The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that there are two ways to be deceived: one is to believe what is not true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.¹ Between 2017 and 2018, around twenty fabricated articles were submitted to a number of respected academic journals.² These articles dealt with several topical and controversial subjects, including postcolonial theory, identity politics, queer theory, gender studies, obesity, and sex.
The people behind the “studies” were three left-liberal commentators: James Lindsay, an author with a PhD in mathematics; Peter Boghossian, a philosopher and educator; and Helen Pluckrose, an author and writer. They were concerned about the wave of postmodern nonsense and critical theories* spreading throughout the Western world and beginning to take over schools, government agencies, and politics.
But before we go any further, let us provide some historical background.
During the 1960s, modernism began to be questioned by French academics such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Their theories came to be known as postmodernism and were described as a deconstruction of what the West tends to take for granted. The great Western narratives of the Enlightenment, Christianity, and science were not objective truths, they argued, but rather subjective stories elevated to strengthen our own narratives at the expense of others. Therefore, they were flawed and had to be dismantled.
This way of thinking then spread from France to the United Kingdom and on to the United States and the rest of the West, where it flourished until the mid-1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a second postmodern phase followed—so-called applied postmodernism—which meant that a number of identity-based critical theories gained extensive influence within Western academic institutions.
The idea behind Lindsay’s, Boghossian’s, and Pluckrose’s hoax papers was to investigate whether nonsensical essays disguised as serious articles on subjects promoted in the wake of postmodernism and the woke wave in the West would be approved by the experts and experienced researchers responsible for evaluating academic articles—so-called peer review—based on scientific rigor, content, and language.
According to the authors, a destructive culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are permitted and where social grievances take precedence over objective truth, leading to increasingly absurd phenomena in schools, government agencies, and politics. One example is so-called Fat Studies, which is based on the assumption that obesity is not a medical condition with negative consequences, but a social construct created by thin people to oppress fat people.
What these theories share is the belief that systematic oppression permeates society and is directed at specific identity groups. Applied postmodernism rejects grand truths and individualism alike. It dismantles social structures and individual identity and elevates group identity as paramount. An individual’s value depends entirely on identification with a given group identity.
White people are said to bear collective guilt by virtue of their skin color for the colonialism practiced by their ancestors. Non-white people are, by definition, oppressed, since this way of thinking assumes the existence of structural racism exercised by whites throughout society.
The authors of the fabricated studies wanted to expose what they call “grievance studies”—fields that create antagonism between groups and reject rationality as a Western invention. According to this worldview, there is no objective science. What we call knowledge is, in reality, created by powerful, white, heterosexual men in order to maintain their power over everyone else—a kind of conspiracy.
Closely linked to this is so-called cancel culture, which means that researchers and others can lose their jobs or be ostracized if they express the “wrong” opinions. The widely discussed “Twitter Files scandal”³ during the pandemic, later revealed by Elon Musk and several journalists, illustrated this frighteningly clearly. Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish biostatistician and professor of medicine, is among the most recent victims of this madness.⁴
Students are also expected to be protected from opinions or experiences that are perceived as even mildly provocative. Course literature receives trigger warnings, “safe spaces” are introduced, and teachers may be dismissed if they use the wrong words or if students feel offended by the teaching.
An individual’s right to “feel good” is placed above others’ right to speak freely and hold opinions that deviate from the mainstream, and those who challenge the “consensus” in academia risk being frozen out.
This utterly unhinged activism is now spreading across institutions and universities throughout the Western world. It has hampered science and led to students who do not learn to deal with emotions or opposing viewpoints, but instead are constantly shielded from ideas that disturb them.
At King’s College London, security officers have now been deployed at student gatherings and political discussions so that no one is exposed to “stressful opinions.” The medical faculty at Harvard University and the law faculty at Yale University offer therapy dogs for students to pet in order to reduce stress.⁵
We thus have a situation in higher education where students are wrapped in cotton wool to avoid provocative arguments—at institutions that are supposed to promote critical thinking.
Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose described their exposé project as an attempt to raise awareness of the damage postmodernism and identity-politics-based thinking have inflicted on science and academia as a whole. The articles—several of which were published—deliberately promoted absurd ideas or morally questionable practices and were received enthusiastically.
In the paper “Statement of Retraction: Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon,” they described how they had observed the genitals of 10,000 dogs and the rape culture among them, and then “concluded” that men should be trained in the same way as dogs to combat rape. The article was named one of the year’s most brilliant by the respected journal Gender, Place & Culture.
Another article, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” argued that the male penis functions as a meme that damages and destroys the climate. It was published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences.
A third article, “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism,” was an excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in intersectional language, with the word “Jews” replaced by “men.” It was published in Affilia, a journal of gender studies.
Lindsay and Pluckrose later wrote the bestselling book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (2020). In it, they argue that the politically liberal West is under attack by cynical discourses that have taken over large parts of Western academia, from which this destructive ideology has spread into the rest of society and is now undermining the very foundations of democracy.
