Identity Politics

Certainty and the independent mind

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Time, time again, it is said
We will hear, we will see
See it all-in his wisdom-hear
His truth will abound the land
This truth will abound the land
This state of independence shall be
Evanghelos Papathanassiou & Jon Anderson

We live in a time of anxiety – yet we long for certainty.

Not certainty born of wisdom, experience or careful reflection, but certainty manufactured and amplified by technologies, institutions and cultures that reward simplicity over complexity, outrage over understanding, and tribal loyalty over independent thought. Never before have we had access to so much information, yet rarely has there seemed so little patience for ambiguity. Every issue arrives pre-packaged with approved opinions. Every controversy demands allegiance. Every debate is framed as a struggle between competing moral absolutes.

The pressure to choose a side is relentless.

Whether the issue is climate change, immigration, Indigenous recognition, Israel and Palestine, Donald Trump, nationalism, globalisation, identity politics or any number of the controversies that dominate contemporary discourse, citizens in countries like ours are increasingly expected to sort themselves into camps and remain there. To question one’s own side is often viewed as disloyalty. To acknowledge complexity is mistaken for weakness. To recognise competing truths can invite accusations of moral cowardice. Nuance, once regarded as evidence of maturity, is frequently condemned as equivocation.

Yet there is a deeper paradox at work. We often confuse certainty with conviction and conviction with wisdom. We mistake confidence for competence, consistency for truth and, increasingly, certainty for authenticity itself. In an age of institutional distrust and social fragmentation, those who sound most certain are often assumed to be the most honest. The politician who never wavers appears authentic; the citizen who hesitates appears weak. Doubt becomes suspect. Reflection begins to look like indecision.

At the centre of this lies a curious development. The word independent has itself become strangely contested.

Traditionally, independence implied a particular intellectual virtue. It suggested someone who weighed evidence, resisted fashion, distrusted slogans and arrived at conclusions through reflection rather than tribal loyalty. The independent thinker might be right or wrong, but their independence lay in their willingness to examine competing arguments, question prevailing orthodoxies and tolerate ambiguity. Independence was not a destination but a habit of mind.

Today, however, independence is viewed through very different lenses.

For some, it has become shorthand for conspiracy, contrarianism or the performative scepticism of the “do your own research” cohort. The independent thinker is recast as someone marinating in YouTube rabbit holes, Facebook memes and endless distrust of expertise. Independence becomes less a mark of judgement than a rejection of established knowledge.

For others, independence has become suspect for an entirely different reason. In an age defined by existential moral struggles – Trumpism, Gaza, Ukraine, climate change, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, democratic decline and a host of other causes that demand urgent attention – the person who refuses to choose a side can appear not thoughtful but evasive. Independence comes to look less like intellectual courage than moral cowardice, a refusal to commit when commitment is required.

Yet both assumptions are flawed. The first mistakes independence for reflexive distrust. The second mistakes uncertainty for indifference.

There is a profound difference between refusing to think and refusing to join a tribe. There is an equally important difference between acknowledging complexity and lacking conviction. The independent mind is neither conspiratorial nor apathetic. It is not defined by permanent scepticism, nor by a determination to stand in the middle of every argument. Rather, it is characterised by a willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads, to question assumptions – one’s own particularly- and to resist the comforting certainties offered by political, ideological and cultural tribes.

The tragedy of our age is that such independence is increasingly difficult to sustain. The incentives run in the opposite direction. Algorithms reward outrage. Social media rewards certainty. Activist movements reward loyalty. Political parties reward conformity. Every institution, it seems, encourages us to choose a side and remain there. The space for doubt, reflection and intellectual humility narrows a little more each year.

Yet life rarely conforms to such neat divisions.

History certainly does not. Human beings are complicated creatures. Nations are complicated creations. Political problems are rarely solved by slogans and almost never by certainties. The ability to hold two truths in tension at the same time – to recognise that a cause may be just yet imperfect, that opponents may sometimes be right, that allies may sometimes be wrong, and that competing moral claims can coexist- is becoming one of the most valuable and least celebrated civic virtues.

