The Fog of Delusion

J. Budziszewski is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. He had a short column in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago (paywall) in which he stated that, contrary to what some of our friends on the left like to imagine, we're already knee-deep in a "war" for the culture and sanity is losing.

Those in charge of the institutions of our nation - its churches, media, corporations, schools and governments - have largely embraced ideas that most people until the day before yesterday would've thought to be lunacy: that men can have periods and get pregnant, that men should be allowed to compete in girls' sports and use girls' rest rooms, that we can't say what a woman is, that it makes sense to use "they" and "them" when talking about a single individual, that it's perfectly okay to have men dressed as women dancing suggestively for children, that it's acceptable to give a child hormone blockers and permanently mutilate their bodies because the child is going through a period of gender confusion, etc.

I doubt very much whether very many people really believe these notions. I also doubt whether very many people really believe the major tenets of Critical Race Theory, for instance, that all whites and only whites are racist and that the stain of racism is indelible.

Yet somehow a relatively small minority has intimidated the majority into acquiesence. People are reluctant to stand up and say that all this is insanity and that anyone who truly believes it belongs in an asylum.

I say that I believe relatively few people truly believe this nonsense, but unfortunately the relative few who do believe it occupy positions of power and influence in our culture and have been successful in cowing many of the rest of us into silence.

Budziszewki continues:

It’s true that no one who has seriously studied American history believes the lies of critical race theory. Deep down, every one of us knows that biological sex is real. And yes, some who don’t believe in these insanities pretend that they do.

Nonetheless, many of those who press these manias are dead serious. That doesn’t mean they aren’t putting over a con. They capitalize on mania to gain status, wealth, and power—but it’s their mania, too.

They work desperately to remain in a state of denial, not to think about the obvious. The exhausting labor of self-deception pushes them into more extreme behavior. Just as lies beget lies, self-deceptions metastasize into new self-deceptions.

Moreover, they have on their side the president, universities, school boards, regulatory agencies, professional and athletic associations, many courts and churches, one of the major political parties and most of the media.

Their constituencies are made up largely of people to whom nothing else matters, and who spend their time—and often earn a comfortable living—trying to wear the rest of us down. Since the rest of us have other things to do, that isn’t difficult.

Ideas have consequences, however, and pernicious ideas often have pernicious consequences. So do pernicious practices like sexualizing children with "Drag Queen Story Hour" and surgical disfigurement of children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

Much of our culture has fallen into massive self-delusion and derangement, and those who haven't feel isolated and afraid to stand against the tidal wave of lunacy that's sweeping over our institutions. We think that we must be the only ones who don't see what everyone else claims to see, and that there must be something wrong with us for thinking that what the culture seeks to normalize we think to be perverse.

But we're not the only ones who believe that the culture is suffering from a form of insanity, however, and the more of us who are willing to call it what it is, the more likely the fog of delusion will lift and many people will start asking how they could have ever gone along with such bizarre ideas.

At least that's my hope, and I hope it's yours as well.