2,226 words
Douglas Murray
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019
I discovered Douglas Murray when he was interviewed by the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson. What struck me about Murray was that he used phrases found in Counter-Currents articles. For example, in the interview Murray says that Europe “doesn’t take its own side,” and regarding the transsexual issue, that there are “no adults in the room.” In reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Murray was probably not a Counter-Currents reader, but I do wonder if our ideas are starting to seep into the mainstream. Murray takes a look at this “madness of crowds” phenomenon, which has also been called the Great Awokening. Why, asks Murray, have Leftists become so appallingly unhinged even as their cherished goals have been enacted with incredible speed?
Cultural Marxism
The roots of this unhappy state of being are how Jacobin Leftist ideas evolved in response to the unraveling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Today we call this Jacobinism “Cultural Marxism,” and there is a direct line from the Jacobin ideas underpinning the French Revolution, through ordinary Soviet-style gulag Marxism, to awokened Cultural Marxism.
The most critical of these metapolitical Cultural Marxist books is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. This book argues that the Jacobin (Marxist) Left – what we have come to call today Cultural Marxists – shifted from organizing around the belief that the working class would lead the revolution to that of organizing to achieve Jacobin aims with a base of women as well as national, racial, and sexual minorities, plus the anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements. Hegemony has been cited more than sixteen thousand times in other academic works.[1] Another important book is White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1988) by Women’s Studies Professor Peggy McIntosh. White Privilege isn’t in the form of an essay; it’s a list of claims. Today, White Privilege is treated as Gospel Truth. There is also Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) by Judith Butler. It argues that feminism made a mistake in thinking there are categories such as male and female. There are more Cultural Marxist works described in Murray’s book, but these are the most critical ones.
The Aftermath of the Financial Crisis
Murray argues that all of these ideas remained on the fringes until the 2008 financial crisis. The proof that these ideas had captured the minds of people willing to do violence after the economy collapsed was documented in 2009 by Kevin DeAnna. At the time, DeAnna was on a trip to Iceland to see how the nation was handling the collapse of their currency and other financial issues. He concluded, after watching black-clad antifa making trouble in Iceland’s Althing, that the Left “will benefit because in any crisis situation, they have a revolutionary gestalt lacking on the right.”
Thus, the timeline of the Awokening is clear. These ideas existed as early as the late 1980s and were broadcast through the educational system with no effective resistance at all. The “madness of crowds” plague arrived in the culture when the economy went into a tailspin in 2008, and accelerated with Obama’s election. During Obama’s second term, those infected by the Awokening were further empowered by Obama’s claims of oppression that were transmitted from the presidential Bully Pulpit. The awokened had also begun their careers and had the youthful energy to push their vision.
At the same time, the Protestant-led Christian religious revival in the US that had been so powerful in the 1990s fell apart. The misadventure-filled presidency of George W. Bush, an open Evangelical Protestant, was part of the problem. For the religious, the downward spiral began in November 2006, when the Democrats won Congress; then, the Christian movement lost a tremendous leader a few months later when Jerry Falwell died.
Additionally, the center-Right was bumbling. DeAnna wrote in 2009 that “the center-right in Iceland, as the Communists in China, defined the core of their legitimacy as ensuring economic growth. Once this was lost, they have nothing else to offer.” In sum, Murray says, “[W]e have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed.”[2]
The Five Groups that Make the Madness
The “madness of crowds” has various factors: homosexuals, feminists, corporate tech companies, non-whites, and transsexuals. Each group and their specific philosophical assumptions are examined by Murray.
The first group Murray looks at are homosexuals. Murray, who claims he is gay, remarks that the LGBQ(T) coalition is unstable. Lesbians are not homosexual men; they are dowdy and dull. Gay men are otherwise ordinary men sexually attracted to other men. Queers are gay men who deliberately behave in outlandish ways, even to the point of being irresponsible. Bisexuals are disliked and mistrusted by all the other groups.
The homosexual movement has provided a foundational philosophical component to the “madness of crowds” phenomenon. That is to say, homosexuals have made the claim that their sexual orientation is the product of hardware rather than software. As part of their striving to gain social acceptance, the idea was advanced that homosexuals are hard-wired to be attracted to members of the same sex (hardware). They deny that their activities are a lifestyle choice, the result of sexual abuse, or some other psychological factor (software.) With homosexuality being “hardware,” it puts them into a totally different moral situation than if their homosexuality were “software.” There is no solid evidence either way for why homosexuality exists, although it runs contrary to Darwinian logic. (So there must be a Darwinian logic to it – possibly?) However, this hardware/software dichotomy is also being applied –falsely – across all these groups, and that pushes the “madness of crowds” ever forward.
