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The argument so far has been simple. Some movements define the good less as a workable order to be built than as a stain to be removed. They know with great intensity what must disappear, but with much less clarity what a livable settlement would require, permit, or cost. That is what I have called negative idealism. Its danger does not lie in one doctrine alone. It lies in a recurring structure. A purified horizon is announced. Reality fails to comply. The gap is moralized. The search for the guilty begins.
That structure does not make all radical movements identical. Their moral vocabularies differ. Their goals differ. Their institutions differ. Their body counts differ. Some are more total than others, more lethal than others, more metaphysical than others. The point is not sameness. It is family resemblance. Very different movements can exhibit the same political logic once their ideal collides with reality and failure has to be explained.
Begin with revolutionary communism. Marxism gained its power not because it saw nothing real, but because it saw a great deal: exploitation, class hierarchy, alienation, and the concentration of economic power. Its danger emerged when those insights were fused to a purified horizon, a classless society in which private property, exploitation, and alienation had been abolished. Once that ideal is announced, reality predictably fails to conform. Scarcity persists. Self-interest persists. Coordination problems multiply. Political power concentrates rather than withering away. At that point defenders often retreat to a familiar refrain: the theory was sound, but it was never properly implemented. Yet that defense weakens with repetition. A theory does not remain innocent when its real-world enactments, across countries and decades, repeatedly produce coercion, censorship, prison systems, famine, terror, and death on a scale measured in the tens of millions. Recurrence is evidence. The problem is no longer bad luck, bad leaders, or accidental betrayal. It is that the theory cannot admit the limits it was built to transcend. So the gap between promise and outcome is moralized and blamed on sabotage: the kulak, the wrecker, the bourgeois remnant, the counter-revolutionary. What began as a critique of economic relations ended, again and again, in purges, show trials, and the Gulag. The engine is the same: limits are recoded as betrayal, and the search for the guilty supplies the movement with both explanation and mission.
“A theory does not remain innocent when its real-world enactments, across countries and decades, repeatedly produce coercion, censorship, prison systems, famine, terror, and death on a scale measured in the tens of millions. Recurrence is evidence.”
Fascism is not the same doctrine, and it is not purely negative in the same way. It carried positive mythic content of its own: blood, nation, destiny, rebirth, struggle. Yet a partial but important family resemblance appears once that mythic horizon collides with reality. The nation does not become pure. Decline is not reversed. Social unity remains elusive. The promised restoration fails to arrive in the form imagined. At that point, failure too is personalized. The saboteur, the degenerate, the outsider, the parasite, the internal traitor become the explanation for why renewal has been delayed. The ideal may be clothed in heroic language rather than egalitarian language, but the structure is still recognizable. Limits are not admitted. They are assigned a human face. The result is not compromise but purification.
One sees a softer but still recognizable version of the same dynamic in some activist and institutional descendants of critical race theory. The academic tradition itself is not reducible to slogan or HR catechism, and it would be lazy to pretend otherwise. But once its ideas are translated into bureaucratic and activist practice, a recurring pattern appears. Persistent disparities are treated less as problems requiring multi-causal explanation than as proof that racist obstruction remains embedded everywhere. The stain is no longer merely prejudice in the ordinary sense, but structures coded as whiteness, norms coded as domination, and habits of dissent treated as evidence of complicity. Again, the issue is not that racism is unreal. It is that an explanatory framework built around permanent moralized suspicion has difficulty recognizing limits, tradeoffs, agency differences, or the possibility that some disparities may have causes not fully captured by oppression alone. The purified horizon remains a world without hierarchy, stigma, or unequal outcomes traceable to race. When reality resists, the gap is moralized. Someone, somewhere, must still be carrying the stain forward.
The same temptation now appears in movements of the dissident or woke right as well, which is useful precisely because it shows that the engine is not confined to the left. Here too one often finds an idealized social order imagined as cleansed of decadence, weakness, corruption, betrayal, demographic threat, or liberal softness. Here too disappointment seeks a culprit. The managerial class, the traitor elite, the degenerate, the subversive, the foreign contaminant, the internal enemy: different labels, same explanatory move. What matters is not the formal ideology but the recurring habit of treating the limits of politics as evidence that enemies must be rooted out. Once that habit takes hold, the movement acquires the same dangerous moral convenience. Failure need not falsify the ideal. Failure merely proves that the guilty still obstruct it.
This is why family resemblance matters more than doctrinal content alone. Movements do not need to agree on the good in order to behave similarly when the good fails to arrive. One wants class abolition. Another wants racial purity. Another wants permanent anti-oppression. Another wants civilizational restoration. The language changes. The symbols change. The designated enemies change. But the political logic keeps recurring. A purified horizon is held before the faithful. Reality resists. Limits are refused. Friction is personalized. Scapegoats enter. Purification replaces politics.
