To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are

By Glenn H. Reynolds

Most Americans hate woke politics — and most minorities don’t share “woke” priorities. Indeed, according to pollster David Shor, woke excesses are causing black voters to flee the Democratic Party. Despite endless charges of “racism,” former President Donald Trump took the biggest share of minority voters of any Republican in my lifetime.  

Woke tyrants ride high, even so; according to a Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression. Only a tiny minority of consumers care about Mr. Potato Head’s toxic masculinity, about “Aunt Jemima” as a brand or about the #MeToo aggressions of Pepé Le Pew. Yet corporations, universities and governments rush to placate that minuscule slice of the population, trashing large chunks of our culture in the process.

It’s happening not because anybody voted for it, but because a small but determined and vicious minority is bullying people to go along, relying on cowardice and groupthink to achieve ends that could never happen via majority vote: How do you think Dr. Seuss would have done in a referendum?

How does this happen? To some degree, the woke abuse the good nature of Americans. For the most part, Americans want their fellow citizens to be happy. If they hear something makes others unhappy, they generously look to change things.

And there’s fear. Writing about the goings-on at New York’s Dalton School, Bari Weiss notes that even parents who think the political correctness has gone too far are afraid to speak out: They think their kids’ shot at the Ivy League could be at risk. And it’s not just Dalton.

Weiss quotes one mother: “I look at the public school, and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another says: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”

In his book “Skin in the Game,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes about the surprising ability of small but intransigent minorities — 3 percent to 4 percent is enough — to change the direction of entire societies. He writes: “The most intolerant wins. . . . Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. . . . [I]t will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”

Does this mean we should be less tolerant of our own minoritarian tyrants? In a word, yes.

I don’t mean that they should be forced into camps, or even driven from their jobs and from polite society, as the woke are all too willing to do to their opponents. But they need to be deprived of the thing that is most important to their self-image: moral credibility.

The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.

That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.

Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.

You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.

Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.

___________________

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

Source

Outrage Culture is Becoming Mainstream Culture

“The biggest threat to free speech is that WE are actively silencing OURSELVES, not that the government is silencing us….The outrage machine will just dull us all down to the point where we won’t share ANY original thought because we won’t want to deal with the repercussions.

You think I’m being alarmist here? Well, do we seem more politically correct or less politically correct than 5 years ago? What about 10 years ago? Do you find yourself censoring yourself more or less now than even last year? Who is forcing you to censor yourself? Is it the government? I don’t think so.

And guess what, this creep of stifling speech for fear of being ostracized isn’t going to magically reverse itself: we have to pro-actively fight it. And we should have started this a long time ago.”     

The Regressive Left has Become the Religious Right

Great vid by Sargon of Akkad

New Gender Studies™ Glossary

Welcome to the exciting , ever-expanding field of ‘New Gender Studies™’. The following is a collection of the newly politically correct terms to be phased in over the next 12 months and in all likelihood mandatory in a university near you sometime in 2015. Please begin substituting these newly correct terms for the old immediately, every time they appear:

Danny DeVito = Feminism
Mashed Potatoes = The Patriarchy
French Tickler = Misogynist
Cornflakes = Privilege
Yellow Cornflakes = Benevolent Sexism
Squirrel = Gender
Red squirrel = Transgender
Badminton = Sexism
Melissa McCarthy = Male
Hitler = Female
Homunculus = Equality
Rubbery = Feminine
Svelte = Masculine
Lube = Intersex
Chocolate = Single Mother
Justin Bieber = Oppression
Tom Cruise = Heterosexual
Bonobo = Lesbian
Charlton Heston = Homosexual
Vigorous Thrusting Motion = Sexual Orientation
Fedora = 18 Inch Dildo

MORE TO COME. SMASH THE MASH.

John Lennon: A "Racist" And A "Homophobe"? Really??

This is in response to a question a friend of mine - a big John Lennon fan - received anonymously :  

What do you say to the homophobic/racist things John Lennon has said?

Present day political correctness is an ideological set of lenses which, if we choose to interpret the world through them, give us an excuse to demonize anyone we want to from the past. We can call Mark Twain, one of the most prominent pro-equality voices of his time a racist simply because he used the word ‘nigger’ in his antislavery masterpiece ‘Huckleberry Finn’, and demand book publishers censor it. We can call John Lennon racist or homophobic - if we choose - because we can play recordings of him making jokes in an Indian accent or using an effeminate voice.

But these judgements are literally meaningless, as you will not be able to find pretty much any other person living through the same time period that didn’t use the same language and share the same cultural sense of humour, which had no cultural stigma surrounding it at the time. Whereas, in the same period of time, using the word ‘fuck’ or even ‘Jesus Christ’ was considered shocking and could lose you your job and/or friendships amongst the ‘good’, ‘moral’ people.

So, unless the person in question took any of this behaviour to some very noticeable extremity - ie, organized lynch-mobs or campaigned to have gay people shot or whatever, it cannot actually mean anything, as there is no valid reference point from their time to compare their behaviour to.

As a thought experiment, imagine in 30 years time the words ‘black’ and ‘gay’ have been made taboo and are now universally reviled. Any writer from today who talked about ‘black people’ or ‘gay men’ would find their books either removed from school library shelves or released only in censored versions, with the future world ‘correct’ terms ‘coloured’ and ‘queer’ (or whatever) put in their place. Video footage of people using the offensive words - such as yourself - are rolled out only to show how evil a person you were, and if you are still alive, why everything you do should be boycotted.

Something like this actually will happen: it’s inevitable. As the old saying goes: “He who marries the spirit of his age becomes a widower in the next”.

Reality continues to exist beyond all the fashions of all ages and all perceptions shaped by ideology can only ever be temporary. People 50 years from now will be far more judgmental of the feminist and social justice mobs cruelly witch-hunting people today over amplified trivialities than they will be of the innocent folk they presently vilify.

Look to yourself and try consider what the very different future will think of your actions today. You won’t get to redo them, after all, and you can be sure all your excuses won’t be any excuse at all.

A Letter To O2

Here's the response I sent to one of the representatives of O2 that contacted me in regard to their blocking of this site. No reply as of yet.

