Robert Oulds - Moralitis: A Cultural Virus

A Cultural Virus

Robert Oulds (Bruges Group)

& Niall McCrae (Kings College London)

Published in 2020 by

The Bruges Group, 246 Linen Hall, 162-168 Regent Street, London W1B 5TB

www.brugesgroup.com

EPUB Edition

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Bruges Group publications are not intended to represent a corporate view of European and international developments. Contributions are chosen on the basis of their intellectual rigour and their ability to open up new avenues for debate.

Robert Oulds MA, FRSA is the director of the Bruges Group. His masters degree is in communications management. Amongst other works, Robert is the author of Montgomery and the First War on Terror and Everything You Wanted to Know About the EU But Were Afraid to Ask (both published by Bretwalda Books), and co-author of Federalist Thought Control: The Brussels Propaganda Machine. Robert served as cabinet member for education in a London borough council, and as a treasurer and standard bearer for the Royal British Legion. He regularly appears on television and radio in political debate.

Niall McCrae PhD, MSc, RMN is a senior lecturer in mental health at Kings College London. His previous books were The Moon and Madness (2011) and Echoes from the Corridors: the Story of Nursing in British Mental Hospitals (with Peter Nolan, 2016). Niall writes regularly for Salisbury Review magazine and various socio-political websites, and he campaigns for freedom of speech in universities.

Lists of Illustrations

Background

Much is written about a divided society, split between young and old, progressives and conservatives, patriots and globalists, the posh and the plebs. Perhaps it was ever thus. But there is more tension than ever, with widely diverging ways of seeing the world. As people become polarised, many fear for the future. One side worries about nationalist dictators, the other about loss of cultural security to the forces of globalisation. One side is obsessed with the rights of minorities, the other thinks that a silent majority is the dog being wagged by its tail.

In the progressive outlook, the younger, socially-liberal generations will inherit the world, and conservative nay-sayers are on the wrong side of history. Yet this perspective fails to appreciate the enduring value of faith, flag and family. Emancipatory activism has brought significant improvements to the rights and social inclusion of previously disadvantaged groups, but it did not stop at equality, and the demands of identity politics have become more aggressive, if not absurd.

Enlightenment values of freedom of speech, democracy and equality before the law are being eroded by censorship and moral relativism. The euphemism political correctness has taken a more extreme form, with young social justice warriors identifying themselves as woke. With the political and cultural establishment behind them, their ideas have been elevated to the status of moral hegemony. Contrary opinion is quashed, and ordinary people are afraid to speak their minds.

Moralitis

In this treatise we argue that society is infected with a cultural virus. Moralitis is a disorder of the mind, spread throughout society by ideological pathogens. Symptoms of this delusional syndrome include rejection of common sense and conventional social norms, uncritical acceptance of subversive ideology, inflexibility of thought, cultural self-loathing and reflex denunciation of dissent. The afflicted may think that they act with autonomy but they are progressively controlled by the virus. Parroting group-think, they virtue-signal at every opportunity, and police moral compliance in conversations and on social media. The moralitic make life a misery for themselves and others.

Prevention and treatment

While some believe that we are nearing a turning point, the cultural sickness is so pervasive that it will get much worse before it gets better. Antibodies exist in the form of contrarians who courageously speak out against stifling conformity and irrational ideas, but they lack critical mass. The woke have been radicalised, and it would be futile to attempt to cure their illness with reason alone. Therefore, a concerted effort is needed, akin to a public health strategy, to eradicate moralitis. Our main recommendations are shown below.

Recommendations

We propose a radical programme of general and specifically-targeted interventions:

1. End cancel culture: appoint free speech advocates and introduce mandatory training in civil liberties in all organisations (public, private and voluntary sectors) with a workforce of 70+

2. Promotion of plainspeak: Orwellian language to be banished from public documents

3. A virtue-signalling swear box to be installed in every workplace

4. School reform: introduction of specific learning opportunities to engage in different opinions, to develop respect and resilience; headteachers to be legally bound to meet parents on any concerns about ideologically-motivated changes to curricula (e.g. transgender propaganda)

5. Establish an inspectorate for universities, taking a carrot-and-stick approach: awards for promoting debate and creative endeavor, and penalties for censorship or political discrimination

6. Impact assessments on any government or local authority policy that could undermine national / local identity

7. Repeal the Equality Act and hate crime legislation, replacing these with a Statute of Liberty; reinstate the Statute in Restraint of Appeals and terminate judiciability of the European Court of Human Rights

8. Stop funding hate: no more public money to groups that exacerbate division in society

9. A rigorous enquiry into the anti-Christian, anti-conservative and anti-patriotic bias in the BBC, with the withdrawal of the television licence

10. Identity politics to be banished from the armed services, and rejection of the Wigston Report into inappropriate behaviours

11. Root-and-branch reform of the Civil Service to the will of the people as expressed in elections, through better recruitment and promotion processes; appoint a Wokefinder General in Whitehall, reporting to the Cabinet

12. A Royal Commission of Enquiry to be appointed with a broad remit to investigate the impact of subversive ideology on society

Alongside such institutional reforms the theme of liberty should be emphasised at every turn. Hearts and minds will be won by promoting the very freedoms denied by the moral puritans who govern our lives. Just as dehumanizing fascism and communism were defeated, so too will wokeness.

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

JG Ballard

Society is infected. Like the growth of bacteria in a Petri dish, subversive postmodern ideology has spread through the collective mind. The march through the institutions, as urged by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, is almost complete. Replacing the social class struggle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the pursuit of identity politics, rationalised by moral relativism and policed by political correctness.

From transubstantiation to transgenderism

In the religious piety of past centuries, it was dangerous to doubt Roman Catholic creed. It was blasphemous, for example, to suggest that the Eucharist is merely symbolic, and not literally the body and blood of Christ. Today, forced belief and inquisition is focused on sexual politics, with the new doctrine of transgenderism. First puberty blockers then gender-bending hormones are given to children who were influenced by messages from gender-confused peers about being born in the wrong body . Binary sex is rejected: men can menstruate and women can have testes. The laws of nature are redefined as social construct, and any dissent causes furore. How has such unscientific and irrational ideology taken hold on society?