The argument that there is no objective truth, only ideologies, opinions and feelings, has been utterly compelling to this generation, for whatever reasons. An entirely vacuous and self-contradictory way of thinking has taken hold of most of population.

How has this new way of thinking and being taken hold?

MORALITY

It could be because the once ruling philosophy of Christian morality combined with excellence of thinking (the good, temporary fruit of the Enlightenment) has been abandoned, only to be replaced by “emoting”.

It could be because today’s self-perceiving losers (“victims”) – the colonised, first peoples, those of colour (in some cases, only very little), the homosexuals, the women traduced by patriarchy, the transgendered – have been successful in mounting a persuasive case for their eternal glorification by the rest of us.

It could be simple nihilism and self-worship. Maybe it is the result of the easy rewards for plodders gifted by the post-industrial economy, with all of its “BS jobs”, as the late David Graeber termed them.

Or it could be the generational lack of education in the hard sciences, both natural and human, among those unfortunate enough to have been schooled after about 1980.

Low information citizens who think that “feeling” makes good policy now run the show. The Prime Minister himself says so.

Sky News contributor James Macpherson says Anthony Albanese is “encouraging” people to think with “their feelings” when voting for the Voice to Parliament.

“The constitution is a legal document that outlines how the country is run, it’s not a hallmark greeting card to express sentiments,” Mr Macpherson told Sky News host Rita Panahi.

“Rather than explaining the detail and treating people like adults, he’s just appealing to people’s emotions.”

Indeed.

In any case, today’s opinion makers simply do not believe in truth, or research, or hard thinking, or objective science-as-process. This transformation in our age has had massive consequences for policymaking and for life as a whole in Western democracies.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The second development is the advent of social media and its subsequent corporatisation.

What began as a garage business in Silicon Valley, a good idea for liberal democratic interaction, a worthy challenger to the oppressive same-ism of the monolithic corporate media and a glint in the eye of an iconic, youthful entrepreneur has morphed, within fifteen short years, into a way of life, the primary means of communication among the hoi polloi and, alas, an instrument of bullying and the oppression of dissidents and contrarians by those who control these new channels of social intercourse.

The massive failure of the new digital demons is one of the stories of the age.

Here is a headline from The Sydney Morning Herald this week: “Two flops and you’re out: The internet declares Margot Robbie so over.”

Margot Robbie is an Australian actress, with poor box office returns on one or two of her recent films. Let those words sink in. “The internet declares”. Game over, or so it seems.

The ease and unintended perceptiveness of the headline show where and how things now get decided. And the ways of the cancellation process. The ways of bullying that lead to teenage suicides and mental health going through the floor.

Then there is the policy impact of powerful social media processes. Can anyone doubt that governments around the world might have resisted imposing COVID tyranny if they didn’t fear, more than anything else, the finality of the mob’s instantaneous social media verdict on any actions that could be portrayed as (in this case) endangering public health?

Bodies piling up in the streets – which, of course, was never going to happen, despite the fake videos from Wuhan – was always going to be a problem for governments not doing enough to satisfy the social media hordes.

SUICIDES

Piles of dead cancer sufferers not treated properly because of the COVID obsession, or piles of teen suicides driven to despair by lockdowns could safely be left to governments further down the track.

Or think of the power of the social media wars in relation to same sex marriage. Or any other hot button issue in these times. Especially culture issues and life issues. (The mob doesn’t seem that interested in economic or governance issues).

Now idiot and immoral ideas that are popular with the emoting masses, especially the clueless young, have a guaranteed megaphone, and sound-but-unappealing policies a guaranteed death-knell.

That would be all right if the idiot ideas – like transgenderism – were confined to the whackos and creepies who believed in these things and left the rest of us alone.

When dissidents are cancelled, social media becomes megaphones in echo chambers.

Worse than the megaphone is the seamless transference, from those who form ruling ideas and then see them spread across the land, and into our formerly private domains that once were beyond the reach of the State, bureaucracies, powerful corporations and interest groups with barrows to push.

The elite perpetrators of bad ideas suddenly have the capacity to bleed their beliefs into the lives of ordinary people who do not believe the crap, but have to live with the consequences.

For many of those who pronounce on the great debates of the age to their social media friends do not remotely understand the ways of thinking and the hidden agendas of the ruling class whose ideas they so readily accept.

They thought that “love was love”, oblivious to the anti-Christian and anti-family agendas of those behind the push for SSM.

Those who have blindly bought the vaccines narrative have little understanding of the darker forces at work in their production and rollout.

Those who think euthanasia is about human dignity have no conception of the slippery slopes down which we are already travelling.

People who love their tap-and-pay and who welcome contact-tracing technology have not, it seems, considered the sinister uses to which such technologies can be put.

NOTHING

And to which they are being put, as we speak. The same with Central Bank Digital Currencies and social credit. We will own nothing, and be happy. 

It is the speed of the circulation of false-but-plausible claims and fringe ideologies, and their almost instantaneous absorption into the mainstream, that has done us irreparable harm as post-Enlightenment societies.

There is no contemplation, no reflection, no deep analytical thinking, no bedrock of stable, considered values upon which to rely. No past and no future.

Only an endless present for what Mark Bauerlein has termed “the dumbest generation”.

It is only a few decades, for example, since the traditional family (that is, not two gays and a cocker spaniel) was still regarded by the vast majority as the building foundation of civil society. To be preserved and nurtured.

Now, all the pillars holding up our former core values have been kicked away. The whole edifice lies now in a pile of rubble.

Mad ideas and creepy values have infiltrated key institutions with whom the punters are forced to interact, and from whom they learn their core values and ideas.

The punters do not know what they do not know. This explains part of the victory of the postmodernist doctrine. This is the top-down, vertical strategy. But the serious infiltration of ordinary minds has occurred through the demonic work of bastardised ideas being readily spread through social media.  This is the bottom-up, horizontal strategy.

There is now a ready-made, natural conduit for ruling ideas, packaged to appeal to the shallow and the inattentive, to be absorbed without demur.