Introduction Some Crazy Ideas Are Deadly Serious We needto face our society''s problems cheerfully--but to face them cheerfully we need,above all, to face them. I thinkmost people know that. When Italk to groups about social topics, I am often asked two questions. "What''swrong with us?" "Why are we going crazy?" Thecraziness of the culture has become so obvious to everyone in the room thatthey don''t have to explain what they mean. It isn''t necessary to go into thedetails of tampon dispensers in boys'' bathrooms. Thisbook is about the first of those two questions: the what, not the why. I thinkI can help understand our culture''s descent into lunacy. I think I can helpexplain how the descent can happen.

I think I can say something aboutwhy it spreads and develops so quickly once begun. I think I can even help seethrough it. But whyis it happening at all? "It''s because of P." "It''s because of Q." Yes, yes. Anysane and competent thinker can list a dozen contributing causes withoutbreaking a sweat. I''ve heard them all, from the absence of fathers to thetrickle-down influence of the late-medieval philosophy of nominalism. Some of themare mentioned in this book.

Yet what caused all those causes, and what madethem come together all at once? No one knows that. No one could ever know that. On theother hand, if we can come to a better understanding of what is happening--especially about what is going wrong with the way we think--then maybewe don''t need to know the "why." After all, nothing forces us to swallowthese delusions. Ultimately, we swallow them because we choose to be persuadedby them, even against better arguments. Maybe we can become a little saner. Nowthere is a happy thought! Peoplewho come to my talks are a self-selected bunch who don''t need to be convincedof the lunatic mood of the times. But when I tell friends who are onlymoderately engaged with social issues some of the things taught in universitieslike the one where I teach, or which are abroad in elite culture, I get theopposite response.

Many respond with disbelief or giggles, or they say "That''sjust a passing fad." It isn''tthat they''ve never heard of such ideas, but that they can''t imagine thateducated people really hold them, much less that they insist on them. Youcan''t be serious. Nobody can really believe that there are ninety-fivegenders or that men can get pregnant! That''sthe wrong way to be cheerful. Perhaps I shouldn''t carp, since I agreethat these notions are crackpot. But when people in politics, scholarship,punditry, and everyday life treat "culture wars" as unserious--or as lessserious than things like economics and foreign policy--I wonder how serious theyare.1 Take "gender"again, though gender insanity is merely one of the more bizarre of the manyforms of craziness discussed in this book. I agree with the sane majority that notonly do we come in two sexes but that deep down every one of us knows it.

Andyes, I know that some who don''t believe in the nonsense about innumerablegenders and about people in the wrong bodies pretend that they do. Nonetheless,many of those who press such manias are deadly serious. I don''tmean that they aren''t putting over a con. They may be grifters, capitalizing onmania to gain status, wealth, power, and attention--but it''s their mania, too. Theywork desperately to remain in denial, to avoid thinking of the obvious. Theexhausting labor of self-deception pushes them into ever more extreme behavior.Just as lies beget lies, self-deceptions beget new self-deceptions. Moreover,those who press these delusions have with them the universities, school boards,professional and athletic associations, the entertainment industry, many courtsand churches, one of the major political parties, part of the other, and mostof the media, including most of the social media.

Although a barrage ofpresidential executive orders has weakened their hold over just one domain,federal agencies, these orders have been strongly resisted. Besides, thebarrage mostly reversed the previous administration''s barrage, and so long asthe underlying thinking does not change, a new administration could reverse thereversal. The constituencies of the delusionists are made up largely ofpeople to whom nothing else matters, people who spend their time trying to wearthe rest of us down (and often earning a comfortable living at it). Since therest of us have other things to do, that isn''t difficult. Unfortunately,derangement has real-world consequences. Against everyday delusions, everydaysanity is fighting for life, and the everyday lives of adults and children areincreasingly disordered. Our age didn''t invent all these lunacies, but in oursthey run riot. Why isn''tit serious that we surgically disfigure children and pump them full of hormonesto prevent the onset of puberty, then call this "care"? Or that medicaljournals publish articles discussing whether surgical amputation is the besttreatment for people with sound limbs who "identify as paraplegics" or are "distressed"by having all their fingers?2Or that "Drag Queen Story Hour" hasbecome an accepted event in numerous public schools and libraries?3 Why isn''tit serious that so many of us pretend this isn''t happening, are afraid to speakup, or think that having a burning concern about it distracts us from moreimportant things? The normalization of disorder and empowerment of lunacy arenot to be taken lightly.

But weare not in normal times. Perhapsto this point, populist readers will have cheered. Now I will lose some ofthem. Why? Becausethe exotic ideas I criticize are not just the fancies of our managerial andopinion-forming classes, as we might like to think. Ordinary people who decrythe lunacy of our times often accept humdrum versions of the same delusions,even while denying their implications. We want lunatic premises without lunaticconclusions. We want the poison apple, without the worm. I notice, for example,that moderates and conservatives who protest lunatic versions of "marriage"such as polyamory quite often believe that cohabitation without vows and withfreedom to change partners is equivalent to marriage.

Again, moderates andconservatives who would consider it totalitarian to forbid women to stay athome to raise their children commonly view women who do choose that way of lifeas dim bulbs. And vast numbers of moderates and conservatives who find theideas I criticize crazy try not to think so because they haveinternalized the crazy idea that making any judgment about craziness isintolerant. This isone of the reasons why insanity can make way so rapidly, for the knife of thepremises has already been slipped quietly between our ribs--and we have slippedit there ourselves. And this is why, even though many of the outré symptomswhich ordinary people find so ridiculous, offensive, or baffling willeventually fade, the underlying fallacies are likely to outlive them andproduce new symptoms, perhaps equally outré. All too often what we mean incalling ourselves "moderate" is that we are only moderately lunatic; all toooften what we mean in calling ourselves "conservative" is that although we complainabout new craziness, we want to conserve the craziness we have swallowedalready. In abizarre way, some of lunacy''s critics tacitly collude with its boosters. Forexample, many who would agree with the proverb "A bad man cannot be a goodstatesman" merely accept another form of the same delusion: Your thug is athug, but mine isn''t. Granted, a bad man or a bad woman might sometimes dosomething good.

And rocks may sometimes fall from the sky. But we do not expectto cobble our streets with them. Tacitcollusion is nothing new. The possibility of being committed to beliefs withoutrealizing it has been recognized for centuries. In the 1600s, for example, thepolitical philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that many people who think theybelieve in God are "atheists by consequence," meaning that they claim Godexists, yet embrace premises which imply that He doesn''t exist.4 Ironically,Hobbes himself seems to have been an atheist by consequence. As a materialist,he believed in something he called "God," but for him it could be only thegreatest material body--hardly what has classically been meant by God. Is allthis just lazy self-deception? It is self-deception, but let no one say it islazy.

It takes a lot of work not to think, for the human mind tends to followthe golden path of logical consequences. Eventually, it gets to the end. Once,when I pointed out in a magazine article that the premises which justifyabortion also justify infanticide, my editor protested that "people are notthat logical." As he said, not many proponents of abortion want to kill bornbabies too! I see matters differently. People are very logical, but they arelogical slowly . A conclusion of their premises which they don''t acceptin their twenties, they may well accept in their f.