Can we please return to reality?

It’s sometimes called progress. At other times, paradigm shift. Some prefer talking about evolution.

I call it the onset of schizophrenia, a chronically abnormal perception of reality. A sufferer creates his own, virtual reality that has nothing to do with the actual kind.

Any connection between the two is lost. His own mental images overpower his common sense, experience, even his eyesight. He sees only what he believes, never vice versa.

When this awful disorder afflicts a person, that’s bad news for him and his family. When it plagues a society, that’s bad news for the whole civilisation. For collective schizophrenia is like the individual kind: it’s progressive.

Medicine uses this word more precisely than does the common parlance. For ‘progressive’ doesn’t mean ineluctably getting better. When it comes to diseases, such as schizophrenia, ‘progressive’ means steadily getting worse.

I first wrote about this at length in my 2010 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis. The subject was specifically our economic ordeal, but I treated it in the context of general decline.

Now, quoting from oneself may be in bad taste, but such quotations have the indisputable advantage of being easy to find. So here’s what I wrote then:

“We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, Christianity with Christianism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures. We now live in a virtual world – so is it at all surprising that we live on virtual money?”

A dozen years have elapsed since then, and one can’t help noticing that the diagnosed condition has indeed progressed, largely thanks to the self-deception at which modern people excel.

Historically speaking, 12 years is a whiff of air, a fleeting glance, a grain of grit in the Alps. And yet… and yet.

If in 2010 someone had told me, or I am sure you, that people would eventually accept without screwing their index finger into their temple that a woman could impregnate a man, and that this would be treated as a blow struck for human rights, we would have called for the men in white coats.

We would have responded the same way to the view that kindergarten tots should be given a shopping list of every sexual abnormality and encouraged to choose one that particularly appeals to them. We’d even look with genuine concern at someone telling us that there exist over 70 sexes, not the actual two we knew.

Yesterday’s insanities are becoming today’s orthodoxies at an ever-accelerating speed, and not just in matters sexual.

We no longer think we are dealing with a lunatic when a prime minister boasts about the number of women and ethnic minorities in the cabinet, as if such a demographic cocktail were righteous in itself. Or when another politician defines virtue as flinging the country’s doors wide-open to all comers. Or when one can be censured for refusing to accept that, in a realm whose sovereign swears to uphold Christianity, all creeds should be equal not just legally but in every sense.

Those who build our virtual reality piece by piece are indeed schizophrenics for they do so with utmost conviction. I used to think they are simply out to deceive the masses the better to control them. Now I incline towards the view that above all they deceive themselves. They believe their own lies.

Like all progressive diseases, this one showed rather mild symptoms at first. The founding document of modernity, or rather the first triumphant statement of its victory, proclaimed that “all men are created equal”.

That was a symptom of incipient schizophrenia. For the evidence before their own eyes should have convinced the sufferers that all men are created unequal physically, intellectually, morally, socially and in every other conceivable way.

If they meant that all men should be equal before the law, then this is what they should have said. But even that equality isn’t something man is created with. It’s a matter of political consensus, not innate endowment.

Even the paragons of liberal virtue, the US and the UK, set limits on such consensus. In America, no one under 35 or born outside the 50 states can become president. In Britain, a Catholic can’t become king.

As for seeing social and economic equality as a desirable and achievable desideratum, holding this belief is a tell-tale clinical symptom, especially if accompanied by professed attachment to liberty. Because all men are created unequal, social and economic inequality is a natural condition that can only be eliminated by unnatural means.

Since people themselves will never do that, such equality can only ever be imposed and enforced by the state. That state would be despotic, no matter what it called itself.

There have been reasonably successful despotic states. In fact, in the 18^th century ‘enlightened despotism’ became the buzz phrase of absolute monarchs who claimed affection for the ideas of the Enlightenment. That by itself was symptomatic of an intellectual shortcoming, not a mental disorder. But insisting at the same time that despotism was liberty definitely was just that.

Another symptom is a sufferer’s insistence that men and women are not just equal but the same in every faculty of body and mind. Divorce from actual reality is very much in evidence there.

Wise men of the past cautioned against even legal egalitarianism in that area. For example, Dr Johnson once said: “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.” Today that quip would have him drummed out of polite society. He’d quickly feel tired not only of London but also of life.

Schoolmasters and university professors are being reprimanded or even sacked for pointing out physiological and psychological differences between men and women. The detractors of such intrepid academics are schizophrenics: their perception of reality is warped.

Or look at the global warming madness. Somehow people have been forced to ignore that warm and cold periods alternated throughout history even before man graced the Earth with his presence. And they continued to do so even long before man began to rely on hydrocarbons to make himself prosperous and longer-lived.

Ancient Romans, for example, didn’t have a hydrocarbon-fuelled economy, and yet the climate was then several degrees warmer than it is now. However, most people have now swallowed the global warming canard because a few lunatics screamed about it loudly enough.

It’s an amply described social phenomenon that evil madmen exude powerful psychic magnetism that can get hold of the masses and lead them to perdition. This quality is often described as charisma, but madness is usually closer to the clinical truth.

Trotsky and Hitler were prime examples, but they were different from run-of-the-mill propagandists of today. Those villains preached hatred based on pride in one’s own class or race. Their current equivalents sermonise hatred based on shame of one’s own class (if not low), race (if white), sex (if male) or at least car (if not electric).

And enough people are attracted to such drivel to go along with it and vote such madmen into various public offices. So forget Covid. It’s the pandemic of schizophrenia that’s destroying our civilisation. And so far we haven’t come up with an effective vaccine.

Or rather we had one, but chose to toss it out of the window. The tossers are called Enlighteners. I call them schizophrenics.

P.S. Well-done to Manny Macron, and I thought these words would never cross my lips. He has ordered that all flags in France be flown at half-mast until the burial of our Queen.