How trans exposed the stupidity of our elites

If there’s one lesson to be learnt from this month’s Supreme Court ruling on what a woman is, it is surely this: never again should we trust the wisdom and authority of our supposed betters and superiors. The paradox of the stupidity of clever people may be age-old, but it’s come to the fore with a gruesome absurdity in recent years.

Ever since the Great Awokening of around 10 years ago, our intellectual elite, in government and in our institutions, has abetted in the fantasy that a man can become a woman – either through undergoing cosmetic surgery or even through performative utterance alone. Our superficially educated clerisy toed this line for utterly primal motives. They wanted to be part of the herd, to obey the norms of the in-group, for fear of ostracism and to avoid the terrible fate of those who made dissenting noises. They displayed a raw, base drive for self-preservation.

The stupidity of our educated elite proliferated not just in obvious places (like the top universities, which for decades have been citadels of brain-rot conformity), but also manifested elsewhere. Respected journals such as Scientific American and the Lancet went along with it. The NHS went along with it. Only a few weeks ago, British newspapers were still referring to some rapists as ‘she’. Surgeons became the tools of an ideology, doing what the sterilisers and lobotomists of yesteryear did. They maimed healthy and vulnerable young people because the upper echelons of society had been swept up in a delusion – a delusion that most ordinary people regard with bafflement and horror.

Was the overclass always so bovine and suggestible? Aldous Huxley wrote in his non-fiction work of 1958, Brave New World Revisited: ‘Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.’ This sentiment reflected Huxley’s Fabian inheritance, but a Fabian mindset has long outlived those who once described themselves as such.

This thinking – that a superior, enlightened and progressive elite has the right and duty to guide the ignorant masses, to deliver them from barbarism and folly – flourished well into the 21st century. We saw this attitude in all its supercilious condescension during the Brexit vote of 2016, when the elites – the economists, the Bank of England, the Financial Times, Will Hutton – voiced in collective bleating that Britain would collapse should the knuckle-scraping Cro-Magnons vote to leave the European Union. We did vote to leave, but calamity never happened. Now it’s countries in the EU that are floundering most, both economically and socially.

Similarly, it was the apparently omniscient elites who ordered us to stay indoors and stay apart when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020. They were the panicky, power-hungry ones who barked about the imperative to follow ‘the science’, even though there is no such thing as ‘the science’, only provisional knowledge and contingent theories. It has been the same insulated elites and gilded graduates, with their in-group speech codes, who have been telling us with a straight face that a ‘woman can have a penis’.

The late sociologist, Christopher Lasch, warned us years ago about the ‘revolt of the elites’, as our new cosmopolitan rulers abandoned all ties and obligations to their nations and fellow citizens. Even he would be astonished by the extent to which they’ve abandoned sanity and rationality, too.

The ‘Great Replacement’ on our screens

Whether you think it’s right or wrong to ban French writer Renaud Camus from entering Britain, it’s worth at least discussing his contentious ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which has gained significant popularity among the far right in recent years.

This is the idea that white people in France and beyond are being expunged from their own homelands and replaced by those with darker skin tones, via immigration and changing fertility patterns. Mass immigration and demographic change are real enough, but the notion of a nefarious elite plan to erase the white race is quite clearly no more than a racist conspiracy theory.

While there is no truth to the claims of a ‘Great Replacement’ in the real world, a replacement of sorts is happening in the realm of fiction, entertainment and on our screens in general. This is not out of a desire to do down or erase white people, it should be said, but out of a patronising effort to make the media more ‘inclusive’, ‘diverse’ and ‘representative’ on behalf of ethnic minorities.

The latest series of Doctor Who is but the most obvious case in point. That its lead protagonists are both now non-white reflects the culmination of a drift in the series, in which over the years white males have steadily disappeared. It’s a similar story for the comedy panel show, Taskmaster, which in its 10 years of existence has seen its number of white male guests dwindle. It has been the case everywhere, on large screens and on the small, on University Challenge, Mastermind, QI, Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, in most contemporary and historical dramas, and in seemingly all television adverts. White males are literally being replaced in front of our eyes.

The horrible irony of this trend is that people now have a distorted picture of Britain’s demographic make-up, perceiving it to be much more diverse than it actually is. Not for the first time, a nice, well-meaning initiative has made things more nasty in the world, fanning fears and fuelling resentment.

The Great Gatsby still speaks to modern melancholy

As many readers will know, this year is the 100th anniversary of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. This work still warrants its status as a classic. Its underlying mood of melancholy and its themes of regret, nostalgia, missed opportunities and unfulfilled desires has an eternal appeal. But, a century on, it also has a more timely quality than it did in recent decades.

The narrator, Nick Carraway, could well recognise our own times, in which an increasingly lonely crowd squanders its existence on hand-held devices that render them ever-more miserable and isolated. ‘At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others’, Nick reflects on his first impressions of New York City. In his time, there were ‘young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life’.

Then there’s the great, doomed Gatsby himself, the playboy who devotes his energies trying to recapture the past and restore a connection with a girl he once loved. As Nick relates in a conversation with Gatsby: ‘“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before”, he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”’ Things didn’t end well.

The Great Gatsby reminds us of the adage that you can never go back, and the truism that you can’t always get what you want. In our age of petulant entitlement and utopian wishful thinking, this still needs keeping in mind.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.