How Did We Ever Get Here?
The Dystopia of Performative Selective Empathy.
Millions must be asking themselves this.
We’re living through the end of British political, cultural and social cohesion. Not one of our national institutions isn’t collapsing, with society more divided than at any time since the English Civil War.
Pointless now to elaborate with many details, but my exemplar is the unwillingness to protect our national borders and territory. We have a government which is desperate to duck and transfer this fundamental responsibility to ‘international law’ and supranational bodies. Not to mention the collapse in law and order at home, especially in London, whatever bullshit Sadiq Khan spouts.
Anyway, we now lack the means – and the will – to defend Britain, here or abroad. Put simply, our governing elite is destroying this country, though a visceral hatred of its history and people. The ruling classes sit vastly rewarded, united only in their fear and loathing of each other – and us. No point even mentioning our ridiculous royal family, whose antics resemble the last days of Rome or the Ottomans.
So far, so obvious. And doubtless, so painful to read again.
At 61, this seems the endgame of all I’ve seen politically, culturally, socially – and in education. An exception can be made for the years 1979 to 1990, when we had a PM who – whatever terrible mistakes she made – believed in Britain. But Thatcher’s economic determinism and trust in free trade caused huge social breakdown and poverty. She also helped create the greedy and useless managerial middle-class, who’ve enacted the horrors listed below, especially in the public sector.
This is a simplified distillation, of the five mutually dependent toxins which poisoned our national life:
- Elite guilt and self-loathing, assuaged by projection onto the British, particularly the English. A quasi-colonial ‘divide and rule’ approach, ideally suited to our erstwhile imperial classes.
- A new state religion of multiculturalism and diversity, bludgeoned through via DEI destruction of institutions and working-class communities.
- Uncontrolled immigration, without any democratic mandate. Blatant inquality before the law to favour Muslims (and others, when necessary) as political bribes for Labour votes.
- Ideological capture of education, in schools and universities. Often labelled Cultural Marxism, or ‘the long march though the institutions’. Indoctrination in subjective relativist ‘theories’ and rejection of empirical scientific truths.
- Performative Selective Empathy (PSE, pun intended) – as seen in cult lunacies, like Net Zero or trans-ideology – enforced via free-speech cancellation. Performative Selective Empathy is now ubiquitous in our politics and culture, especially education, media and the arts. It explains the buffoon Zack Polanski.
Performative Selective Empathy is perhaps the most pervasive and deadly of these. In many ways, it’s the enabling mechanism for the others. Because no one can truly escape a cultural orthodoxy running rampant through their lifetime, though they can fight it.
Exposing this humbug should improve things, perhaps removing charlatans like Miliband, Starmer and his authoritarian legal enforcer, Hermer. But its stranglehold on our institutions will take some shifting, over decades.
I can trace its suffocating embrace in my own life, at least back to school, but above all starting at Oxford in the 1980s. What seemed just an atmosphere became everything in the public arena, so that from the 1990s onwards, the outcome was obvious. The class divide shifted, with ‘progressives’ – suposedly on the left – becoming the new elite. They equal in intolerance and selfishness any ruling class from our history, without their beneficial legacies.
Can you name a single positive thing done by a British government, since 1990? Or indeed much of value done by ‘progressives’, in society? What a shameful conquest they have made.
The overriding sense I have is that this occurred socially, with immigration in particular never properly discussed. Our new elite stifled debate, celebrating an unprecedented cultural and demographic change, from which they were mostly insulated. They indulged in an orgy of Performative Selective Empathy, at the expense of the working classes, who were then demonised for objecting to this undemocratic imposition. This was our class system going full throttle, with pious lectures on diversity from those unaffected.
Now it’s too late, for Starmer et al. Only their doomed attempts to censor discussion are left…
But there are clear signs that the young have seen through all this. Many are openly questioning the cultural hegemony inflicted on them, including at our appalling universities, mostly run as property empires flogging passports to foreigners. Increasingly, our young are refusing to be censored. They live in a low-wage and high house-price dystopia, knowing who’s to blame.
Above all, technological advances have thwarted the longed for destruction of free speech by ‘progressives’. And the middle classses now see their own positions and privileges under threat, from the changes they saw inflicted on others, with no one to turn to except a breast hypnotist.
Game on!