Why New Age puritans are the enemies of progress.

This is an unexpectedly great article. I didn’t think really anyone had completely caught on to the newly-developing culutural zeitgeist save me (and lord, please do save me from it), but Rachel has nailed it, and how we should react to it. The whole thing is a gem but here is one highlight.

As the risk has receded owing to the vaccine rollout, that power is proving hard to relinquish. An IpsosMORI poll published in June found that a significant minority of Brits would like certain restrictions such as closing nightclubs (26 per cent) and imposing a 10pm curfew (19 per cent) to be enforced permanently regardless of Covid risk. Even when the question specified there were no safety grounds for the restrictions, a quarter of people still wanted to stop everyone else enjoying themselves.

I saw that poll, too. It applies to the US just as well. And though what I cited mentions Covid, the piece is more than just about how the New Puritans have seized onto the particular crisis of the pandemic. Instead it, as I’ve seen no writer do except me, ties this priggishness all together with degrowth nonsense, seuxal shaming (on both sides of the political aisle) and even weight loss. In other words she understands deeply what’s happening at the sociocultural systems level and that it’s not one political movement that is foisting all this on us. No, it is in fact every party and political assemblage that are roughly on the same ideological ground, just refracting neo-puritanism through their peculiarities and proclivities. It’s not a monopolar problem. It’s a society-wide problem and it can only be addressed and defeated as such.

Of course I like this piece partially because when I brought this up years ago — well before Covid — more than a few people told me it wasn’t happening, I was imagining it, it was fake, etc. But it is happening and it’s worsening. Rachel is the first mainstream writer I’ve seen who understands the parts and pieces all interacting and how it’s not just one group, one party, that has moved this way. It’s everywhere now, and not going away soon.