The Madness of Crowds Quotes

“Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“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. Today we do seem to live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If two people are in disagreement about something important, they may disagree as amicably as they like if it is just a matter of getting to the truth or the most amenable option. But if one party finds their whole purpose in life to reside in some aspect of that disagreement, then the chances of amicability fade fast and the likelihood of reaching any truth recedes.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power’. Not because they haven’t absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t – and don’t – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Trans campaigners intent on arguing that trans is hardware can only win their argument if they persuade people that being a woman is a matter of software. And not all feminists are willing to concede that one.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’.70 Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“After all, in the sporting world, being discovered to have taken testosterone is ordinarily grounds to prevent someone from competing – unless, it turns out, the person is taking testosterone to transition to the opposite sex. In which case sensitivity overrides science.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something. A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of ‘intersectionality’. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable. But today intersectionality has broken out from the social science departments of the liberal arts colleges from which it originated. It is now taken seriously by a generation of young people and – as we shall see – has become embedded via employment law (specifically through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in all the major corporations and governments. New”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“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. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristics taken away from you.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Perhaps one reason why people – especially neo-Marxists – are coy about the precise comparisons they are making is that the comparisons they would cite (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia) would reveal the deeper underbelly of their ideology and the true reasons for the negative accounting of the West. But most often the question ‘Compared to what?’ will elicit only the fact that the utopia with which our society is being compared has not yet come about.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If it is assumed that the primary purpose in life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If you tell Google that you would like to see images of ‘Black men’ the images that come up are all portrait photos of black men. Indeed, it takes more than a dozen rows of images before anybody who isn’t black comes up in the images. By contrast a search for ‘White men’ first throws up an image of David Beckham – who is white – but then the second is of a black model. From there every line of five images has either one or two black men in the line-up. Many of the images of white men are of people convicted of crimes with taglines such as ‘Beware of the average white man’ and ‘White men are bad’.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“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. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life. We may certainly aim to live in a society in which nobody should be held back from what they can do because of some personal characteristic allotted to them by chance. If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“The women of colour on that show made it clear to Dolezal that trans-racialism was not acceptable because a person who had grown up white could not understand what a person who had grown up black could feel like. They could not have had the same experiences.7 This was the point that the second-wave feminists were making at the same time about the transsexuals. But an argument that had worked with race had not worked for women.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Why should certain feminists feel entirely fine about men who become women only then to either flaunt their perfect breasts, ape the royal family or take up knitting?”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“If there was a genuine chance of diminishing racism, sexism or anti-gay sentiment, who would not wish to seize it with every tool and engine at their disposal? The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Research into IQ and genetics is among much competition probably the most dangerous and cordoned-off subject of all. When Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve in 1994 they were believed to be setting off precisely this landmine. Even though few of their critics read the book, criticisms of its investigation into the hereditary aspect of genetics were widely attacked. A few publications realized that the subject was of such significance that it had to at least be discussed. But in the main the reaction to The Bell Curve was to try to shut it and its author down”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Consider the example of trans. There was a reason to linger over the difficult and poorly discussed issue of people who are born intersex. It was not for prurience but to make a point. As Eric Weinstein has observed, anyone genuinely interested in addressing the stigmatization and unhappiness felt by people who are in the wrong bodies would have started addressing the question of intersex first.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Yet if the absence of serious discussion and the innate contradictions alone were enough to stop this new religion of social justice, it would hardly have got started. People looking for this movement to wind down because of its inherent contradictions will be waiting a long time. Firstly because they are ignoring the Marxist substructure of much of this movement, and the inherent willingness to rush towards contradiction rather than notice all these nightmarish crashes and wonder whether they aren’t telling”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Almost any student of history is familiar with the truth summed up in the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ It requires a level of naivety to imagine that a piece from a magazine published in 1916 would meet the precise social criteria of 2018. In 1916 women in Britain and America did not have the right to vote, you could still be sentenced to hard labour in prison for being gay, and an entire generation of young men were being gassed, blown-up, shot at and shelled in the fields of Flanders and France. Things were different then.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Until the last decade or so, sex (or gender) and chromosomes were recognized to be among the most fundamental hardware issues in our species. Whether we were born as a man or a woman was one of the main, unchangeable hardware issues of our lives. Having accepted this hardware we then all found ways – both men and women – to learn how to operate the relevant aspects of our lives. So absolutely everything not just within the sexes but between them became scrambled when the argument became entrenched that this most fundamental hardware issue of all was in fact a matter of software. The claim was made, and a couple of decades later it was embedded and suddenly everybody was meant to believe that sex was not biologically fixed but merely a matter of ‘reiterated social performances’. The claim put a bomb under the feminist cause with completely predictable consequences for another problem we’ll come to with ‘trans’. It left feminism with almost no defences against men arguing that they could become women. But the whole attempt to turn hardware into software has caused – and is continuing to cause – more pain than almost any other issue for men and women alike. It is at the foundation of the current madness.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’ It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps?”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.2 Yet although we are being aggravated by a tech world which is running faster than our legs are able to carry us to keep up with it, these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will. Although the foundations had been laid for several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia. The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism. And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives but every inequity on earth. The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology. To”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

“On that occasion Lilla provided an insight into one of the other central conundrums of our time. He said, ‘You cannot tell people simultaneously “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me”.’ Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn’t, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted.”
― Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity