The lazy self-righteousness of the unaccountable classes

Academe generates it, the media sells it, activists mobilise it and bureaucrats aggrandise it.

Western civilisation, over the last two centuries, has gone through the Emancipation Sequence whereby—taking the Anglosphere pattern—free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. We live in free societies of mass prosperity, yet we have highly motivated political networks that think nothing of casting our societies as marked by layers of oppression.

Yes, this is based on a monstrous (and self-serving) inflation of the concept of oppression. It also functions to channel the rage of downwardly mobile children of Western elites.

Rage of the Falling Elite

More important still, it is the signature politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up—as distinct from the accountable classes whose income depends directly on their performance. The dominant politics of the unaccountable classes has acquired a name: it is woke politics, the politics of wokery or of being woke.

The technical name for wokery is Critical Constructivism. It is the popularisation of Critical Theory. I have labelled it Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, as it rests on critiques of The Enlightenment, and rejection of Enlightenment values, while orienting itself towards an imagined future—one where it is no longer true, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), that society is based:

on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

That is, of oppression as they define it.

Wokery is the currently dominant form of left-progressivism. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann defines “wokery” as:

making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities.

That is how the Oppressor/Oppressed template that Critical Theory takes from Marxism is popularised in a post civil rights world, using any differences in outcomes between groups as markers of oppression. The Oppressor/Oppressed template requires oppression to be pervasive in contemporary societies, hence psychologist Steven Pinker’s observation about progressives hating progress.¹

What wokery also is, is lazy self-righteousness. The self-righteousness is obvious and pervasive. These folk really do act as if they own morality; as if they can withhold the moral grace of their presence from the wicked, from wrongthinkers; as if wrongthinkers are purveyors of moral pollution. This has much to do with the dwindling of the culture of public debate.

But it is also lazy, in that it massively economises on the use of information and intellectual effort. Much of the appeal of “wokery” comes from how remarkably little accurate knowledge it demands. All one has to do is to master the lingo, the linguistic signalling, involved; the pre-set talking points; which terms of moral abuse apply and when; and be willing to engage in any required level of rationalisation and mental gymnastics. Once you do so, the moralised status game of lazy self-righteousness is open for you, with approved positions lined up for one to adopt, all based on semblances of knowing.

This dynamic has much to do with why one side of US politics is far more conformist in its political opinions than the other.

Source.

The underlying blank slate views about humans means you don’t have to accept any constraints from evolutionary biology. If we are all blank slates, if there are no inherent differences between groups, then all inequalities between groups can be classed as malicious—as signs of oppression—so you do not have to bother exploring differences in traits, cultures, life-strategies, etc.

Lazy self-righteousness does not require any thinking about successful and unsuccessful life strategies, about what makes things work, or not work. It does not require much in the way of statistical or mathematical understanding. The most mathematical it gets is whether social outcomes are proportional to a group’s population share or not.

If a group is doing better than average, they are oppressors. If they are doing worse, they are oppressed. Viewing society through the oppressed/oppressor mindset always ends up looking for (and finding) kulaks.

It is a simple metric to adopt, with the self-righteous status game built-in of opposing oppression and supporting the marginalised. No further intellectual effort is required.

It is also a disastrous way to think of things. If doing well marks one as oppressors, then success, having successful life-strategies, is turned into vice. If doing badly marks one as oppressed, then failure, having unsuccessful life-strategies, is turned into virtue.

Understanding how to make things work—what works and what does not—is systematically sabotaged. But making things work is not salient to those paid for turning up—or paid to flatter those playing such status games.

This is not merely defining deviancy down—itself corrosive of a flourishing social order. It is defining social success as moral deviancy, which is profoundly destructive towards a flourishing social order.

Various Democrat-run cities in the US have banned holding boys back from starting school—so that they “catch up” with the earlier emotional maturity of girls—because affluent parents were doing it more. To achieve equality, you stop people doing what works better and so frustrate—or even penalise—those more alert to what works, more able to do what works. Eric Kaufmann is not wrong to call wokery cultural socialism: it has the same disastrous “flattening into mediocrity” (or worse) via toxic equalitarianism as economic socialism.

Critical Race Theory—with its inbuilt assumption that racism is always operating—is classic lazy self-righteousness. It is not a matter of enquiring into how society actually works. It is using the a priori assumption of the existence of racism to engage in a self-righteous status game, much of whose appeal is precisely that it requires minimal intellectual effort for maximum moral grandstanding.