Murray also discusses feminism. I don’t have much to add, as F. Roger Devlin has already written the greatest critique of it. But feminism’s main drawback is that it presumes that being “used up” in life through a career is greater than being used up by life through motherhood. If you’re regularly reading this site, you already very well know that children and family are far more rewarding than a career, but great truths must be repeatedly restated by many people, or they will get lost in the noise. The key factor that makes feminism a problem among the awokened is that it applies the hardware/software dichotomy to what is otherwise a hardware issue. In truth, women’s bodies are hardware; however, to achieve the feminist goal of getting girls into the infantry,[3] one must advance the argument that being a woman is a software rather than a hardware issue (see Gender Trouble, above).
Also, feminists encourage rather reckless claims of rape. The situation has gotten bad enough that businessmen are starting to not book their business travels through the women in their offices; the risks of a #metoo claim are simply too high. The awokened don’t see how their movement will end at all; the logical endpoint of feminist demands are not empowered women, but the purdah.
Tech
Murray argues that there is a tech issue that facilitates the entire phenomenon of awokened insanity. Google searches for “European art” turn up portraits of Africans painted by Europeans. Type in a search for “white families” and you get images of Negroes, mixed-race groups, and so on. Only when the searches are made from IP addresses elsewhere in the world does one get images of whites at all. The tech industry is essentially all for the awokened “madness of crowds.” They drank the Kool-Aid and are true believers. This makes it far clearer as to why Counter-Currents gets deplatformed and suppressed.
Non-Whites
Nobody can escape race. Murray discusses the problems that have emerged since the Obama election. Non-whites in the United States have carried out a manipulative attack against whites. The general way in which these attacks have been playing out are well-known, but one notable example is an attack at Evergreen College that was quite racist indeed, though few have remarked upon it. Non-whites attempted to force all whites to leave the campus for a day. This was the opposite of their earlier tactics, when non-whites would walk out in protest against “racism” or whatever. When a professor protested, he was hounded out of the school and out of town. Murray mentions the obvious: that the opposite can be imposed on non-whites by whites. The next “Rosa Parks” archetype may well be forced into the “safe space” at the back of the bus. Like the feminists, the non-white activists fail to see the logical endpoint of their movement. In short, non-white activists don’t realize that non-whites who leave white civilization aren’t missed, and sustained attacks by non-whites may draw a severe backlash.
Trans
Murray also provides a serious study of the transsexual movement and explains all the weasel words associated with it, such as substituting “gender” for biological “sex.” Murray argues that transsexual behavior is related to several different things, but the most prominent is sexual desire. One group of transsexuals are straight men who are sexually aroused by imagining themselves to be members of the opposite sex. They get turned on by wearing women’s clothing and such. Another group of transsexuals are gay men who are so feminine that other gays are not attracted to them. Thus, they dress and act like women in an attempt to cause men to be attracted to them.
The final, and most tragic, form of transsexuals are socially awkward children. Cowardly “awokened” adults have become so bound by the “madness of crowds” that they are encouraging kids to be “transgender.” Meanwhile, evidence is mounting which shows that transsexual children are getting the idea from other kids, as well as the Internet. There is a clustering effect here. One transsexual kid becomes a social star, and then others follow. Transsexualism is a fad, and a dangerous one at that.
What about reasonable people who transition, such as Jan Morris, who wrote an excellent series on the history of the British Empire? Some people do extreme things out of genuinely-held beliefs, but those beliefs could still be wrong for society.
Unequal Weights
With transsexualism, the entire culture is such that children are being encouraged to believe that they are of the sex opposite to how they were born, and scientists are being pressured to go along with it. This is the hardware/software analogy turned around: In transsexuality, social pressures – software – are being declared hardware.
Another problem is that all homosexual contact is presumed by the reigning social consensus to be the end of the sexuality road, when in fact it could be that the boy who kisses another boy might very well not be gay and the entire thing is a passing phase. Likewise, in the past it was often presumed that a tomboy would grow into a feminine woman. But today, as gender activists would have it, any homosexual contact permanently consigns a person to a very narrow community.
