Is the Madness of Crowds Beginning To Recede?

Douglas Murray's “The Madness of Crowds” painted a thorough overview of the woke problems we inevitably encounter in our society. Is there any hope that they will just go away?

Upon publishing his book on identity politics, Douglas Murray expected it would lead to his expulsion from all respectable society, as had happened to many others who dared to be critical of the dominant narrative on so-called minorities (women, people of colour, LGBT+). All it takes to be 'cancelled', fired, and declared a pariah, is to dare to say that there are still certain differences between men and women, or even to mention that there are two sexes, male and female. To survive then an argument that gay marriage is not really an issue for gays, but a gay activist agenda, or to say that the prevailing narrative of transgender activists runs opposite to that of feminists, i.e. that there is no LGBT+ agenda uniting all these groups, is a real dare. To do so, you would first of all have to be gay yourself, and second, a highly respected publicist who presents his views in a calm and reasoned manner. Douglas Murray fulfils these characteristics and can thus still go around in public and appear on many media channels. It is also possible that the heyday of the madnesses described in the book is coming to an end, and that each messenger representing voice of reason is no longer to be executed. At least that is what we can hope for.

The subtitle of The Madness of Crowds is Gender, Race and Identity. The book looks at the history and current state of identity politics. The book has four major chapters: 'Gay', 'Women', 'Race' and 'Trans', and three interludes: on the Marxist roots of this struggle, on the technology that is giving it unprecedented momentum, and on forgiveness, which seems to be a disappearing phenomenon.

Douglas Murray in 2019. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

All the movements described in the book have started as struggles for human rights. But just when victory has been won, the campaigners are reluctant to rest on their laurels and instead begin to behave as their most extreme opponents did in the past: harassing and hating those who disagree with them, prescribing the right positions, the right language, the right research, and brutally persecuting those who dare to waver from or even criticise the official narrative. In Murray's view, this struggle is the raison d'être of activists. That is why it must not be won; the point of the struggle is to sustain it.

Gay

The chapter starts with a description of an incident in modern-day London where gay activists tried to prevent the screening of a documentary. The film argues that homosexuality is a matter of choice and can be overcome with the help of God and counsellors. The film features former homosexuals who have now become heteros and the counsellors who helped them. The venue booked for the premiere was cancelled at the last minute, and guests had to sneak off to a new location to see the film. Murray isn't exactly thrilled about the film, but he doesn't question the sincerity of the people involved in it and doesn't see anyone in danger from such a film. What he dislikes even less are gay activists who restrict freedom of speech and thought and persecute dissent. As well as claiming the right to censor everyone and everything in the name of the 'gay community', activists even go so far as to decide who is the 'real gay'. As it turns out, this is an honourable title that can be stripped from someone, for example for expressing conservative views. As one gay rights activist put it: "The gay liberation movement has left us a powerful legacy, and protecting that legacy requires understanding the meaning of the term "gay" and not using it simply as a synonym for same-sex desire and intimacy" (Jim Downs, "Peter Thiel shows us there's a difference between gay sex and gay", Advocate, 14 October 2016; cited in Murray, 2019 p 45).

“Even today, the author wonders whether the predominantly childless and mostly rather 'open' gay marriage is the same as the traditional family.” Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The author is critical of the disproportionate predominance of gay issues in the press, both on the front pages and on the social, business and cultural pages. Gay marriage, legal today in most countries, was until recently criticised by society as a whole, and gay organisations were not an exception in this. The author wonders whether the predominantly childless and mostly rather 'open' gay marriage is the same as the traditional family. But that is a line of thought that is allowed only to a gay author and certainly not to politicians or other public figures. If someone is in a public office, their views of years ago, which at the time coincided with the views of the majority, might today end their career. Gay status today seems to confer a certain higher moral authority. The discovery of one's homosexuality deserves respect; the opposite is shameful – in the film described above, many former gays came out, hiding their identity and face, just as gays would have done some twenty years ago. It looks like only the representatives of minorities themselves are allowed to speak out on minority issues today, but only if they do not deviate from the 'official' narrative and do not question positions that everyone was questioning only recently. Laws and prevailing attitudes may have changed, but there is still no greater scientific clarity on the fundamental issues.