Such Theory—by defining unequal outcomes, or any inconvenient constraint, as oppression—is how oppression is found to be pervasive, so that the moralised status game of fighting oppression can be activated, thereby motivating adherence to the popularisation of such Theory. This circularity does not require contact with reality, though it gets more power by turning molehills of truth into motivating mountains of bullshit.

The key thing is that such “oppression” can always be found, though at the cost of corroding the legitimacy of the society, its heritage and belittling its achievements. The moralised status game of always finding oppression is not merely a self-righteous structure of untruths, they are toxic untruths.

The vision of the future as one free from any inconvenient constraints is at the heart of Marx’s vision of the end-point of History. As Marx tells us, we will so humanise the world, that division of labour will end for:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Division of labour is about managing constraints. Define any constraint one does not like as oppression, then there is always oppression to find—and this entire status strategy requires that oppression be pervasive. Anyone who seriously wrestles with such constraints becomes a facilitator of oppression.

Thus can Marxian templates be mobilised—including the Oppressor/Oppressed template—to generate moralised status games while using the cultural turn involved, the shift to cultural categories, to sidestep all that inconvenient tyranny and mass murder that economic Marxism—aka Communism—generated. Much of the nonsense and/or patently false Theory generated by the academy is generated precisely because the embedded status games within the academy demand such claims. For example, the claim—easily demolished, but alive and well in the academy—that Western wealth rests on the plundering of the non-West, on the exploitation of the “Global South”.

That cultural turn in Marxian thought has been enormously convenient. Derivatives of Marxism via Critical Theory (Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, etc) now dominate the academy far more than conventional Marxism ever did. Meanwhile, so many of the adherents of the status games of lazy self-righteousness that represent the popularisation of Critical Theory—and its spin-offs—have no idea of the intellectual pedigree of what they are adhering to; what they have decided shows them to be good people.

But that just goes with the general pattern of covering ignorance with semblances of knowing. The appeal of the moralised status game with its semblances of knowing actively discourages intellectual effort or curiosity beyond the necessary rationalisations to play the moralised status game.

It is much simpler to conceive constraint as oppression than to determine what constraints are operating, why, and how to deal with them. The imagined future of abolishing all constraints conceived as oppressive becomes the benchmark of all judgement, both moral and cognitive.

Such politics of the imagined, golden future operates on political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon’s principle that:

The golden age lies not in the past, but in the future.

(L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir.)

An imagined golden age so much greater than the ever-tarnished, ever-inadequate, record of actual human achievement, hence commitment to that imagined future makes its adherents so morally and cognitively superior to all others. It is the ultimate political status game that grants to its adherents ownership of morality.

The powerful simplicity of this vision splendid has so many uses. Since the imagined future is the benchmark of judgement, and there is no information from the future, you do not have to subject that vision to any reality tests. Any and all inconvenient constraints or differences in outcomes can be declared to be “oppressive”. The imagined vision can be as splendid as you want.

Anyone defending something humans have built will defending something with deficiencies, limitations and sins—real or imagined—in its present or past: so such defenders can be lambasted with those. Using the vision in your head as your benchmark of judgement—which can be as glorious as you want, as it is subject to no reality tests—gives one the laziest of self-righteous rhetorical advantages.

It also protects the claim of pervasive oppression that the moralised status game of “fighting oppression” requires, as any denial of the reality of oppression becomes complicity in oppression. Much of the power of such lazy self-righteousness is that it operates as a mind virus as economist Arnold Kling defines such:

A mind virus is not merely a set of beliefs with which we disagree. A mind virus is a set of untrue beliefs that includes a defense mechanism against truth-seeking.

Speaking of Mind Viruses

Once you buy into the moralised status game, everything you do is judged by its glorious intent, so you don’t have to explore consequences of your preferred policies. Indeed, policies with such glorious intent are their own protection: if you are pushing X to achieve glorious thing Y, then anyone who objects to X can be deemed to be against Y. If you are motivated by compassion, then anyone who disagrees must clearly be motivated by hate.

Since the glorious imagined future—the splendours in your head—are the benchmark of judgement, you and yours own morality. You do not have to engage with any dissent because it is all immoral, it is all bigotry, ignorance, psychological incompetence, a sign of a lack of moral character. It is all “hate” and can be subject to whatever form of moral abuse is convenient. You do not debate, you “diagnose” which form of declared bigotry is operating in any dissent, so which forms of moral abuse apply.