The differences still matter. Revolutionary communism, fascism, activist anti-racism, and dissident right populism are not morally or historically interchangeable. Their scales differ. Their claims differ. Their capacities for violence differ. Some culminate in camps and mass graves. Others work through bureaucratic coercion, reputational terror, compelled speech, institutional sorting, and moral denunciation. These are not trivial distinctions. But they do not erase the structural resemblance. The same engine can recur across very different movements once political disappointment becomes impossible to interpret except through guilt.
“Movements do not need to agree on the good in order to behave similarly when the good fails to arrive.”
That is also why the language of unfinished justice or not yet fully realized deserves more suspicion than it often receives. Those phrases can describe real work still left to do. They can also function as shields against correction. If the ideal remains permanently pure, then every failure can be attributed outward. The theory need not be revised. The movement need not be humbled. Reality itself becomes the accused. At that point, dogma begins to wear the mask of moral seriousness.
The deeper lesson is not that ideals are dangerous simply because they are ideals. Politics without ideals collapses into cynicism and management. The danger begins when an ideal cannot survive contact with limits, tradeoffs, tragedy, or rival goods. Then every obstacle looks illegitimate. Every dissenter looks stained. Every failure demands a culprit. The question is no longer what kind of order human beings can actually sustain. It becomes who must be exposed, silenced, excluded, or punished so that the redeemed horizon can remain morally intact.
This is where the next essay begins. Once a movement has learned to interpret failure through enemies rather than limits, the step from moral sorting to coercion becomes much easier. Before the knock on the door comes the explanation for why someone deserves it. Before force comes the story that makes force feel righteous.
Some political movements seek to reform institutions. Gender ideology asks for something larger and stranger. It asks society to treat subjective identity as more authoritative than sexed embodiment, and then to reorganize language, law, education, medicine, and intimate social norms around that priority. The promise is liberation from constraint. The reality is collision. When the self is treated as sovereign over the body, every boundary that still reflects sex begins to look like an injustice in need of correction.
That point has to be stated carefully. This essay is not a denial that some people experience genuine dysphoria, distress, or alienation from their bodies. Nor is it a claim that every trans-identifying person arrives at that identity through the same motives, pathways, or degree of ideological commitment. The target here is narrower and more political: an activist doctrine that turns subjective identification into a public demand, treats resistance as harm, and insists that the rest of society ratify its claims even where doing so dissolves clarity, boundaries, and truth.
At its most ambitious, gender ideology offers a redemptive promise. The conflict between self and body can be resolved. Alienation can be overcome. The old constraints of sex can be socially, medically, and linguistically superseded. The person need not reconcile himself to reality. Reality can be revised until it reflects the inner claim. But that promise carries a built-in instability. The body does not cease to be sexed because the surrounding vocabulary changes. Social reality does not become infinitely plastic because institutions adopt new rules. Other people continue to perceive bodies as they are, not merely as they are declared to be. Where the doctrine expects resolution, it encounters friction.
“Women are told to absorb the contradiction and treat it as progress.”
That friction matters because it does not remain abstract for long. Women’s boundaries are among the first places where sex remains socially visible and morally non-negotiable. Changing rooms, shelters, prisons, sports, hospital wards, quotas, maternity language, and the ordinary right to name male bodies as male all become targets once identity is treated as sovereign. The demand is not merely for courtesy. It is for override. Women are told to absorb the contradiction and treat it as progress. If they object, their objection is rarely treated as a competing rights claim grounded in privacy, vulnerability, fairness, dignity, or safety. It is moralized as exclusion, cruelty, or hatred.
This is where the negative-idealist mechanism, already traced in earlier essays, sharpens into focus. In a visible subset of male transition pathways, the conflict is intensified by a contested but persistent pattern: autogynephilia, the eroticization of the self as female. The concept is disputed and does not explain every case. Even so, it accounts for observable features in some trajectories: fantasy-driven identification, idealized femininity, online reinforcement, and a demand that others ratify the internal image as socially real. Where that pattern is present, sexed reality appears not as a limit to be reckoned with, but as an insult to be overcome. What cannot be secured inwardly is demanded outwardly through language, ritual affirmation, institutional policy, and the erosion of boundaries once thought too basic to require defense.
Institutions then inherit the contradiction. They are asked to affirm that sex is real enough to matter in medicine, reproduction, and anatomy, but unreal or irrelevant wherever women seek exclusion, protection, or clear naming. They are asked to treat words as both descriptive and compulsory, as if language were a branch of ethics rather than a tool for tracking reality. They are asked to uphold fairness while denying the relevance of the sex differences that made female categories necessary in the first place. The result is not ordinary accommodation. It is organized unreality, maintained by euphemism, fear, and social pressure.