This essay is, in part, a reflection on that disappearing virtue. It draws upon a lifetime spent marching, protesting, arguing, campaigning, reading, writing and observing. It traces a journey from the certainties of youth to a greater appreciation of complexity; from the exhilaration of causes to a deeper awareness of unintended consequences; from the satisfactions of belonging to the more demanding discipline of independent judgement. Along the way it explores the distinction between moral clarity and moral certainty, the phenomenon of moral capture, the seductive appeal of authenticity, the dangers of passionate intensity, and the democratic necessity of intellectual honesty.

Above all, it is a defence of the independent mind – not as a posture of detachment or superiority, but as a commitment to judgement, humility and the difficult task of remaining intellectually free in an age that increasingly rewards certainty and punishes doubt.

Certainty, conviction and the curse of complexity

One of the curiosities of life is discovering that certainty becomes less attractive just as complexity becomes more apparent. When I was young, certainty seemed abundant. The world appeared neatly divided into camps. There were causes to join, banners to carry, songs to sing, villains to oppose, journeys to be made and futures to build. The moral landscape looked reasonably well ordered. There was right and wrong, justice and injustice, progress and reaction. The task, it seemed, was simply to determine which side one was on and then commit oneself accordingly. It was an age of grand narratives and great causes, and like many of my generation I threw myself into them with enthusiasm.

I marched against the Hydrogen Bomb and I marched against America’s war in Vietnam. I sat down, occupied buildings, disrupted meetings and occasionally found myself caught up in the odd mêlée when passions overflowed into something more physical. Later in life, I marched for East Timor and Bougainville and against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. I marched for forests, gun laws and airport noise. I confronted politicians, ambushed ministers and once helped surprise a Prime Minister at an election campaign launch. Looking back, I regret very little of it. There is something admirable about citizens who care enough to leave the comfort of their homes and enter the public square. Democracies require dissent. They need people willing to challenge power, question orthodoxies and occasionally make nuisances of themselves.

What I have learned, however, is that participation and wisdom are not the same thing.

That may sound obvious, but it is a lesson often forgotten. One of the enduring pleasures of activism is the feeling that one is participating in history. There is camaraderie in a march, solidarity in a crowd, a sense of shared purpose that can be intoxicating. One feels part of something larger than oneself. There is also a certain vicarious satisfaction in having “done something”, a sense of moral exoneration that comes simply from having turned up. If the cause succeeds, one can share in the triumph. If it fails, one can at least claim to have been on the right side.

Yet causes and solutions are often very different things. It is relatively easy to identify a grievance. It is much harder to resolve it. It is relatively easy to denounce injustice. It is much harder to construct a better alternative. It is relatively easy to carry a placard demanding perfection. It is much harder to govern a society of imperfect human beings.

This is not cynicism. It is simply an observation born of watching decades of politics unfold.

In recent years I have often found myself asking a question that rarely receives much attention. When people tell us that Australia is a racist country, that we live on stolen land, that our prosperity was built on dispossession and suffering, what exactly follows from that? If those propositions are accepted, what practical obligations arise from them? What policies should be adopted? What institutions reformed? What outcomes are being sought? Likewise, when people demand sanctions against one country, boycotts against another, the cancellation of this person or that organisation, do they imagine governments can simply comply? Do they believe that governments, with all their responsibilities, alliances, competing obligations and access to information unavailable to the rest of us, can simply act on moral impulse alone?

These are not dismissive questions. They are political questions. Indeed, they are the questions politics exists to answer.

There is often a significant gap between diagnosis and prescription. Many activists are extremely good at identifying injustices, hypocrisies and failures. Sometimes they perform a valuable service in doing so. Every society needs its critics. Every society needs people willing to point at uncomfortable truths that others would rather ignore. Yet identifying a problem is only the beginning. The harder question is what comes next. What is the proposed destination? How do we get there from here? What are the costs, the risks and the unintended consequences? These are the questions that confront governments every day. The activist’s role is often to pull society’s attention towards an issue. The government’s role is to balance competing goods, competing interests and competing risks. The activist can demand the impossible. The government must live with the consequences.

It is here that I find myself increasingly preoccupied by the distinction between moral clarity and moral certainty. The two are frequently confused, but they are not the same thing. Moral clarity involves recognising that some things are plainly wrong. The deliberate murder of civilians is wrong. Racism is wrong. Antisemitism is wrong. Corruption is wrong. Authoritarianism is wrong. Human suffering matters regardless of who experiences it. These are moral judgements that do not require ideological membership cards. They do not depend on tribal affiliation.

