The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

New heuristics have been required to force people to ingest the new presumptions. The speed at which they have been mainstreamed is staggering. As the mathematician and writer Eric Weinstein has pointed out (and as a Google Books search shows), phrases like ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘transphobia’ went from not being used at all to becoming mainstream. As he wrote about the graph that results from this, the ‘woke stuff’ that Millennials and others are presently using ‘to tear apart millennia of oppression and /or civilization . . . was all made up about 20 minutes ago’. As he went on, while there is nothing wrong with trying out new ideas and phrases, ‘you have to be pretty damn reckless to be leaning this hard on so many untested heuristics your parents came up with in untested fields that aren’t even 50 years old’.5 Similarly, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have pointed out (in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind) how new the means of policing and enforcing these new heuristics have become. Phrases like ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ and claims that words that do not fit the new religion cause ‘harm’ only really started to spike in usage from 2013 onwards.6 It is as though, having worked out what it wanted, the new metaphysics took a further half-decade to work out how to intimidate its followers into the mainstream. But it has done so, with huge success.