Instead, Murray organises his material into four themes: “Gay”, “Gender”, “Race” and “Trans”. But there is not so much as a sniff of these trends in The Madness of Crowds. The Home Office is growing increasingly anxious about the threat of far-right extremists cooperating across Europe. A university was recently forced out of Hungary by the government. MPs and journalists are being harassed and threatened simply for doing their jobs. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes.”įew would fail to recognise this as a starting point. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. “In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray sets out to explain why societies are now so characterised by conflict. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images Populism and culture warriors exploit this aspect of human psychology, reinforcing the comforting (but ultimately harmful) feeling that any conflict in the world is their fault not ours.ĭouglas Murray. We are all guilty of this from time to time, rarely more so than on social media, where the world can appear perfectly split into goodies and baddies. The result is an exaggerated sense of one’s own virtue and innocence, but an equally exaggerated sense of the selfishness and corruption of others. Psychoanalysts refer to the process of “splitting”, where the self is unable to cope with its good and bad qualities simultaneously, and so “splits” the bad ones off and attributes them to other people. There is one question that few drivers ever consider: what is my own contribution to this quagmire? Why are there so many cars on the road anyway? Horns begin to honk. Other drivers can be seen cutting in, changing lanes excessively, and getting worked up. From within one’s own car, the absurdity and injustice of the situation is abundantly plain. Being stuck in a culture war is a bit like being a driver stuck in a traffic jam.
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