Moral certainty is something different. It is the conviction that one’s own side possesses not merely some truth but all of it. It is the belief that complexity is merely an inconvenience, that ambiguity is weakness and that every disagreement can be explained by malice, ignorance or bad faith. Moral certainty seeks to simplify the world into a contest between heroes and villains. It transforms politics into a morality play. It demands allegiance. It leaves little room for contradiction.

The difficulty is that reality is full of contradictions.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that citizenship requires the ability to hold two truths in tension simultaneously. This is becoming increasingly difficult in a culture that rewards certainty and punishes complexity. Yet many of the most contentious issues of our age demand precisely this capacity. It is possible to believe that October 7 was an atrocity and that Gaza has suffered terribly. It is possible to oppose antisemitism while criticising aspects of Israeli government policy. It is possible to support Palestinian self-determination while condemning Hamas. It is possible to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians while also recognising the achievements of modern Australia. It is possible to support immigration while discussing its challenges. It is possible to care deeply about the environment while recognising economic realities. None of these positions should be controversial. Yet increasingly they are treated as evidence of indecision, weakness or insufficient commitment.

The pressure today is not merely to possess moral clarity but to display moral certainty.

The photograph at the head of this essay and those below are of the 1966 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Aldermaston March reaching central London. The writer was somewhere in its ranks.

Moral capture and the discomfort of doubt

This pressure is reinforced by a phenomenon I have come to think of as moral capture. Moral capture occurs when a cause becomes so central to a person’s identity that every question must be filtered through it. Facts cease to be facts in their own right. Instead they become assets, liabilities, weapons or threats depending on whether they support the cause. The question is no longer whether something is true. The question becomes whether acknowledging it helps or hinders the narrative.

At that point intellectual honesty begins to erode.

Intellectual honesty is one of the most demanding virtues because it requires us to acknowledge facts we would rather avoid. It requires us to recognise when our opponents are correct and when our allies are mistaken. It demands that we apply the same standards to friends and enemies alike. It obliges us to distinguish between evidence and preference, between analysis and advocacy. Most importantly, it requires us to accept that reality does not rearrange itself to accommodate our politics.

This is remarkably difficult. Human beings are tribal creatures. We enjoy belonging. We like certainty. We prefer the comfort of the crowd to the discomfort of doubt. The tribe offers affirmation. The slogan offers simplicity. The crowd offers solidarity. Complexity offers none of these things. Complexity is untidy. It frustrates neat conclusions. It introduces caveats where certainty seeks absolutes.

Modern technology has made this problem worse. The algorithms that increasingly shape our information environment are not designed to cultivate wisdom. They are designed to cultivate engagement. Outrage is engaging. Certainty is engaging. Nuance is not. A meme travels further than a history lesson. A slogan spreads faster than an argument. A false analogy often possesses more emotional power than a careful comparison. Every issue is compressed into a binary choice. Every debate becomes a loyalty test. The first question is no longer whether a statement is true but which side it helps.

The result is a culture increasingly dominated by assumptions, preconceptions and caricatures.

I think back sometimes to those old marches through London in the 1960s. As we walked along singing earnest and often dreadful protest songs, members of the public would call out from the footpaths. “Get a haircut!” they would shout. “Have a wash!” “Get a job!” The implication was always the same. Protesters were outsiders. Troublemakers. Layabouts. Dreamers disconnected from reality.

Years later, in Australia, at that Liberal Party campaign launch I mentioned above, a young Liberal supporter deployed exactly the same line. “Get a job!” she called to me. I reached into my pocket and handed her my business card – back then, I was chief accountant with a small “c” conservative publishing firm. The look on her face was priceless. For a brief moment the stereotype collapsed as an assumption collided with reality. The protester turned out not to be the caricature she had imagined.

The incident was trivial, but the lesson was not. Much of political discourse today consists of people arguing with caricatures rather than engaging with reality. We sort one another into categories and then proceed as though the categories explain everything. Activist. Conservative. Progressive. Populist. Elite. Nationalist. Globalist. Zionist. Anti-Zionist. The labels become substitutes for thought. The person disappears behind the category.

Yet reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate. Human beings are more complicated than their labels. Nations are more complicated than their histories. Political problems are more complicated than their slogans.

