Born, made or brainwashed

A fascinating article by Professor of Politics at Birbeck College, Eric Kaufmann, entitled Progressivism, Sexuality, and Mental Illness deals with the report that 21% of “Generation Z” Americans now identify as LGBT.

This is an astonishing number, as well as an astonishingly steep increase over just a few years. In 2008 the figure was closer to 5% – so it has quadrupled in just 14 years. Remember that careful studies, only a few decades ago, showed a rate of homosexuality of between 1% and 4%, depending how stringently it is defined, and that transexualism was, effectively, non-existent before the 1960s. Even the activists bandied “10%” around – not 21%.

Kaufmann discusses, at length, the various possible explanations for the massive increase, including the reasons why the figure is somewhat inflated from the actual increase. He is able to dismiss the rather desperate claim of activists that all these folk are simply emerging from repression of their true selves.

One of his arguments is the rather remarkable observation that a high percentage of these “new” LGBT people are living “heteronormative” lives – that is, twice as many people identify as LGBT as actually live it out. This is far more significant an observation than it would once have been.

We are now in a time when society has set aside a whole month to the enforced celebration of aberrant gender and sexuality, and is now actively discriminating in their favour. For the first time in history, your economic prospects are significantly enhanced by self-identity in a sexual minority… though if the present trend continues, Kaufmann half-seriously suggests it will be “straights” who are the minority.

Trans-athletes, notoriously, have been taking over women’s sports – including, of course, the prestige and money that success brings. Ordinary people are being forced by their employers not only to suffer diversity training, but to wear badges announcing their pronouns, which means to make a public declaration of where you stand on the supposed LGBT spectrum whether you want to or not. And customers of the Halifax Bank have been told they can close their accounts if they find such badges offensive – no doubt employees will similarly be told to leave if they object, for the sake of inclusivity.

Young children at school are also being encouraged early on to make such self-identity decisions, which of course begins with persuading them that there are such decisions to be made when, for the vast majority, it would never have entered their heads otherwise.

Consider for a moment how cruelly subversive this indoctrination is. Children do need to find their individual place in the world, once they have sorted out the basic biological fact of their being boys or girls (except that even that basic knowledge is now taught to be at fault, putting kids’ very identity totally in the teachers’ hands rather than their own). It was certainly a chance remark during a conversation on the street between my mother and one of her friends, which included how well I was doing at school, that when I was five helped form my self-image as a “swot” rather than as an athlete, a playground bully, or (of course) a victim. But what happens if the teacher stresses that your individuality is likely to be primarily a matter of gender identity rather than your ability at drawing rather than maths? You’re likely to seek out an interesting gender simply to assert your individuality.

The most parsimonious explanation for the high percentage in the survey, then, is that it is this cultural milieu that has caused the massive increase in gender and sexual confusion amongst the new generation (for it is certainly confused to be identifying as one thing and living as another). This, of course, raises the longstanding question of sexual aberration as being either a matter of “born that way” or “the product of circumstances.”

I’ve previously written on the huge disparity between both the incidence and expression of sexuality in different societies through history, and the lack of any good science accounting for it biologically, both of which favour the “predominantly nurture” position. Massive changes in prevalence downstream of concerted sociological engineering only increase the plausibility of that explanation.

There is, though, a caveat arising from Kaufmann’s analysis, and that is to do with the concomitant rise in mental health issues in Generation Z, which closely correlates with the rise in LGBT self-identification and, more significantly, is much greater among those who so identify. This trend does not match the standard LGBT narrative : the near-universal acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle in 2022 (which if anything has been increased by the furore over transgenderism) should be making gays happier. That is, after all, supposed to be the benefit of “coming out.” But it seems that the greater the number declaring their true identity, the unhappier they are. Something is wrong with the model.

That, though, is not in itself the caveat to the evidence for the environmental nature of LGBT self-identity. The aberration lies in the difference Kaufmann reports between those who say they are LGBT, who tend to have mental health issues, and those acting in same-sex relationships, who tend to have fewer. On the face of it this might mean that the confusion of our culture has led an increasing number of biologically heteronormal people to see themselves as not so, with this denial of nature making them unhappy, whilst there is a core of “true” LGBT people who are “born that way” and so are happy.

However, a little thought will show that this is a difference without a distinction. Since there is no objective biological evidence either for sexual or gender aberrations, all we have to go on is the belief (aka “lived experience”) of individuals themselves. How is any therapist, or even a concerned individual, to know whether an unhappy self-identifying bisexual has been programmed into their confusion by the evil forces at work in society, or is “really” a bisexual, whatever that means? The question is not even allowed to arise, because governments and churches across the Collective West have condemned “conversion therapy” as barbaric. Nobody can challenge one’s LGBT self-identity, even if it is delusional and psychologically destructive, as it certainly seems to be amongst a significant, mentally suffering, percentage of young adults. It is also a percentage set to increase greatly as primary school indoctrination works through the system.

One more thought here. You must be (or certainly ought to be) aware of the current work of Mattias Desmet on “Mass Formation,” notably in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism. What we have seen over the COVID crisis, and in a number of associated phenomena, is an undeniable rise of state totalitarian power posing as democracy, accompanied by propaganda and other psychological manipulation, and the systematic suppression of minority views.

But the most shocking part of this to most of those of us who see it and resist is the abject compliance of the majority of the population, and indeed their active endorsement of every new official lie and every tightening of the control screw. Every free soul feels isolated in their own workplace, their own family, and their own church. Incidentally it would be interesting to see if this makes them, too, psychologically ill: I have a feeling we are mainly unhappy yet healthy, because our pain arises from truth, rather than delusion.

Be that as it may, Desmet’s explanation is that it is when a population is anxious and disorientated that it is particularly susceptible to mass formation. He cites the loss of shared values in western society as the particular cause in our case. When I first encountered his views, this seemed the weakest link in his chain of argument. There has undoubtedly been, over many decades, a decline in shared values, resulting in a slackening of family and other ties within society. From a Christian point of view, I’m happy to endorse the idea that losing a sense of our accountability before God and society has an intrinsically alienating effect on both individuals and cultures.

And yet, for most of my life in such a “diverse” culture (in the true, pre-critical-theory sense of “diversity”) people seem to have rubbed along OK, substituting all kinds of things from consumer materialism to false religions for the true God. This, I have no doubt, has eternal consequences, but missiologically the obstacle to faith appears to have been people’s complacent self-satisfaction rather than existential angst.

But the insidious rise of identity ideology, beginning with feminism and culminating in the complete dissolution of gender (the end-point for the time being – but watch out for the increasing sexualisation of children to add a “P” to the LGBT+ “community”) may be the decisive factor. It was an early aim of Communism, and an age-old aim of Satan, to demolish society to its foundations by abolishing the family and the Christian Church, in which family is modeled on the triune nature of God himself.

Communism’s aim – and the aim of its neo-Marxist successors in the radical movement – was to “build back better” and create a Utopia on the cleared ruins of the old order. Satan’s aim, of course, was more to destroy humanity along with its God-given order. But we are now seeing, all too clearly, that in order to destroy bourgeois values, you have to destroy biology itself, and by persuading people that they are something other than God created them, you make them so deeply unhappy and alienated that they become willing agents of totalitarianism, in their inchoate longing for some kind of dependable order. And so Justin Trudeau or Joe Biden become figures of trust rather than execration. Sexual liberation guarantees tyranny as night follows day – who would have guessed?

The perfect expression of such order, for those who refuse to see through the lie, will be the reassuring figure of antichrist. Keep your eyes open.