Once the doctrine reaches this stage, dissent can no longer be treated as ordinary disagreement. Neutral refusal leaves sex standing. Clear language leaves the body visible. Female boundaries leave the claim of total override incomplete. So resistance must be moralized. Women defending sex-based spaces become aggressors. Parents asking for caution become extremists. Professionals who refuse to lie become threats. The contradiction is externalized so the doctrine can remain innocent. What it cannot resolve, it accuses.
“The result is not ordinary accommodation. It is organized unreality, maintained by euphemism, fear, and social pressure.”
At that point the familiar mechanism returns. The promised reconciliation between self and world fails to arrive in full. The body remains sexed. Other people keep noticing. Boundaries persist. Tradeoffs refuse to disappear. Rather than treating this as evidence that the doctrine asks too much of reality, the movement interprets the friction as proof that enemies remain active. A purified horizon is announced. Reality fails to comply. The gap is moralized. The search for the guilty begins.
The cost is now visible everywhere. Women lose the confidence to defend boundaries without being cast as moral offenders. Institutions lose the ability to speak plainly about sex without fear of sanction. Children are taught contested metaphysical claims as though they were settled truths. And a doctrine too unstable to secure assent through evidence alone increasingly relies on compulsion, euphemism, intimidation, and institutional pressure. What begins as a politics of identity becomes a politics of override.
The problem, then, is not simply that gender ideology is confused, though it often is. It is that confusion has been translated into policy, pedagogy, and compulsion. A doctrine built on unstable metaphysics now presses against some of the most basic social distinctions human beings have long relied on: male and female, mother and father, privacy and exposure, fairness and force, truth and courtesy. Because the doctrine cannot secure its claims through evidence or peaceful coexistence alone, it increasingly seeks protection through euphemism, intimidation, and institutional pressure. That is why the breakdown of female boundaries is not a side issue. It is one of the clearest signs that the ideology has moved from private belief to coercive social power.
When a movement cannot make reality yield, it begins by demanding silence and ends by punishing those who still name what they can see.
When an ideology cannot make reality yield, women are often told to bear the cost in silence.
Most political reform begins from a defect that can be named and a remedy that can be argued over. A law is unjust. A policy fails. An institution overreaches. The aim is improvement, not redemption. The point is to correct a problem within the permanent constraints of social life.
A different kind of politics begins elsewhere. It is driven less by a concrete vision of what a good society can actually sustain than by an intense certainty about what must be abolished: domination, exclusion, stigma, hierarchy, impurity. The ideal appears first not as a positive order with defined institutions, costs, limits, and tradeoffs, but as a purified horizon from which every visible moral stain has been removed.
That structure matters. A politics organized around what must disappear often possesses enormous critical energy but weak constructive discipline. It can identify contamination faster than it can describe settlement. It can mobilize outrage faster than it can specify completion. Because its standard is defined chiefly by negation, it struggles to say when the work is done. The result is a politics of permanent dissatisfaction: a style of moral and political life in which every remaining imperfection is read not as evidence of human limits, conflicting goods, or institutional friction, but as proof that the world is still guilty.
I will call this negative idealism. By that I mean a way of thinking in which the desired social order is known mainly by its absences rather than by its positive form. No oppression. No exclusion. No domination. No harm. No taint. Those aspirations can contain real moral insight. But as political endpoints they are unstable unless they are joined to harder questions. What institutions will carry this vision? What tradeoffs does it permit? What tensions are permanent? What counts as enough? When those questions go unanswered, negation begins to do more than criticize the present. It becomes a self-renewing engine of dissatisfaction.
The attraction is not mysterious. Negation is easier than construction. It is emotionally cleaner to denounce a stain than to design a settlement. Critique flatters the conscience. Construction burdens it. One allows people to inhabit moral clarity. The other forces them to reckon with scarcity, conflict, enforcement, and cost. It is easier to unite people around what they reject than around the terms on which they are prepared to live together.
“The structure is often recognizable: a purified horizon is announced, reality fails to comply, the gap is moralized, and the search for the guilty begins.”
That asymmetry gives this style of politics much of its force. It does not need to answer many hard questions in order to condemn domination, exclusion, or stigma. It can gather energy long before it can govern. It can speak in the language of moral emergency without yet saying what institutions would embody its ideal, what competing goods would have to be balanced, or what losses would remain even after reform. In that sense, it is potent precisely because it defers the moment when aspiration must submit to architecture.
Politics becomes serious at exactly that moment. It becomes serious when a moral vision is forced to move from diagnosis to design. What laws would reflect its principles? What institutional powers would be needed to enforce them? What rights would be protected when goods conflict? What exclusions would still remain, and on what grounds? What counts as enough? These are not secondary questions. They are the point at which aspiration is tested by the world it proposes to inhabit.