“Civil Rights”
The one flaw in this otherwise excellent book is that Murray still believes in “civil rights.” He even takes the words of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. about “content of character” seriously. It is more accurate to say that the “I Have a Dream” speech was a deceptive information operation which masked the fact that the “civil rights” movement was not about rights at all, but was in fact a racially-motivated attack upon whites by blacks – who were themselves being led by Jews pursuing their own interests. Non-whites taking over Evergreen College was the aim of “civil rights” all along, not “equality” or any other such thing.
“Civil rights” is the Big Philosophical Lie at the center of American society, and it is the smokescreen for other awokened groups participating in the “madness of crowds.” A great many whites have fooled themselves regarding “civil rights.” Indeed, it is still impossible to publicly criticize “civil rights” in even the mildest way. As a result, history becomes God. In this view, those opposing King in 1963 were on the “wrong side” of history (i.e., God), and because homosexuality, feminism, and transsexualism deliberately imitate the processes and logic of “civil rights,” it is nearly impossible for anyone in authority to put the lid on any of this stupidity.
The concept of history as God deserves a few more remarks. Those awokened and fully engaged in the “madness of crowds” are practicing a religion of sorts, but this religion has an ever-shifting set of rules, such that yesterday’s commandments are today’s evil. There is no salvation in this religion. Humor is now forbidden. Even popular TV series like Friends, which often made humor out of issues related to sex and homosexuality, have become too scandalous. Awokened university officials are clamping down on free speech, and science has given way to bald-faced lies. None practicing the “madness of crowds” have any end-goal in mind – and we all seem headed for a hard landing. Indeed, we are living today in something like the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution, in which the revolution is killing its own supporters.
The awokened are carrying out a vindictive strike on society. There is no reason to accommodate them.
Notes
[1] Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p. 62.
[2] Ibid., p. 6.
[3] I’ve been in the infantry. It’s not much fun. Why make this a goal?
19 Comments
The notion that Cultural Marxism got its start in the 1980s is a massive retconning of history. We all know the process began much earlier with the Frankfurt School. Communism failed to win over the masses in Germany, so the Marxists recognized race was more important to people than class. At this point they began the switch from class-based politics to race-based politics and to deconstruct race in white nations; first by fabricating lies about race (race doesn’t exist, it’s all culture) then by opening the gates to non-white immigration. Is (((Murray))) intentionally obfuscating his tribe’s role in the above?
He’s Scottish. Coming from the same Isle as Trump’s mother. A lot of the Spectator alumni have Scottish roots.
I believe he’s a crypto. Both the names Douglas and Murray are extremely common in the Jewish community, and interchangeable as first and last names. As with his previous book, “The strange death of Europe” he avoids calling it a murder – which it is – and therefore doesn’t have to call out the murderer or their motives. He also talks a lot about Jewish issues, including Israel and anti-Semitism, all in a kosher fashion assuring he is never unpersoned by the establishment.
In England, he’s in all of the establishment ‘right wing’ publications as the the Intellectual. With good reason. He knows when to seem radical to journos without being cancellable. He backed Tommy Robinson (no, I don’t like the guy either) when he was still in the EDL which was rare to see. He ran an excellent campaign against the New Statesman journalist who got Roger Scruton fired from government. An excellent showcase of using the left’s Twitter mob attacks against themselves. Also, he is one of the few who have dedicated themselves in destroying the arguments for euthanasia, a rare feat in the UK.
He has his flaws. He ran the Neo Con think tank, the Henry Jackson society but even his book on why you should be a neo-conservative argued in favour of racial profiling. He is well worth reading if anything.
Now, politically correct effeminate ((conservatives))) realise that their brainless ‘civic nationalism’ didn’t work. The other ethnicities are not as delusional as the White races of Europe. They don’t assimilate. Why should they? They have kept their ties of blood alive even on the foreign soil. The ‘Melting pot’ balderdash has brought Europe and its cultural extensions (The US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) on the brink of ethno-cultural suicide. Milquetoast, feminist-ridden, libertarian spiritually dead autistics cannot retake their continent.
The blame lies squarely on the so called ‘Conservatives’. They stood by and let Cultural Bolshevism destroy their dwellings. What a shameless lot!
Secondly, the new normal among kosher circles has been that F*gs can also be ‘Conservative’. What do they actually conserve?
Lastly, Mr. Murray, unsurprisingly, doesn’t offer any concrete solutions. How could he? After all, salvation lies only in strong nuclear families and, obviously, Mr. Murray has nothing to do with the natural order of things.
Secondly, the new normal among kosher circles has been that F*gs can also be ‘Conservative’. What do they actually conserve?
