Warning, Or Tombstone? Douglas Murray's "The Madness of Crowds"

Warning, Or Tombstone: Douglas Murray’s “The Madness of Crowds”

We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like, and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes.

-From the introduction

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m living in some deranged dream caused by drinking too much, eating a too-powerful edible, or way too spicy Indian food.

Up is down, black is white, wrong is right. As Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, “Cats and dogs, living together!” I am certain I am not the only one who feels this way.

I consider myself an articulate person. I am a trained actor. A former law enforcement officer. A writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Yet the enormity of the present insanity is so overwhelming that I cannot quite find the words to express how wrong it all is. I stumble towards understanding; but like a man with only one part of a treasure map, I cannot fully comprehend what lies in front of me.

I need to know where that map leads. If not for me, a middle-aged man of precarious health, then for my children. My daughters are young, strong, and smart. They deserve the kind of future I dream of for them. But the sad truth is; they may not get it.

All of us, hopefully, strive for a better life for our children. We endure, so they need not. Compared to previous generations, we’ve had to endure precious little. But it is all for nought if our children will inherit a hell.

Douglas Murray warns us that this is exactly what we may be facing, in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity.

In just a few short years, previously unthinkable ideas have become not only accepted, but orthodoxy. Some ideas I would have objected to just twenty years ago, like gay marriage, are now the natural order.

That one, I can live with. Eventually, as I got older, I became less “conservative,” and more “libertarian.” As the bumper sticker says, “I believe gay married couples should be able to defend their pot plants with guns.” Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. And how does gay marriage, or pot, or legal gun ownership, really box my nose. It doesn’t.

Some change in society is evolutionary and desirable. Other change is not. While Frenchmen today may celebrate the glorious Marianne on their money and commemorate the storming of the odious Bastille, few of them would mourn the bloodthirsty Robespierre, fittingly the victim of his own guillotine.

All revolutions have a by-product. That by-product is madness.

Some people want revolution with a defined end goal. Equal rights for ethnic minorities. Decriminalized soft drugs. Gays being viewed as equal to straights. These people are satisfied when the finish line is reached. Like a soldier who has seen too much war, they are happy to put down their arms and pursue peace.

These people are not the targets of Douglas Murray’s incisive and defining document of our Era of Madness. No, Murray has no problem with any of the above developments. As an openly gay journalist, he hardly could. Murray is instead concerned with the permanent revolutionary.

For the permanent revolutionary, there is no finish line. If we are becoming colour-blind, then that is, in and of itself, a kind of racism. If we have accepted men loving other men, then we must be tested further by believing that men can have babies. If we can accept racial equality, then we must accept racial abasement. We must “take a knee,” and accept that our very identity is the problem. We cannot be just people, because it is our very existence that is the problem.

As someone who has researched and written about genocide (See Genocide is a Ham Sandwich), let me be very clear: Genocide can happen to anyone. And the prelude to genocide is demonization.

Murray makes it very clear that several troubling things have happened in the last thirty years to the “social justice” movement. I use quotes because today’s revolutionaries have nothing even remotely in mind which resembles justice.

Murray divides his discussion of modern “wokeism” into four categories: Gay, Women, Race, and Trans. He deftly illustrates how, in each of these categories, modern social activism has drifted so far from any recognizable form of democratic ideal into the province of totalitarianism.

This, as Murray points out, is no coincidence; for the roots of modern social justice activism lie in an inherently totalitarian ideal: Marxism.

After the end of the Cold War, Marxist theorists were confronted with a ruined landscape. Their Soviet gods had completely crumbled, with their satellite states falling like dominoes. Their Chinese gods had decided to keep the oppression but hold the command economy. Who to turn to? North Korea and Cuba? Even for the most committed career firebrand, that was a stretch.

I saw evidence of this ideological confusion first-hand as a student at Simon Fraser University in the 1990s. My mother, a graduate of the University of British Columbia, always used to tell me that the initials “SFU” stood for “Soviet Fucking Union.”

