Ultra-Realists

Author: Prof H

  • Zemiogenesis and the Rudakubana case

    Steve Hall

    “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”
    Jacques Lacan

    Before, during and after his heinous crime, Axel Rudakubana clearly displayed symptoms associated with the psychopathy spectrum. The symptoms must have been noticed by parents and professionals, and they must have aroused some suspicions. Forty years ago, Rudakubana would have been at least eligible – if not guaranteed a placement – for time-limited confinement in a secure ‘assessment centre’ awaiting diagnosis and a recommended treatment programme. In the 1980s I worked with a dangerous youngster and his darkly obsessed family in such a centre. In this case, as in many others, all professionals agreed that earlier therapeutic and medical intervention would have produced better results.


    In 2019, after years of budget cuts, only 14 such centres – renamed Secure Children’s Homes – remained in the UK. Some of these homes are failing inspections, there’s a long waiting list, and children are referred only as a last resort after numerous failed interventions by the social services and the criminal justice system. Glancing briefly through the official literature, it’s quite noticeable that the cost of running such places features heavily in the analyses. Those who believe the myth that taxes and borrowing fund public spending will be quite easily convinced that the government simply can’t afford adequate services for young people with mental health issues, some of which, as we have just seen, can be deadly.


    As the children’s mental health crisis deepens, we are forced to live under the neoliberal cult of austerity, the objective of which is to run down public services ready for privatisation. It is aided and abetted by the postmodernist cult of moral relativism and the new left cult of minimal intervention and anti-psychiatry. This toxic combination of institutionalised parsimony, negligence and naivety demonises any form of moral, scientific or political authority – no matter how humane, advanced and rational – as an existential threat to the freedom of the individual. It also conveniently supplies the neoliberal politicians and financiers with yet another excuse for cost-cutting. Individual freedom is a great thing, no doubt. By the way, it’s also quite cheap to run, and neoliberals are convinced it can be cheaper still, at least where public money is involved.

    Each cult in the symbolically inefficent trio is now a veteran in the art of concocting excuses for itself and the other two tacit partners. The new three-headed master currently exerts its negative consequentialist power over all of us – I command that everyone shall be free from authority no matter what the real costs. Apart from the authority of the market, of course. The master is playing with children’s lives, both the tiny and often remediable minority suffering from the more dangerous forms of mental illness and their innocent victims. The current Anglo-American, late liberal way of life is, in the term used by ultra-realists, zemiogenic.

  • The Society of Enemies: 1. Identity Politics and Crime

    Steve Hall

    The extreme liberal activism associated with identity politics and sexual/gender politics continues to poison the well. Recently, myself and others made the claim on social media that the ‘moral panic’ cult, backed up by the dubious statistical ‘crime decline’ narrative, has hampered effective research and the struggle against today’s largely hidden traditional and novel crimes, particularly child sexual abuse. Originally placing itself in opposition to media sensationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia and ‘authoritarian populism’, the cult’s principle of minimal intervention has backfired badly, creating an atmosphere of inertia, ignorance and anxiety in which hidden crime proliferates and hostile, authoritarian reactions are more likely.

    The recent child abuse scandal in the UK elicited immediate responses from self-appointed identitarian activists – individuals and small cabals who imagine themselves to be intrepid leaders of their cultural constituencies. Rather than argue for the return of universal ethics, intelligent research and rational, effective politics and policies, they claim that hateful ‘white cis-het reactionaries’ – people like me and some other ultra-realist researchers, I suppose, along with gender-critical feminists – are all abusers at heart, care nothing about crime, harm or abused children, and simply want to take advantage of the current outcry to accuse gay, trans and ethnic minority communities of harbouring a disproportionate number of paedophiles. Paranoid whataboutery seems to have replaced rational research and debate.

    When Kimberlé Crenshaw, with what we must assume were good intentions, proposed an intersectional matrix of race, gender, sexuality and class, she hoped we could transcend hostile identity politics to create new solidarities, where each group might develop an empathetic understanding of the others’ modes of subjugation. But no. Activists, mimicking the zero-sum mindset of ethnonationalists, instead drew upon the intersectional matrix to emphasise what they feel – not ‘know’ – is the timeless existential hatred felt towards them by the groups on the other ends of the intersecting axes. In an emotivist culture, of course, what people ‘feel’ assumes the elevated position of absolute knowledge beyond question.

    The activists’ solution? They demand that we immediately subvert and abandon all traditional identities, institutions – including the family – and moral orders to become like them…. free-floating, undefined individuals, the pioneers of a beautiful, free, progressive future. Was that ever going to work, or was it the road to intersectional paranoia, the return of reaction and what Simon Winlow and and I once called ‘the society of enemies’ ? A society in which inherently antagonistic cultural groups imagine a world full of hostile others who don’t want them to exist, and immediately react with aggressive denunciations that can elicit and affirm precisely that assumption amongst the others they blame? This is the polar opposite of the ‘tolerance’ that liberals claimed to be one of their founding principles. Has post-structuralist identity politics bequeathed us with the most destructive, multipolar self-fulfilling prophecy we have ever known? Is this danger inherent in accelerated cultural progressivism in the midst of declining economies and institutional orders? An accidental ‘fatal strategy’? We need to know.