------------------

Hi Bob,

thank you for your reply, it was a good deal more courteous than I had expected, so that was appreciated.

The two explanations I have received from you and others at O2 for why my anti-hate, pro-equality website should be - somewhat bizarrely - listed under O2's 'HATE' classification are as follows:

1) It “includes anti-feminism and covers hostility to individuals or groups on the basis of gender”. 

OK so, first off, these are obviously two separate things: feminism, after all, is not 'women'  or even 'equality', any more than 'communism' is 'the working classes'. It is simply a political ideology, like anarchism, libertarianism, communism, capitalism, fascism, whatever, with its own particular beliefs, goals, and agenda. To criticize a communist regime does not mean you hate the working class. To criticize radical feminism - a political and social movement with, after all, an enormous number of male adherents - does not mean you are spreading hatred of women. The two things simply do not follow.

On top of that, labeling criticism of any political ideology as 'hate speech' can only help push society towards a situation in which all political criticism is silenced, under the guise of concern that somehow, somewhere, someone might be offended.

So that's a huge flaw - or at least a grievous misunderstanding of 'anti-feminism' on the part of the O2 policy-makers - right there.

2) The second explanation I received was:

"The ‘hate’ category is a very broad category that covers a range of topics. Any web site that is shown to be displaying aggression to any person or group of people will be assigned to this category. Your site includes information about domestic violence and feminism. And whilst you’re campaigning against this rather than advocating it, the category would remain the same. This is to prevent people under the age of 18 from viewing any content related to ‘hate’."

Again, this makes very little sense: as I have written to you before, if you can point to anything I have written on my website in which I am "displaying aggression" to anyone I will a) be very surprised, & b) be happy to take it down, as I am unaware of it being there in the first place.

The question that logically follows on from both these is, of course: are ALL sites that cover the topic of domestic violence being blocked or only those that mention violence against men and boys? Checking your 'website status checker' site I found popular feminist sites such as
http://manboobz.com/ and
http://feministing.com/
that daily express extremely hostile, hateful and insulting opinions towards all males - regardless of their beliefs or actions, or the groups they belong to (though especially those asking for equal treatment in the eyes of the law), as well as regularly writing about domestic violence - are not blocked but free for anyone - including children - to see at will.

I have not checked yet whether any of the even more radical feminist websites are being allowed through the filter, but if that is the case then plainly this is a prejudiced and partisan silencing of freedom of expression, and I and others will have to begin taking steps to publicize the situation and bring such bias to the public's attention.

Also, even more seriously, domestic violence support sites such as
www.dvmen.co.uk/
& sites for divorced fathers trying to deal with family court such as
http://www.fathers.bc.ca/ and http://f4jquebec.org/

have also been blacklisted and blocked by O2, which is extremely disturbing, as these are resource centers for people in genuine need, being stopped from accessing help and support by a censorship policy which appears to be skewed, arbitrary, blatantly flawed and in all probability unlawful.

A statement on this matter would be appreciated, though I know you probably have very little input personally over the decision-making - I don't want to make you think I'm trying to try hold you individually responsible for the actions of a entire corporation.

Anyway, thanks once again for taking the time to reply,

Best wishes,

L. Byron

Boycott Norton / O2 / Symantec

So I found out a week or two back that Trigger Alert is on the list of Men's Rights sites that are now being blocked by O2 & Symantec.

The list now includes more than 100 sites & is growing, so I wrote to the company to ask why I was being blacklisted & received two very polite, illogical & Kafkaesque replies telling me my blog had been classified a 'HATE' site(!) due to its critical analysis of feminist ideology & occasional glance at the reciprocal nature of domestic violence in order to better understand it & thereby lessen its harmful effects on all society.

Yep, that's all the 'hate' you need these days, it turns out.

In another age, this Orwellian doublethink twaddle would actually be funny, & this very post dismissed as a particularly far-fetched piece of dystopian satire. And the people in that age would laugh if they heard someone believed it was actually true, & probably say to one another "You couldn't make this shit up!".

But no:

I note, by the way, using O2's own URL checker, that this is not also being applied to a good number of radical feminist sites that actually DO quite openly & unashamedly hate one whole half of the human race & disseminate false information about interpersonal violence only to exploit the fear & hysteria that generates to further their own particular ideological goals just about every single day.

Funny, that.

Anyway, this is just a brief one to urge you to boycott any of those three names if you have dealings with them at all, in the name of free speech.

It's not a big ask, anyway, as Norton is by some distance the worst piece of bloatware it has ever been my misfortune to come across & the first thing I've taken off of every computer I've ever bought. In terms of mobile/cellphone coverage, there are plenty of other alternatives out there these days to O2 so it's very little trouble to switch providers.

Even if you are not in a position to do this yourself at present, please spread the word - twitter is apparently a good one but social media generally is a good way to get the light shone on the shady politics of internet giants. Remember - it may be us today, but could be you tomorrow:

First they came for the Jews,

& I didn't speak out, because I wasn't a Jew

Then they came for the communists,

& I did nothing, because I wasn't a communist

Then they came for the gypsies,

& again I said nothing, since I wasn't a gypsy 
Then they came for the religious,
& I said nothing, because I was not religious
Then they came for the athiests,
 & again I would say nothing, because I never called myself an athiest,

Then they came for my neighbours,
& I said nothing, because at least it wasn't me.

Then they came for me

And there was no-one left to speak out

*

One last thing: if you have this site bookmarked or linked, please change to:

www.triggeralert.blogspot.co.uk

if you do not have it down as that already, as the blogspot.co.uk domain is apparently still free from this ridiculously misguided censorship at present.

That's all for now, thanks for stopping by.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, Vol.3

Aw come on now... everyone loves a trilogy...

Those previous pieces reminded me to dig out a letter I sent to one of those friends I lost when I first got on board with this way of thinking, three or four years ago. It was one long-ass screed, & most of it would be old news to anyone familiar with the MHRM now, but some of the things I said still hold up so I thought I would dust off some of the better extracts here. 

This is the last of it, I promise, but bear in mind while reading: we were best friends for over 12 years. She never replied to this letter, & I never heard from her again.