One of the key questions is whether homosexuality is a matter of personal choice (does the so-called lifestyle homosexuality exist) or an innate phenomenon, a 'hardware issue', as the author puts it. As is well known, homosexuality, once classified as a mental disorder, has long since been excluded from the lists of disorders by authoritative associations. In 2014, Britain's influential Royal College of Psychiatrists published a position paper which makes it clear that homosexuality is formed by a combination of biological factors and birth environment and that, for the most part, people do not have a choice about their orientation. However, while sympathising with the 'no choice' view, the author concedes that in some cases, there is a personal choice, even after the primary choice has already been made. Some people are not satisfied with their orientation, some of whom want to and can change it. The genetic origins of homosexuality have not been found, and given the politicised nature of the subject – undesirable results can seriously jeopardise academic careers – it is not a popular research topic. While scientific clarity about the origins of homosexuality has not increased much over the years, public attitudes have changed radically. Only two-thirds of today's teenagers believe themselves to be exclusively heterosexual.

According to various authors, the prevalence of homosexuality ranges from 1-13%; the most accurate estimate seems to be the one given by the former Google data scientist Stephens-Davidowitz, based on an analysis of big data (internet searches), according to which homosexuals could form about five per cent of all people. Half of Americans believe that homosexuality is innate, and a majority (63%) consider same-sex relationships morally acceptable.

Women

Readers here may not have seen one of the famous music videos whose lyrics are the book's motto: "Oh my gosh, look at her butt/Oh my gosh, look at her butt" etc. The video shows a skimpily dressed female singer who wiggles her butt for the camera. Towards the end, this action takes place in front of the face of a tormented-looking young man, who finally commits the fatal crime: he reaches out and touches the buttocks that have been flogged in front of his face. Immediately, his hand is hit and he leans with his face in his hands signalling that he is the one to blame.

This video is a good parable of the narrative of women activists, which Murray ironically describes. Women can be provocative and sexy, but woe betide the man who therefore sees them as sex objects. Women wear lingerie and accessories that emphasise their nipples and labia and make them, according to their salesmen, 'extremely sexy”. And of course, this has nothing to do with men, but only makes women feel better. 

Women are the same as men; they are just as capable, just as clever and just as successful if men do not stop them, as they have done for centuries. In fact, women's rights activists are increasingly inclined to go a step further, claiming that women are better. The men who screwed up the economy and are waging wars now have a duty to help women take responsibility, support them and encourage them. Even men who call themselves feminists are, in fact, misogynists at heart, even if they do not know it. Such issues can be identified by clever questionnaires and treated by special awareness-raising courses. Many companies require the participation of all employees in these kinds of courses, but not all – there is still a long way to go.

In fact, men are pigs; they should be exterminated or killed, especially if they are white and straight. And when a woman says something like that, she shouldn't be taken at her word; she's just saying that women should be a bit better off in this world. Women who have posted slogans on social media like 'kill all men' or 'men are trash' have got away with this kind of explanation. It doesn't take much imagination to see what would happen to a man who said something similar about women.

A survey in Britain found that while the majority of people are in favour of equal opportunities for men and women, very few (nine per cent of women and four per cent of men) are prepared to identify as feminists. The first word associated with 'feminist' was 'bitchy' – mean.

Race

Martin Luther King gave his famous speech on race in 1963, when many racist laws were still in force, for example, the ban on marriage between blacks and whites, there were different schools and segregation zones for blacks and whites in public places. Descendants of former slaves were still second-class citizens. All these laws were repealed five years after that famous speech and, by all objective indicators, the situation of blacks has only improved in the fifty years since then. But, at the behest of activists, Dr King's ideal of the 'colour-blind rule', whereby race was supposed to be so insignificant that it was not taken into account in any decision about a person's fate, no longer applies. Fifty years after the abolition of racial segregation in legislation, the activists have decided that it is the colour of one's skin that counts most of all. Just when a black president was about to take office in the United States and the race issue could have been considered closed, race activists really got into their stride and made skin colour the most important issue in the world.