Here the negatively defined ideal often begins to wobble. The problem is not that it identifies nothing real. Many such projects do identify real injustices, real cruelties, and real failures of social order. The problem is that the ideal itself remains underdescribed. A society can reduce particular evils. It can mitigate harms. It can discipline abuses. But it cannot become a place with no stigma, no hierarchy, no domination, no friction, no exclusion, and no conflict unless words have ceased to mean what they usually mean. Human beings are finite. Goods compete. Institutions are blunt. Boundaries protect some things by restricting others. Social life is not clean.
Once that reality is faced, the burden of politics changes. The question is no longer how to abolish every trace of moral injury, but how to order a society under conditions where some tensions are permanent and some tradeoffs are unavoidable. That is the work negative idealism resists. It prefers purification to settlement. It treats compromise as contamination. It treats incompleteness not as a condition of human life, but as evidence that the moral task has been betrayed.
That is why dissatisfaction becomes self-renewing. An ideal that cannot be positively specified also cannot be clearly achieved. There is always another residue to expose, another hidden structure to name, another dissenter to classify as complicit, another demand that must now be treated as morally urgent because prior concessions have already established the principle. Partial victories do not calm the impulse. They often intensify it. Each gain becomes evidence that the horizon can be pressed farther still, and each remaining imperfection becomes proof that justice has been delayed by someone’s refusal, cowardice, or bad faith.
What this pattern often lacks is a serious category of tragedy. Not every persistent social imperfection survives because wicked people protect it. Some survive because resources are finite, institutions are crude, and goods that matter can come into conflict without any clean resolution. Freedom and equality can pull against each other. Inclusion and standards can pull against each other. Compassion and truth can pull against each other. Order has costs, but disorder has costs too. A politics that cannot admit such tensions will misread the world it is trying to govern.
The refusal to acknowledge limits distorts judgment. What should have been recognized as friction, tradeoff, or permanence is recoded as obstruction. What should have been understood as an unintended cost is treated as evidence of hidden malice. What should have been accepted as the unfinished character of social life is interpreted instead as proof that the work has been sabotaged. A movement that cannot say, “this good is real, but incomplete,” will be tempted to say, “this good has been denied because guilty people still stand in the way.”
This does not belong to one ideology alone. Variations of the pattern have appeared in revolutionary class politics, racial purification movements, and newer forms of moralized identity activism. The content differs. The vocabulary differs. The designated enemies differ. But the structure is often recognizable: a purified horizon is announced, reality fails to comply, the gap is moralized, and the search for the guilty begins.
That is the deeper political danger in negative idealism. It does not merely produce endless critique. It creates pressure to personalize failure. If the ideal is pure, and the ideal remains unrealized, then the fault must lie not in the ambition itself, nor in the constraints of reality, but in the people said to be resisting redemption. At that point dissatisfaction ceases to be diagnostic and becomes accusatory. The inability to perfect the world is no longer treated as a human condition. It is treated as evidence that enemies remain.
“A politics that knows the good chiefly as the removal of taint will have difficulty describing completion, accepting limits, or recognizing partial success.”
Ordinary politics depends on a harder and more chastened wisdom. It depends on the recognition that some injustices can be reduced without being abolished, that some conflicts must be managed rather than solved, and that settlement is often the proper goal where purification is impossible. A society that loses that wisdom becomes vulnerable to movements that know how to denounce every stain but do not know how to live with human limits. Such movements can speak with immense conviction. What they struggle to do is stop.
None of this means moral criticism is misplaced, or that reform should be timid, or that injustice is merely the name we give to unavoidable discomfort. It means something narrower and harder. A politics that knows the good chiefly as the removal of taint will have difficulty describing completion, accepting limits, or recognizing partial success. It will remain permanently dissatisfied because the horizon it serves is permanently receding. And once that condition sets in, the search for a better order can all too easily become a search for the guilty.
This is where the next question begins. If a movement cannot explain the gap between its ideal and reality through limits, tradeoffs, or tragedy, how will it explain that gap instead? Usually by finding someone to blame.
Glossary
Negative idealism: A way of thinking in which the desired social order is known mainly by what it seeks to abolish rather than by a clear positive account of what it can sustain.
Purified horizon: An imagined social condition from which moral stain has been removed, even though its institutions, limits, and tradeoffs remain vague.
Permanent dissatisfaction: The condition that arises when a movement cannot clearly define completion and so treats every remaining imperfection as proof that the work is unfinished.
Tragedy: The fact that some social tensions persist not because of sabotage or malice, but because goods conflict, resources are finite, and human beings are limited.