------------------

When I last talked with [mutual friend] he tried to convince me to be more specific about which 'branch' of feminism I think is harmful, for fear of upsetting anyone. I've taken this on board, & am trying to integrate it into my thinking but I'm still not truly convinced: it seems to me like being forced to pick which kind of Coca-Cola I want when I don't want Coca-Cola at all, I want water.

Feminism is not 'women', anymore than Communism is 'the masses': the masses don't give a poo about Communism, by & large. In both cases you have a group that deigns to speak for all the people it simply claims as members.

It's like me starting a group called 'The Friendly Foxes Club', that does some work towards helping protect foxes from being hunted. You look into it & see that yes, my group is mad about foxes, but it turns out is also full of really unpleasant people who go out every weekend hunting rabbits.

BUT, the thing is, if you don't join my group, it means you hate foxes.

Well, that's kind of how I feel about feminism right now. The idea that if you believe in equality for all then you believe in feminism is so obviously illogical that it stops me in my tracks whenever I hear it said. How can any group with a gender in its name purport to be acting wholly in the interests of the entire human race? If feminism is truly 'about equality', show me three public statements by any prominent feminist spokesperson saying even one thing positive about men. I've not really looked but I'm fairly sure you can't do it, & yet even 15 seconds with google can get me things like this:

"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig."

- Andrea Dworkin

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman."
- Catherine MacKinnon 

"(Rape) is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear".
Susan Brownmiller

 

"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience."
- Catherine Comin, Vassar College. Assistant Dean of Students.

There's a lot more where those came from. A hell of a lot more. 45 years worth. And I don't hear feminists of any kind actually denounce statements like these - instead of treating these inhuman, hateful proclamations as the toxic, genocidal rantings they are, the feminists I have met & read seem to regard them as slightly batty aunts that we might not fully agree with after they've had a few but certainly aren't going to say anything bad about because they're family. And besides, Aunt Andrea might go a bit far sometimes, further than we would, but essentially..... she's right.

The problem with mainstream feminism is there is no prominent speaker or author who holds up any of those statements & says 'this is not what we stand for'; 'Andrea Dworkin, we repudiate your hate-speech, Catherine MacKinnon, we repudiate your hate'.. And that is why feminism can never be about equality. And it's also that which tells you what Feminism as a movement is actually all about. Which is the demonization of men in order to acquire political influence & financial power.

Imagine if Jewish spokespeople made statements like 'the population of [the goyim] must be reduced until they approximate only 10% of the population': how much generosity of spirit would we feel towards them then? Or, conversely, what would we think about a person who would write graffiti saying 'dead [Jews] don't rape'?

How could you work alongside people with such hateful ideas? What kind of world would be made by allying yourself with people who think like that?

Feminism is, as you say, a relatively young movement, but it's had enough time to demonstrate its intents. In 40 years it has risen to an astonishing level of power & influence - its demands & petitions are respected like papal bulls in the media, the courts, the workplace, parliaments, schools & universities across the world. It reminds me of that quote by Alan Watts about the difference between a religion & a cult. He said there is none: a religion is simply a cult that has grown too large to be pushed around by the government. Well, feminism is a religion now, not a cult. It's large enough to be scrutinized & held to account.

But it isn't. Ever.

The points you brought up - female circumcision & the female vote - are not really applicable to make any case for modern feminism today in the west. One occurs in small pockets in a culture as far removed from our own as we can get, & the other occurred a hundred years ago. Both are exaggerated & used to whip up emotions to hurry through laws that penalize men & give women special privileges. I'm not disputing that both of these things are horrific or unjust, but it's a lazy, latch-ditch argument that gets thrown out too much simply to silence any dissent at all. What laws are there today that discriminate against women in Britain & America?

While it's true that 100 years ago women could not vote in this country, before 1832, neither could 90% of all men. And after that it was only, at most, 1 in 5, & these almost all rich or middle-class. 'Men', as a group, only got the vote in 1918 (along with women over 30, & 10 years later all women). This means that there was actually only 10 years in british history when 'Men' as a group had the vote & women didn't.

The reason I'm pointing this out is that it shows the essential division is not about gender but about wealth & class & always has been. The great majority of everybody who has ever lived has been poor & disadvantaged. To be angry at & to blame 'men' - billions & billions of men - for all the ills of the world is not only hateful but patently absurd.


I did a little research myself the other day about wealth, & found that in the whole world, the number of people who have a million dollars is 0.13% of the population. That's a tenth of 1 percent of the world.

Now, think about this: these people aren't truly wealthy - they have no special power or influence, for the most part they're just working people made good. A friend of mine, for instance, co-owns & runs a small chain of restaurants. They're doing quite well. I'm not sure what sort of money they pull in but I imagine it can't be too far off that in total. If she were to keep working hard a few more years I expect she could sell it all up & get her million. That wouldn't make her Rich - she wouldn't have yachts & mansions & what have you, & she would have no more power & influence in the world than she - or anyone I know - has ever had. She might be able to live without working if she lived very frugally, but that would be about it.

Above these people there are the super-rich, which are people with, say, $30 million. These are the people we think of when we talk about 'wealth'. These people do have yachts, & they get preferential treatment wherever they go, regardless of their sex. The laws of society apply differently to them, & there are only 85,400 of them in the world. I've not worked out what percentage that is of the world population but I think we can be sure that it is only a very small fraction of that previously mentioned 0.1% of the real world, of humanity.

Above them still are the billionaires: out of the nearly 7 billion people in the world there are only 793 of them. Imagine a football stadium. Now imagine a pea in the middle.....

By the way, 84% of all these millionaires & billionaires - men or women - are married & have children. This is an important point because once we realize that, we see that we are not talking about gender anymore but families, organizations, dynasties.. The wife of every wealthy man is pretty much as wealthy as he is: if he dies, she gets the money. If she divorces him she gets half, or something like. And when both of them die, the kids get it, regardless of their sex.

It should be obvious to all that the issue is not whether men or women hold the reins of political power - the families & corporations that hold practically all the wealth & resources of planet earth are an infinitesimal tiny minority, & it really doesn't matter the sex of them, because there's so few of them & their lives & concerns are so different to ours. 