Critical Constructivism literally holds than any claim about the world has to be judged by its presumptive effect on designated categories of people. Hence one must not give “oxygen”—i.e. the moral grace of one’s presence and engagement—to the moral “pollution” of anyone who dissents.

The Foucauldian lazy simplification that everything is the operation of power blandly simplifies all questions of causality, yet can be passed of as this blessed insight that puts you ahead of the common herd. Linguist and polemicist Noam Chomsky’s critique of the French Theorists is spot on—including that their thinking is pre-Darwinian.

Academe has become an ever expanding arena for rationalisations of moralised status games, with Critical Theory and French Theory spreading through Anglosphere academe, as both naturally generate such status plays. That Anglosphere academe is such a large social arena has enabled more intense selection for the most effective moralised status games.

All this appeals very strongly to the mathematically incompetent and the scientifically illiterate. No statistical reasoning has to be adopted beyond the most banal. Even the constraints of logic, such as set theory, can be dispensed with.

It appeals to emotion, to feels, over facts and reason. It hardly seems a surprise that rationality terms have been retreating, emotional and emotive terms advancing, in fiction and non-fiction books. The timing of that retreat from rationality as beginning the late 1970s suggests that the combination of the spread of French Theory, and the beginning of the feminisation of academe and publishing, may have something to do with the shift. It is also period when—thanks to the expansion of the welfare state, of higher education, of the non-profit advocacy economy, and of HR departments in the wake of anti-discrimination law—the unaccountable classes (those paid to turn up) hit critical mass. If you are paid to turn up, status games in your organisational and social milieu—especially moralised “good” and “bad” feels status plays—can easily matter more than accuracy about the world.

Dark Emu

A clear example of how lazy self-righteousness mobilises ignorance under a semblance of knowing is provided by Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, a 2014 book by writer Bruce Pascoe that claimed—citing various reports by settlers and explorers, but no Aboriginal sources—that the Australian Aborigines were farmers.

Since the mid C19th, anthropologists from maybe 20 nations had come to Australia precisely because it was the continent of hunter-gatherers. No farmers, no pastoralists, but foragers of considerable sophistication who managed the landscape by what has become now known as fire-stick farming. Australia prior to European settlement had no domesticated plants and animals (apart from the dingo), so no sowing, hoeing and ploughing. If the claim that Aborigines had been farmers—rather than remarkably sophisticated foragers—was correct, anthropologists from all those countries had been getting it wrong for 150 years.

But who has read that anthropology? Once Dark Emu and its thesis had been adopted as what good people believed—with the relevant talking points disseminated by media—most people were in no position to argue against it and those who were, were taking away people’s newly mobilised status game. A status game of the type and pattern that it was already established could be “rightfully” defended by moral abuse of those who dissent.

Neither ignorance, nor falsity, are a problem for the status strategy of lazy self-righteousness. On the contrary, casting a semblance of knowledge over ignorance elevates the believers and generates acquiescence among the vast majority who lack the information base to demur.

Moreover, falsity can be an advantage. It means that the claims are new and exciting, while any rationalisations required to defend false claims demonstrate loyalty and commitment to the shared status game. There is no more redolent example of the advantages of falsity for the politics of lazy self-righteousness than Trans, which requires so much rationalisation to support its grotesque lie that a person with a penis is a woman and its evil lie that the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors represents “care and compassion”.

A perverse propriety

Academic Theory generates endless new and exciting claims that cast a semblance of knowing over ignorance, using ideas laundering to give such claims undeserved authority. Such use of Theory has, for decades now, been a case of rinse and repeat. Critical Theory and its derivatives have a huge advantage in this game, as its Oppressor/Oppressed template naturally generates both a sense of moral superiority among adherents plus moral abuse for those who dissent.

Of course, expounding care for the “marginalised” in an academe with inadequate reality-tests—and a weak or no sense that folk can be “marginalised” for good reason—can lead to going places that the general public will have the confidence to reject if confronted with them. (Given the dynamics of contemporary mainstream media, the public being informed about them is a somewhat big “if”.)

