The Destructivists: How moral usurpation is being used to control us and change every aspect of life without our consent

By William Collins

All "Western" societies have become deeply divided, and the divisions have become ever more acrimonious. The reason is that the differences of opinion stem from differences of moral perspective. Where existing works fall short is in explaining why and how this dichotomous morality has arisen, a question which is related to who benefits from it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: principia publications unlimited
• Release date: Feb 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838021627

Book preview

Part One

The Elements of Moral Usurpation

1. A Signpost

Wherein I trick the Preface-skipping reader into reading the Preface by making it Chapter 1

It is most unwise to declare your intentions at the outset. Wiser by far is to let the words fall as they will, and cunningly declare that, whatever their ultimate import, that was indeed the objective all along. It was foolish of me, then, to attempt to write this opening chapter first. You may assume that I revised it later when the book was largely written and it had become somewhat clearer to me what I was struggling to express.

My previous book (The Empathy Gap) was lengthy and heavy on data and source references. Undoubtedly it contained opinion, but overwhelmingly it was an exercise in presenting empirical evidence. This book is very different. It is overtly a book of opinion, a personal perspective. It will rely on (relatively) few references. Moreover, my intention was that it should be far shorter and to the point, so much against my natural prolixity.

In openly confessing that this is a book of opinion, I steal a march on those who also fill many pages with opinion but pretend it to be something better, and perhaps base a career upon it. I, at least, have confessed. And I have no desire for another career.

The reader should not be alarmed that I have turned my back on the discipline of the empirical. Nothing could be further from the truth. But scientists (and not only social scientists) are apt to forget that the first step in applying the scientific method is to make an hypothesis – which is a posh word for guess. Without an initial hypothesis, the random gathering of data, followed by an attempt to make sense of it, is generally rewarded with confusion, not enlightenment: that is not the scientific method. Rather, empirical investigations should always be focused on examining whether a given hypothesis is consistent with experiment or observation, preferably as a binary yes/no outcome. The devising of suitable empirical tests is an art in itself, which I happily leave to the thousand PhD students that would be required to address the hypotheses (viz opinions) herein. Any ideas stand or fall according to the rulings of that jury.

That said, whether opinions on morality are even within the purview of the scientific method is one of the many questions which I shall make no attempt to address.

It has become a commonplace that the very evident divisions in our society result from a bifurcation in our accepted moral code. Many excellent books have appeared which describe the difference in perspective which results, and the very real impact on people’s lives. One side sees the other as dangerously bonkers, whilst in return the latter interprets the former as fascistic hatemongers – or so they say. Where existing works fall short is in explaining why and how this dichotomous morality has arisen, a question which is related to who benefits from it.

The purpose of this book is to address that question: why has a radically different view of moral rectitude arisen and become so widespread? I will not be morally neutral. Indeed, that moral neutrality is itself a moral error is central to my thesis. The book is essentially my diagnosis of the problem. Accurate diagnosis is the essential prelude to successful treatment. For now, I will say only that an answer confined to the political has never satisfied me, though an answer ignoring the political is also seriously incomplete.

I will not be attempting value-free sociology. Quite the opposite. I shall assert specific values and explicitly condemn the opposing camp. A generally sound guiding principle in unravelling sociological phenomena is to ask cui bono - who benefits. Nothing explodes moral posturing so convincingly as exposing personal gain.

In a book based centrally on morality, it is inevitable that religion will feature to some degree. In that context, please note that I use the term atheist to mean someone who does not believe in a personal creator God. Buddhism, for example, is atheistic in that sense (though not in a broader sense which it would be inappropriate of me to attempt to elaborate). This usage of atheist is to be distinguished from the irreligious atheism which is now prevalent in the West, and which is generally coupled with a repudiation of the transcendent and an embracing of materialism or scientism.

Consistently, I use God to mean a personal creator God.

The purpose and structure of this book will be described in chapter 2, after I have set the scene by describing the social context it addresses. That the provisional title of the book was The Morality Vampires tells you how central to the book is morality. Its final title betrays my opinion of the destructive course on which dominant social discourses are now driving us.

Let me express one irritation. It has become common for the debacle of our divided society, or some particular manifestation of it, to be identified as a moral panic. It is not. That is lazy analysis leading to inaccuracy. Oh, it may spawn moral panics. But primarily the divided state of our society arises from moral manipulation, moral exploitation and moral usurpation. The salient point is the directed intent inherent in the latter which is not conveyed by the phrase moral panic.

