By Robert Oulds and Dr Niall McCrae
"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy" (World Economic Forum, 18 November 2016).
Covid-19 is a crisis too good to waste for UN agencies and other transnational bodies. The coronavirus pandemic has led to governments around the world signing up to the 'Great Reset' designed by the World Economic Forum, with the slogan 'Build Back Better' appearing on the lectern at press conferences. However, SARS-CoV-2 is not the real driver behind the global reform agenda; arguably, it is merely an accessory. A much more insidious virus has been festering.
Moralitis, a cultural virus, causes simplistic dichotomous thinking about good and bad. People are taught to be 'citizens of the world', to eschew national identity and to believe that only international bodies have moral legitimacy. The afflicted have lost respect for Enlightenment values: free speech means hate, and democracy produces leaders chosen by backward bigots. The UK is in danger of delivering Brexit only to find that power has been transferred beyond Brussels to unelected global authorities. Like Olympians the Transies (our new guardians in transnational UN agencies) are more remote than ever from the ordinary voter.
Writing in the Washington Examiner (26 October 2020), Conservative politician Dan Hannan feared: -
The old order is not coming back. The world that lies on the other side of the lockdowns will be colder, harsher, more pinched. Power is shifting to the autocracies. Even in the liberal West, authoritarianism is ascendant.
Yet the progressive globalists will not win without a fight. Lesser mortals are realising that something dreadful is happening to society, and that the Covid-19 aftermath is an opportunistic globalist putsch. They were already troubled by an education system that teaches national shame; a public service broadcaster that insults our intelligence with blatant bias; a politicised police force and governments that seems to do the opposite of what they were elected to do. But most people want to get back to a semblance of normality, not to be digital slaves of a new world order.
This virus has found fertile soil in the education system, where woke ideology is propagated. Cultural appropriation is one of the dehumanising concepts of identity politics, and zealots are on the lookout for any infraction to shame the offender. The rules are arbitrary and constantly changing. For instance, a student union recently ruled that wearing a sombrero to a party is cultural appropriation and thus borderline racism. Yet a piñata, another Mexican tradition of a papier-mâché donkey filled with sweets, is okay for a birthday celebration. A corn row hairstyle is prohibited for a white schoolgirl, but nobody would deny a black schoolgirl her hair straighteners. The virus has spread from the moral madrassas of academe to permeate all organisations: whatever their purpose, they become uncompromising platforms for progressive causes.
How has such an illogical and punitive code of conduct taken hold? Our book 'Moralitis, A Cultural Virus' describes how Western society has gradually fallen to the subversive ideology of cultural Marxism. A long march through the institutions has succeeded in overturning traditional ideas with doctrines such as gender fluidity, toxic masculinity and white privilege. Truth has been redefined from objective fact to favoured narrative. Who would have believed, a few years ago, that the biological status of woman would become a bigoted trope, to be replaced by 'womXn' and 'people who have periods'?
The book has three parts: the first telling the story of cultural revolution, leading to the division of society into the grounded common folk and a progressive, globalist intelligentsia. We go back to the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, founded in the 1920s by communist sympathisers who realised that mature social democracies were resistant to Marxist revolutionary fervour, and that nothing changes if the culture doesn't change. Then there was Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political criminal whose prison diaries guided the attack on the traditional structures of society, and later the Left Bank philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida. Deconstructionist teaching would have been harmless if it was no more than a rite of passage for gullible students, but the principles were put into deadly practice by totalitarian states. Year Zero amassed countless corpses.
The second chapter presents our unique thesis of moralitis, a disease spread not by microbes but by memes that literally 'go viral' on the internet. Woke memes spread and mutate most violently in the metropolitan middle class. Here are the 'Anywheres' identified by David Goodhart, who account for no more than a quarter of the population but have disproportionate power and privilege. They dominate our institutions, the BBC, police, the professions, the arts and universities. They used their influence to frustrate the democratic decision for Brexit, and to invoke a draconian lockdown of the great unwashed in the current pandemic.
A typical contagious case is the graduate of 'grievance studies' at university, who became a student union officer, develops a CV of righteous activism, and ascends the ranks in a public or private organisation, thereby gaining influence. The majority of moralitic cases, though, are carriers. While having little potency alone, they are readily enticed into collective action (e.g. Twitter storms, petitions). Their ideological commitment is shallow, with limited awareness of the underlying cultural Marxist agenda, but they display the social symptoms at mild to moderate level: -
• Virtue-signalling at every opportunity
• Parroting of phrases and slogans
• Declaration of cultural guilt
• Rejection of national identity and Judeo-Christian heritage
• Hostility and outraged response to contrary opinions
• Simplistic dichotomising of debate by labelling people as good or bad
Moralitis is not only similar to an infectious disease in transmission, but also in its detrimental impact on the afflicted. The younger generations brainwashed with progressive ideology will struggle to get a secure job or emulate the family comforts of their own upbringing. Their causes are detrimental to their own interests: open borders, carbon-free living and divisive identity politics.
Youthful idealism has always been a prime target for revolutionary movements. But woke culture is sham radicalism. It will not lead to a fairer society but instead consolidate the wealth and hegemony of a self-serving elite: the banking 'masters of the universe', corporate businesses who want a fully digitised market on their terms, bureaucrats in global institutions, and the cultural Marxists in politics and academe. This is the unholy alliance that is pulling the strings.
So, moralitis is a manmade virus. As any cult leader knows, the best way to manipulate followers is to deprive them of their reason. Woke ideology reduces people's autonomy and ensures their compliance with rules and norms that undermine faith, flag and family. Promisingly, there are signs that Generation Z may be more conservative than millennials. Moralitis is a sickness from which society can recover and grow stronger. The severely moralitic are impermeable to rational argument, but the larger mass of carriers is amenable to persuasion. Our book may contribute as a powerful antidote. Change will not happen overnight, but the whole woke edifice is a house built on sand. Like Soviet communism, another totalitarian system built on delusion, eventually it will collapse. For the sake of humanity, let's hope sooner rather than later.