Gender Ideology Destroyed Institutional Trust.

Our elite institutions capitulated to the most extreme niche ideology the political left has ever produced and they still can't figure out what the public doesn't trust them anymore.

As I wrote on X/twitter last week: I don't think the left realizes the degree to which giving puberty blockers and sex-changes to kids who wanted to change genders was a test of moral and intellectual integrity, and that test utterly destroyed the moral and intellectual credibility of everyone who failed it. The left appears to have no understanding of the degree to which the adoption of gender ideology by social institutions destroyed the credibility and legitimacy of those institutions. To make matters even worse, the left appears to have no idea WHY the adoption of gender ideology was so corrosive to the credibility and legitimacy of the social institutions that adopted it.

The left seems to have thought that if all the sense-making institutions of the west proclaimed in unison that:

-Men can become women
-Children can choose their gender
-12 year olds should be allowed to get puberty blockers if they want to change their sex
-Biological males who identify as women ought to be able to compete in women’s sports

this would result in the ideas and values of gender ideology being adopted by the public. It appears that the writers, publishers, thinkers, academics, and elite professionals believed that if medical professionals, academics, journalists, legislators, and public intellectuals proclaimed this new understanding of sex and gender to be a fact the public would follow suit, and in time that gender ideology would come to be seen as clear and obvious common sense.

But that is not what happened.

What actually happened was that the general public stood aghast at the fact that their prestigious social institutions could possibly adopt such obviously terrible ideas. People could not believe their eyes when academics and doctors with advance degrees proclaimed that 12 years olds could change their gender, and they were shocked when journalists not only refused the challenge these claims, but actively participated in proclaiming these claims to be stone cold fact. Not only did the public refuse to adopt these views, but they actively rejected them. Public trust in social institutions plummeted, and the institutions began to lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The people who went along with gender ideology didn't just end up on the wrong side of public opinion, as far as the general public was concerned the institutions demonstrated for the whole world that they had no intellectual integrity, moral fortitude, and no ability to stand up for the truth or think for themselves.

To this day both the leftists who pushed these ideas in the institutions and the people who manage, staff, and run our sense-making institutions appear to have no idea how or why they lost the trust of the public. They appear to think that their failure to convince the public to get on board with the new sex and gender orthodoxy, is the result of such things as misinformation, bigotry, poor messaging, systemic transphobia, and closed-mindedness on the part of the public. The result is that our institutions have in almost all cases doubled down on gender ideology, while continuing to be utterly dismayed at the fact that their legitimacy is being eroded in the eyes of the general public.

This is because the left has adopted a theory of social and political change which is completely divorced from reality, and used that theory to create and implement a set of strategies for social change that have been and corrosive the to health of our social institutions.

For the better part of the last 60 years the Social Justice left has labored under a false understanding regarding the relationship that social institutions have with both the culture at large and the general public. Following the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, large portions of the left came to believe that the culture at large functioned as a sort of enormous apparatus of social control that operated by inculcating certain norms, ideas, beliefs and values into the consciousness of the general public. The idea is that the ruling class can embed it’s ideas, values, and beliefs into the culture, and this will result in the general public ends adopting the values and beliefs that are embedded into the culture by the ruling class. As such, the institutions which create culture will have the power to decide which ideas, beliefs, and values in society are seen as legitimate, and therefore decide which ideas, norms and values get embedded into the culture to be adopted by the public. The upshot of all this is that whoever controls institutions of cultural creation get to control the culture, and whoever controls the culture gets to control the consciousness of society.

As the saying goes: politics is downstream of culture.

Following this idea, the left thought that by taking control of the sense-making institutions and the industries which produce culture and knowledge: universities, schools, news media, government, artistic institutions, publishing studios, social media, and so fourth, thy would be able to transform society according to their liking. They thought that by owning the social institutions which had the power to bestow legitimacy on ideas, they could bestow legitimacy on just whichever ideas they desired and the public would then dutifully adopt those ideas.

The problem is that this entire theory of cultural change is just is not true.

The major flaw in the theory lies in the fact that institutions do not have an inexhaustible well of credibility. The credibility of institutions is not inexhaustible, it needs be continuously refreshed through consistent demonstrations of excellence, competence, that confirm the integrity of that institution. But institutional credibility is not unassailable, it can be eroded through demonstrations of incompetence, corruption, dishonesty, and malfeasance.

The ascendance of gender ideology was seen by the public as a sort of stress test for the intellectual and moral integrity of our social institutions. Here was case where an obviously absurd set of ideas was being advanced by an interest group with a political and social axe to grind. People wanted to see institutions flex their intellectual muscles and demonstrate their political independence by refusing to adopt a set of politically motivated ideas that were obviously false. Instead, almost every one of our social institutions surrendered without a fight, preferring to go along with what was obviously a moral and intellectual fad. In the process they showed that they have no intellectual or moral anchors of any kind and that they will pretend to believe anything and go along with any ideology in order to preserve their social standing and the esteem of their colleagues. The result is that the institutions, industries, and individuals who went along with gender ideology showed they were intellectually and morally hollow and in the process destroyed both their credibility and legitimacy as experts in the eyes of the public.

This isn't a merely a PR crisis. What is at issue is not about the focus of the institutions or the way people present themselves, what is at issue is whether or not our institutions have the professional capability, raw competence, and moral fiber to do their jobs. Gender ideology served as a test for whether or not our institutions are in possession of a moral compass, intellectual integrity, and professional competence. The possession of any one of those three things would have lead an institutions to reject gender ideology, which means the only way an institution would ever go along with gender ideology is if that institutions completely lacks a moral compass, intellectual integrity, and professional competence.

The people who went along with gender ideology demonstrated no moral compass, no intellectual integrity, no ability to think for themselves, and no professional competence in understanding important issues. They thus showed themselves to be utterly illegitimate as elites/experts. The institutions showed themselves to be constitutionally incapable of doing the jobs they were assigned to do, and for that reason they have lost all social legitimacy and trustworthiness.

Leftist who think that this the loss of institutional credibility is a PR crisis brought on by bad messaging and poor communication have completely misunderstood the nature of the problem. The fundamental legitimacy of the entire institutional apparatus from which the elite class draws its professionals, staffers, employees, ideas, policies, and overall direction has been totally destroyed. The institutions can't escape the crisis of credibility by simply trying to shift the blame or through changing their messaging, because what is at issue is the intellectual and moral legitimacy of the entire institutional landscape. The only way out is for institutions to admit that they failed the gender ideology test, to tell us why and how they failed the gender ideology test, and then put people in charge who would pass the gender ideology test. Once that is done, the institutions can get to work figuring out how they were brought to heel by the most extreme wing of the most niche leftist movement in American politics.

Until they do this, they will continue to lose credibility.

Unfortunately, so far most of the institutions are doubling down on their behavior, and it seems to be because they are constitutionally incapable of taking an 'L.’ Which is, ironically, a demonstration of the exact sort of pride and hubris which caused them to destroy their credibility in the first place.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.