It is intrinsically hazardous to write about morality. And if moral discourse is hazardous, injecting religion into the brew is frankly suicidal. Yet it must be done, and that it is done by an irreligious author only underwrites how unavoidable it has become.

The specific hazard of moral discourse is the inevitable temptation for the reader to assume that the author is setting himself up as an exemplar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lamentably, I am far from being an exemplar and do not anticipate ever being even close to it. Look elsewhere for your role model. That error of interpretation is to mistake a signpost for the destination. Any fool who is just a little alert can read a signpost (or create one). Travelling to the destination is an entirely different matter. I offer you a signpost; the journey is yours to manage.

2. Our Parlous Society

Wherein I set out the book’s intention to ascribe the divisions in our society to a form of moral corruption which must be countered in moral terms. The scope of the rest of the book is also described in brief.

The Background and Other Publications

I hesitate to write that it is undeniable that our society has become fractured and deeply divided – because, inevitably, someone will then deny it. There have always been political disputes and disagreements about the best way for society to be organised. There have always been heated exchanges on such subjects, with tempers being lost on occasion. But the nature of the conflict has changed over the last few decades. The divide has become morally charged, even defined by a presumed moral content. Whereas previously we might have been disposed to accept, perhaps reluctantly, that one’s opponent was well motivated, if misguided, now the opponent has become the manifestation of evil.

One school of thought has been elevated to be morally unassailable whilst any dissenting voices have been successfully presented to the public as morally reprehensible. As a result, only one view may be voiced in polite society without risking shock and severe disapprobation. Not the giving, but the taking, of offence now hovers on the brink of defining a crime. This has generated a serious problem over free speech. People with Incorrect views find their invitation to speak at universities cancelled due to protests, their opinions labelled as hate speech to which influential bodies of students and faculty alike unilaterally decide that no one should be exposed. Similarly, cogent arguments presenting the Incorrect position on any sacrosanct topic will not be published in mainstream news or media outlets. Links to sources of such counternarratives are commonly blocked by social media platforms on the grounds of violating their community standards, i.e., being Incorrect – especially when empirically correct.

In the specific context of criticisms of feminism or the attempt to discuss male disadvantages, books exposing the issues from the unauthorised perspective go back at least thirty years and have created a large literature, though very few works have achieved a wide readership. More recently, in the last ten years or so, the topics which provoke de facto censorship have broadened in range as acceptable opinion on an increasing number of issues has become morally compelled. The phenomenon is often dubbed the Culture War. The term is appropriate as it captures how culture, and I would say specifically morality, constrains and directs acceptable opinion. However, the word war is of debatable accuracy. The phenomenon has been more a case of cultural re-education than one in which any great push-back occurred. In this respect it resembles the so-called sex war which has been far closer to uncontested slaughter than war.

Several books have appeared recently which describe our parlous society as it now is. I give an extremely brief introduction to a few of them, but I hope the reader would acquire and read them in full.

Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds is perhaps the most cited. He addresses the Identity groups defined by sexuality, sex, race and trans. He exposes nicely that these are now political categories, not actually defined by sexuality, biological sex, ethnicity, etc., at all. We have become accustomed to the view from the Correct axis that anyone can identify as a woman. Similarly, Murray (himself gay) notes with some bewilderment his realisation that merely having sex with men but not with women is now insufficient to qualify as gay. He found himself excommunicated from the Church of Gay for having the wrong politics. In Correct thought, being gay, being a woman or being black are defined by, and are declarations of, the required politics. Margaret Thatcher, from this brave new perspective, was not a woman. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was very much a white man.

Murray’s interlude on forgiveness is particularly important and comes closest to the subject matter of this book, on which more later.

Murray notes a peculiar phenomenon. Huge changes have occurred in our society over the last half-century and the discriminations against gays, women and non-Whites which undoubtedly existed previously have been overturned as regards the bulk of society. There will always be individuals who are bigoted, but what is socially acceptable has changed radically. And yet, as Murray correctly observes, this progress is denied. We live in an appallingly racist society (we are told), homophobia is still rife, and women are oppressed and have a long way still to go. Murray uses a metaphor repeatedly to describe this strange phenomenon whereby, the target of equality being all but achieved, suddenly we are again miles away from it. He describes it thus: just as the train appeared to be reaching its destination it suddenly picked up steam and went crashing off down the tracks and into the distance.

