The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

‘Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man.

One 2006 study of universities in the US found that 18 per cent of professors in the social sciences happily identified as ‘Marxist’.

Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love.

Why would the war and the rhetoric become so heated when the standards of equality have so much improved? Is it because the stakes are low? Because people are bored and want to assume the heroic posture amid a life of relative safety and comfort? Or is it simply that social media – the challenge of speaking to yourself or possibly to the entire planet – is making honest discussion impossible?

If we are already running in the wrong direction then tech helps us to run there exponentially faster.

If ‘the Truth’ (in scare quotes) is a white thing, then what is everyone else meant to live in and strive towards? Truthfully the worrying thing about such cases is not that young people would regurgitate such positions. The disturbing thing is that they have been taught them.

This is an important cog in the crowd-maddening mechanism: the person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention.

social media the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity.

What you’re seeing is victim mentality versus victor mentality.

It suggests that you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you.

Equality in the eyes of God is a core tenet of the Christian tradition. But it has translated in the era of secular humanism not into equality in the eyes of God but equality in the eyes of man.

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven – or at least understood – in turn.

As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered.

This book has focused on four of the most consistently raised issues in our societies: issues which have become not just a staple of every day’s news, but the basis of a whole new societal morality.

Politics may be an important aspect of our lives, but as a source of personal meaning it is disastrous.

One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning.

minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist.