The Poverty of Transgressive Allegiance

A Modern Sickness

This is a brief and tentative exploration of a modern condition: millions of citizens who not only do not love their country or their culture or their history but despise it and instead substitute allegiance to a recent and highly unnatural ideology. I believe the psychological impact of this is becoming apparent.

We all have allegiances. Humans are designed to require and derive meaning and motivation from them, even if they’re as simple and selfish as ‘myself’ or ‘drugs’ or ‘money’. Those kinds of allegiances lead to shallow and antisocial lives, but most people have deeper and wider allegiances: family, sex, nation, tribe, trade, religion.

There are (roughly) three kinds of allegiance: hereditary (allegiances by birth-ethnic identity or love of homeland or connection to one’s family), learned (religious conversion, the acquired homeland of the expatriate, political ideology, learned philosophy), and transgressive (allegiances held in opposition to a learned or hereditary ideology). I think the third kind is almost entirely a creation of the modern world, of a time in which people have enormous flexibility to choose their path and beliefs and in which human civilization is peaceful and diverse enough to allow experimentation and active opposition to the status quo.

A transgressive allegiance can be useful or admirable. The feelings of the abolitionist radicals of 1840’s America, or the deep convictions of Martin Niemöller’s opposition to the Nazi ideology were both transgressive allegiances. For a transgressive allegiance to be ethical and pro-social two things must be true:

1. The system or allegiance or idea being opposed must be corrupt or somehow in need of total reform (and there must be a workable and ethical alternative on offer)

2. The person must have other allegiances which ground and center them. For example, Niemöller didn’t hate his homeland. He loved his family and derived his opposition from an uncompromising, action-focused species of Christianity. The abolitionists hated the reigning system of chattel slavery but they often had a real love for slaves (not as a class or an abstract group, but as individuals) and they were generally patriotic and family-oriented. They hated one feature of their contemporary society but loved far more than they hated

Any person whose worldview is purely or mostly transgressive will be an unhappy and worthless creature. Humans must be motivated by love and that love cannot be abstract or theoretical. Anyone who is motivated primarily by allegiance to an ideology or to opposition to their society as a whole will become robotic, vicious, amoral. To be good, people must love real people and places and real practical ideas. We could probably explore the reasons for that at length but for now we’ll just make the claim.

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Which brings us to the modern world, where a large share of our elites owe their allegiance to a vile combination of self-interest/class privileges and transgressive ideas. (Yes, most people still love their families but do they derive meaning from this? Does this inform their beliefs about the world and duty and gender roles or is an aberration?).

Look at the social justice worldview, which has given rise to much of this: while they claim allegiance to black folks they rarely know any normal (non-wealthy) black folks and they find many aspects of their lifestyles and perspectives (Christianity? Community loyalty? Masculinity? Honor culture?) alien and distasteful.

They fetishize indigenous people, but the real beliefs of indigenous cultures (sincere spiritual beliefs, rigid sex roles, scripted aggression, hunting, masculinity) are, again, anathema.

They like these groups as abstractions, as totems, but have no love or concern for the actual members of these groups.

There are groups which command the true allegiance of social justice believers… but upon examination we find that these groups are pathological and are, themselves, totally transgressive in belief and practice. The abnormal margins of the trans culture (such as it is) and the theatrical stylings of drag queens lie close to the hearts of social justice ideologues, especially Queer Theorists (one possible reason why ‘drag queen storytime’ is such a fixture across the Left, even though there are millions of more representative and admirable examples of gay people available) but these are unhealthy subcultures. Many places in the murky world of trans (which now seems to be primarily an online phenomena) are riddled with mental illness and personality pathology and the drag queen subculture is saturated with drugs and sex workers. There are interesting and even productive pathological subcultures (and in certain ways these could be as well). Look at the punk scene or underground hip hop. These are necessarily incomplete cultures though, and unhealthy places in which to live for long. A culture exists to give meaning and structure to human life and to provide a setting and template for the raising of children. If a subculture is not a place for the raising of children then it is, in some sense, transitory and incomplete and probably pathological. I can think of no exceptions.

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Social justice is a transgressive ideology to its very core (anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, anti-heteronormative, anti-tradition, anti-patriotic-it’s essentially every major transgressive impulse of the modern world distilled into one strange brew) but it’s also rigid and universalist. While they might pay lip service to postmodern ideas of power relations and socially constructed meaning we can see that these moves have really been made as routes by which to subvert our society. The truth is that they absolutely have moral codes and make objective claims to truth.

When Uganda passed its Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023 the social justice activists didn’t recognize that Uganda is its own unique country with its own beliefs and its own history of Western colonialism. They practiced the new and more fashionable kind of colonialism by stridently opposing the law and using Western media and governments and NGO’s to try to neuter and repeal it. Sincere cultural relativists would never do such a thing.

The point is not that I support anti-homosexuality legislation. The point is that whenever the organic and deeply-felt aspects of various cultures around the globe oppose the transgressive priorities of the modern Left (anti-masculinity = feminist, anti-growth & -capitalism = radical environmentalism, anti-patriotism = globalism, etc.) the Left will bulldoze them, imposing their new vision upon the world.

Every aspect of humanity which loves its homeland and longs to defend its family and worships its god and desires material safety and personal opportunity will be slowly, and by turns, excluded. Every natural impulse of men and women and fathers and fathers and religious believers will be, eventually, met with intolerance.

In the modern lexicon, this is called tolerance, and inclusion.

These folks are deeply opposed to the ideas of social justice. How do I know? Because EVERY instance of la patrie or organic religion or tribe is opposed to them. They are formulated as contradictions of the deepest feelings of humanity and they attempt to put something else in its place.

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