The exotic ideas I sometimes criticize are not just the fancies of our managerial and opinion-forming classes, as we might like to think.  I posted recently – but without explanation, a fault I will rectify now -- that ordinary people who decry the lunacy of our times often accept humdrum versions of the same delusions, even while denying their implications.

I notice, for example, that moderates and conservatives who protest lunatic versions of “marriage” such as polyamory quite often believe that cohabitation without vows and with freedom to change partners is equivalent to marriage.  Again, moderates and conservatives who would consider it totalitarian to forbid women to stay at home to raise their children commonly view women who do choose that way of life as dim bulbs.  And vast numbers of moderates and conservatives who find the ideas I criticize crazy try not to think so because they have internalized the crazy idea that making any judgment about craziness is intolerant.

This is one of the reasons why insanity can make way so rapidly, for the knife of the premises has already been slipped quietly between our ribs – and we have slipped it there ourselves.  And this is why, even though many of the outré symptoms which ordinary people find so ridiculous, offensive, or baffling – such as men in women’s locker rooms -- will eventually fade, the underlying fallacies are likely to outlive them and produce new symptoms, perhaps equally outré.

All too often what we mean in calling ourselves moderate is that we are only moderately lunatic; all too often what we mean in calling ourselves conservative is that although we complain about new craziness, we want to conserve the craziness we have swallowed already.