What the politics of lazy self-righteousness is doing is mobilising propriety—status from conforming to norms—in a shared status games across institutional and social networks. Network goods tend to be monopoly goods due to the network effect—the larger the network, the greater the benefits of membership and the easier it is to add an extra person. This encourages coalescing about shared moralised status games based on performative beliefs, where affirming X makes you a good person while saying not-X makes you a bad one. If the politics of X is the politics of ostentatious compassion, then the politics of not-X must be the politics of “hate”.

As correct affirmations of belief become status markers, dialogue with wrongthinkers represents moral pollution, while being offended in the correct ways, and on behalf of the correct groups, shows commitment to the shared status game. This is an outlook profoundly hostile to open dialogue, to open discourse, to critical thinking, and to accountability, particularly democratic accountability.

Merely being a citizen gives one no authority in the politics of lazy self-righteousness. Correct affirmations of belief are the sole basis of authority: even being a member of “sacred” marginalised group is negated if one goes against the moralised status games of correct belief. Thus, African-American commentator Larry Elder famously became the “black face of white supremacy”. Tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel was not gay because he supported Donald Trump.

Moreover, as the imagined future is the benchmark of moral judgement, the votes of citizens are subject to the judgement of whether they advance that future or not. We can see this operating in the EU whereby popular votes are judged by whether they advance the project of “Ever Closer Union” or not. The non-electoral politics of institutional capture come naturally to the politics of lazy self-righteousness, both because these are the network politics of the unaccountable classes—those paid to turn up—but also because the views and votes of the general citizenry are so systematically discounted.

If one is wondering how the UK has become such an enthusiastically censoring state—with the censorious politics of the unaccountable classes so thoroughly embedded—it is because the Blair-Brown Governments of 1997-2010 took power away from elected officials (apart from the PM) and handed it to “experts” in Quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation and to the EU. Those with the “correct” understandings could thus do their thing, insulated from voters who, if they disagree, become benighted wrongthinkers. The result of this destruction of accountability—and atrophying of democratic feedback—has been a sharp decline in British state capacity, a dramatic increase in policy and institutional dysfunction, and deep voter alienation.

One sees various forms of such patterns in Democrat-run cities and States in the US. The degradation of the mechanisms of accountability naturally elevates the “no-debate”—so censorious—lazy self-righteousness politics of the unaccountable classes.

Precisely because these are status-games against fellow citizens—generating glib sneers against working-class citizens has become something of a cottage industry in Anglosphere academe—based on ownership of morality, said status-games do not make their adherents popular either domestically or globally. Chinese netizens coined the term baizuo (“white left”) as an expression of contempt. A friend who follows Arabic Twitter/X observed that folk there:

think these people are FULL OF SHIT and incidentally providing material support to the Muslim Brotherhood.

(The currently most salient offshoot from the Muslim Brotherhood being Hamas.)

“Woke” cultural politics has degraded various formerly beloved entertainment franchises such as Stars Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well as various book adaptations, such as The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, the Wheel of Time, Song of Ice and Fire, the Man in the High Castle. The “woke” cultural politics of lazy self-righteousness, with its sense of being the owners of morality—cognitively elevated above the common herd and the denizens of the benighted past—destroys the humility of respect for an author’s work. It replaces it with a by-the-numbers, ticking-moralised-status-markers, moral narcissism that dwindles characters into avatars for lazy self-righteousness messaging.

The “scholarship” of lazy self-righteousness does the same to both past and present, to history, to the humanities and to the social sciences. Setting the imagined future as the benchmark of judgement, giving one ownership of morality, requires past and present to conform to the use of the imagined future as the benchmark of judgement. The myth of the golden future requires the mythologising of history. This produces cartoon (simplistic) and caricature (distorted) history to fulfil the arc of the transformative future being the oppression-free moral heaven, the past as benighted moral hell, and the present as oppressive moral purgatory. One need go no further than New York Times’s 1619 Project for such mythologising.

The Oppressor/Oppressed template requires adoption of a Conflict Theory of social dynamics, seeing conflict between groups as central to social dynamics. A huge problem with this is that human societies are mostly exercises in social cooperation. The Emancipation Sequence—with its politics of bargaining and persuasion—is a striking example of this. Human societies habitually display levels of cooperation between unrelated lineages—i.e., non-kin cooperation—not achieved by any other species.²

Legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s reduction of politics to the Friend/Enemy distinction is a classic example of Conflict Theory destructively flattening reality. It is never a good sign when folk go all Schmittian—as for instance, with the enthusiasm for his thought in CCP China. As a friend notes:

Conflict theory produces utter wreckage when applied to politics.