To say that 'men', as a group, have 'power' is a fallacy. And to say that 'men' have it easy is a revolting lie. It's hard all over, for practically everyone. And it's probably always been that way. Whatever vision of the world we want for the future has to be a world where we acknowledge that, & love people for being people, to work towards making a better world for all. And Feminism is not the way to bring this about, as it only works towards ends that give power to one half of them.

> the white male has had it too good for too long for me to feel too concerned with his
> 'rights' or perceive 'gender feminism' as 'sinful'... with all the wrongs
> in this word, this is not one that's high on my personal agenda of
> perceived threats to the planet and/or humanity's development.

99.9% of all the millions & millions slaughtered in battle this past hundred years are men, men & boys. Only men in our society are forcibly conscripted. Men's bodies are not considered their own - they have to go to the front & allow themselves to be murdered or else be shot as a traitor. 9 out of 10 of those British working class men sent to their deaths in the first world war didn't even have the vote.

Are these the white males who have had it so good for so long?

More than 93% of all fatalities at work are men - 93% of everyone who dies at work, anywhere, is male. Why is that? Because only men are expected to do the jobs in which you can die.

What does this tell us about how we see men & womens place & worth in the world?

 

Men are 90% of the homeless & 80% of the suicides - that last one the world over [with the exception of China, if I remember correctly]. I don't see how, by any stretch of the imagination, men can be said to be having it easy. It's a myth. Or rather, it's a vile fallacy propagated entirely by feminism...

------

Well, I'll wrap it up there. Reading it over again, it puzzles me just what that friend of mine found so ugly & unforgivable that she felt duty-bound to end all contact with me. It's a strange old world & doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense but I've started to accept that as a reliable base-camp to set out from. And as I've said before, it is only ideology that can make good people do bad things: me, her, you... all of us have to be vigilant of the hypnotic pull of our beliefs. Here endeth the lesson for today.

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, Vol.2

So, this week I got yet another letter from another friend who didn't want to know me anymore. 

She returned the gift I'd sent her & told me she hoped one day my 'hatred of women' would pass. Of course - & as usual - nothing that I’d said to her was even remotely expressive of any hatred of any woman whatsoever, only critical of a specific political ideology which I think I can demonstrate demonizes & scapegoats one whole half of the human race for political gain & financial support. It was frustrating, of course, that she was unable to take that on board, even as a hypothetical position. I guess I could get angry at her, but 10 years ago it's entirely possible I would have done the very same thing myself. And besides, the fact of the matter is, I wasn’t arguing with her: I was arguing with someone else, from long ago, someone neither of us had ever met, whose mean, unfounded, fear-mongering proclamations about the world she had come to believe & now felt duty-bound to defend.

It’s funny: you can tell a person a lie but very often they won’t believe it, because they can see with their own eyes that what you say isn’t so. It is only ideology that can make someone believe something all their senses tell them isn’t so. 

Such is the nature of the beast. Pretty much all belief systems are based on nothing more than a couple of notions some impassioned passer-by has managed to make seem plausible to a larger bunch of lesser minds. Get yourself enough gullible souls together & you've got yourself a cult. A few more, you got yourself a religion.

But if a person is choosing their beliefs that way, of course,  they must surely also have to recognize that’s also why other people - you know, those other wrong people—chose to be Mormons, or Scientologists, Freudians, UFO freaks, al-Qaeda... Or, y’know, feminists.

This Losing Of The Friends ritual has happened so often at this point that I am no longer surprised, but it still hurts, & each time it happens I lose a little more faith in human beings. I’m more surprised now when people choose not to hate, not to turn their backs, than I am at their ideologically-instilled unkindnesses. It's hard for me, these days, not to see every crowd of people as anything but two meetings away from a lynch mob.

*

I've got the kind of mind that thinks a lot about thinking, about all the different psychic spaces other people & animals I meet are inhabiting. I think a lot about how a dog sees the world, for instance, & how much information goes right up their noses. I think about how others see me, & if what they see is more true than what I see when I look at myself. I think about what must have gone through the heads of my old, turncoat friends to make it seem right just to abandon someone that they loved & who loved them only days before. It’s sure been a hard few years, I lost two lovers & a fistful of my very best friends. The former had little to do with falling out of love with feminism, the latter everything. And I'm not someone who makes friends easily. So I find myself still poring over the ashes, trying to figure it all out like some kind of riddle, as if I think if I can solve it I can go back & make it right. But of course, I can’t. Nothing leaves as fast as love.

Still, I wish I could convey in words just how special I thought these people were, how set apart from the herd they always seemed to me to be. We could argue about philosophy, religion, race, capitalism, communism, revolution... just about anything at all, I thought. So strange that of all things, criticizing feminist hate-speech turns out to be the one that makes them turn tail & run. But of course also kind of telling: the desire to protect the female of the species, to put their safety & well-being before that of the male, is hardwired into all of us, male & female, regardless of the validity of the dangers - real or imagined - we can be made to believe are threatening them.

Misandry is a word most people have still never heard. Everyone these days knows what Misogyny means. That in itself says a lot about the age we are living in: how one type of hatred can seem trivial, or even invisible, while its mirror image can be made to seem the worst thing in the world. And I used to spread that hatred of men as much as the worst of them. These days, thankfully, I see just how abhorrent my actions were back then, but no-one else I know thinks that way, & probably won't for some time yet.

To me, they have let the cause down, & of course they must think the same of me. But the cause, as I saw it, was never any movement, any political ideology or sports team to wear the colours of but simply Truth itself, wherever that may lead us. The task was to grope our way ever closer to that distant light. To speak truth to power. To change as the universe requires. To have the guts to change your mind in public.

You change & you grow.  Hopefully, you don't sell your principals out for money or an easy life, but when you realize you've been lied to, when you realize you’ve reached conclusions that are woefully wrong, you move on, you wise up, you try to fail less destructively next time. Change & growth don’t end once you’ve turned 21—that should itself be obvious to all: what 21 year old would want to be stuck living by the beliefs & values they had when they were 9? Yet to see the changes a 40 year old father goes through is as incomprehensible to a 21-year old as the behaviour of that 21-year old is to that prepubescent boy swearing to himself that when he gets older he's never going to be interested in stupid girls.