From the 1960s onwards, American Universities saw a growth of 'Black studies'. The initial aim was to highlight the role of formerly oppressed people in history, for example by talking about black writers. Now, long since black writers have become a natural part of American literary history, 'the race studies' took on a whole new latitude. A discipline designed to rehabilitate the stigmatised began to stigmatise itself. From 'Black studies', originally intended to prove the equality of blacks, have now sprouted 'white race studies courses', explaining that 'white supremacist guilt' is inherent in all whites and that not to mention it, or to have a view that race is not important at all, is a statement of racism. Courses explaining white supremacist attitudes have become compulsory in many American and Australian universities.

Books about critical race theory on display at the University of Wisconsin in 2021. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Against such an academic backdrop, of course, all sorts of activists emerge, who can have a lot of fun on campuses, humiliating respectable academics and removing them from their posts. There are many such cases, several of which have made it into Murray's book, such as the story of Bret Weinstein, who refused to take part in an action at his college. For many years, all the non-whites had left campus one day in protest at a past injustice. In 2017, however, activists decided that all white people should leave campus that day. Weinstein, a biology professor, did not see the need to leave his job. This triggered violence against him and his family, which eventually led to him and his wife leaving the university. (He is now a well-known podcaster, and in the meantime was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. See here.) Remarkably, none of Weinstein's colleagues came to his defence.

Trans

The final chapter of the book deals with the trans issue, the most astonishing and horrifying of all the madnesses described.

Nancy, a Belgian girl who grew up with brothers, decided in her teens that it would be better to be a man. In her thirties, she became Nathan – she was given hormone treatment, had her breasts surgically removed and, in a second operation, had a penis built in. She wasn't happy with the result, she didn't like her new body any better than her old one. At the age of 44, she was euthanised by the Belgian state medical system that had unsuccessfully tried to make a man out of her. It may be difficult for future generations to understand that the eventual killing, just like Nancy's sex-change operations before that, was carried out with the best intentions.

Is trans a category that actually exists? What makes someone transgender? Is it really possible to change someone's physical sex? And is it really the best way to solve many complex problems? Of today's complex issues, the trans movement is the most radical in its demands and the most confusing in its assumptions. The trans issue demands, and will continue to receive, constant public attention, urging a restructuring of language and perceptions. In a short space of time, the trans issue has become a dogma whose questionable nature could mean political suicide and the end of a public career. In today’s Britain we can see even Conservative ministers defending the simplification of biological sex reassignment, we find educational guidelines recommending that primary school children should be told that all people, regardless of gender, experience menopause, and then we come to the US federal law that gender is no longer a biological phenomenon but a category of identity. Trans is like the battering ram that must break down the last patriarchal bulwark.

Transsexuality is not a modern invention, the knowledge of gender ambivalence exists in almost all cultures, ranging from transvestites (people who wish to wear the clothing of the opposite sex) to transsexuals (people who have undergone a series of medical procedures to adorn their bodies with the markings of the opposite sex). In most cultures, there is some form of acceptance of the notion that there are people who are born in one kind of body but choose to live in another.

There is a small number of people who are born with bodies that have traits of both sexes or other physical traits that would suggest that their sex is not clearly identifiable. One in two thousand babies has such characteristics, and one out of three of such babies needs medical attention. For a long time, it was thought that the right thing to do was to decide early on the most appropriate sex for such a child and to shape them as such. However, in the age of social media, such people began to find each other and organise themselves as an identity movement.