The perils of passionate intensity

As I reread these reflections, I find myself returning to two observations that have echoed through much of my adult life. The first is Yeats’s famous warning from The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Like many celebrated quotations, it is often invoked more than it is examined. It is frequently used to lament the supposed timidity of moderates or to argue that our age requires more conviction, more certainty and greater willingness to fight for what we believe. Yet that was not Yeats’ point. He was not celebrating passionate intensity. He was warning about it.

Writing amid the upheavals of the early twentieth century, Yeats was observing a world in which restraint, balance and judgement appeared to be collapsing while fanaticism, absolutism and ideological fervour were on the rise. The “passionate intensity” belonged not to wise statesmen or thoughtful citizens but to those who possessed an unshakeable belief in their own righteousness. It was a description of certainty untethered from humility.

History would soon provide abundant examples.

The twentieth century was not a century that suffered from a shortage of conviction. Fascists possessed conviction. Communists possessed conviction. Religious extremists possessed conviction. Nationalists, revolutionaries and racial supremacists possessed conviction. None lacked certainty about the correctness of their cause. None doubted that history, morality or destiny stood firmly on their side.

The problem was never too little certainty. The problem was too much of it.

That is why Yeats’ warning speaks so powerfully to our own age. We live once again in a time of passionate intensity. Political tribes, activist movements, media ecosystems and online communities all encourage us to embrace certainty. The incentives are obvious. Certainty is emotionally satisfying. It creates solidarity. It simplifies complexity. It identifies heroes and villains. It provides meaning, belonging and purpose. Above all, it relieves us of the burden of doubt.

Yet doubt, properly understood, is not a weakness. It is one of the disciplines that protects us from ourselves.

The second observation, one we have touched upon above, comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay collection, The Crack-Up, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Whether Fitzgerald consistently met his own standard is perhaps beside the point. The insight itself remains profound.

One might see Fitzgerald’s observation as a kind of antidote to Yeats’ warning. Where Yeats alerts us to the dangers of passionate intensity, Fitzgerald reminds us of the intellectual discipline required to resist it. The capacity to hold competing truths in tension, to acknowledge complexity without succumbing to paralysis, to recognise ambiguity without abandoning judgement—these are among the most important habits of mind a democratic citizen can possess.

Indeed, the independent mind is simply the refusal to surrender that capacity.

Not because all sides are equally right. Not because truth is unknowable. Not because every question has two equally valid answers. But because reality is usually larger, stranger and more contradictory than our tribes permit. Human beings are complicated. Nations are complicated. History is complicated. The slogans painted on our banners and the memes shared across our screens rarely capture more than a fragment of the truth.

Certainty and the attraction of  authenticity

One of the reasons certainty remains such a powerful force in politics is that people often confuse it with authenticity.

A recent observation about populist Australian politician Pauline Hanson captured something important. Her views have not substantially changed in thirty years, and that certainty about what she stands for forms part of her appeal to voters who feel alienated, anxious or ignored. Whether one agrees with Hanson or not is almost beside the point. The observation reveals something larger about the political culture in which we now live.

In times of uncertainty, certainty itself becomes politically valuable.

When people are struggling with rising costs, housing pressures, declining trust in institutions, geopolitical instability and the bewildering complexity of modern life, they are naturally drawn towards voices that appear confident and consistent. Human beings have always preferred clarity to ambiguity and confidence to hesitation. We are pattern-seeking creatures. Faced with confusion, we look for certainty. Faced with complexity, we look for simplicity.

The attraction is understandable.

What is often misunderstood, however, is that certainty and wisdom are not the same thing. Nor are certainty and conviction.

A politician may possess strong convictions while remaining open to evidence, criticism and changing circumstances. Indeed, that is probably what we should hope for in a democratic leader. Conviction involves knowing what one believes and being prepared to defend it. Certainty goes a step further. It is the belief that one cannot be wrong. Conviction allows room for learning. Certainty often does not.

Yet from a distance the two can look remarkably similar.

This is particularly true in an era when so much mainstream politics appears managerial, cautious and focus-grouped. Many contemporary politicians sound as though every sentence has been tested, refined and stripped of anything resembling genuine belief. They speak in carefully calibrated formulations designed not to offend any particular constituency. Such caution may be politically prudent, but it often creates an impression of evasiveness. Voters may not always agree with a politician who speaks plainly, but they often appreciate knowing where that politician stands.