The maddening thing about getting older is the realization that for all of your living & all of your learning, & all of your powers of expression, there are things you have learned that you cannot pass on to others, no matter how hard you try. It’s rather like trying to explain sex to that 9-year old: there really is nothing you can say about their future that they will be able to understand. The best you can do is tell them that they’ll be there soon enough themselves, & then it won’t need explaining at all.

Of course, most people within an ideology don’t think like that, or at least don’t live like that. That’s the point. What would be the use of accepting the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart if it were only a halfway house until something better came along? Until you found something more right, more true?

One of these friends of mine told me in our last real conversation  together - & with a remarkably straight face - that he identified himself as a feminist ‘because he believed in equality’. Yes, it’s an old one but a doubleplusgood one, & it put me in mind of something Bill Hicks once said in response to a pro-lifer: “You’re Pro-Life? What does that make me?” 

This, of course, is another defining attribute of ideology: to claim universal principles of goodness for your own. So for instance, an act of kindness or charity is reclassified under the Christian narrative a 'Christian' act. If you believe in fairness for all then you already support the Revolutionary Communist Party, why not just sign up? If you care about the safety & well-being of women then don't you know you're a Feminist? And so on, etc. As if none of these noble virtues ever existed before those crooked, parasitical institutions opened up their collection boxes for fundraising. 

I remember many years ago a feminist member of the RCP urging me to forget my misgivings & join so that I could “change it from within”. That’s got to be maybe 15 years ago now, & in that time - you know what? - the Revolutionary Communist Party hasn’t changed in any particularly discernible way, & neither has the fundamental core of feminism.

I wouldn’t identify myself as a feminist anymore than I would identify myself as a Christian, a Communist, or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, I’m sure that there must be some kind, humane, gifted or even brilliant people working beneath the umbrella of all those organizations. I really am. The law of averages demands it. But I wouldn’t want to join them because I’ve seen enough of what they have done to know that I disagree with much of what they stand for, & that to involve myself with them would not change the essential nature of what they do even one little bit, though it might very well change me.

Feminism’s past is littered with as many hateful, separatist statements as the KKK or the National Front. They may well be as invisible to our age’s sensibilities as the antisemitic remarks so common the world over in the 1930’s were to the people of that time, but a person's morality must be above their age, above their society. And yes, above their friends.

Well, I could go on. I realize I’m hardly the first this craziness has happened to, either here & now or in the past; over this particular insanity or a long, long list of others. Every age has its delusions & a few foolhardy martyrs prepared to laugh at them. But the world keeps on continuing, & 50 years from now will look dramatically different to the way it looks today, whether it turns out to my liking or not.

Anyway, the problem remains: it's a lot harder to walk the future all alone. Whoever you are, a good friend is hard to come by & a great joy to find. And yet, it turns out, so easy to throw away.

*sigh*

 My life is a Kafkaesque nightmare.

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, Vol.1

It is surprisingly easy to find yourself cast out of pretty much any ideological belief system.

The way to discover whether you are IN an ideological belief system - whether you are, in fact, part of a batshit crazy cult - is simply this: Disagree with it.

Go on, try it. What's the worst that could happen?

Well, the worst that could happen, it turns out, is this: the great majority of everyone you know from within that belief system will now not only want nothing more to do with you, but will also go around telling everyone else you used to know what a Bad Person you now are. 

The unfortunate fact of the matter is - & yes I know you know this already, but watch me do my thing - if you speak out on behalf of the human rights of men & boys in public discourse, if you want to at least consider treating men & boys with even a smidgen of the compassion & concern we have always accorded women & girls, you will discover, with little delay, just how terrifyingly at odds you are with not only the present state-enforced laws & beliefs of your society, but even the hardwired impulses of your own biology. We evolved to put women & children first, & indeed most likely wouldn’t even be here if we hadn’t, or at least not in anything like these numbers. And for all our talk of equality, little of that has, will, or can change.

Male disposability was, of course, around long before feminism appeared - there is no society which sends its women off to war while the men stay home & play with the children, no society where the women get sent down into pitch-black mines nine hours a day, every day for the rest of their lives, or are made to go try kill ferocious people-devouring animals for others to eat while the men pick berries. But this innate lack of compassion for men was never exploited to anything like the degree it is now, & in such a gleefully callous fashion.

Men of the past were at least accorded some degree of gratitude for their service & sacrifices— a father who chose to stick around & care & provide for a woman & the children she bore was once reserved a position of dignity in his community at least a little higher than, say, Homer Simpson. If he got divorced he could still expect to keep the children he was providing for. A man who went to war to defend his country from invasion was thanked when he came back & told he was a hero, not a baby killer. A man who succeeded at business was thought a hard worker & a good catch, instead of a male chauvinist pig who needs to check his privilege.

That hatred, & the lies & propaganda which feed it, emanate from a single source, a single set of narrative assumptions about the world that had never been expressed by anyone until around 100 years ago, & the past 40 or 50 in earnest. And if you’re here, well, you already know what name that set of assumptions goes under.

The nature of all ideologies is that those within them do not perceive what they believe in as ideologies but simply The Truth: Christians, Atheism+ fanatics, Marxists, Nazis, Feminazis, Freudians, & 9/11 conspiracy buffs... what these seemingly wildly differing positions have most in common is an inability to see the limits of their position. And also the unshakeable belief that 'if you’re not for us then you’re against us. And if you're against us, then you deserve everything you get. In fact, you deserve everything we're going to give you, you fucking scum...'  

To fix the popular atheist slogan, it is only ideology that can make good people do bad things.

The reaction of sheeplike followers to any independent thought which contradicts the tenets of their beliefs is always that the person saying it must be a Bad Person. If you contradict the teachings of Christianity? It is The Devil talking. The only reason you could ever possibly want to criticize Communism is that you hate the working class. If you point out the hate speech & absurdities inherent in the Nation Of Islam, it must mean that you hate black people. And if a person criticizes Feminism, then they must hate women. Right? 

After all, there’s no other possible explanation, is there?

