Peter Stockland: It’s Time to Stop Toeing the Line of Ideological Craziness

American author and journalist Lionel Shriver poses for a photograph at her home in southeast London on April 27, 2010. David Azia/AP Photo

Commentary

In a pre-publication interview for her novel that will hit bookstores April 9, American author and journalist Lionel Shriver says it’s easy to diagnose what’s wrong with today’s world.

Her novel is titled “Mania“ because, Shriver explains, we are in the grip of the manifold social manias that periodically sweep through humanity. The evidence, she insists, is clear.

“All that’s required is to take a step back and recognize everyone has gone nuts,” Shriver told Laura Dodsworth of The Free Mind website.

As if to verify the claim, the National Post coincidentally reported on a legal dispute in which a self-identified non-binary Ontarian has gone to court to have the public purse pay for surgery that will leave the individual with both a vagina and a penis. Nuts R Us.

Not, however, the special kind of dark and twisted social nuttiness that has led to an otherwise healthy 27-year-old Alberta woman being given legal blessing to have State-authorized medical agents kill her. Why? Because she simply doesn’t want to live anymore. Why else?

The judge who issued the non-culpable homicidal benediction, which has since been appealed by the woman’s father, said he didn’t have the authority to interfere with a “medical act” approved by two doctors.

Intriguingly, in the Ontario case of Mixed Genitalia v. Beaten Down Taxpayers, the Post notes that the “2SLGBTQI” rights lobby group Egale is arguing the opposite. Ontario’s health insurance system, OHIP, has no standing to make assumptions about what care may be medically necessary and therefore qualify for public payment, the group contends.

“Ultimately OHIP’s interpretation (of a vaginoplasty) is exclusionary and discriminates against nonbinary people on the basis of their gender identity,” Egale argues according to the Post.

So, the courts are unable to stop delivery of gratuitous medical death. But the courts can—and should—order the public health system to have the cosmetically conjoined happily ever after at taxpayers’ expense?

And we think fruit cake is only a Christmas affliction.

Fittingly, Shriver says in her interview that the seeds for “Mania” were planted about a dozen years ago when the “rage for transgenderism” jumped the garden wall and began dingle dandering down the streets of every city, town, and village in the Western world.

“I wanted to ... fashion my own mania,” she says of the novel’s plot. “The mania I invented most resembles our sudden obsession with pretending to change sex. Virtually overnight it becomes holy writ (in “Mania”) that you mustn’t ever impugn anyone else’s intelligence much as virtually overnight transgenderism also became ’the last great civil rights fight.' To emit a single discouraging word about ’trans’ would be guaranteed to destroy your career and reputation.”

Shriver, a long-married she/she who changed her name legally to Lionel from Margaret Ann when she was a rebellious 15-year-old, makes abundantly clear she doesn’t single out only gender identity in “Mania.” Neither the novel nor the supporting interview are “transphobic” tracts.

As in her other work, the real target is rigid intellectual conformity. It’s the un-think adoption of the latest fashionable brainburp-cum-slogan, which rapidly metastasizes into a social, political, and legal imperative. You can almost hear her sardonic laughter coming off the page of the interview when she describes “South Koreans marching down their streets chanting ‘Black Lives Matter!’ when the country basically doesn’t have any Black people.”

The impulse to enforce conformity has been part of humanity since the first cave artist was de-platformed for painting insufficiently diverse woolly mammoths on the walls at Lascaux. We always and everywhere think of ourselves as reasonable and au courant, ergo we accept phrenology or bloodletting or Stalin as “progress” until the latest fit of ideological fashion passes and we see each one as a succession of sheer lunacy.

“What’s changed,” Shriver says, “is the rapidity with which people suddenly embrace one prescribed view, and also the ease with which these mind viruses now spread internationally.”

COVID, she argues, was the viral proof.

“[It] was itself a mania — the infection fatality rate of the disease especially for anyone but the very old did not merit our draconian response — that gave birth to sub-manias: the love of lockdowns, the cult of the vaccine, the hysterical faith in masks.”

Almost overnight, “the land of the Magna Carta” became a country of citizens willing to give up birthright freedoms of speech, assembly, the press, mobility, and “even the right to leave your own home,” she points out.

“Obviously, people will believe anything, and for something like National Socialism to triumph in the UK, it would take Adolf Hitler at the most about three weeks.”

Call me a maniacal optimist but that’s where I part company with Shriver’s thesis, though certainly not with her as a singularly courageous and free-minded artist. There remains a cohort of questioners who insist on asking, across same-think lines, “Is that true?” “Are you sure?” “Why do you think that?” “How does that make sense if…?”

Socrates never rode a bandwagon. Now, neither does Lionel Shriver. Given that this is her 18th novel, there must also be a sizeable audience eager to say “nuts” to toeing any ideological line.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.