People forgive a surprising amount in leaders they regard as authentic. What they struggle to forgive is the suspicion that their leaders believe one thing and say another.

This helps explain why figures as different as Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Nigel Farage have attracted passionate followings. Their supporters frequently describe them not as wise, sophisticated or nuanced, but as “authentic”. What supporters often mean by authenticity is consistency. They know what these figures believe. The message may be right or wrong, attractive or repellent, but it is recognisable.

That consistency becomes especially attractive when the political centre appears uncertain of itself.

The irony is that certainty often flourishes precisely when trust is declining. When institutions command confidence, when living standards are improving and when mainstream parties appear competent, certainty on the political fringes tends to have less appeal. When trust collapses, however, certainty becomes a scarce commodity. Voters begin searching for leaders who seem sure of themselves, even if the proposed solutions are simplistic or unrealistic.

This is where the independent mind must exercise caution.

The temptation is to mistake certainty for competence, confidence for wisdom and consistency for truth. History repeatedly warns against such assumptions. The twentieth century did not suffer from a shortage of certainty. Some of its greatest disasters were fuelled by people who were utterly convinced of their own righteousness. Fanatics are rarely troubled by doubt. Ideologues seldom lack confidence.

Yet there is an equal danger in the opposite direction. A politics devoid of conviction quickly descends into managerial drift. Citizens want leaders who possess principles. They want to know where their leaders stand. They want evidence that there is something beneath the polling, the slogans and the spin.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between conviction and uncertainty, but to distinguish conviction from certainty. Conviction says, “This is what I believe, based on the evidence and experience available to me.” Certainty says, “This is what I believe, and no evidence could persuade me otherwise.”

The difference may seem subtle, but it is profound.

After decades of marching, arguing, protesting, campaigning and often, tilting at windmills, I have not lost faith in causes. Nor have I become indifferent to injustice. If anything, experience has reinforced the importance of civic engagement and public participation. Democracies need citizens who care. They need people willing to stand up, speak out and occasionally make nuisances of themselves.

What experience has changed is my relationship with certainty.

I have become more wary of movements that claim exclusive possession of truth. More alert to false analogies, seductive slogans and the temptations of moral capture. More conscious of unintended consequences. More appreciative of intellectual honesty, especially when honesty requires acknowledging facts that complicate one’s preferred narrative. More willing to question my own side as rigorously as I question its opponents.

In short, I have become less impressed by passionate intensity and more interested in judgement.

The challenge of democratic citizenship is not to choose between conviction and doubt. It is to possess enough conviction to act and enough doubt to remain honest. It is to seek moral clarity without succumbing to moral certainty. It is to care deeply about injustice while resisting the temptation to reduce every issue to a morality play. It is to recognise that one’s opponents may occasionally possess a fragment of truth and that one’s allies may occasionally be mistaken.

That is not fence-sitting. It is not moral relativism. It is not indifference.

It is the difficult and often uncomfortable work of remaining intellectually free.

And perhaps that is the final lesson. The independent mind is not characterised by the absence of belief but by the refusal to surrender judgement. It is not a rejection of commitment but a resistance to dogma. It is conviction disciplined by humility, passion tempered by experience, and certainty held in check by the recognition that the world is almost always more complicated than it first appears.

A healthy democracy requires leaders with convictions strong enough to act and citizens thoughtful enough to question them. It requires moral clarity without moral absolutism, confidence without arrogance, and principle without dogma. Above all, it requires the capacity to recognise that knowing what one stands for is a virtue, but believing that one possesses all the answers is not.

That distinction lies at the heart of the independent mind. It is not an argument against commitment. It is an argument against the seductive comfort of certainty. For while certainty may be politically attractive, judgement remains the rarer and more valuable quality. Yeats warned us about passionate intensity. Fitzgerald reminded us of the discipline required to resist it. Between them lies a space that democratic societies desperately need to preserve: a place where conviction and humility coexist, where competing truths can be held in tension, where citizens remain free to think for themselves, and where wisdom begins not with certainty but with the humility to recognise that reality is usually far more complicated than the slogans painted on our banners. In an age increasingly defined by certainty, that may be the most radical act of all.

Judgement and the Limits of Certainty

At this point an obvious question arises. If certainty is so dangerous, why place such faith in judgement? Are we not equally vulnerable to error there as well?