In this book I explain why this strange phenomenon occurs and why it is not strange at all. On the contrary, this phenomenon usefully exposes the true purpose of the equalities industry and Identity Politics. What I will stress is that apparent moral rectitude functions as a resource for the acquisition of power. Loudly proclaiming the injustice of ostensible inequalities positions the speaker on the perceived moral high ground and hence conjures power from nothing. Any attaining of equality, where there was previously inequality, is a diminishing of that source of moral cachet and hence a loss of a source of power. Equality attained is as much use to the moral usurper as a dead battery. So the moral usurpers will maintain the narrative of inequality at all costs, whilst pretending to be fighting to overcome it. Their concern is a sham. It is a power strategy, not compassion.

It is said that annexing the moral high ground provides a smokescreen for other purposes. This is quite true, but it should be noted that claims to moral rectitude are also claims to power. Thus, Identity Politics and allied moral corruptions do indeed provide a moral smokescreen behind which authoritarianism advances, but the authoritarianism is also powered by the usurped moral perspective itself. This is the theme of the present book. This type of authoritarianism is actually only a variant on earlier forms of authoritarianism which have a long pedigree and very specific modus operandi.

Another work which does a good job of laying out what has happened to our culture is Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture. The authors are sociologists. They usefully describe our society now as a Victimhood Culture by way of contrast with the two dominant cultures which preceded it: Honour Culture followed by Dignity Culture. Honour Culture and Victimhood Culture share an extreme sensitivity to personal slights or perceived transgressions of highly restrictive codes of behaviour. However, whereas those who were on a hair-trigger in the Honour Culture had to back up their sensitivity with a significant degree of personal bravery, even this virtue is eliminated in Victimhood Culture which relies upon powerful external agencies or mobs to castigate those whom the ostensible victim declares to deserve it.

The shortcomings of Honour Culture are readily apparent. If you happen not to be terribly good at duelling then you are going to be obliged to suck up any insults or to die young. Honour Culture is therefore rather too close to might is right. It is easy to understand that this would provide some impetus for powerful external agencies, e.g., the law, to be the arbiters in disputes, rather than swords or pistols. It is equally easy to see how the transition away from duelling to legal settlements would also necessitate a far greater tolerance to minor slights. The hair-trigger of Honour Culture would generate far too many disputes to be settled by the courts, or any other external agencies. So a greater tolerance – fronted by a cool dignity which can ignore foolish insults – would naturally arise under these conditions, thus producing Dignity Culture.

Victimhood Culture is a return to the hair-trigger of intolerance, and is facilitated by mechanisms of discomforting against declared offenders which are not legal but social. These are implemented by mass actions against offenders by social media mobs, or by large groups of university students, or by bodies such as the educational institutions or news media. Which person is the offender and which the victim is decided by a rigid code which, though morally based in the minds of the proponents of the system, is actually decided in many cases based on the profoundly immoral and prejudicial basis of identity group membership. Victimhood Culture is the worst of all worlds. It is fundamentally intolerant, illiberal, cowardly, unforgiving and divisive.

But worse, is it the case that, in the minds of the more knowing of the system’s zealots, the intolerance, the twitter mobs and the victimology are deliberate stratagems? Are they, as some believe, the manifestations of a dialectical activism whose acolytes believe such intolerance will usher in a utopia? There is indeed reason to believe that the faithful are unconcerned about their authoritarianism because they are The People Who Know Best. Their behaviour is for the Greater Good, and so no objection to it can ever be valid.

The academic underpinning of the latter political shift has been documented in Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories. The book provides an academic history of the progress of postmodern philosophy and its transmogrification from effete epistemological nihilism into the rabid political activist movement that is misleadingly called Critical Theory. The book is an exemplary account of the origins of Wokeness within the academy. But it is less strong in explaining how Wokeness came to infect the institutions outside the universities, and the public generally, especially the middle classes. Entryism is surely not a sufficient explanation, though it is certainly a contributor. The appeal, I shall argue, is through the moral dimension. As for Critical Theory and its antecedents, I shall have more to say about that in chapter 25 and Appendix B.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind describes how emotional fragility has been promoted within the American educational institutions, identifying this as significant in Woke intolerance as well as in steeply rising rates of common mental disorders among the young. They put forward an hypothesis to explain why this has come about, essentially due to over-protection of the young, helicopter parenting and the malign influence of social media. They suggest (in my words) that parents and educational systems have made the mistake of thinking the road could be prepared for the child, instead of concentrating on preparing the child for the road. They have forgotten that protection is impossible and that resilience is key.

Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind can also be mentioned in this context. It also laments how the stifling forces of political correctness and illiberal Wokeness are threatening freedom, reason and true liberalism. His explanation is that certain ideas are both infectious and parasitic, and so he likens the problem to a virus-induced pandemic.

Feminism, in one of its dialects or another, is implicated in all the above. That early second-wave feminism was strongly linked to a variant of Marxism is beyond doubt, and the connection is explicit in feminism’s standard bibliography (see, for example, Herbert Purdy’s Their Angry Creed). However, I have never been content with merely linking feminism with Marxism and somehow regarding that to be an explanation of its rise to social and political dominance. After all, Marxism never succeeded in the UK or the USA or Canada or Australia previously. Actually, Critical Theory or Wokeism, and hence intersectional feminism, have roots which are older than Marxism. It is important to expose these, and in particular to expose the implicitly religious nature of the overarching credo. This I shall do in chapter 25 and Appendix B, albeit with extreme brevity. The epistemology of Critical Theory cannot be ignored.

However, this will still leave us well short of the machine code which underpins these political movements. Neither politics nor philosophy are themselves the true motivation but only the manifestation of deeper motives. These deeper motives are always psychological or sociological or moral. The widespread acceptance of the mores promoted by Wokeism extends well beyond those who have any knowledge of, or interest in, the philosophical underpinnings of Critical Theory or postmodernism. It is therefore the moral, psychological and sociological dimensions that are the recruiting sergeants for the popular spread of Wokeism.

The cluster of social and political phenomena, the origin of whose popularity I propose to explain, is known by many names: Progressivism, Cultural Marxism, Collectivism, Identity Politics, Intersectional Feminism, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, Victimhood Culture, Social Justice (complete with Warriors), or simply Woke, or perhaps just the hard Left. With no pretence at all at neutrality, I shall replace all these terms with one: Destructivism, because their common purpose is to undermine and destroy Western culture. Words are important. Indeed the clever use of words is one of the most effective tricks of these Destructivists.

I might instead have adopted the term Divisionism, as the modus operandi of all of these dialects of Destructivism is to create division and conflict. However, Destructivism is more forthright as destruction is the actual aim, whilst division is a means to that aim.

The books summarised above are all excellent and I do not seek here to emulate, duplicate or exceed them. My intention is to do something else which these books do not address. Insightful though these works are in describing the position in which we find ourselves, they do not explain how or why Destructivism has become dominant in all the influential institutions: education, entertainment, social services, the judiciary, and especially in politics. Excellent job though Pluckrose and Lindsay do in laying out the development of Critical Theory within the academy, by what mechanism has this arcane perspective invaded the minds of large swathes of the public, most of whom would not know Derrida from a cockapoo? My concern in this book is to address how and why Destructivist views have become so dominant in centres of power and influence as well as in the public mind.

The answer cannot lie in the intellectual facade which fronts Wokeist Critical Theory and in which only a few hard-core academics have any interest. The theme of this book is that the answer lies in the moral suasion which Destructivism wields. This is indeed odd because divisiveness and destruction are not normally associated with the moral high ground. But this is precisely the point. Destructivism throws up false moral smokescreens specifically in order to hide its true nature. The mechanism underlying the rise of Destructivism is Moral Usurpation.

What I have realised in the process of writing this book is that we are not dealing with a single phenomenon or a single group of people, but an ecosystem of mutually supporting phenomena and groups. Embracing this broader perspective is essential in order to understand how and why the elites are invested in the system as a whole. Otherwise one would be left with a puzzle: why have agencies of the State, including the justice process, large corporations and mega-rich globalists, all aligned themselves so eagerly with Destructivism? These higher animals of the socio-political environment must be positioned correctly within the ecosystem. The key is that, for some, the moral carapace of Destructivism has become their latest mechanism of control, whilst for others it is Destructivism itself which they applaud.

The Purpose of This Book

This book seeks to expose the moral smokescreens that hide the whole ecosystem and to help the reader see through them. As Jonathan Haidt will remind us, moral suasion acts through the emotional psyche. Do not seek to defeat it through empirical evidence and reason. It must be defeated in the arena from which it draws its strength: its moral pretensions must be exposed as fraudulent on moral grounds. True morality must be asserted to defeat the false.