Marxist professors, self-proclaimed ones, mind you, seemed lost. They still heroically tried to hoist the red banner high; yet the evidence of people voting with their feet to leave Socialist paradises and standing in front of “The People’s” tanks was a bit too much. They were still smugly certain of their dialectical ideal of constant class war; but not that certain.

Today, they, and two generations worth of their disciples, are very certain indeed. What changed?

What changed was that the permanent educational class raised on sixties’ radicalism pivoted like the Brigade of Guards on the parade square. Class warfare not fitting the bill? Chinese people becoming too fond of Nikes and Russians lining up at the Red Square McDonald’s? Aha, we’ve got a new iteration for you. Call it, “Revolution 2.0.”

With favourable government tax policies, generous alumni and corporate grants, and the obsession of boomer parents with getting their kids degrees fuelling the higher education industry, the stage was set for the fostering of permanent revolution.

Add to that, the 2008 financial meltdown, stagnant wages and minimal growth, and the export of jobs overseas, and you had a fertile ground for revolt. As Murray points out, you cannot expect people who have no realistic chance of owning a home, or any post-degree job prospects past “Starbucks Barista,” to buy into capitalism and it’s corollary, liberal democracy.

On top of this came the development of social media. Almost exactly at the same time, Twitter, Facebook, et al, developed a means for anonymous mobs, free from the worry of being punched in the face, to assemble around any conceivable flashpoint.

Marxism was the fuel. A dissatisfied and aimless student class was the kindling. And social media was the spark.

I won’t go into all of Murray’s incisive, thoroughly researched material in too much detail. But here’s some takeaways for me:

1. The excesses of fringe elements in all four groups, gay, women (feminist), race, and trans risk endangering the justifiable gains in equal rights that have been achieved. Murray worries about a backlash; he isn’t wrong. Radical acts inspire radical reactions.

2. Marshall McLuhan’s mantra, “The medium is the message,” has literally become true. Hateful speech is only hate speech if the speaker is hated. If they are loved, then all is forgiven.

3. Tech is a willing accomplice in all of this. Search engine algorithms actively suppress speech. Google is guilty.

4. The inherent tensions between gay, women, race, and trans causes will inevitably tear the woke movement apart. Gays are not comfortable, overall, with the demands of the trans movement. Feminists resent “Jilly Come Latelies” and are seething over their intrusion on what is seen as hard-won turf. Trans resent feminist and gay conservatism. Racial minorities are often socially conservative, and not truly comfortable with the demands of any of the other interest groups.

5. Social justice fanatics target weak and wobbly institutions first and foremost. People like Murray, who exude an air of simply not giving a shit, are relatively immune. Never give in.

6. Marxism’s dependence on eternal conflict means there is no finish line; the existence of the activists depends on eternal strife.

7. Social justice activists seek not dialogue, but acquiescence; like the Stalinists of old, they are happiest when their victims demonstrate shame and self-loathing.

8. No crime, no matter how old, is ever forgiven. As Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “There was no past and no future, only an everlasting present in which the Party was always right.”

9. The trans movement is asking for things far beyond what the other interest groups have ever asked for. At their most radical, trans activists are seeking a redefinition of reality itself.

10. The freest societies on earth are the targets of the greatest criticism. This plays, naturally, to the full advantage of the totalitarian tide once again sweeping the planet. Century-old graves entitle China, a country currently practicing genocide, to criticize Canada. No one objects to this. Least of the most “woke” corporations on the planet, all of whom dare not anger China in any way.

I could go on. But you should really read the book. I read a lot of non-fiction, and in my mind, this is the most important book of the twenty-first century. Murray writes about infuriating topics and venomous people with the calm of a saint. I couldn’t have written this book. I’m not nearly as smart as Douglas Murray, and I couldn’t keep my cool even if I was.

The Madness of Crowds is a work of genius. Warning, or tombstone? That all depends on those of us who’ve chosen to keep thinking for ourselves.