Settlement: A workable political order that manages conflict and tradeoffs without pretending to abolish them entirely.
When people say “trans rights,” they often smuggle in the conclusion before the argument has even begun. The phrase suggests a class of basic liberties being withheld from a minority population. In most liberal democracies, that is not the real dispute. Trans-identifying people already possess the same ordinary civil rights as everyone else: to vote, work, speak, worship, associate, and live free from assault or arbitrary exclusion. The real conflict begins when contested demands are framed as rights claims in order to place them beyond criticism.
That distinction matters. A right is not the same thing as a demand for access, validation, or institutional compliance. Female sports were not created out of prejudice, but out of recognition that sex differences matter in strength, speed, endurance, and physical risk. Female shelters, prisons, and changing rooms were built on the same logic. They exist because privacy, safety, fairness, and dignity are not imaginary goods. They are concrete protections, won through long struggle, and they do not cease to matter because a new vocabulary has been imposed on the debate.
Once this is seen clearly, much of the rhetoric falls apart. If a male-bodied person demands entry into a female space, the objection is not that he lacks human worth. It is that women have sex-based boundaries, and those boundaries exist for reasons. If a parent objects to gender ideology in schools, that is not the denial of anyone’s basic rights. It is the defense of parental authority in an area of profound moral and developmental consequence. If a citizen resists compelled pronouns or refuses to treat metaphysical claims about sex as binding fact, that is not violence. It is a refusal to surrender conscience and language to activist pressure.
“When one group’s ‘rights’ require another group to surrender privacy, fairness, or conscience, the conflict is no longer about equality. It is about power.”
This is where the phrase “trans rights” does its real work. It pre-loads the moral verdict. It makes disagreement sound like oppression before the argument has even begun. Once that framing is accepted, women’s boundaries become cruelty, parental caution becomes hatred, and democratic disagreement becomes abuse. But this is not a serious use of rights language. It is a way of insulating contested claims from scrutiny by wrapping them in the prestige of civil rights.
None of this means every accommodation is unreasonable, or that every dispute is zero-sum. Ordinary civility and equal treatment in public life are not difficult standards to defend. But when one group’s claimed “rights” require another group to surrender privacy, fairness, language, or the right to maintain sex-based boundaries, the conflict has moved beyond equal citizenship. It has become a struggle over whose moral framework will rule, and whose objections will be permitted to count.
That is why the language matters. “Trans rights” sounds like a plea for equal liberty. In many of the most contentious cases, it is something else: a demand that others yield, affirm, and rearrange long-standing social boundaries on command. When women refuse that erasure, or parents refuse that indoctrination, or citizens refuse that compelled speech, they are not violating rights. They are defending their own.
One of the more unsettling ideas in political history is that civilization may depend not only on teaching people virtue, but on steadily removing the people least capable of civilized life.
That is the thesis Peter Frost and Henry Harpending explore in Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. It cuts against the modern habit of explaining violent disorder almost entirely through environment, incentives, poverty, trauma, and weak institutions. Those things matter. But Frost and Harpending press a harder possibility: what if the long pacification of Western Europe was driven not only by stronger states and changing norms, but also by selection against the men most prone to chronic violence? (PubMed)
The historical pattern they point to is clear. In medieval Europe, homicide rates were vastly higher than in the modern West. Over time, as states consolidated their monopoly on violence and private vengeance receded, courts imposed the death penalty more systematically. Frost and Harpending argue that by the late Middle Ages, courts were condemning between 0.5 and 1.0 percent of all men of each generation to death, with perhaps as many more violent offenders dying at the scene of crimes or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, long-run homicide rates in Western Europe fell dramatically across the centuries. That broader decline is visible not only in their paper but in later summaries built from Manuel Eisner’s historical homicide datasets. (PubMed; Our World in Data)
That much already matters. Peace is not the natural resting state of a society. It is achieved. It is enforced. It is built through institutions capable of suppressing predation. The state does not merely administer order after the fact. It creates the conditions under which ordinary trust can exist. Without that floor, commerce, family stability, education, beauty, and freedom remain fragile.
But Frost and Harpending are interested in more than deterrence. Their stronger claim is that repeated removal of violent men from the breeding population may have altered the population itself over many generations. In plain language: if men most disposed to impulsive violence, predation, and chronic criminality are disproportionately executed, killed while offending, or otherwise prevented from reproducing, then over centuries one should expect some reduction in the prevalence of those tendencies. The state, in that account, does not just restrain violence from the outside. It may slowly reshape the human material with which the society reproduces itself. (PubMed)
That is the interesting part of the thesis, and the part that needs the cleanest handling. Frost and Harpending present it not as a settled master key to European history, but as a plausible co-factor alongside state formation, punishment, and cultural conditioning. Direct genomic confirmation remains absent. Other explanations place more weight on the state’s monopoly on violence, changing norms of self-control, declining honor culture, economic development, and improved policing. So the strongest honest claim is not that the paper has solved the history of European pacification. It is that it raises a serious possibility modern readers are strongly conditioned not to consider. (PubMed)
“Civilization is not sustained by kindness alone. It rests on a prior achievement: order strong enough to protect the peaceable from the predatory.”
