Some years back, I was deeply shocked to hear that a good friend and ex-colleague had committed suicide in England. It seemed incomprehensible that a man of such remarkable character should be driven to the ultimate act of despair, leaving behind his wife and child.
We had taught together at a high school in Rhodesia, where he had been Head of Science, and probably the best teacher I have ever known. Many men, now in their sixties, still passionately testify to the moral and intellectual impact this great man had on their lives. Brilliant, dedicated, compassionate, and creative, he was everything a teacher needs to be. How on earth had such a tragedy come to pass? A mutual friend provided the answers.
As teachers, we also did military service during the Rhodesian War. On one stint in the bush, our friend had witnessed the interrogation of an insurgent, who was taken several hundred feet up in a helicopter so as to terrify him into giving up intelligence data. The young man was then hurled out of the chopper, and fell screaming to his death. Our friend was horrified by this act of cruelty, but the Official Secrets Act, and an atmosphere in which criticism of the armed forces was treated with suspicion, prevented him from saying anything.
Not long afterwards, he and his family emigrated to the UK, where he was appointed to teach at a famous public school. There he was subjected to relentless pressure and bullying by senior staff who were well-aware of the employment insecurity of new immigrants, and the unlikelihood of any pushback.
Who can fathom the depths of human anguish even when the victim is allowed to openly express his or her feelings?
Our friend was not, and a great soul finally broke down. The suppression of truth is inescapably destructive of the psychological well-being of both individuals and society.
The current climate of political correctness, cancel culture, calumny, corporate censorship, fear-mongering, fake news, and almost universal employment insecurity is doing precisely this to millions of people, who are daily subjected to the elevation of untruth as truth, injustice as justice, treason as patriotism, and quackery as science. Vaclav Havel and all those brave men and women who have opposed tyranny would be aghast at the docility with which we have allowed this cancer to come upon us so soon after the tragedies of the 20th century.
The choice is between truth and lies, leadership and misleadership. This is the challenge we all face in this critical moment for civilisation. Consider two propositions, and the logical conclusion that may be inferred:
- Insanity is the inability to reason and the consequent denial of reality.
- The incidence of mental health problems is increasing in the western world today.
- Inability to reason and the denial of reality are increasing in the West today.
Evidence supporting the conclusion is copious. Consider a small sampling of facts that are not allowed to be argued, and realities that are denied by governments, multinational corporations, the media, and academia:
1. The most humane, albeit flawed, civilization in history is incessantly misrepresented
2. National self-loathing is promoted by politicians, academia, schools and the media
3. Illegal immigration is actively sponsored in a time of terror, disease, and drug abuse
4. The rule of law is violated at every turn, with the inevitable increase in crime
5. The family is relentlessly undermined, and social dysfunction proliferates
6. Promiscuity and pornography destroy individuals, relationships, and community
7. Nations with the greatest ethnic diversity, who led the war on slavery, are called racist
8. Ugliness is celebrated in art, literature, music, architecture and junk culture at large
9. Science, reason, and common sense are dismissed as tools of ‘White Supremacy’
10. Financial and economic mismanagement and malfeasance are rampant
People living in a socio-political atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, in which once trusted mechanisms of law and order are perverted and used as instruments of oppression, will struggle to make sense of their lives, more especially without a rational religious worldview to guide them. The radical freedom to define reality for oneself, except when political correctness decrees otherwise, has ushered in a pandemic of social dysfunction and the ever-increasing power of the managerial state, with its bloated bureaucracy intruding on every aspect of life.
This is the root of the civilisational crisis in which we find ourselves. All the other disorders that crowd in on us are but symptoms. Reality or ideology, truth or lies, sanity or insanity, leadership or misleadership – the choice is clear, but who will have the courage to make it.