After all, our judgement is shaped by the very things that make us human. It is influenced by our experiences, upbringing, education, culture, temperament, loyalties, fears, aspirations and prejudices. None of us approaches the world as a detached observer. We all carry assumptions into every argument. We all inhabit particular histories. We all see some things more clearly than other.

A former refugee may view immigration differently from someone whose family has lived in the same town for generations. A soldier may understand war differently from a pacifist. An Indigenous Australian may experience Australian history differently from a recent migrant. A Jew may hear echoes in antisemitism that others fail to recognise. A Palestinian may understand displacement in ways others cannot. These perspectives do not necessarily cancel one another out. Nor does any single perspective possess a monopoly on truth. Each illuminates part of the landscape while leaving other parts in shadow.

The independent mind does not somehow escape these influences. It merely becomes conscious of them.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of intellectual maturity is recognising that our own perspective is necessarily incomplete. We are all standing somewhere. We are all looking from a particular vantage point. The challenge is not to eliminate subjectivity – an impossible task – but to understand its influence upon us.

This is why judgement differs from certainty.

Certainty assumes that because we have reached a conclusion, the matter is settled. Judgement recognises that conclusions are always provisional, always vulnerable to new evidence, new experiences and new insights. Certainty seeks finality. Judgement remains open to revision.

In this sense, judgement is less about arriving at the right answer than about cultivating habits that reduce the likelihood of arriving at the wrong one. It requires a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves. Why do I believe this? What assumptions am I bringing to the issue? What evidence would change my mind? Am I applying the same standards to friends and enemies alike? What facts am I tempted to ignore because they complicate my preferred narrative?

These questions rarely provide certainty. They do, however, encourage honesty.

That honesty is particularly important because many of the most important questions confronting democratic societies involve genuine tensions rather than simple choices. Liberty and equality, security and freedom, justice and mercy, order and compassion, national interest and universal values – these are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are competing goods that must be balanced, negotiated and continually reassessed.

Politics, at its best, is not the elimination of such tensions but the management of them.

History offers countless reminders of the dangers of forgetting this. Time and again, the greatest political disasters have emerged not from excessive doubt but from excessive certainty. The fanatic, the ideologue and the zealot are rarely troubled by ambiguity. They know exactly where they stand. They possess answers for everything. They are convinced that history, morality and truth march in step behind them.

Yet history is littered with the wreckage left by people who were absolutely certain they were right.

This is where the independent mind returns to the insights of Yeats and Fitzgerald.

Yeats warned of those who are “full of passionate intensity,” not because conviction itself is dangerous, but because conviction unrestrained by humility can become fanaticism. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, celebrated the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Between those two observations lies a profound truth. Mature judgement is not confidence in one’s own infallibility. It is awareness of one’s own limitations.

The paradox is that the people with the best judgement are often those most conscious of how easily judgement can fail.

The more one learns about history, politics and human nature, the harder it becomes to believe that complex questions have simple answers. Good intentions can produce disastrous outcomes. Bad policies can emerge from noble motives. Opponents can occasionally be right. Allies can occasionally be wrong. Causes that deserve support can still produce unintended consequences. Human affairs are untidy in ways that slogans rarely acknowledge.

Yet none of this absolves us of responsibility. Citizens must still make choices. Governments must still govern. Voters must still vote. We cannot escape the necessity of judgement simply because certainty is unattainable.

The alternative to imperfect judgement is not objectivity. It is paralysis.

The challenge, therefore, is not to become certain of our judgement but to hold it provisionally: firmly enough to act, yet lightly enough to revise. To possess convictions without becoming imprisoned by them. To care deeply without succumbing to moral capture. To remain committed to principles while accepting that our understanding of them may always be incomplete.

Perhaps that is the most difficult discipline of all. Certainty says, “I know.” Judgement says, “This is my conclusion based upon the evidence and experience available to me, but I remain open to the possibility that I have missed something.”

The difference may appear subtle, yet it is immense. Certainty seeks closure. Judgement remains in conversation with reality.

And reality, unlike ideology, always has the last word.

In conclusion

Perhaps the independent mind has become one of the last unfashionable virtues.