If you do not see how extensive human cooperation is, you will not inquire into, or respect, the mechanisms that generate that cooperation. This leads progressivism to be recurrently very bad—even disastrous—at encouraging and sustaining such cooperation. Thinking you and yours own morality is particularly antipathetic to such sustaining, as it cripples your access to, engagement with, and use of, information.

Marx has a hugely overblown notion of the possibilities of human cooperation because his wildly over-stated Conflict Theory means that he grossly neglects the mechanisms of cooperation, especially the constraints they have to overcome.

Much about the US education system serves the politics of lazy self-righteousness which, via Critical Pedagogy has shaped teacher training and curriculum development for decades. This has generated a “pinkwashed” education that leaves students with Hitler, Nazism/Fascism and McCarthyism as the only symbols and examples of evil. Even educated Americans often lack the knowledge to recognise that a lot of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) training turns into struggle sessions.

They absolutely lack the background knowledge to be aware that the first state to bring a DEI program was the Soviet Union, with its Korenizatsiya program. Mao developed his own version of DEI and notions of privileged/oppressor v oppressed groups (the so-called Black and Red identities). This was an improved version of the Soviet original. North Korea has its own version, the Songbun system.

This policy pedigree is not remotely accidental. When one looks at the—almost entirely spurious—intellectual underpinnings of DEI in the West, it comes from derivatives of Critical Theory, which are themselves derived from Marxism. All those DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers and so forth are the networked-activism equivalents of commissars, who are updated versions of inquisitors. But decades of pinkwashing of the US education system via the pedagogy of lazy self-righteousness has meant that so many Americans lack any historical framing or background knowledge to understand what is going on.

A hugely inflated academe—increasingly pervaded by people who push false Theory because they suffer no penalty for being wrong provided they lean into academic status games—that selects via reputation into shared status games, has generated the structures of lazy self-righteousness. Academics are often very narrow in their knowledge base, but their cognitive self-image is as being the people who know. Of course they generate, and adopt, moralised status games based on semblances of knowing.

Graduates them take these patterns of lazy self-righteousness based on semblances of knowing out into the wider world. These take off among the unaccountable classes, among those paid to turn up, and for whom social feedback within their own networks and institutions dominates over any feedback from reality or from the wider citizenry.

The politics of lazy self-righteousness not only provides a shared moralised status-game, it also generates moral projects that provide bases for claims on resources.

Journalists can both play this status game themselves as well as sell themselves as providing the narratives that one has to believe to be good people. They become both participants in, and purveyors of, the status game of lazy self-righteousness. They provide valuable coordination-via-mutual-signalling services to all those engaged in the shared status games.

Public broadcasting is the media of the unaccountable classes, so it becomes an avid purveyor of the narratives and politics of lazy self-righteousness. By providing a “free” service, public broadcasting helps undermine the economics of mainstream media, whose classified advertising income streams have collapsed. Mainstream (private) media suffers the go broke, go woke phenomenon, employing cheaper young recent graduates invested in the status games of lazy self-righteousness.

The politics of lazy self-righteousness is great for activists, as it enables them to combine highly motivated zealotry—they are fighting oppression!—with a semblance of knowledge in shared status games that give them ready-made “ins” into media and institutional networks. They can play the game of calling something racist, sexist, transphobic, etc. etc. until they either destroy it, take it over, or otherwise bend it to their will.

The politics of lazy self-righteousness is great for bureaucrats, for managers, as it gives them ever-expanding moral projects that justify ever-more resources while shielding them from accountability. Everyone playing the same status-games will cheer them on. Moreover, such folk will all be hostile to any inconvenient information, arguments or concerns that breaches their shared semblances of knowing, their shared sense of moral status.

Indeed, precisely because their moral and cognitive identities, as well as sense of status, are at stake, the participants in the cultural politics of lazy self-righteousness are likely to be quite vicious in protection of such—we saw this in the policy responses to the Covid pandemic. This is quite disastrous for accountability.

If the bureaucrats, the managers, are doing X to achieve Y, any critique of X can be presented as an attack on/denial of Y. If we are doing lockdowns/closing schools/mandatory experimental medical interventions, to stop the pandemic—while ignoring that its dangers were highly concentrated in the metabolically unhealthy—to “save Grandma”, clearly anyone who demurs on any of these measures “wants to kill Grandma”.

