When considering why the narrative around so many issues is so at odds with the reality, one of the main reasons is that there pertains an esteem/self-esteem inversion among many groups of people. This psychological occurrence can be seen in a spoiled child, who because of the high esteem given to them, has developed a commensurate inflated self-esteem whereby they consider themselves to have been given little esteem. Therefore it is because they have so little grievance that they have so much self-grievance.
This phenomenon can be observed in all major political issues. In relation to ‘climate change’, the countries that are doing the most to transform their economies to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions are those that activists claim are not reducing them quickly enough, whereas in countries like Russia, India, and China which are not reducing their emissions, there is no demand that they do so. This can particularly be seen in Britain, a country whose Climate Change Act (2009) is an ambitious and legally-binding measure to reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions, which all executive organs there operate pursuant to, and yet that country has groups like Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain disrupting society while claiming that their government isn’t doing anything about emissions.
Another issue where this pertains is immigration. It is in countries that have the most generous immigration policies such as the United States, Canada, and the countries of North-West Europe that there is a discourse that such countries are racist and xenophobic. Whereas in Eastern Europe where there are actual anti-immigration policies, such are not deemed to be problematic. Even in Spain and Italy, countries which are often the first European countries of entry to migrants, there is a different culture to North-West Europe; migrants don’t want to settle in these countries, and these countries don’t want to admit them. It is the self-styled ‘racist’ countries that are target destinations for migrants.
In Britain, footballers have been ‘taking a knee’ for two years in relation to a death in America, though therein this abasement is considered to be never enough. By contrast in Spain footballers do not ‘take a knee’, and nobody cares.
In relation to Covid restrictions, while Ireland had more severe restrictions than most other countries, the narrative was that we didn’t have enough restrictions. It is being said of the massive increase in State spending that it doesn’t go far enough, even though it was the State’s lockdowns which caused all of these economic problems in the first place.
Another such issue is violent victimisation according to sex. It is a matter of fact that males are the overwhelming victims of violent victimisation, with the 2021 figures showing that males were 84.2%, and female 15.8% of victims of murder and manslaughter. The narrative around ‘structural violence’ however suggests that females are the main victims. It is worth contrasting the coverage of two murders which occurred in January. Michael Tormey was murdered on January 9th and Ashling Murphy on January 12th. The occurrence of the former crime was reported but that was the extent of the coverage. The latter crime elicited a narrative around ‘structural violence’.
It is from the very fact that male murder victims are part of actual structural violence that Tormey’s murder got little coverage beyond reportage, while it is from the relative rarity of female violent victimisation that Murphy’s murder obtained blanket coverage. This latter murder led to discourse about how we need a ‘zero-tolerance- policy’ towards this 15.8% sub-set of violent victimisations; while the 84.2% sub-set is not considered for reduction.
A more general occurrence of the esteem/self-esteem inversion is in identity politics, whereby minorities are becoming ever more self-grievant as their legal and social situations ever improve. While African-Americans have benefited from increasingly prevalent ‘affirmative action’ for more than fifty years, there pertains among them an ever greater sense of victimhood.
This can also be seen among gays in the recent example of the footballer Idrissa Gueye, who refused to wear a rainbow coloured shirt, and as a result ‘Rouge Direct’ – a gay lobby group – stated: “Homophobia is not an opinion but a crime”, while also asking Gueye to explain himself as well as suggesting that he be sanctioned. Another example can be observed in relation to the recent ‘monkeypox’ outbreak. Despite the fact that gay men entail 98% of those responsible for spreading this disease, Western politicians will not suggest that gay men behave responsibly; though these same politicians were happy to cruelly confine entire populations in order to supposedly prevent the spread of Covid-19. Despite this there is a discourse that even mentioning gay overrepresentation regarding monkeypox is ‘homophobic’, which speaks to gay men’s inflated self-esteem and persecution complex.
Among Western ‘feminists’, there is an increasingly shrill obsession with ‘patriarchy’ despite modern Western women having the highest social and legal esteem that women have ever had in any time or place.
It is therefore clear that in the West certain policies and groups of people have high esteem attached to them, and it follows, by which, that these groups will perceive this esteem to be non-existent. This is why all of the main media – political narrative talking points are so in opposition to reality.
Seaghán Breathnach is a Donegal-based writer. He writes at https://seaghanbreathnach.substack.com/