Some people observe that we are drowning in moralisation. That, I think, is true. But they may go on to conclude, falsely, that the solution to our social ills is to chase morality out of public discourse and policy. This would be a most grievous error. Pause for a moment and you will see that it makes no sense to claim that there is too much morality. To etiolate, and ultimately to eliminate, the moral dimension is to de-moralise: a revealing word indeed. The confusion here lies in the crucial distinction between false morality and true morality. We are not drowning in true morality. How could that possibly be? We are drowning in false morality.

But this is not being asserted with sufficient clarity and force. Instead, intelligent discussion orbits around the issue, seemingly afraid to name the problem clearly. The reason for that fear is the very existence of an absolute or natural or true morality has been vilified, and expressing such a view will bring disapprobation down upon you immediately. But it must be done.

That is the simple purpose of this book: to expose our current social divisions as being the result of a widespread adoption of false morality. The antidote to false morality is twofold, not only to point out why it is false (negative), but also to reassert true morality to take its place (positive). The negative approach alone will not suffice. The moral circuits in people’s minds must needs be occupied with something. The true must be used to displace the false.

That, in short, must be the modus operandi (MO) of those wishing to fight back against the unfortunate turn society has taken. The MO must be morally based because the root cause of the problem is moral. Merely endlessly repeating empirical facts will not be efficacious against morally based resistance. Truth, in its mundane form of empirical justification, is indeed a central issue. But the payload of reality must be delivered in an armour-piercing shell composed of moral principle, because that is what is required to penetrate armour plating which is composed of false moral posturing.

Structure of This Book

The book is structured in four parts.

The first part presents the strategy which I claim underpins the many different strands of Destructivism, which I call Moral Usurpation. This strategy relies upon the distinction between what I term the social morality and true morality. The latter term speaks for itself, and chapter 6 will clarify its meaning further.

By social morality I shall mean that code of behaviour which is accepted, and socially enforced, within a given society. The manipulation of the social morality is, I shall argue, the central feature of the elites’ mechanism of control. The theory of Moral Usurpation is presented in five parts dealing with Moral Infantilism, Moral Vampirism, the Creation of Zealots, the Appeal to the Elites, and the Feedback Mechanisms. The relationship between these ideas and the more familiar Cultural Marxism, or Gramscian Marxism, is also discussed briefly.

To emphasise further the role of the moral dimension in bolstering the elites’ consolidation of power, the idea of the Woke Industrial Complex is explained. Finally in Part One, I make some general observations about the nature of ideologies and the related concept of auto-totalism. It is pointed out that the fact that the adoption of Identity Politics gives rise to authoritarianism is mathematically provable in the context of an evolutionary game theory model.

Part Two of the book addresses the many specific strategies which contribute to the overall Destructivist project, as well as how they are deployed in practice. These are the enablers, or precursors, which provide an environment conducive to Moral Usurpation arising. There we shall look at the relationship between political opinion and moral perspective, and especially the tendency of left-leaning people to become morally unidimensional, focussing almost entirely on the care/harm axis of morality (courtesy of Jonathan Haidt).

Critiques of feminism and feminist psychology will feature large in Part Two, including how feminism is built upon evolved psychological traits by corruption, or misapplication, of natural female moral authority. Feminism is of special relevance because it is the leading example of Identity Politics as well as a major part of wider political stratagems.

The most important concept in Part Two is the moral anchor, the loss of which has rendered us vulnerable to the Moral Usurpation strategy. It is impossible at this point to avoid mentioning the significance of the collapse of religion. More generally, the corrosive effects of the repudiation of the transcendent are addressed explicitly.

Also in Part Two we ask whether the blame for our social divisions can be laid at the door of liberalism (in the sense of UK or European Enlightenment liberalism). We look briefly at collectivism versus individualism, and what those ambiguous terms mean. It will be very important to clarify the distinction between the two diametrically opposed uses of the term Individualism, and the associated psychologies.

Part Two also introduces postmodernism and Critical Theory, but refers to an Appendix for the philosophical history to avoid digression in the main text.

Part Two includes a sequence of chapters which lay down how advanced the Destructivist agenda is already. I address the destruction of truth, beauty and love; the destruction of religion and the transcendent; the destruction of education, science and merit; and the destruction of family and parenting and, of course, the destruction of the relationship between the sexes. This is depressing but must be faced forthrightly.

