And I will make boys their princes,
and infants shall rule over them.
And the people will oppress one another,
every one his fellow
and every one his neighbor;
the youth will be insolent to the elder,
and the despised to the honorable.

Isaiah 3:4-5

Adults have ceded absolute power to the faux-righteous, doctrinaire young

8 July 2023

By Janet Daley

Reprinted from The Telegraph [in the U.K.]

Many of the most contentious policy decisions of our national life are apparently now being made by people so young and so junior in their positions, that their opinions would once scarcely have been taken seriously. At least, this is the excuse that we are being offered.

Questions of employment practice, social policy, investment strategy, and the rights of consumers to access a service are being enforced – not just in the public sector but in private corporate life – by inexperienced staff who have seized an unprecedented monopoly of moral authority. In one case after another, when outrageously gratuitous judgments about what may or may not be said (or even believed) within the industry’s purview come to light, the institutions involved offer the same pathetic explanation.

These decisions to deny access to certain consumers, or to make pronouncements that some sorts of customers are unwelcome, or to institute policies that prohibit forms of speech, are being put into effect by young staff members who insist on implementing the practical side of the business in the way they see fit. Which is to say, they are licensed enforcers of the doctrines they have been taught to believe are beyond question. Any challenge from their superiors is simply repudiated and condemned as ethically unacceptable

The discovery which came to light last week that most of the country’s commercial banks have officially adopted Stonewall guidance on corporate practice was a revelation which should have initiated a major controversy. Instead, it seems to have been met with resignation: this is just the way things are, so – as the lobbyists themselves like to say – get over it.

The orthodoxy embodied in the Stonewall doctrine which may not be transgressed has triumphed because a new cohort of managers has accepted this package of attitudes so zealously that any breach of it is tantamount to professional disqualification. This is the brave new world to which we must give way because the cadres of its advance guard have seized the levers of power and, with their absolute moral certainty, will not even deign to argue with supposedly anachronistic ideas.

There is nothing new or novel about this phenomenon. History offers many examples of a militant younger generation being persuaded by a political movement that they are the bearers of a great Truth which obliges them to subvert and destroy the old order. Communism used this youth mobilisation strategy with particularly ruthless effectiveness. The Soviet Union had its Young Pioneers, membership of which was effectively compulsory, and the Maoist cultural revolution recruited children to inform on their parents for any suspected ideological deviation. Every successful totalitarian state has understood that, if you seize the imagination and loyalty of youth, you will own the future.

But we are not – yet – living under an authoritarian regime. Education in the West is not designed to inculcate an unquestioned, rigorously enforced dogma. And if, by some historical aberration, schools and universities do fall for this dangerous temptation to proclaim absolutist doctrine, there should be a failsafe remedy.

Those mesmerised students eventually emerge into adult occupations and take their assigned place at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. They then learn from their elders what the shifting priorities of life really are and how changes of opinion must be accommodated. As they progress up the ladder of authority, they may argue with senior staff, and succeed in changing out-of-date attitudes and assumptions.

But they, in turn, will grow and mature in their views and the rebellious certainty of their youth will give way to a perspective that only experience can bring. That was how it used to be – before a spectacularly successful infiltration by professional activists seized what seems to be invincible power over the public discourse.

So complete and crushing has this victory been that it has virtually eliminated the resistance which confident adults used to exercise in the workplace, in cultural life and in education – and even, extraordinarily enough, the financial institutions which hold the nation’s economic future in their grip. We now know, for example, that the Bank of England has adopted Stonewall’s doctrine even though it is notoriously controversial even within the ranks of progressive campaigners.

So what has happened to the confidence and conviction with which adult rationality once led national life? Where – to put it bluntly – have all the grown-ups gone? Presumably they have abandoned their leadership because of the faux righteousness of the young usurpers. But ironically the justification for this repressive coup is the opposite of what it claims to be: it is not tolerant, or liberal, or kind.

Because it has no standard for truth other than personal feelings, it is determined to accept every individual’s assessment of his own identity and capabilities. So children who claim to be cats, or moons, or aliens must be permitted to function without language or social skills – even if that cripples their development. (What if they identified as inanimate objects and refused food and water? Would that have to be respected, too?)

As any responsible parent would know, a child who genuinely believes it is a cat, or a moon, needs psychiatric help, not uncritical respect for its chosen identity. There is nothing kind about encouraging a delusion. (That statement itself is, of course, a heresy because anything that anyone states about his identity must, by definition, be true.) We have entered a Dark Age in which objective fact, evidence, argument and tolerance have been banished by a cult which permits no dissent.

The great hope is that the infantile narcissism into which its followers have been inducted will eventually give way to the natural human inclination to question, re-invent and rebel against what you have been told to believe. Generations of children have shown a reassuring proclivity for doing just that. If the adults in the room can’t accept their responsibilities and take charge of this absurd travesty, you can be sure that the kids will eventually do it for themselves.