Our Marxist government is about to spend £10.7 million of taxpayers’ cash on a research project to establish “how the NHS can best support children and young people attending gender services”.
The working hypothesis is that the best way to provide such support is to castrate children chemically with puberty blockers and then ask them two years later how happy they feel. So much for objective scientific analysis of test results.
Lest you may think this is just a dystopic fantasy, let me assure you it isn’t. This project is championed by Health Secretary Wes Streeting and supported by the entire cabinet. Their line of thought starts with a lexical solecism: the use of ‘gender’ (as in ‘gender identity’) to describe anything other than a grammatical category.
Gender identity to them is the option a child chooses from a menu of 100-odd ‘genders’. This is the only thing that matters, with biological sex reduced to the status of disposable irrelevance.
This is one example of how a false premise is like a termite-eaten foundation. Any structure built on it will eventually collapse, but this doesn’t prevent ignorant, stupid or wicked people from trying to build it.
The Left yet again lives up, or rather down, to the Latin derivation of the term. This sinister plan brings back the memory of another regime, one that sterilised 400,000 people in the name of maintaining the Aryan purity of the race.
The Nazis identified seven categories to be subjected to chemical castration. One such was what they called ‘transvestites’ and what our progressive people call ‘transgender people’.
Anyone appalled by my attempt to draw a parallel between our anodyne Wes Streeting and his creepy Nazi counterpart, SS-Obergruppenführer Leonardo Conti, will point out some salient differences between the two regimes.
Fair enough, they exist. But, on this evidence, the similarities are no less salient, which ought to make us stop and think in more general categories.
People like to say that opposites attract. As proof of that statement, they often cite the two extreme ends of the political spectrum, Left and Right.
They outline the obvious similarities between, say, the communists and the Nazis, and insist the point has been made. I agree with the observation but not with the conclusion.
Opposites don’t really attract. If they do, they aren’t really opposites. They are two aspects of the same phenomenon, diverging only on its periphery while converging at its core.
Politics is never just politics. It’s also, perhaps mainly, an administrative expression of both philosophy and morality. Philosophy poses the question of what is true, morality asks what is good, and the answers shape the prevailing ethos, identifying what it considers true and good.
This ethos is always incorporated in the makeup of the state, and no state can deviate from it too much without risking its own extinction. What kind of state doesn’t really matter: this holds true for all of them.
In democracies, such deviant leaders are voted out. In authoritarian states, they are ousted by a palace coup. In totalitarian regimes, they are overthrown by revolutions or military defeat. In every known type of state, they must toe the philosophical and moral line running through the nation’s psyche – or else.
A useful definition of a human being, one among many that is, is a creature searching for meaning. After numerous failed attempts to find it internally, the human mind usually strikes outwards and upwards, looking for meaning outside itself.
This need was for millennia satisfied by religion. That was faith in either a demiurge who made the universe orderly, or a god who created it in the first place and imposed certain moral rules, or else God the Saviour who, having created the world, became man for 30-odd years and then died to save his creation.
Several thousand years of known history sufficed to create a certain habit of mind, training it to look for meaning outside itself. The Enlightenment sought to break that mental custom by empowering man to seek self-sufficiency. The meaning of life, people were now taught, somewhat illogically, was life itself. You, Mr Everyman, are your own meaning. No other exists or is needed.
However, searching for meaning external to oneself had become an ontological property of man, and such properties weren’t to be expunged. They could, however, be rerouted towards surrogates, secular ersatz religions for which the Enlightenment philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined the term ‘ideologies’.
That was during the Reign of Terror, when Destutt was in prison awaiting execution. That sort of thing is known to focus the mind, and the condemned man came up with a term still in wide use. He was spared though and lived for another 40 years, overlapping with Karl Marx by 18 years.
Enlightenment ideologies seemed to enable man to eschew the supernatural when looking for the superpersonal. But that turned out to be fool’s gold: religious surrogates on offer were numerous, but none satisfied the inner craving fully. They were all heresies in the original sense of the word: accentuating a particular at the expense of the whole.
Liberal democracy, communism and Nazism are all such heresies traceable back to the common progenitor: Enlightenment secularism. They all share a common DNA and certain familial traits, which explains why they can interchange so easily.
Fascism, Nazism, communism can pop out of liberal democracy like Jack in the Box, only then to be replaced with the same ease by a sort of democratic redux. Many people are surprised when observing such leaps to and fro, but only because they aren’t aware of the kinship among all descendants of the Enlightenment.
Knowing that this kinship exists should heighten our sensitivity and suppress our natural complacency. We may prefer our own offshoot of the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, to, say, communism or fascism, but we’d be on a losing wicket if counting on the unshakeable endurance of our particular heresy.
States instituted along Enlightenment principles are never just out to create a new political dispensation. They are out to create a new type of man, that is to change the very concept of man that had existed before the so-called Age of Reason (more properly called the Age of Spurious Reason).
Usually they rely on cradle-to-grave indoctrination aimed at scouring the human mind of every notion contrary to their particular heresy. But there is absolutely no reason they would balk at also playing sinister tricks with the human body.
The assumption is that the state has dominion over not only philosophy and morality, but also over biology. In that sense, all offshoots of the Enlightenment are alike, the only differences among them being those in degree, not in kind.
The sinister experiment prepared by our Marxist government should be cause for revulsion but not for surprise. Governments are like people: they tend to act in character. If we understand their true character, we may be able to understand and predict their actions.
Mr Streeting, meet Herr Conti. You have much in common and a lot to talk about.