Even with that caution in place, the paper still does useful work. It moves the discussion beyond the sterile split between “bad systems” and “bad individuals.” It suggests a layered civilizing process: institutions suppress violent conduct, norms change under the shelter of that order, and then, possibly, population traits shift over time as the most antisocial men are less likely to survive and reproduce. Culture and coercion do not sit in separate boxes here. They interact.
You do not have to buy every part of that model to see why it has force. A society does not begin from zero every generation. It inherits habits, expectations, institutions, and distributions of temperament formed over long stretches of time. If Western Europe became unusually low in interpersonal violence by world-historical standards, that happened through a civilizing process measured in centuries, not slogans. It was produced by a long narrowing of the space in which violent men could operate, flourish, and reproduce themselves socially.
That last phrase matters because reproduction here is not only biological. Violent men reproduce disorder culturally as well. They shape neighborhoods, train younger males, normalize intimidation, degrade family life, and turn predation into a viable strategy. Once that ecology is established, disorder becomes self-reinforcing. The reverse is also true. When a state reliably incapacitates the worst predators, peace can become self-reinforcing too.
That is part of why modern examples like El Salvador draw so much attention. The cases are not equivalent, and they do not prove Frost and Harpending’s genetic hypothesis. What they do show is older and simpler: when a state decisively removes a violent criminal stratum from daily circulation, social peace can return with surprising speed. The IMF reported in 2025 that El Salvador’s homicide rate fell from 54 per 100,000 in 2018 to 1.8 in 2024, and tied the improvement in security to stronger growth, tourism, remittances, and investor confidence. Human Rights Watch, from the opposite moral angle, also reports a significant decline in gang violence while warning that restricted data access and changes in homicide counting complicate full independent verification. (IMF; HRW; AP)
That is where a serious reader has to keep both truths in view at once. El Salvador does not demonstrate multi-generational selection. It demonstrates the older principle that predators must be removed from circulation if ordinary life is to recover. At the same time, Human Rights Watch documents arbitrary detention, torture, ill-treatment, and deaths in custody under the state of exception. The rights costs are real. The case does not prove that every harsh regime is wise. It proves that liberal societies often flatter themselves about how peace is maintained. (HRW)
This is not an argument for population engineering or collective guilt. It is an argument for recognizing that a small fraction of high-rate violent offenders can do outsized damage, and that civilization depends on their incapacitation. Modern liberal societies are comfortable discussing prevention, rehabilitation, and root causes. They are much less comfortable discussing the incorrigible. But any serious civilization needs a theory of that minority and the will to act on it long enough for the peaceable majority to live normally.
That, in the end, is the value of Frost and Harpending’s paper. Not that it offers a final key to history. Not that every part of its model has been settled beyond dispute. It matters because it reopens a forbidden question: how much of social peace depends not merely on teaching better values, but on the long-term suppression of the people least fit for peaceful life? Even readers who reject the paper’s stronger selection claim should still feel the pressure of that deeper point. Order is not self-generating. It has to be maintained against people who would dissolve it if allowed.
Modern states, at their best, answer that problem more humanely than medieval ones did. They use prisons rather than gallows. They rely on due process rather than spectacle. Good. They should. But the softer method does not abolish the harder principle. Social peace depends on removing certain people from the field, sometimes for a very long time.
That is the truth buried beneath the discomfort here. Civilization is not sustained by kindness alone. It rests on a prior achievement: order strong enough to protect the peaceable from the predatory. Everything higher comes after that.
References
Peter Frost and Henry C. Harpending, “Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification,” Evolutionary Psychology 13, no. 1 (2015). PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25748943/ ; journal page: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300114
International Monetary Fund, El Salvador: Request for Extended Arrangement Under the Extended Fund Facility (2025). IMF page: https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2025/058/article-A001-en.xml ; PDF: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/english/1slvea2025001-print-pdf.pdf
Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2026: El Salvador.” https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/el-salvador
Our World in Data, historical homicide materials drawing on Manuel Eisner’s data: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/homicide-rates-have-declined-dramatically-over-the-centuries and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-western-europe
Associated Press, “El Salvador closes 2024 with a record low number of homicides.” https://apnews.com/article/69384a8705267eaddd18dcd28a53465b
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto is hosting its 13th annual decolonizing conference from March 12 to 14, 2026. The title tells you plenty: Colonial Ruptures: Unmasking Ongoing Coloniality and Fostering Counter Insurgency, Resistance and Liberatory Possibilities. The event materials describe a gathering of scholars, activists, educators, artists, Elders, and community leaders committed to critical reflection, collective action, and “decolonial futures.” They speak of resisting “global capital extractivism and supremacist thinking,” rejecting “colonial binaries,” and advancing liberatory possibilities. This is not an outside caricature. It is the institution describing itself.