In the book, they list a number of things traditionally taken for granted in the West: belief in the legacy of the Enlightenment, in science, in liberalism as a political and economic system (modernism), and in the overarching history of Christianity. In other words, everything that is now being attacked and dismantled by truth relativists who proclaim that the only truth that exists is their own—and that anyone who objects is a denier, whether the issue is climate, gender identity, or anything else.
Much of the madness now marketed under politically correct thinking known as “woke,” according to Lindsay, has its roots in the work of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Born in Sardinia in 1897, Gramsci studied philology and philosophy in Turin before joining the Socialist Party in 1913. Believing the labor movement to be too reformist and union-controlled, he agitated for revolt and for workers to seize control of production in factories.
From 1919 into the early 1920s, Turin was dominated by mass strikes and factory occupations. Gramsci believed the working class’s “war of position” should turn into a war of maneuver and took on the role of revolutionary agitator and strategist. He wrote articles for left-wing newspapers and, after being imprisoned by Italian fascists in the 1920s, authored a series of essays between 1929 and 1932 known as Prison Notebooks, which would later prove highly influential.
Lindsay claims that so-called cultural Marxism originated with these works and later gave rise to what we now call identity politics. To understand contemporary society, Lindsay argues, one must understand Gramsci’s philosophy.⁶
Although Gramsci did not coin the famous phrase “the long march through the institutions,” it was from his thinking that the communist Rudi Dutschke drew inspiration when he formulated it in 1967. The long march through the institutions was, at its core, a strategy for implementing Gramsci’s plan to create a new alternative through which communism could conquer the West.
Since the “cultural hegemony” of Western societies prevented communism from taking root, a strategy was developed to dismantle major cultural institutions—especially religion, the family, education, media, and the legal system.
The idea of hegemony was partly inspired by Lenin, who sought to build a communist utopia based on Karl Marx’s teachings. Marx was an avid student of Hegel, whose dialectic—the doctrine of the interplay of opposites—he developed in a radical direction.
Marx described a model of progressive development with conflict at its core: social development occurs through a struggle between two opposing camps, resulting in ever-intensifying conflict until one side is ultimately eliminated. This applied not only to humanity but to the world itself.
In other words, all natural development occurs through a “leap” when the conflict between two opposites reaches a certain level, resulting in the annihilation of one or its subsumption into the other. For Marx and his followers, the communist revolution was thus a natural part of social evolution.
Although Marx himself was not wealthy, he never lived a proletarian life, but rather one resembling that of the upper middle class. He spent his student years supported generously by his father Heinrich and quickly spent whatever money he received. Later, his friend Engels supported him with funds from his father’s industries.
Nevertheless, regardless of one’s opinion of Marx in general and communism in particular, there were undoubtedly valid points in some of his analyses. Workers at the time often labored under unreasonable conditions, with extremely long hours and miserable wages. Injustices were widespread, and fertile ground existed for supporters of the theories Marx promoted.
When the Bolsheviks in 1913 celebrated the 30th anniversary of Marx’s death, Lenin wrote:
“Marx’s doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is complete and harmonious and provides men with a coherent worldview, irreconcilable with all superstition, all reaction, and all defense of bourgeois oppression.”⁷
The problem, however, was that whenever someone attempted to implement Marx’s ideas in practice, it invariably resulted in persecution of dissenters and mass murder.
The policies of Lenin and Stalin meant that those who had lived under the Tsar’s feudalism instead came to live under communist oppression. People thus moved from one form of servitude to another, and tens of millions were oppressed and killed under the brutal regimes of both Lenin and Stalin.⁸ Children were indoctrinated at an early age. Only the Communist Party’s views were permitted, and dissidents were persecuted and murdered.
When Mao seized power in China in 1948, he too set out to realize the communist project at any cost. As a consequence, tens of millions were enslaved and lost their lives there as well, either directly or indirectly. The exact number of deaths is impossible to determine, but serious estimates range from 40 to 70 million.⁹ The total death toll attributed to communism in the twentieth century is estimated at around 100 million.¹⁰
So how are we to understand that so many still cling to this ideology—and have even “developed” it further to encompass not only class, but also race, gender, climate, and God knows what else that has now permeated nearly the entire Western world?
In The Coddling of the American Mind, free-speech lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describe the epidemic of oversensitivity and resistance to free expression spreading across Western universities. This is not merely an academic problem, they explain; much of the blame lies with overprotective parents. The primary responsibility, however, rests with those forces that seek to silence others.
A frightening example was a violent riot at Berkeley University in 2017. Shortly after Trump won the presidential election, Milo Yiannopoulos—a controversial commentator and Trump supporter—was invited to speak at the university. This led 100 students to sign a petition to stop the lecture. When that failed, they gathered outside the venue to block Yiannopoulos and the audience from entering.
A group of violent left-wing extremists then attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails, assaulting attendees and causing damage worth 4.5 million SEK, ultimately forcing the lecture to be canceled. Haidt describes them as safety fanatics, a result of parents who—having more time and resources than any previous generation—never dared let their children out of sight, instead constantly supervising, catering to, and pampering them.
