Our leaders have lost the ability to turn their words into actions and to make hard decisions. We have fostered a complacent community that is not willing to expend any cognitive resources to form a coherent thought about sensitive, taboo topics.
Do not criticise Islam, that’s Islamophobic. Do not criticise homosexuals, that’s homophobic. Definitely don’t criticise transsexuals, that’s transphobic. What about other ethnicities or cultures? No, that’s xenophobic.
All one needs to do is to take a step back outside this echo chamber of consensus to realise how ludicrous and infantile such claims are. We seem to have invented powerful terms for the irrational fear of everything we can conjure, yet, have forgotten that this is nullified when one provides reasons and evidence for their reservations.
The staunch dismissal and downright shaming tactics used to nullify dissenting opinions goes to show the level of bigotry and hypocrisy the supposed champions of righteousness have popularised. The evidently growing intellectual stagnation, most notably among millennials, completes this destructive cycle driving social change backwards.
Rather than addressing our immediate problems head on, we constantly beat around the bush by painting an alternate, idealistic narrative using vague terms like inclusion, diversity, multiculturalism, equality and acceptance, which, when examined, reveal themselves to be shallow, utopian – attractive prospects that effectively only serve to stunt any realistic progress.
Our ever-increasingly infantilised society has become allergic to facts while being caught up in idealism
The mere mention of different opinions regarding intelligence and ethnic, racial and religious differences is enough to send half the internet into an incomprehensible state of mass hysteria.
Our ever-increasingly infantilised society has become allergic to facts while being caught up in idealism. We live in a society that celebrates this notion to such a nonsensical degree that it has embraced the hive mind while inadvertently advocating the complete abolishment of any intellectually diverse debate.
So how does this relate to the apparent inaction of our public figures and politicians? Due to the increasingly noticeable fact that Western politics has become a festering cesspool of immoral schmucks, driven only by personal gain at the expense of everybody else, nobody in a position of authority wants to take a committed stance on sensitive topics for fear of losing their fleeting popularity, which already hangs by a thread. When every pushed policy is meant to maintain and, preferably, widen one’s prospective audience, one inevitably begins to lose one’s integrity for the sake of the elusive approval of everyone.
Moreover, when prominent politicians essentially suspend their morals by saying they will act according to public sentiment, they are plainly confessing the shallow nature of their integrity and that they should not be trusted.
How have we come to be in such a precarious situation?
Why are we only now becoming more suspicious about the intentions of our supposed representatives? If you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. If citizens, so easily beguiled by ‘social progress’, idly stand by and watch as everything our forefathers fought and died for is obliterated as a result of unrelenting deception, then we are all to blame for not doing anything to stop it. Do not take comfort in the false security of consensus, because you may find that you’re on the wrong side.
The degradation of our core democratic values, like national sovereignty, competition, free speech and the presumption of innocence have allowed for otherwise trivial social matters to be given the spotlight at the expense of real, pressing issues like the two-odd million refugees who are expected to flood into Europe just in 2016.
I would like to think that there still are people of integrity wandering around the public sphere who will rise to face the abject dishonesty plaguing our society. But it seems immigration is only trendy when the problem reaches our shores.
We need public figures and citizens alike to vehemently renounce demagoguery and champion reason and evidence at all costs. Winston Churchill once said that an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Do not be that person.
Christopher Attard is studying psychology