Some children are insufferable

The title is an oblique, possibly blasphemous reference to Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children… to come unto me.” Alas, these days they are more likely to flock to an unholy destination.

When children of all ages, from cradle to grave, shill for faddish causes, there is no point looking for the pearl of good sense or a sound idea in the dung heap of effluvia. There is none.

All such causes are numerators to the common denominator: destructive, passionate hatred of our civilisation. And this passion isn’t something that can be adequately expressed in political terms, certainly not the binary ones of Left and Right.

Theological terms may work better, such as possession by the evil spirit, but this system of thought is too archaic for modern tastes. Nor can it be described as truly exhaustive.

Hence, in the absence of a comprehensive study of the root causes, let’s leave them aside and concentrate on a few empirical observations.

First, all faddish discontents have the same nihilistic cause, but one camouflaged by slogans ostensibly having nothing to do with it. Second, adherence to that nihilistic cause is and always has been infantile.

However, mental and moral infantilism is no longer the prerogative of children. It’s a disease affecting all ages at an ever-increasing rate.

The apocryphal adage attributed to Churchill says something to the effect that youngsters who aren’t lefties have no heart, while adults who still are lefties have no brain. Though the attribution is false, the saying rings true – or rather used to.

We’ve all known teenagers who champion all sorts of vogue causes with hormonal enthusiasm and then grow up to acquire jobs, families, mortgages – and conservative ideas. Yet the reverse of that progression is becoming more and more widespread.

Many young, intuitive conservatives – and I could cite the examples of several I know – steadily move leftwards as they grow older, thereby relapsing into intellectual and emotional childhood. The whole world seems to be becoming infantile, and in such a world it’s infants who are kings.

This explains Greta Thunberg’s obscene rise to prominence. This hysterical, mentally backward dropout has acquired a global following, with her admirers including monarchs, presidents and prime ministers. That makes her not just an evil child worthy of contempt, but also a phenomenon worthy of study.

Every time I type her first name, AutoCorrect changes it to ‘Great’, and in a way she is just that. Greta is great at proving many of my pet theories, including those I’ve touched on above.

Just look at the attached photograph. Greta and her accomplice are holding up placards calling for seemingly unconnected outcomes.

Greta, whose stock in trade is supposed to be saving our planet from the depredations of capitalism, demands that we support Hamas terrorism. Her accomplice links the two causes even better, in a way that elicits the admiration of the former adman in me.

She makes the text (copy, in advertising parlance) and the picture (visual, as we call it) complement each other synergistically. The statement of “Climate justice now!” is illustrated with Palestinian images. Any creative director, present or, like me, former would approve.

Now, it would be pointless looking for a rational link between the noble causes of helping Hamas to destroy Israel and preventing capitalism from destroying ‘our planet’. A link does exist, but in order to find it we have to backtrack from the face value of the messages.

Support for Hamas, climate fanaticism, campaigns against nuclear energy and for lowering the voting age to prepubescent levels, calls for wholesale nationalisation and against private medicine or education, militant feminism, struggle for homosexual and transgender rights that are actually wrongs, calls for cancelling conservatives, demands for rewriting history books to depict our whole history as nothing but racial violence – these aren’t unrelated causes.

They are all pursuit of the same cause: hatred of the West and a craving for its destruction. They are all weapons in the arsenal of evil, and it’s evil that unites them all.

Therein lies the great danger. For all those nihilistic malcontents are indeed united in pursuit of the common cause. Their adversaries, on the other hand, those I like to call PLUs (People Like Us) show nothing like the same unity.

We don’t seem to realise, or at least accept, that our opposition comes not from this or that group of loudmouthed zealots but from sheer, unadulterated evil. Most of us aren’t even conditioned to think in such categories.

As a result, we protest against this or that outrage, establishing our credentials as anti-anti-Westerners. Yet by doing so we cede the terminological high ground to our enemies. We speak their language by tagging the prefix ‘anti-’ to their harangues. Our own clear statement of what we are for, not just against, is mute if at all enunciated.

Yet the opposite of absolute evil is absolute good, not professed attachment to free enterprise, fossil fuels or, for that matter, Israel and the Ukraine. To the West’s credit, it used to know the only possible source of absolute good. To the West’s discredit, it has forgotten that knowledge.

The 19^th century satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin quipped that: “Russian powers-that-be must keep the people in a state of constant bewilderment.” Replace ‘Russian’ with ‘today’s’, and our situation is the same. We look in constant bewilderment at the workings of modernity and either wince or mock or utter why-oh-why tirades.

That’s all we can do for we’ve lost not just the power of our convictions but the convictions themselves. That leaves the field to evil children of all ages who are growing more and more insufferable.