This, according to Haidt, is how one must understand phenomena at American universities that appear utterly insane to a reasonable person. These include not only the incident described above, but also demands for safe spaces where students can play with teddy bears and be shielded from uncomfortable opinions, as well as the nonsense of trigger warnings on course literature that may contain ideas students find disturbing or offensive.
Haidt also notes that these overprotected young people—in the United States as well as in Sweden—are more prone to mental illness than earlier generations. If one has never learned to tolerate adversity, one becomes more easily unwell when it arises. Sweden, unsurprisingly, ranks among the highest in Europe in prescriptions of antidepressant medication.
In the book Happy in Paradise, psychiatry professor Christian Rück argues that much of the suffering inherent in life is now diagnosed as abnormal. Psychiatrist David Eberhard makes a similar point. Young people and adults today may sometimes react like children when faced with setbacks or opinions they dislike.
Another contributing factor behind fanatical activism is that we in Sweden have lived so sheltered and have turned away entirely from spiritual values, creating a void that many try to fill through activism. Since activists perceive themselves as fighting for good—or even to save the world—every opponent becomes an “evil” enemy.
Thus, almost anything can be justified, including the destruction of art, blocking airplanes from landing, or obstructing motorists and ambulance drivers in traffic. The ends justify the means, because the “good” are “fighting for all our survival.”
Fanatics never see contradictions in what they do. That is why one day they can criticize the white patriarchy, and the next march side by side with people who respect neither equality, democracy, nor freedom of speech—provided their own sacred doctrines are not questioned.
And so it goes, year after year, in a world where the greatest shortages do not seem to be food or water, but rather self-esteem and self-awareness.
It is, of course, not strange that people feel resistance to examining themselves, since it can involve discomfort. But the price is often high when people in positions of power or large influential groups refuse to do so. Mass psychosis and violence are rarely far behind—whether we are talking about right-wing or left-wing extremist groups. They are merely different sides of the same dialectical monstrosity.
So how does one reach these people?
It is not easy.
As the author Thomas Pynchon once aptly wrote, there is no polite way to tell people that they have built their entire lives on a lie.
The Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo, in turn, wrote:
“If there is no free conversation, human aggression accumulates… If man cannot solve his everyday tensions through words, the archaic primitive demands within him will grow… The world falls victim to accumulated obsessions and eventually collective madness breaks through. Let us talk now, before we become mad animals.”¹¹
Michael Delavante, The long march through the idiocies
Sources:
- Søren Kierkegaard. Man kan jo bedrages paa mange Maader; man kan bedrages ved at troe det Usande, men man bedrages dog vel ogsaa ved ikke at troe det Sande;’ (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, SKS vol.9 Gad & Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscentret 2004 [1847], p.13)” Also see: Søren Kierkegaard , Works of Love, 1962 Harper Perennial, p.23)
2. Helen Pluckrose, The Rise and Whys of Grievance Studies., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJwCGBhwYBo Also see: James Warney, Grievance Studies exposes college corruption with hoax papers, The Washington Times, 3 October, 2018. Samt:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346?journalCode=cgpc20
https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18DoO44m2G5tvJcQaMdau6d8CSrdKDRBf/view
3.Twitter Files: What they are and why they matter, By ’Censorship Industrial Complex’: Twitter Files Journalist Michael Shellenberger Issues Dire Warning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmDtfL_rYZg&ab_channel=ForbesBreakingNews
4. Martin Kulldorff: Fired by Harvard for getting Covid right, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OouDv90Tj8g&ab_channel=UnHerd
5. Håll världen på avstånd, Brendan O´Neill, Tema, 2018, https://www.axess.se/artiklar/hall-varlden-pa-avstand
6. Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Marxism, Woke and Leninism 4.0. The New Discourses, https://newdiscourses.com/2021/01/antonio-gramsci-cultural-marxism-wokeness-leninism/
7. V.I. Leninmarxismens tre källor och tre beståndsdelar 1913, https://www.marxists.org/svenska/lenin/1913/03.htm
8. R. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocides and Mass Murders Since 1917, Taylor & Francis Group.
9.The legacy of Mao Zedong is Mass Murder, heritage.org, Lee Edwards, Feb 2, 2010. https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder See also: Frank Dikötter, “Mao’s Great Famine: The history ocf Chinas most devasting cathastrophe 1958-62, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010, (page Xii, 333) Samt: Jon Halliday, Jung Chang, Mao: The Untod Story, Vintage books, 2007, (page 3-761)
10. Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, 1999, Harvard University Press, (sidan 15) Se även: Ken Pope: ”Communist ideology has caused the death of 100 million people worldwide” 21/04/2023, https://www.uspceu.com/en/press-room/new/pope-communist-ideology-caused-death-million-people-worldwide
11. Joost A. M. Meerloo, ”Conversation and Communication”, International Universities Press, 1952, (page 239)
*Critical theory is a Marxist-inspired movement within social and political philosophy that is associated with the Frankfurt School. Drawing on the theories of Marx and Freud, critical theorists argue that the primary aim of philosophy is to understand social structures.