The combination of expansive moral projects—remember, these moral projects are based on an Oppressor/Oppressed template where oppression is so defined that it will always be found—that automatically have a highly complicit media and institution networks, all committed to the same semblances of knowing, the same moralised status games based on affirmations of belief, means such projects are shielded from accountability. This is great for bureaucratic aggrandisement.

While the contemporary UK provides an object lesson in these dynamics, so does Canada—read journalist Tristin Hopper’s darkly humorous book Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once for a whole series of object lessons. So much of what had gone wrong with institutions and discourse in Canada, and elsewhere, has been the spread of lazy self-righteousness as the politics of the unaccountable classes. There are many striking cases. One that I found clarifying was British Columbia’s “harm reduction” drug policy, which has been a grotesque failure. This does not appear to matter, because no one apparently bothers to check the stats or, if they do, respond to them.

There are also many US examples. For example, watch economist Roland Fryer talk about the experiments they had run to see what worked in schooling—which, of course, Education Faculties have mostly paid NO attention to. Why would they? They suffer no penalty for training teachers in toxic untruths that conform to academic status games.

As Education Faculties dominated by Critical Pedagogy mainly sell lazy self-righteousness, the semblances of knowing they sell do not need actual evidence about what works. On the contrary, that would get in the way. There are a whole series of mechanisms that block American public schools from doing better, but the pedagogy and cultural politics of lazy self-righteousness are a big part of the problem.

Conclusion

Lazy self-righteousness mobilises ignorance under semblances of knowing. Of course it is catnip for academics, journalists, activists and bureaucrats. Of course it has spread through our institutions. It takes advantage of weaknesses in accountability.

It also frustrates accountability via mainstream media buying into—and actively purveying—the narratives of lazy self-righteousness. Hence we end up with political classes that systematically do not reflect the cultural views of voters, being pulled towards the narratives of lazy self-righteousness.

A necessary response to the damage done by—and the appeal of—lazy self-righteousness is to re-invigorate mechanisms of accountability. That includes shrinking the size and reach of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up.

In particular, all activist scholarship should be stripped of any taxpayer funding, including any access to research grants. That means no taxpayer funding of any institution that employs any purveyors of activist “scholarship”. This would mean either all universities, schools and education facilities get purged of such sources of toxic untruth, or they get closed.

It also means defunding the media of the unaccountable classes, aka public broadcasting.

The larger the group insulated from reality tests—and from accountability—the more dysfunctional public discourse, public policy and institutions become. Hence the importance of comprehensively shrinking the size and reach of the unaccountable classes.

References

David Card, Christian Dustmann and Ian Preston, ‘Immigration, Wages, and Compositional Amenities,’ Norface Migration Discussion Paper No. 2012-13, February 2012. https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/immigration-wages-compositional-amenities.pdf (A future Nobel memorial laureate apparently cannot recognise social capital when the evidence for it is right in front of him.)

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

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Jo Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness,’ blend of three versions published in: The Second Wave Vol.2, No.1, 1972; Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 17, 1972-73, 151-165; Ms. magazine, July 1973, 76-78, 86-89. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

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

Tristin Hopper, Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, Sutherland House, 2025.

Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Constructivism, Peter Lang, [2005] 2008.

Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras, Michael Quayle, ‘Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts,’ British Journal of Social Psychology, (2024) 63, 37–51. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12665

Richard E. Mayer, ‘Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction,’ American Psychologist, January 2004, Vol. 59, No. 1, 14–19. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8909497_Should_There_Be_a_Three-Strikes_Rule_Against_Pure_Discovery_Learning

Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen, ‘The rise and fall of rationality in language,’ PNAS, 2021, Vol. 118, No. 51, e2107848118. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, [1980] 1996.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers: the Dark Emu Debate, Melbourne University Press, 2021.

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, ‘Moral Grandstanding,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016, 44, no. 3, 197-217. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/papa.12075

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358989232_The_marketplace_of_rationalizations

1. Pinker’s observation that populism is a phenomenon of older voters has not worn well. Also, it is a sign how reflexive future-orientated judgements have become, that the voters with the most experience of the EU were most likely to vote against it in the 2016 Brexit referendum passes people by.

2. In foraging bands, for instance, unmarried young men will regularly provide food—especially fat and protein—from their hunts to children that they are not related to.