And so the pack turns on the individual, to stop them saying those troubling things: Troubling things leads to cognitive dissonance & that makes me feel bad. Why would you want to make me feel bad? You must be a Bad Man.

And so it goes.

*

I imagine there must be a moment in everyone’s life, even if they don’t now even remember it, when they first asked that question they shouldn’t have, when they spoke out of turn, said out loud a thought that was theirs alone, instead of simply repeating what dogma they have been taught up to that point - & immediately saw how inappropriate & deeply unappreciated whatever they had to say of their own was considered by the body of believers around them.

When that happens - & it will, at some point, to just about everyone - the great majority of people will simply say 'OH! I see I was wrong to say that, I apologize, & I'll know not to say that, or even think that, in future." We learn pretty fast, what to say & what not. As I’ve said elsewhere, the price of conformity is the loss of individual thought; the reward for conformity is love, acceptance & support. Most human beings, naturally, would like both. But if it comes to it, 19 out of 20 of us will always choose the latter.

And there’s the rub: say I want to continue working towards halting the ecological destruction of planet earth. That seems to me to be an empirically worthwhile activity to devote at least some of one's life to - dependent on the details, obviously, & the likelihood of success, on a case by case basis. But you're not going to get very far trying to do that all on your own, so you have to try work with others. The problem is, once you start doing that, once you involve yourself with other people presumably motivated by similar intentions, you find within that - or any - movement there is a shared set of laws you didn't know were there when you first signed up. Political Correctness is ideologically created, state-enforced morality & there is no greater threat to basic human freedoms of thought & expression than the acceptance of PC authority. But the people who make it their stated aim to overthrow state-control also happen to be its biggest supporters.

I spent most of the past 20 years surrounded by people I thought were the most open-minded, truth-seeking individuals in the western hemisphere. Feminism, unfortunately, was a part of that shared worldview, as it is for most of my generation - one of those unchallenged assumptions that makes an ass out of u & me.

Some of those unspoken assumptions were simple, golden-rule common sense: do unto others as you would have them do unto you; Be Kind, be fair, work for the good of all humanity rather than just thinking of yourself. Stuff like that. But some of the beliefs seemed to get a little more rigid & specific over time, leading to concepts such as ‘The Patriarchy’, ‘Male Privilege’, ‘Positive Discrimination’ & the ‘Female-Safe Spaces’ needed because of the ’Rape Culture’ & so forth & so on, without a great deal of thought given over to where any of that repugnant shit originated. The language of Political Correctness & feminist hate just sort of appeared like mist, like the morning dew, & one day we woke up covered in it. Or I did, anyway. Woke up, that is.

The thing about any ideology is, & I'll wrap it up now, that you very rarely realize there is one there until you disagree with it. And the thing about life is that it is bigger than any ideology, bigger than any idea we can have about it, any ultimate explanation for it we can attempt to give. All definitive explanations invariably come to obscure the wild & shaggy uncertainties of life.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, & I still can feel myself fall into those habits now just the same as when I was a feminist. I mean, I hopefully know at least a little about what I’m speaking of now, & my positions these days are based on more than just emotional haranguing & white knight indignation. But the only really obvious difference I can see between my life now & my life then is simply that people treated me a lot better back then.

But what can a poor boy do? You can’t start believing in things you now know to be lies. You can’t go back to believing in Santa Claus when you’ve white hairs growing in your own beard.

Awww, fuck it. They crucified Lenny Bruce too.

*

In Defence Of Pornography

I've always found the subject of pornography - the very phenomenon of its existence - endlessly fascinating. The history of its development & suppression, the magical, spellbinding effect it has upon men, the cries of repulsion it extracts from most women. What that tells us about most men & women, the innate differences between us, what at root we truly are.

Like poetry, pornography & erotica are an internal history of the age. The outer history books give us no insight into how people of the past really thought, felt, & dreamed in their most private moments. To find that out you need to turn to the places people are no longer having to answer to their bosses, priests, policemen, neighbours, parents, children, husbands, wives. Pornography is, very simply, the documentation of desire: nothing there is hidden, all is laid bare. That is its value.

Pornography gives the lie to the church, the state, political correctness, politicians speeches, children's books, chick flicks, Mills & Boon... Underneath the changing times, the ideas we hold about ourselves, the things we are made to believe about ourselves, some things remain ever constant. And one of those is the desire that men feel for simply the sight of women, & the compulsion to look upon their naked forms. The nakedness of woman is the work of God, said William Blake. And the lust of the goat is the bounty of God...

Men don't talk often about any of this openly for fear of female censure & scorn, which is - socially - a very high price to pay & a very real concern. No man wants to have a gaggle of women gossiping about him, or massing in numbers against him. Historically, whatever a group of women ask for, if a man can give it, they get. We see that with prohibition, the (female) suffrage movement & now all the kowtowing of governments to modern feminism. Every western world leader has to have photographs taken of them shaking hands with feminist spokeswomen. Every president & prime minister has to make The Speech - the one that says how their term in office will be the one to end the 'pay gap', to shatter that 'glass ceiling', no matter how illusory & impossible both of those goals must inevitably be.

But men go on looking, all the same. 

The thing I feel is always missed out of the commentary on this subject is the emotional component, which is easier to see in the female equivalent of porn - the Romance novel, with long-term monogamous commitment as the money shot - but men have found wonder & fulfillment in depictions of naked women all the way back to the walls of caves. In the film Venus, Peter O'Toole's aging character says to the young girl he is smitten by,

"For most men, a woman's body is the most beautiful thing they will ever see". 
To which she replies "What's the most beautiful thing a girl sees? Do you know?"
He answers: "Her first child".

What is lacking in society is the acceptance & understanding that these two things are, in the larger scheme of things, the same: that the love that is sexual is no better or worse than the love for a child - & indeed, because of neoteny (the physical retention of childlike features in adult women), in men these things are very close anyway. Men have a hardwired urge to protect women the way women (both sexes, actually) feel the compulsion to protect children. We have these things in us because we needed them, as a species, to survive. And still do.

