And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.

And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.

Roger Scruton (A Political Philosophy. Continuum, 2006.)

The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

Mon Mothma Speech in the Senate, Andor S2E9

My ethics students are particularly fond of the so-called Trolley Problem — the philosophical thought experiment introduced by Philippa Foot and later popularized by television shows such as The Good Place. The scenario is familiar: a runaway trolley is about to kill five people. You can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track where it will kill only one. Do you intervene, actively causing a single death to save five, or do you refrain, allowing the five to die and accepting responsibility for the consequences of inaction? The exercise is meant to illuminate the tension between utilitarian reasoning — the greatest good for the greatest number — and deontological principles that forbid certain acts, such as the killing of innocents, regardless of outcomes.

My own first encounter with a version of this dilemma came not in a philosophy classroom but in 1982, while watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The dying Mr. Spock, having sacrificed himself to save his crewmates, consoles Admiral Kirk with the words: “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” In the sequel, the equation is reversed. Once Spock’s body is resurrected, his friends risk everything to bring him back, with Kirk explaining to a confused Spock that “the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.”

It may seem odd to begin an analysis of contemporary institutional life with a reference to science-fiction cinema. Yet the phenomenon I wish to describe belongs to the realm of performance and aesthetic appeal — of narrative, symbolism, and enjoyment. The language of “the many” and “the few” has migrated from moral philosophy into political theater, where it is deployed less to clarify dilemmas than to confer legitimacy.

What happens when a relatively small number of radicals succeed in framing their political obsessions as representing “the many”? And what happens when the expressions of collective identity by “the few” — in this case Jews, who constitute roughly 0.2 percent of the world’s population and about 0.9 percent of Canada’s — are simultaneously redefined as inherently antagonistic to the needs of the majority? I have written elsewhere about how this pattern has mutated over time, but its current expression within academic and elite cultural spaces deserves renewed scrutiny.

In contemporary institutional life, a curious inversion has taken hold: activists whose views would once have remained peripheral can, through skillful manipulation of social media, manufacture the appearance of broad popular support that simply does not exist. Paired with luridly binary moral rhetoric — the division of the world into the pure and the irredeemably dirty — this manufactured consensus allows them to punch far above their actual weight, especially in environments where ideological conformity is already the path of least resistance. Academic departments, student and teacher unions, professional associations, and elite cultural or media institutions are particularly susceptible, not because their members are uniquely gullible, but because of institutional architectures and how the social incentives within them reward alignment and penalize friction.

Because this projection bears so little resemblance to reality, it must be aggressively maintained. Dissent cannot merely be answered; it must be pre-empted. What follows is a recognizable pattern: secrecy masquerading as prudence, procedural maneuvers reframed as moral necessity, and ordinary disagreement reclassified as misconduct. Neutral institutional rules become instruments of lawfare. The language is one of certainty and justice, but the operating methods are intimidation, selective disclosure, and the strategic weaponization of process. In such an atmosphere, the appearance of unanimity becomes more important than the substance of debate.

This dynamic also helps explain the drift toward conspiratorial thinking and, at its worst, the embrace of openly hateful narratives, not least antisemitic ones. However, when a consensus is manufactured rather than earned, it is inherently fragile. So when it begins to erode, activists who relied on procedural leverage and social pressure find their tools less effective. The temptation is then to escalate — to rally supporters around ever more sensational or morally discreditable claims. As the goal is no longer persuasion but unification, emotional loyalty becomes a substitute for substantive agreement.

Underlying much of this is a taxonomy of victimhood — a moral hierarchy that ranks validity not by evidence or argument, but by proximity to an approved category of oppression. The so-called “anti-oppression” framework, in its most reductionist forms, collapses all of social life into power relations and treats entire populations as embodiments of either privilege or grievance. Within this logic, Jews are frequently cast as the principal beneficiaries of an allegedly unearned advantage within systems that they themselves are said to have designed and maintained. The result is a permission structure in which hostility is rationalized as critique and prejudice is reframed as justice.

This ideological lens also encourages the creation of academic echo chambers under the banner of “privileging subaltern voices” or “deconstructing dominant narratives.” In principle, expanding the range of voices is certainly laudable. In practice, however, it can become a pretext for insulating favored narratives from scrutiny while granting militant movements moral cover in the name of solidarity. The ecosystem that emerges is less a marketplace of ideas than a gated community of approved positions.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the profusion of organizations and slogans claiming to speak on behalf of Palestine and Palestinians. For decades there has been no shortage of groups — some nationalist, some Marxist-Leninist, some Islamist — asserting representative authority. Many of the movements that once drew support from left-leaning academics on ideological grounds have, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, shifted their funding sources toward religious or state-aligned actors. Yet the symbolic vocabulary remains elastic enough to accommodate these contradictory alliances – so long as the overarching narrative of resistance is preserved. All this is amplified by social media, turning acronyms and hashtags alike into interchangeable tokens of affiliation rather than indicators of practical commitments.

At the local level, the consequences are often stark. A small number of activists and their institutional enablers can succeed in privileging the discourse of a narrow, well-organized constituency while presenting it as the authentic voice of a much broader community. The discourse itself may be illiberal, maximalist, or even annihilationist in tone, sometimes going so far as to praise violence against noncombatants as “armed resistance.” Predictably, objections are brushed aside as insensitivity or bad faith, with those who raise concerns being told, implicitly or explicitly, that their perspectives belong elsewhere.

The deeper issue is not merely political; it is epistemological. The right to express dissent is a cornerstone of Canadian society — and Western liberal societies more broadly. This right is not some loophole in the system; it is essential to it. We have, over time, shed formal blasphemy laws, yet new legislative and cultural pressures periodically arise that risk re-creating similar taboos under different names. The problem is not that speech has consequences; it always has. The problem emerges when activists seek not only to promote marginalized viewpoints but to insulate them from criticism altogether, pre-emptively redefining disagreement as harm and debate as harassment.

This tendency produces what might be called the ghettoization of knowledge: intellectual spaces that are not merely specialized but self-sealed, protected from opposing viewpoints under the guise of safety or solidarity. The irony is obvious. Those who most loudly champion inclusion are simultaneously excluding entire categories of dissenting voices, thereby replicating the very power dynamics they claim to resist. When Jewish students or faculty question the platforming of militant speakers, for example, they are told that they “have their own spaces,” as though the mere existence of a Holocaust symposium were a substitute for participation in broader institutional discourse. One is left to wonder whether the same logic would tolerate the inclusion of Holocaust deniers in those commemorative forums — a question that reveals the asymmetry at work.

At its extreme, this posture supports a kind of activist epistemology in which objectivity is not merely critiqued — a healthy and necessary exercise — but disavowed altogether. Reality becomes a zero-sum contest among narratives that succeed or fail solely based on preexisting power dynamics. Evidence yields to alignment; persuasion yields to pressure. Silencing, bullying, and gaslighting become tactical tools rather than moral failings.

The cost of this trajectory is borne not only by those directly targeted but by the institutions themselves. Universities, unions, and cultural bodies forfeit their credibility when they substitute moral theater for intellectual rigor. A society that loses confidence in its capacity for open disagreement does not become more just; it becomes more brittle. The antidote is neither censorship nor counter-orthodoxy, but a renewed commitment to pluralism, procedural fairness, and the difficult discipline of argument. Manufactured consensus may be loud, but it is never durable. Only the slow, unglamorous work of honest debate can produce the kind of legitimacy that does not need to be policed.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)