One of the first attempts to describe what most trans people consider to be ineffable was the autobiographical work Conundrum (1974) by Jan (formerly James) Morris (1926-2020). James was a soldier, later a foreign correspondent for several newspapers, married and the father of five children. In the 1960s he began hormone therapy and a few years later became world famous for his book where he tells the story of how, from childhood, he knew he was not a boy and how, as an adult, he felt increasingly uncomfortable in his male body. He describes how his masculinity began to recede under the influence of hormone therapy. At the time, it was not easy to find a surgeon willing to perform the operation. The prevailing understanding was that such a desire was more a manifestation of mental illness, like the claim that one was Admiral Nelson and should have one of his arms amputated. The operation was carried out in Casablanca and, after recovery, under the influence of continued hormone therapy, Morris began to feel better, perceiving the world as a woman does, beginning to hear things said to women but not to men, and expressing himself in a more feminine way.

So, there are intersexed people who are biologically male or female, but who also have secondary gender markers of the opposite sex, but there are also those who feel sexual arousal by imagining themselves to be or dressing as the opposite sex, or even imagining themselves living in a body of the opposite sex. This phenomenon is known as autogynephilia, and in today's trans narrative, it is a taboo subject that can almost be labelled as hate speech. Researchers who approach the phenomenon from this perspective are persecuted and hated, as the general desire is to desexualise the whole subject. It is therefore preferable to use a new word – transgender – instead of transsexualism. As with homosexuality, which is presented as a hardware problem in which a person's individual preferences, choices and desires play no role, any reference to the possible erotic motivation of transsexuality must be avoided when talking about trans issues. However, some researchers argue that this is precisely the root of the case. Michael Bailey, for example, has argued on the basis of years of research that most transgender men are gay men who are too feminine for many other gay men. Becoming a woman greatly expands the amplitude of potential sexual partners for such men.

Recognising the existence of two trans groups is at odds with prevailing trans politics. Namely, when it comes to someone's sexual preference, a liberal society may tolerate it, but this does not in any way imply the need to change the language of society as a whole or to abolish male and female toilets. Nor is it a sufficient reason to replace former knowledge of gender in school curricula with the understanding that gender is a social construct. Giving people the right to think whatever they want about themselves does not in any way imply that society as a whole has an obligation to adopt their views.

“Giving people the right to think whatever they want about themselves does not in any way imply that society as a whole has an obligation to adopt their views.” Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

However, this reasoning overlooks a key difference. A gay person is truly gay if he or she so chooses. It doesn't deprive him of the possibility to decide otherwise one day. A gay man may fall in love with a woman and find that he is still bisexual or heterosexual. Transsexuals do not have that option. Fifty gender reassignment clinics have been set up in the US in the last ten years, with teenage girls changing sex en masse, without their parents knowing it. In many countries, informing parents or asking their opinion is banned by law, and it is made very easy for teenagers to initiate a change of sex. In some countries, trans counselling and hormone treatments are available on school premises. The majority of teenage girls who decide they are actually boys have not experienced intimacy with the opposite sex, but have already felt the discomfort of puberty. For most, gender dysphoria will pass within a few years, especially if it is met with a different response and supportive therapy, other than hormones, is held on the menu. However, affirmative action is the prevailing approach among doctors and other professionals, and in many countries, the only one accepted or even permitted. A teenage girl (who is the typical gender changer) comes to a therapist and declares that she is in fact a boy. Even though she has shown no earlier signs of any gender dysphoria, the doctor or other counsellor is unwilling, and often not allowed, to question her decision. Puberty-blocking treatment is often started immediately, and the next steps – hormone therapy and surgical intervention – follow later almost automatically. Often the decision to start the journey of transgenderism is linked to friendships (girls become boys by groups), often the teenager who wants to transgender has other adjustment or communication problems, and almost always is the decision preceded by a thorough immersion in social media, where there are many influential trans-authorities and dedicated pages. The newly transgendered person will have a new community, almost like a new family, which will welcome them as a brave convert and hero. It remains to be noted that trans topics have already found their way into school curricula, where children as young as primary school are being taught that chromosomes do not determine gender. This is happening in several countries in Europe. In Sweden, for example, the number of gender change operations has increased by 1400% over the last decade compared to a decade earlier, and the Ministry of Social Affairs of the Republic of Estonia has also recently been working on a draft regulation aimed at simplifying decisions for such transition.