Without men's sexual desire, humanity cannot continue.  Lust gets a bad rap but it's just as essential a part of humanity as love, & it's only a leftover monotheistic hang-up that makes us think any different. People always say we are born out of love but of course that's not true: Lust is what gives us life, just as it is love that gives us survival. Both of them are nature, & we can't have one without the other - every man-hating, Andrea Dworkin-sized radical feminist could never have the gift of life to squander in such hatred without a man lusting for a woman long enough to plant the seed inside her & bring forth said leviathon.

All sorts of emotions come up when I see images of nakedness from the past: a sad wistfulness that that part of the river has gone, that I will never get even the chance to feel that skin in full bloom beside mine but mainly a starry-eyed wonder at both the beauty (for men) of womankind & the huge magnets that move within the yin & the yang, pulling the two sexes together down through the ages. 

When I see a grainy 'blue movie' from the 1920s, made illegally in France by anonymous, masked actors, I see - feel - with the weight of revelation how men all the way back then weren't simply square boxy suits & bland faces, & the women weren't prim, sexless corsets, but flesh & blood underneath, just the same as you & I. Their bodies worked the same as yours & mine! Where else can one find the truth of that for sure?


In the past, it was largely the church which repressed the expression of sexuality; now it is mostly the state. Well, that & feminism. There is, after all, no force in the modern world more pro-censorship than radical feminism, with the possible exception of fundamentalist Islam. And the two of them have more than only this in common. Anyhow, the climate of public shaming, from whatever source, kept pornography way, way underground for hundreds of years, all the way up to perhaps 10 or 15 years ago.

The internet has changed all that. The move into The Machine as an extension of self & consciousness has meant people have, for the first time in human history, been freed to explore the corners of their curiosity as never, ever, before, in pretty much total anonymity. And as Rule 34 states: "If it exists, there is porn of it": if you can think it, it's probably already out there in tremulous colour. I don't think it has been widely grasped yet how much this has already changed male sexuality on a near-global scale. One's most deepest, dizzying fantasies are now only a click away at any time of the day: of course you go look. Why wouldn't you? What in heaven's name would stop you?

The downside of this, as with female fantasies since the romance novel, the Hollywood movie, & the Rampant Rabbit™ came along, is that the general expectations of each sex have grown wildly unrealistic & unrealizable:  There is always a newer, younger body to be found online. There is always a richer, taller, more famous, more sensitive, more high-status man than the one you've already got.

It has also made men less obviously dependent on women, & women less obviously dependent on men. Which inevitably leads to more loneliness, & bitter blaming on both sides, with sexuality increasingly a solitary experience, instead of one celebrated fully with another. This sure is one sad age we are living in, but perhaps a necessary stage we need to pass through in order to come out the other side & find each other again.

*

*

As I noted earlier, women for the most part consume their pornography - 'emotional pornography' - in book form, which we call Romance, or sometimes - for the more daring sort - Erotica. Women's specifically female needs & desires are more often fulfilled by the long, exhaustive rituals of the romantic novel (or now movie) in ways that largely bypass men's comprehension. Men's internal wiring, on the other hand, favours visual stimulus - predominantly photography & moving images - & it is for this we reserve the more pejorative label 'Porn'. One of these is considered benign, the other sinful, even now. But we know all men - straight men, anyway - are lit up inside by the sight of the naked bodies of women, so why should anyone be shocked that men should seek them out? The great majority of all 'pornography', after all, is simply pictures of naked women. Why would anyone view that as aberrant behaviour? It is no less to be expected than a hungry man seeking food.

The present-day issue with pornography is for the most part that it is an expression of male desire. Western society went directly from the Victorian age, with the Christian demonization of all sexuality, to the feminist age, in which only male sexuality is demonized, where only male sexuality is seen as a problem. Female sexuality in all its forms is now widely celebrated, & practically anything a woman can choose to do in that realm someone somewhere will claim is 'empowering', whether that's masturbation, prostitution, adultery, lesbianism, celibacy, bestiality or anything in between. Whereas there is no sexual act any heterosexual male can carry out - even on his own - that will be described by anyone on planet earth as 'empowering'. Under the feminist narrative, men have all the power anyway, so any sexual activity they can engage in is an exploitation of that ghastly sovereignty, to only a greater or lesser degree. Although few but the most rabid of rabidal feminists will go the whole hog & assert that 'All Men Are Rapists', that core philosophy oozes from the black worm heart of radical feminist ideology in ever more diluted, populist ways until it reaches the mainstream as the vague but haughty dismissal & distrust we see all around us. Misandry, in other words.

Neither of these paradigms - Victorian prudery or feminist fear-mongering - is acceptable. We need to find a better way. Any society which cannot accept the fundamental realities of sex - & the fundamental differences between the sexes - is an unhealthy society that can never make sense either to itself, or to those outside of it looking back years later. The beliefs & morality of all times are only ever incomplete at best, & more often terribly mistaken. This age, too, will be no different. That is one of the few things we can be certain of.

Underneath all constructs, all ideologies, Reality with a capital R continues. Truth continues. And I say again: the societal value of  pornography is that it shines a light on whatever people publicly fear to show. And if we want to understand people, we need to be able to see what people are inside without fear, & without judgement. With curiosity, wonder, & acceptance of all our wild & unruly humanity. 

*

Conformity

While making my way through the deeply fascinating I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Into The Mind of Philip K. Dick, I came across a reference to the experiment on social conformity carried out in the 1950's by Solomon Asch:

'A group of people, all but one of them confederates of the experimenter, were shown three lines of varying lengths and asked which of the lines was the same length as a fourth they were shown. The confederates, as instructed beforehand, all replied incorrectly though the correct answer was obvious. With astonishing frequency, the one real subject, who went next to last, ended up disregarding what his own senses told him was true and joined in with the others.'

The author, Emmanuel Carrère, goes on to say

"Totalitarian states [are] nothing if not an experiment of this kind on a vast scale. They had found out how to show a chair to people and get them to say it was a table. More than that, they got people to believe it as well... the goal of a totalitarian state is to cut people off from reality, to give them a make-believe world to live in instead."

