the superior society that such critique will allegedly lead to would actually work. Academics can revel in the moral superiority of the splendours in their head while literally taking no responsibility at all for making things work, even in theory.
Cardinal Newman wrote:
I have urged that, supposing Theology be not taught, its province will not simply be neglected, but will be actually usurped by other sciences, which will teach, without warrant, conclusions of their own in a subject-matter which needs its own proper principles for its due formation and disposition. Discourse 4: Section 15.
His claim that a university stripped of a guiding Theology—that is, a set of bounded norms—will not only invent its own, but will invent a bad one, has proved to be correct.
Under the Critical Theory magisterium, the imagined future becomes the realm of trumping (i.e. divine) authority—there being no information from the future to contradict such—while various claims about, and on behalf, of “marginalised/oppressed” groups become sacred. That is, no trade-offs from outside the realm of the sacred are permitted against such claims: which is how we get to contesting the claims of Trans folk is Transphobic.
The Critical Theory magisterium does indeed provide a substitute Theology—a catastrophically corrupting one. The research grant innovation cargo cult that I analysed in a previous post has, via academic status games, selected for a set of ideas, a substitute Theology, that provides academics with the strongest sense of moral and cognitive grandiosity. This has been exported across Western institutions as a shared status game.
What we have here is a status game that generates a profound inability to learn. A status game that emanates from Western universities.
Let that sink in for a moment. A profound inability to learn emanates from … our institutions of higher education, much of whom act, in the words of a study of course bibliographies, more like seminaries than institutions of higher education. There can be no greater statement of their systematic institutional dysfunction. It also shows how utterly delinquent Ministers and Secretaries of Education—and their bureaucrats—have been that billions of taxpayer funds have been spent creating and sustaining this profound dysfunction.
Biologist Bret Weinstein discusses this inability to learn and its frightening implications:
2:34 But there’s something about the modern left that has made it impossible to discover that something you believed was true turns out not to be. And it’s terrifying because when you’re in charge of civilization and you cannot learn the lesson that something that you thought was true isn’t, then you just keep barreling along in the same direction and you know it’s only a matter of time before you you collapse what you’ve got.
The editing of reality to support shared status games identifies why there is this inability to learn. But he also identifies another factor:
5:54 I think there’s a problem with city folk and I am one. … City folks are people who live in a totally socially constructed world.And the point is most city folks, they live with abstractions, … They have an idea. I’m for this policy because I want that outcome, … and then they aren’t in a position to evaluate … well we applied that policy here and the outcome that you wanted to become greater became lesser and then over here that same pattern emerged and therefore the thing that we do to try to accomplish this has a paradoxical effect. Okay, that’s just a a normal pattern.
Somebody who works with physical systems—your electrician or a carpenter—they live in a world where if they have a wrong idea, “I know how this should be done”. And then they go into the wood shop and they try the thing and it doesn’t work. There’s no point in telling themselves a lie and saying, “Well, it it should have worked, so it did, right?” Nope. That didn’t work. And now you might know something about why it didn’t work and you’re in a position to correct that thing because the feedback is not social, it’s physical. …
So my sense is that … cities are a natural phenomenon. They happen for a reason, but they do tend to concentrate people whose job in modern times involves exchanging concepts through a screen and a keyboard, … Those people don’t necessarily have a close connection to some system that tells them when they’re kidding themselves. And so you we need some common sense of the sort that people that have to make something work have that bureaucrats often don’t.
As he says, compassionate policy requires dispassionate analysis. The editing of reality to support performative moral displays—and resource grabs—shows that the alleged moral concern is not substantive, it is not usefully operative. On the contrary, it will be reliably—if that is the word—dysfunctional precisely because of the self-sabotaging of the ability to learn. And no, the politics of urban folk are not automatically superior to those of country folk.
Flawed from the base
The simple, even unnoticed, act of psychological self-defence—editing the concept of Left so as to exclude what are both the most horrific and, in historical terms, most important, manifestations of Left politics—to generate an identity, a sense of moral superiority, based on a shared status game flowing from what’s in their heads, creates a politics of toxic falsehoods. A politics that is fundamentally hostile to open discourse and to learning. A politics of deeply dysfunctional policies. The more institutionally entrenched and influential such flawed-at-base reality-editing political outlooks become, the more disastrous for human flourishing they are.
Can there be a Left politics not based on this foundational falsehood? Yes. But that is not the politics that we, in the contemporary West, are being offered.
References
Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2. https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2
Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014
Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2025.
Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems,’ Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/
Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980844
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin, Project Gutenberg, [1852].
Jennica Pounds (@DataRepublican) and Joshua Lisec, Unelected: How You Paid a Sinister Elite to Take Over America, Passage Press, 2026.
Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, Stephanie Muravchik, Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues, Working Paper, July 10, 2025 (rev. July 24). https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Closed-Classrooms.pdf?x73875
Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.