As I understand it Douglas Murray belongs to those conservatives who don’t make any real distinction between straights and gays, but prefers to treat them equally. In “The conservative case for equal marriage” he argues that the acceptance of gay marriage can make gays more conservative:
But true conservatives should welcome gay marriage. For its increasing acceptance across civilised countries represents not the making gay of marriage but the making conservative of gays. The desire of an increasing number of gay men and women to have their stable and lifelong relationships recognised equally by family, friends and society as a whole demonstrates the respect of individuals within, and towards, an important institution.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2012/03/the-conservative-case-for-equal-marriage/
Perhaps, in Mr. Murray’s brand of ‘conservatism’ the sacred and non-negotiable institution of marriage remains open to interpretation.
In the blog that you cited, he criminally forgets that White Christian societies are now on the wrong side of the demographic curve. They need babies produced under stable marriages. He needs to behave and control his sodomite urges. He can’t play on both sides of the pitch. If the trans/pronoun/gender deviants are empowered today it’s only because the Cuckservatives let their guard down.
Or may be he doesn’t think there is cause for any alarm since he starts his argument by mentioning a neo-con cuck Dick Cheney and how he ‘came out in favour’ of ‘gay marriage’. So what? Since when did these backstabbers of the White race become the moral compasses for the populace?
Mr. Murray’s frivolous rainbow lot should be discarded.
A racially conscious generation can only be raised under strong, fecund nuclear families, period.
“A racially conscious generation can only be raised under strong, fecund nuclear families, period.”
This sounds true on the surface, but it is not. The white fellow travelers during the “civil rights” revolution were responsible family men who served as field grade officers during the Second World War. There is something to be said for celibate men leading social movments.
There is something to be said for celibate men leading social movements.
I agree. There are good and dignified celibate men. I don’t deny that. But Mr. Murray and his ilk (the Yiannopoulos variety) are not celibate men. They are sexual deviants.
Homosexuality is largely a fixed biological trait in 2-3% of each generation. Forcing such a small minority “back in the closet” will not make any difference in the scheme of things, and it’s not a feasible plan for white people to outbreed the third world.
I’m skeptical that gay people or gay liberationists back-stabbed the white race. In America, the Hart-Cellar Act actually included a provision banning homosexuals from the country, and the US was extremely homophobic as its foundation myth was being rewritten so that it was considered a “nation of immigrants.”
I enjoyed Murray’s previous book, A Strange Death of Europe, but will not be purchasing anymore of his works for this reason alone:
You exposed the hypocrisy of today’s Conservatives, who’ve become nothing more than useless cucks. This fallacy doesn’t only apply to homosexuals, but also to race and ethnicity. I was briefly dating this one well-educated woman last last year, and our romantic relationship ceased after she pressed me to go into greater detail in regards to my political ideologies — especially concerning racial elements. After disclosing that I despise blacks and no longer associate with them to any capacity, she shot back with something along the lines of “But most blacks are conservatives. So why wouldn’t you want blacks as your friends?”
Everyone here knows that the majority of blacks aren’t true Conservatives. Black “Conservatives” are hypocrites who contradict themselves nearly as much as Limousine Liberals and Civic Nationalists. In the case of blacks, there’s nothing conservative about advocating for thuggery and violence. There’s nothing conservative about leading the nation in abortions and murders. There’s nothing conservative about glorifying a superficial lifestyle that’s driven by materialism and sexual exploits. There’s nothing conservative about rioting and destroying enormous amounts of property in cities such as Baltimore, Ferguson, and New Orleans.
Whether black or Douglas Murray’s Civil Nationalists, what have “Conservatives” conserved?
I should have clarified that the woman’s comment concerning blacks being Conservatives was in reference to their perceived stance on socially Conservative issues.
The one flaw in this otherwise excellent book is that Murray still believes in “civil rights.” He even takes the words of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. about “content of character” seriously. It is more accurate to say… …Non-whites taking over Evergreen College was the aim of “civil rights” all along, not “equality” or any other such thing.”
Well, that is a pretty big flaw–it suggests the author is not qualified to understand the subject matter. I would have to read the book, of course, to critique his thesis. But as an impression, I would say that he is giving t0o much weight to crowd psychology and not enough to the systematic manipulation of the psychologically flawed (and straight-up anti-White “racists”) by people who know precisely what they are doing.
I think the Founding Fathers would have never given us anything resembling “democracy” had they known how heavily weighted the general population is with inherent psychological defectives, whose behavior, and thus exposure, was kept in check by the cultural norms of their time.
In reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Murray was probably not a Counter-Currents reader, but I do wonder if our ideas are starting to seep into the mainstream.