In the book's interludes, the author discusses the background and causes of the phenomena described. In short, the philosophical background is (neo)Marxism and the amplifier/controller is the social media controlled by technology companies. Of course, there is no reason to doubt the influence of social media, but the author's view of the philosophical roots seems to remain too much in the recent past. It is somewhat surprising that Murray makes no mention of the influence of the most influential neo-Marxist and neo-Freudist thinker Herbert Marcuse, be it on gay or feminist movements. Marcuse was notoriously influential both as an ideologue and in suggesting specific methods of struggle, recommending 'remedies' such as thwarting lectures and meetings, destroying the literature of opponents, etc. The 'repressive tolerance' suggested by Marcuse – depriving dissenters of the right to speak out – seems to be the starting point of today's cancel culture.

One of the book's interludes speaks of forgiveness, a phenomenon that is disappearing from the modern world. Someone's 'worst joke in life', a thoughtlessly scattered quip or even an expression of a view once shared by the majority can shatter careers years later. All it takes is for that person to be elected to a position of even the slightest public interest. Will it really stay that way? Even real criminals are forgiven, the sentence they incurred expires one day and should no longer affect their lives. But a sentence uttered on social media (even if it carries the opinion of the majority at the time) will haunt a person forever. Someone can find it and present it as if it had been said yesterday. The bloodthirsty masses are waiting and ready to deliver public executions on social media until the end of time – no mercy, no forgiveness, no forgetting. Mercy and generosity generally depend on who you are talking about – one's own will be tolerated even for extreme views, while the opposing side will be scathingly criticised for even a small misunderstanding. This is how outrage and animosity grow, which is the essence of the social media business. Douglas Murray, however, describes all this madness with a hope for a better future, for reconciliation, forgiveness, and understanding. He hopes for a broadening of the spirit of generosity: "If people were able to feel some generosity in interpreting the remarks of others ... then lessening of the trench-digging might be possible." (Murray, 2020, p. 253).

The book's most general conclusion is that there is no LGBT+ community, just groups of people rather arbitrarily brought together by self-made activists, 'representing the community’ to promote their own cause, which will more often than not make neutral or indifferent fellow citizens antagonistic to the minority.

The second, updated edition, includes a comprehensive afterword by the author, in which he discusses some of the developments in identity politics since the book was first published. The racial politics that have gained momentum with the BLM movement have transformed the notion of white collective guilt into the mainstream. From this has evolved an often violent struggle against white culture, as a result of which "majority of populations are made to feel that almost everything in their culture and history is under not just criticism but attack" (Murray, 2020, p. 266). The author is concerned about the way in which "...calls for justice have turned into calls for historic vengeance; the way that calls for race to disappear as an issue have been subverted by 'anti-racists' into becoming the central issue through which to understand society – and the way in which the contents of someone's speech have become of secondary importance, and ultimately almost total unimportance, compared to the question of the identity of the speaker." (Murray, 2020, p.266) Something positive has happened as well though – for example, the entry of a growing number of brave women into the trans dialogue, which in turn has somewhat dampened the momentum of the LGBT+ people. A major triggering event was J.K. Rowling's revelation that women actually exist and the unprecedented attack on her that followed. The attackers included, among others, the actors and actresses who were made millionaires by playing the characters she had created, and a large number of staff at her publishing house. On the other hand, the argument has drawn in a great deal of women who do not want to ignore their biological sex, do not want to be reduced to 'people who menstruate', but want to retain their right to be women and enjoy the rights that go with it – for example, exclusive private spaces for women.

To sum up, there are some signs of regression in the madness of crowds. The messages from British Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that men and women do exist, and his government's guidance to schools that teachers need not encourage pupils who identify as the opposite sex to do so, or accommodate their desired gender identity, seem to point in the direction of a more sensible world. Moreover, brief PM Liz Truss has just freshly announced a 'Popular Conservatives' group that has an anti-woke agenda to target such issues in particular. It is also true though that if Labour came to power, London's policy on this would change again. So even if there are signs of receding, these are still slight, and there is no real cure for the madness of the crowds – yet.