It should be obvious to regular readers here the implications this has for the PC society we presently live in - which was founded, after all, in totalitarian ideology - the very term 'political correctness' entered our language through the first English translations of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book back in the 1960's, and was used - to begin with - only to highlight the inevitable dangers of such oppressive policing of thought. Campus Marxism popularized these 'left-wing' ideas & portrayed 'PC' as the language of the liberators rather than the oppressors. And so it is still today, in our Orwellian future: Black is white. A table is a chair. Feminism Is Equality. Stuff like that.

Curious about the experiment I looked deeper & elsewhere found the sex breakdown showed

"Consistently within and across experiments, all-female groups (a female subject alongside female confederates) conform significantly more often than all-male groups. Around one-half of the women conform more than half the time, versus a third of the men." 1

Women as a group appear to have evolved to be both more self-group biased than men & also more pack-minded, as presumably getting on with others was more essential to the survival of a woman - usually with child - unable to easily hunt & fend for herself than for a man who was freer to strike out on his own & make his way outside of the tribe, if necessary. Women have always known the strength of numbers, of banding together to get what they want, & a necessary part of that is a greater willingness to defend the beliefs or actions of those within your group (in this case women) regardless of their objective truth or morality (hence: feminism). This is as true now as in the Paleolithic: recent studies have shown that "women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's", & that "men appear to lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference".2


But outside of the sex difference, the dilemma remains & is universal, facing everyone: The price of conformity is the loss of individual thought. The reward for conformity is acceptance & support. Most human beings, of course, would like both. And there's the rub.

For the great masses of humanity, the rewards that come from subsuming their identity & individual thought by joining a political movement or religion (from the Latin religare 'to bind') outweighs the lonely satisfactions of being the fool on the hill, the outsider, an independent observer without affiliation. That is never going to change, & it is the height of foolishness to expect otherwise from almost anyone you meet.

The most I think we can hope for is to work towards a dominant belief system in which the awareness of the lenses, the filters we are inevitably seeing the world through are made so integral a part of the rituals & commandments that they are constantly at the forefront of every persons consciousness each & every day. Such a movement does not presently exist, perhaps never has, & perhaps never will, but if we really want to have any hope whatsoever of seeking Truth beyond ideology, if we really want to break the endlessly recurring silence under the rule of the dictator, the church, the faceless corporation or the bovine masses, I see no other way.

"People are not machines but in every opportunity where they are allowed to behave like machines, they will so behave"

- Ludwig von Bertalanffy

*

One Shade Of Grey

The Woman Racket

An extract from chapter one of The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon (2008). I hope to post further samples from this excellent book in the next few weeks.

We're told that men and women are the same. Or, rather, some of the time we're told this. At other times we're told that men and women are essentially and irrevocably different. We're further told that although men and women are different, this is really just something to do with the way we are at the moment, albeit that we have been that way for a long time, living in the sort of society we do. In time, we keep being reminded, all will revert to how supposedly it should be and how it used to be in times of yore: i.e. men and women are the same after all. Even so, it's then insisted that actually, in the end, no matter what we do, men will never get to be truly the same as women: men and women are forever and totally different (except when it's more convenient to regard them as exactly the same).

We're also told that women are disadvantaged, and that they've got this way because of oppression by men. We're never told how or why this could be. We're not told why—especially if men and women are supposedly the same — there would be any point in one sex oppressing the other. We're not told how it can be—if indeed men are different to women and oppress them— that by most measures it is not women who are disadvantaged but men (or, at least, a large sub-group or even the majority of men). Nobody tells us why men are maligned as if they're at one with the very few at the top of the pile, whereas all women are championed irrespective of who they are, what they have done, or how they have lived their lives.

Confused? You certainly should be. The notion that males and females —or some essence of what is male or female —are the same or different, oppressed or actually advantaged, is like a juggler with two balls up in_ the air. He never gets hold of either of them but is constantly palming each upwards and across the path of the other. Eventually the whole spectacle has to come crashing to the ground. That's what is about to happen to what we currently think about men and women.

The contradictory madness about men and women in which we wallow is not shallow. As I will be explaining in depth, it arises from the most pro-found prejudices we have; prejudices that are currently denied, being invisible to us. We are too close to them, so we can't see the wood for the flees, even though they are the very basis of our politics. They are what the philosopher R.G. Collingwood called ‘absolute’ presuppositions. They come from the hidden heart of what we are, in the fundamental difference—and complementarity—between men and women. These hidden prejudices are against men and in favour of women. It is because of this that astonishing nonsense about men and women can hold sway, hanging unsupported from the political sky. The general consensus about human social behaviour — at least the chattering classes - is the most plainly false in history. In no other culture— and at no other point in the history of our own culture—have people got things so spectacularly wrong.

The real story of men and women, that cuts through all of this, has only fully crystallised the last few years with a deluge of new science. It will be a revelation to almost all, having been merely scratched on the sur-
face in self—help titles like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It is not merely that men and women are different. We all knew that. And ordinary people, at least, admit it. It is that they are different in ways far beyond what anyone had thought. Men and women are also unequal, but it is not women at all, but men-not all men, but the majority — who make up the biggest disadvantaged sub-group in every society. Women by contrast are universally and perennially privileged: over-privileged. This unconditional favour has no counterpart for men, who have to meet certain criteria even to be afforded the most basic consideration.

Even so, you won't find me suggesting adding men to the ever-expanding list of "victims'. As it stands there's but a minority of people who aren't already on this list. It really would be the case that ‘we're all victims now’. Instead, the real story of men and women is the key to tearing up the entire list and throwing it away.
The revolution that we are supposedly undergoing towards an androgynous, unisexual world is all but dead. Revolution has always been a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ (as The Who's Roger Daltrey sang back in 1971), and the revolution regarding men and women is very much a case in point. We've merely been chasing our own shadows, perpetuating the same old attitudes in disguise. The benign consequences of wising up to see this can hardly be over-stated. We're set now for what really is a revolution: a science—inspired revolution of understanding. This is a book of popular science, intended to explain the psychology that underlies the prejudice that in turn reveals why politics manifests in the way that it does. Of necessity I tackle political issues, and I'm aware that this is an awkward mix, but such is the nature of the project.

Politics is in the end a matter of conjecture, but its manifestation and the social psychology that underlies it can be informed by science. Never before has there been a time when political debate was more in need of this than today.