That matters because OISE is not a fringe collective borrowing university space for a weekend. It is one of the country’s most influential faculties of education, and CIARS is one of its public-facing centres. A conference like this does not define every part of OISE, but it does reveal a real moral and intellectual current inside one of Canada’s most important teacher-forming institutions. When an institution like that adopts the language of rupture, insurgency, resistance, and decolonial struggle, critics are entitled to ask a basic question: is this education in the ordinary civic sense, or ideological formation dressed in educational language?
To be fair, proponents would say the purpose is not social fragmentation but repair. They would say decolonizing education means confronting historical blind spots, taking Indigenous and anti-racist perspectives seriously, and widening the moral vocabulary of the classroom. Fine. That case should be acknowledged. But public language still matters. When a flagship faculty of education foregrounds coloniality, rupture, counter-insurgency, and resistance, it signals something more than curricular broadening. It signals an adversarial posture, even when softened by the language of care, solidarity, and reimagined futures.
That is the real concern. The problem is not that Canada’s injustices are being taught. A serious country should teach its history honestly. The problem is that teacher formation may be drifting toward a framework in which critique stops being a tool of civic improvement and becomes the default grammar through which the society itself is read. In theory, decolonial approaches and core educational goals can coexist. In practice, the public-facing language here suggests a hierarchy of concerns in which ideological critique increasingly outranks institutional competence, shared citizenship, and academic pluralism.
“What the public sees is not repair but drift: a professional class fluent in rupture and resistance while the country struggles to do ordinary things well.”
People notice that shift because they are already living inside a country under strain. Canada has struggled with weak productivity for years. The OECD’s 2025 survey says the outlook was worsened by trade uncertainty and tariffs, projects a decline in GDP from the second quarter of 2025 because of falling exports to the United States, and devotes sustained attention to the problem of raising business-sector productivity. Housing is worse. CMHC said in 2025 that restoring affordability to 2019 levels would require roughly 430,000 to 480,000 new housing units per year until 2035, about double the recent pace. That is not ideological spin. It is the national housing agency saying the country is not building nearly enough homes.
So people look around and see weak productivity, punishing housing costs, trade pressure, strained public capacity, and thinning civic confidence. Then they watch elite educational institutions pour moral energy into conferences on colonial rupture and liberatory counter-insurgency. The disconnect is hard to miss. Citizens who want functional schools, affordable homes, competent government, and some residue of common national identity are told, again and again, that the deeper task is deconstruction. Not reform. Not competence. Deconstruction.
That is one reason disillusionment has grown. The problem is not honest history. It is not the inclusion of neglected perspectives. The problem is that “decolonizing” has become, in practice, a legitimating language for ideological sorting. It shifts attention away from what institutions are for and toward the moral drama of permanent critique. In education, that is a serious danger. A teacher should be equipped to help students read, write, reason, deliberate, and live with others in a shared society. If the training environment increasingly teaches that the shared society itself is morally suspect at the root, the civic consequences are unlikely to be good.
Canada does not need amnesia. It does not need self-flattery either. But it also does not need a professional class trained to interpret the country chiefly through the grammar of oppression, rupture, and resistance. A society held together by trust, inheritance, and common rules cannot sustain indefinite elite suspicion toward its own foundations. If public institutions want to recover legitimacy, they will have to rediscover a language of citizenship, competence, pluralism, and shared belonging. Until then, more Canadians will keep feeling that the country they were told to love is being taught to despise itself.
References
OISE / CIARS conference page
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ciars/ciars-2026-xiii-decolonizing-conference-1
OISE / SJE newsletter page on the conference
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/sje/newsletter/march-2026/CIARS-newsletter-conference
OISE February 2026 conference notice
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/home/sje/newsletter/february-2026/CIARS-conference
CIARS centre page
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ciars
CMHC housing supply report page
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/housing-research/research-reports/accelerate-supply/canadas-housing-supply-shortages-a-new-framework
CMHC housing supply gap explainer
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/observer/2025/updating-canada-housing-supply-shortages-new-housing-supply-gap-estimates
CMHC news release on housing supply gaps
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2025/cmhc-releases-latest-housing-supply-gaps-report
OECD Economic Survey of Canada 2025
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269.html
OECD full report
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269/full-report.html
OECD chapter on raising business-sector productivity
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/05/oecd-economic-surveys-canada-2025_ee18a269/full-report/raising-business-sector-productivity_443bcd88.html
Glossary
Decolonizing
A broad academic and political term for efforts to challenge ideas, institutions, and practices seen as shaped by colonial power.