Since Douglas Murray dislikes identity politics, he would also dislike Counter Currents, especially its focus on race and white identity.
In a recent interview he says: “I don’t like when I hear “white” … because it returns us to race … and I think we should avoid it. Because when you open up that chasm there’s hell in there.”
One of the major reasons why he dislikes the talk about “white privilege” is the reaction against it: a growing interest in inherited IQ differentials, which he calls “the ugliest discussion in the world.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF7wIyD707w
I watched Delingpole’s interview with Murray, where he made similar points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2jPVvEi8nY&t=2s
I wrote this in the comment section: “I’m sure Murray has lots of insightful things to say about the current madness plaguing the Western world, but unfortunately he has no real solutions to offer. Murray really seems to think we can persuade these lunatics to give up identity politics. That’s like trying to get the Bolsheviks to give up forced collectivization in the 30s or to tell Mao’s Red Guards to tone down this Cultural Revolution thing a bit before it gets out of hand in the 60s. We are dealing with ideological fanatics hellbent on destroying every white nation on Earth, and these nutjobs won’t stop until we stop them. If that requires using weapons like IQ or explicitly white identity politics that Murray finds distasteful, then so be it, I’m not going to just stand by and watch the whole Western civilization burn to the ground. The other side has no other principles than winning, and neither should we.”
I think this is one of the core messages we should hammer home to the normies. We are dealing with lunatics who cannot be reasoned with. When the cuckservatives start babbling about their principles, tell them to shut up. We talk about the principles after we’ve won.
The comment you wrote in the comment section of the said interview is brilliant! It is as truthful, unvarnished and hard-hitting as it could be. Appreciate your acumen and resonate with your style of expression. Best regards.
Douglas Murray says a lot of things which ought to be said. The dilemma is in translating what he says into political action.
Does Murray have a mass organization which can put activists into the streets to counter leftist mobs? Does he have attorneys ready to engage in lawfare against IT censorship? Is it too much to ask for mass acts of civil disobedience against university speech codes?
The title of Murray’s book evokes Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. There is a strong element today of witch hunting over “racism,” “sexism,” et alia-phobia, with mass hysteria, ritual denunciations and show trials. How do you counter the madness of crowds? One way is like the sheriff in oldtime Westerns, by standing up to the mob and refusing to back down. Madness has to be opposed by sanity.
I suspect this is the reason for the current System crackdown on White Nationalism. Nationalists refuse to go along with the hysteria. They are standing up and being rational, a revolutionary act in itself. Not only that, they are actually out in the streets and into the Internet, from the Yellow Vests to Kekistan.
He even takes the words of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. about “content of character” seriously.
Essentially, Murray (along with many conservatives) accepts the Left’s premise about “equality.” Once you have done that, you are reduced to discussing the most comfortable way to implement the enemy’s agenda. But the Left does not want equality. It wants dominance. Leftists use the rhetoric of equality to gain inroads into institutions and once entrenched proceed to take over. Brown vs Board of Education led to black studies programs which led to the Evergreen uprising. The goal has been to overthrow White people, from Rhodesia to Detroit. It’s a war, but a most peculiar one in which only one side is fighting.
James Burnham makes the point in Suicide of the West that to overcome liberalism it would be necessary to reject the liberal premise of universal equality. Murray may be laying the groundwork, but it is going to take an ideological and organizational leap forward to restore sanity to the crowd.
Being a Marxist that sympathizes with the dissident right, here, again, I am very strongly compelled to take a position against the popular dissident, and regular, right belief that the, so-called, “cultural Marxism” of the modern, liberal, western world, that originated with the Frankfurt school of political philosophy, even though no one in that school ever actually called it that, can justifiably be equated with Marxism, any familiarity with the two philosophical trends thoroughly refutes this belief. To fully explain the profundity of the difference between the two would be a gargantuan task, one I’m simply not able to delve into momentarily, but I can recommend a great interview with Prof. Paul Gottfried, an old The Stark Truth podcast, here on Counter-Currents, that would be at least a
little illuminating on the subject for many of you on the right that think Marxism and “cultural Marxism” stem from one line of thought. Just look up Gottfried on
CC and you”ll find it.
“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
– Sun Tzu (544 – 496 B.C.)
Deception, Subterfuge, Sabotage, Cultural-Marxism, all different names for the same intent. Luckily, whoever is waging this war against civilization has managed to convince people that they aren’t at war. I mean, who could possibly use ideas against an enemy?