Good Friday: When Sociopaths Triumphed
Let us for a moment assume that Easter stirs no religious instinct in you. Even so, perhaps we can look at what happened to Jesus as of particular relevance today. For on one level, Jesus’ ministry was a rebellion against the endlessly proliferating thicket of rules which the Jewish traditions had erected around the mystery of the nameless, formless, God.
The Pharisees and Sadducees derived social and political power from tending and reinforcing that thicket. A hedge like that could surely trap the itinerant Galilean in some ruinous gaffe? To what extent can you help people on the Sabbath? What about divorce in tricky familial circumstances? What about paying taxes to the Romans? Etc.
Jesus simply wasn’t interested in dancing through the rule-book.
So to Matthew, 22:
“But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
“ Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
“This is the first and great commandment.
“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
This is an infinitely freer and happier interpretation of a response to God and to how it might affect the society in which you live. In my parlance, Jesus was reasserting the necessary value of a high-trust society, against those who exercised and enjoyed power by endless rule-making which eroded mutual trust. This message was powerful precisely because it was based on a truth which was obvious then, and is obvious now: a good and happy life irreducibly involves levels of social trust and associated risk (and disappointment). Energetic efforts to avoid or cancel such risks pursued too aggressively not only don’t achieve their aims, they are worse than that. Despite their (possibly) best intentions, Jesus recognized the Pharisees and Sadducees for what they were: there’s a good reason why they have gone down in history as destructive sociopaths.
And so Britain in the 21st century, where the seats of power are very recognizably occupied by well-meaning (we must assume) sociopaths, working hard to erode social trust and establish a low-trust society in which infinitely expanding vistas of the social landscape can be negotiated only by legal dictats supported by fines, bans, and direct state intervention.
Consider, for example, the contribution of Lorely Burt, who has been enobled by our pernicious honours system as ‘Baroness Burt of Solihull.’
Her contribution to the compilation of a secular British Torah is to forward legislation which will make employers legally liable if the firm’s customers upset an employee. Our Parliament has already given it a second reading, so it’s on its way.
Let’s see. This will ensure employers mistrust their employees. It will ensure employees are ready to blame their employers for things they don’t like. It will ensure that both employers and employees adopt a suspicious and defensive attitude towards any customer who may walk through the door. As for that customer: he/she will perhaps feel an accentuated need to patrol his/her own behaviour - speech, actions, dress code etc. Older folk who have not made the effort to keep up with the Guardian/BBC’s latest extensions of offensive behaviour will probably be best to stay home.
That’s a pretty powerful way to erode society, spread mistrust and encouragement pan-social resentment.
It is right to pick on Lorely Burt because her proposed law is so obviously sociopathic.
But would she were alone in her sociopathic work-ethic! Alas, she is fully representative of Britain’s political/administrative/media class which, having given up on attempts to persuade, now talk only in the language of fines and bans, where once political persuasion and argument might have been considered. We are all the worse for it, for with every new ban and restriction, every new avenue for fines and restriction, we erode the mutual trust which is so absolutely necessary for a happy and successful society.
The bad news is that on Good Friday the Pharisees and Sadducees, backed by the power of the Roman state, won. The nailed their man.
The good news is that one way or another, it turned out not to be the end of the story.
While appreciating and endorsing your biblical parallel wholeheartedly, I would like you to consider another frame of analysis. One that I have become somewhat fixated with over the years, and only intensifies: the feminization of society. I would dare to suggest that much of this kind of legislation is driven largely by women - the Creasy worldview - the mindset to embody in law, the entirety of human relations. The health and safety creep, safe spaces, covid hysteria - all symptoms of a society that puts safety above all else, and has lost the ability to evaluate the pros and cons of doing so. How on earth did this get to a second reading, and how on earth do arbitrary misogyny laws get passed in a country with a history such as our own that used to be the archetype of free speech? Why has empathy become the singular virtue of modern Britain? At heart this bill is about empathizing with the greater percentage of women that are in direct client facing roles. As Jordan Peterson quite rightly says “empathy does not scale!” and it certainly should not be the only metric that our governors use when forming policy. But we are so weak as a society, nobody dares push back against the feminist tide, just as much as they won’t push back on multiculturalism and mass immigration. Your colleague Rod Liddle made the point some months ago that woke is largely a product of the radical feminist movement, not as many think from the over reach of civil rights. He didn’t get much traction with that, but I think he’s bang on the money.
Whenever I see some new bill introduced that has anything to do with human rights, I almost inevitably see female names as the promoters. If we don’t reverse this tide - get rid of the 2010 Equalities Act for starters, we are going to continue this authoritarian pathway until we do reach 1984.
Found your Substack via YouTub!