Coloniality
The claim that power structures formed under colonial rule can persist long after formal colonial administration ends.
Counter-insurgency
Traditionally, efforts to resist or suppress insurgent movements. In academic settings it is often used metaphorically, which is part of why it sounds so militant.
Colonial binaries
Simple oppositions said to come out of colonial thinking, such as colonizer/colonized or civilized/uncivilized.
Liberatory
A term used to describe ideas or practices aimed at freeing people from oppression or domination.
Extractivism
An economic model focused on intensive resource extraction, usually criticized for environmental damage or unequal power.
Academic pluralism
The principle that higher education should make room for genuine intellectual diversity rather than one dominant ideological framework.
Civic order
The shared rules, institutions, and habits that allow people with real differences to live together in one political community.
A University of Toronto Scarborough posting for an Assistant Professor in Computational Biology and Data Science looks like a standard academic hire. It isn’t. It is a restricted competition tied to a Canada Research Chair (CRC) nomination.
The posting requires applicants to self-identify as a member of one or more “designated groups” in their cover letter, namely women or gender minorities, racialized persons, Indigenous Peoples, or persons with disabilities. If you do not fit one of those categories, you are not eligible to apply. That is not an inference. It is in the posting.
That one detail captures the reality of modern equity administration in Canadian universities: what is framed as “removing barriers” often functions, in practice, as category-based exclusion.
This is not a rogue department. It is a federal program mechanism.
The university did not invent this framework on its own. The hiring restriction is attached to the Canada Research Chairs program, a federal initiative that allocates prestige and funding to institutions under defined rules. One major rule-set is the CRC equity framework, which includes population-based targets for the four designated groups. The program’s stated targets to be reached by the end of 2029 are: 50.9% women and gender equity-seeking groups, 22% racialized persons, 4.9% Indigenous Peoples, and 7.5% persons with disabilities.
Again, these are not vibes. They are published benchmarks tied to institutional plans and program governance.
The key point is the enforcement logic. Under the CRC’s settlement and enforcement framework, institutions that miss interim targets can face consequences that shape nominations and recruitment practices. In plain terms: the program can push institutions toward restricted competitions where eligibility is limited to designated groups.
So when you see a posting that excludes broad classes of Canadians from applying, it is not a one-off. It is a downstream product of rules that tie federal research prestige to demographic targets.
The problem is the normalization of identity gates
Defenders will say this is equity. They will argue that special measures are justified to counter historical bias and structural disadvantage. That is the argument, and it deserves to be stated fairly.
But there is a moral and civic cost to the method. When eligibility is restricted by identity categories, the institution is no longer selecting among all qualified candidates. It is selecting among those who clear an identity threshold first. That is not “equal opportunity.” It is a gate that sorts people before their work is even evaluated.
If you want a simple test for whether this is principled, reverse the identity labels. A posting that said “whites only” or “men only” would be condemned instantly, for good reason. You do not escape discrimination by flipping who benefits. You normalize discrimination by making it administratively routine.
A better standard
If Canada wants fairness in academic hiring, the standard should be straightforward: open eligibility, transparent criteria, and selection based on demonstrated excellence. If there are pipeline problems, fix the pipeline. Broaden recruitment, strengthen mentorship, reduce opaque networking advantages, and enforce accountable evaluation.
Do not solve bias by writing exclusions into job postings, then congratulating yourself for it. That approach trains young researchers to see institutions as political allocation machines rather than merit-seeking communities. And once that belief sets in, you do not get trust back easily.
References
1) U of T Scarborough job posting (Assistant Professor – Computational Biology and Data Science)
https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Scarborough-Assistant-Professor-Computational-Biology-and-Data-Science-ON/599939517/
2) Canada Research Chairs: “Establishing equity targets for 2021 to 2029”
https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-programme/equity-equite/targets-cibles-eng.aspx
3) CRC Program representation statistics (lists the population-based targets and deadline)
https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/about_us-a_notre_sujet/statistics-statistiques-eng.aspx
4) CRC: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion requirements and practices (overview, settlement context)
https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-programme/equity-equite/index-eng.aspx
5) CRC: 2021 Canadian Human Rights Settlement Agreement page (program framing and enforcement context)
https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-programme/equity-equite/2021_settlement-reglement-eng.aspx
6) House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research, Meeting No. 2 (witness panel includes Steven Pinker and Azim Shariff)
https://www.ourcommons.ca/documentviewer/en/45-1/SRSR/meeting-2/evidence
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