Finally in Part Two I attempt to address whether these destructions have come about through ignorance or through the deliberate adoption of strategies whose purpose is destruction? Are we dealing with directed and malicious intent, making the term Destructivist appropriate – or not?

Part three consists of just two chapters. The first illustrates, in brief note form, how the Moral Usurpation strategy is applied in practice across sixteen different issues. The second addresses the influence of globalist organisations and continues and completes the examination of deliberate planned intent.

Part four of the book addresses the future; the prognosis and the potential for treatment. Will we take the Black Pill of despair, continuing destruction and loss of freedom? Or the White Pill of hope which encourages we, the people, to triumph over the globalist-led Woke Industrial Complex? Which road we take depends upon whether we can win on the moral battlefield by successfully reasserting the true morality and displacing the false. The social role of religion is to do just that, and we should not be distracted by concerns over metaphysics. Morality is a practical matter. Winning the battle for the democratisation of information, and hence truth, is also crucial. I close part four with a reminder of the most important moral factors of all: humility, charity and forgiveness.

Off we go then…

References

Campbell, Bradley, and Manning, Jason. (2018). The Rise of Victimhood Culture. (Palgrave Macmillan).

Haidt, Jonathan, and Lukianoff, Greg (2019). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. (Penguin).

Murray, Douglas. (2019). The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. (Bloomsbury Continuum).

Pluckrose, Helen, and Lindsay, James (2020). Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody. (Swift Press, GB).

Purdy, Herbert (2016). Their Angry Creed. (LPS Publishing)

Saad, Gad. (2020). The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. (Regnery Publishing).

3. Social Morality

Here I argue that Homo sapiens have an innate psychological tendency to adopt a shared code of behaviour, a social morality, which underlies the possibility of large-scale human societies. Hijacking this psychological capacity provides a powerful means of social and political coercion.

Why are human societies mostly harmonious and cooperative? In sufficiently large societies most people are unrelated, or only very distantly related, so genetic kinship factors can be discounted. Game theoretical considerations go some way to an explanation, simulations giving rise to tit-for-tat behaviours so long as cooperation is rewarded by mutual benefit, as it generally is. But such schemas will easily flounder if freeloaders are allowed to flourish unrestricted. Such uncooperative – that is, antisocial – behaviour must be suppressed sufficiently robustly.

Criminal sanctions are part of the answer, but are appropriate only for serious breaches of good behaviour for which it is worthwhile invoking the time consuming and costly process of judicial proceedings and perhaps incarceration. A truly harmonious society cannot be brought about by criminal sanctions alone because cooperation is needed in the myriad of everyday dealings with other people. Cooperation is promoted by a friendly atmosphere, not by the threat of litigation.

Mr Everyman is being controlled, but it is not because he has a policeman sitting in his front room. He polices himself.

The ability of humans to form very large, harmonious, cooperative societies depends, I argue, upon an innate human proclivity – a psychological trait - to conform to agreed (but partly arbitrary) rules of social behaviour. This I call the adopted social morality. It is policed by social disapprobation, which may be mild or more serious, culminating in mass outrage if necessary. This societal disapproval induces in the offender certain adverse social emotions, especially guilt and shame, which are then instrumental in bringing the offender into conformance with expectation. Under the invisible admonishing hand of this inner watchman, most people will self-police for fear of guilt and shaming.

This inclination to self-police is crucial to our social functioning, and yet it is also a great vulnerability.

Whilst the social morality will have common elements between cultures, much of it is contingent and malleable: it need only involve moral relativism. However, that does not mean that all social moralities – that is, codes of behaviour – are equally desirable. In history most societies in most places at most times have been profoundly inequitable and often deeply oppressive to part of their populations, despite these arrangements being fully consonant with the prevailing social morality. In short, social morality need not conform closely, or at all, with true morality.

What I mean by true morality I shall come to shortly.

To reinforce the message that a social morality is essential to harmonious society, here is Lord Devlin from a legal opinion in 1958 on what happens if the socially accepted morality is lost,

"Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures. There is disintegration when no common morality is observed and history shows that the loosening of moral bonds is often the first stage of disintegration."

Devlin went on to add that society is therefore justified in taking steps to preserve its moral code, just as it is justified in protecting its Government and essential institutions. Unfortunately, we have not protected our

Reviews for The Destructivists

[E.D. Dicksson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

William Collins does a fantastic job of explaining how and why people have become mesmerized by an infantile morality.