BY SEAN WALSH

Dostoevsky was right on the money when he wrote about how some people straight-up enjoy taking offence at the most trivial things:

“A man who lies to himself is the first to take offence…he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thereby he reaches a point of great hostility”
– The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky’s novel is an unsurpassed literary dissertation on moral psychology, one which anticipates and punches back at the destructive tendencies of relativism. We are vulnerable to self-deception, and for some this involves the exquisite cultivation of fake grievance.

We have an unbalanced ecosystem which is causing an unstable social order. Too many people are keen to pretend to take offence, and not enough of us are prepared to compassionately dish it out.

There is an obvious solution: offend the easily offended, with panache. Practise in front of a mirror if it helps. On some level they must know they are ridiculous. To the extent they feel any, we have a duty to lead them out of their embarrassment.

We’re in danger of acquiescing to a tyranny of hypersensitivity policed by the perpetually offended for whom the discovery, or invention, of a careless insult is a thing of near-orgasmic significance. This suits the autocratic agenda, which goes at language in part to control how you think but – as important- to monkey with how you feel.

Compelled speech, habits of self-censorship etc don’t just mess with your head, they also meddle with your heart. These are systems deployed to inhibit the cultivation of right and proportionate emotion.

The UK now has an exhausting culture of performative grievance, set up to drown out all who articulate reasoned dissent. Starmer’s social order is not so much settled as unsettling, a Ponzi scheme of stratified victimhood. The perpetually offended are best equipped to rise to the apex of this pyramid of dysfunctionality. This is the new social Darwinism.

Which is why they need to be offended out of their second adolescence throughshock and awe strategies of unwelcome scorn and intentional triggering.

Don’t take my word for it, listen to Plato’s best student. Aristotle had an elevated take on the human animal. His view was that we aren’t passive recipients of whatever happens to happen to us. Happiness, he claims, is activity of the soul in conformity with what is good for you. We can discipline how we feel as much as how we behave.

Aristotle was not, as far as I’m aware, a member of the far right (I can’t vouch for his own student, Alexander the Great). Even if he were, this insight about the composition of the human soul should be drilled into the head of every soy trust fund climate activist or Hampstead cocktail hostess who reflexively cries foul when any offence (real or imagined) is reported to be at large anywhere at all on the climate-compromised planet they are condemned to share with us oiks.

I’m not urging you to be offensive just for the sake of it. I’m urging it for the sake of them.

People agree that nobody has the right to not be offended. We need to strengthen the principle: people have the right to be offended, if only because sometimes, for the maintenance of social cohesion, it is necessary to offend them.

Of course, when deliberately giving offence, it is best to do it sensitively, if possible. You might want to begin with letters to the BBC suggesting the return of some now-cancelled funny but “offensive” 1970s sitcom before progressing to an Easter Morning greeting of “He is risen!” to an online village atheist.

When you’ve got your hand in, but not before, you will find the courage to speak approvingly of Trump’s border policy within earshot of an identifiable local government official.

Many years ago, before being driven insane at the thought that nobody much cared about his sexuality, Matthew Parris compiled a wonderful historical and thematic collection of insults in a little book called Scorn. This anthology affirms the importance of the well-crafted insult and even has a section dedicated to the Welsh, a country so terrified of giving offence to religious intolerance it has gone to war with dogs.

This is the heritage now imperilled by the divisive fanatics of the inclusion ideology, the tradition of insult-as-therapy in which astute social anthropologists alchemise Dostoevsky’s warnings against self-delusion into richly comical material.

Which reminds me. Right-wing stand-up comedians will have a role to play in the counter-revolution, not just because they have experience of the raw harshness of the cancel culture, but also because the easily offended need more than anything else the gift of laughter.

The stand-up is professionally attuned to the absurdity of the zeitgeist and is usually sympathetic to the theory of ridicule-as-therapy (forget Adolescence, what teenagers really need is weekly screenings of a Comedy Unleashed set, preferably a Leo Kearse routine).

Our pushback will eventually be behavioural and not restricted to what we say. The time for offensive merch or smoking near a hospital will come. But none of this will make any difference if we’ve ceded the language.

We need to come up with a thought-through liturgy of offence to fight the current contagion of simulated vexation. Our language is our home, if reclaiming it causes offence then fine. 

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Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has.

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