It lacks the emotional satisfactions of certainty, the camaraderie of tribal belonging and the reassuring simplicity of slogans. It offers no guarantee of popularity and few opportunities for self-righteousness. More often than not, it leaves its advocate stranded between opposing camps, criticised by all sides for refusing to embrace the approved orthodoxy of any one of them. Yet it remains indispensable to the health of a democratic society because it asks something increasingly rare of us: that we think before we choose, question before we condemn, and understand before we judge.

A lifetime of political engagement has convinced me that neither protest nor power possesses a monopoly on wisdom. Activists can identify genuine injustices while proposing unworkable solutions; governments can understand practical realities while losing sight of moral obligations. Both require scrutiny. Both require criticism. Both require citizens willing to think beyond inherited narratives, ideological loyalties and partisan certainties. But this is not really an essay about protest, nor is it ultimately about independents in the electoral sense. It is about a disposition of mind: the determination to remain intellectually free in a culture that increasingly rewards conformity.

When we are young, we often imagine that the opposite of commitment is apathy. We assume that doubt is the enemy of conviction and that certainty is evidence of moral seriousness. Yet a lifetime of politics, protests, campaigns, victories, defeats, enthusiasms and disillusionments suggests something rather different. The real opposite of commitment is not apathy but dogma.

It is entirely possible to care passionately about injustice while resisting moral capture. It is possible to hold strong convictions while remaining open to evidence, criticism and changing circumstances. It is possible to stand for something without believing that one’s own side possesses a monopoly on virtue, wisdom or truth. Indeed, that may be what genuine conviction looks like. Conviction says, “This is what I believe.” Certainty says, “Nothing could persuade me otherwise.” The person who never questions themselves has ceased to serve a cause and has instead begun to worship it.

That, ultimately, is the thread running through this essay: a defence of judgement over certainty.

The phrase that recurs most often in my mind – and has featured prominently in this essay – is that notion of holding two truths at once. It sounds simple enough, yet it runs directly against the grain of contemporary political culture. Our public life increasingly rewards simplification. Algorithms prefer one truth. Activists often prefer one truth. Partisans almost always prefer one truth. The pressure is constant: choose a side, embrace a narrative, identify the villains and remain loyal to the script. Yet reality stubbornly resists such neat arrangements. Mature citizenship frequently requires us to live with competing realities, overlapping truths and unresolved tensions.

It is possible for a nation to be both admirable and flawed, for a people to be both victims and agents of their own history, for a cause to be just and yet produce harmful consequences, for an opponent to be right about one thing and wrong about another. As we have written, it is possible to condemn the atrocities of October 7 and mourn the suffering of Gaza. It is possible to oppose antisemitism while criticising Israeli policy, to support Palestinian aspirations while rejecting Hamas, to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians while recognising the achievements of modern Australia. These are not contradictions to be eliminated but tensions to be navigated. They require judgement rather than certainty, humility rather than righteousness.

I find myself returning, too, to WB Yeats and Scott F Fitzgerald, writers who have hovered over these reflections. Between them lies the intellectual territory occupied by the independent mind: conviction tempered by doubt, clarity balanced by complexity, belief disciplined by self-examination.

This is not because all sides are equally right, nor because truth is unknowable, nor because every argument lies somewhere in a comfortable middle ground. Rather, it is because reality is usually larger, stranger and more contradictory than our tribes permit. Human affairs do not fit neatly into ideological categories. History rarely conforms to our preferred narratives. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. Sincerity does not confer correctness. Authenticity does not guarantee wisdom. The world is full of competing goals, unintended consequences and moral ambiguities that cannot be resolved by slogans alone.

Perhaps that is the final irony. After decades of marching, arguing, protesting, campaigning, reading, writing and, more than occasionally, tilting at windmills, one does not necessarily end up believing in fewer causes. One does not become indifferent to injustice, retreat from public life or cease caring about the future. Rather, one becomes more wary of certainty, more conscious of unintended consequences, more alert to false analogies and seductive slogans, and more appreciative of the rare virtue of intellectual honesty.

One becomes more aware of the distinction between the high moral ground and the low moral ground disguised as the high moral ground. One becomes more sensitive to the dangers of moral capture, more sceptical of movements that demand conformity of thought, and more willing to question one’s own assumptions as rigorously as those of one’s opponents.

That is not a retreat from conviction. It is conviction disciplined by humility. It is passion tempered by experience. And experience, unlike ideology, has a habit of teaching modesty about what we know and caution about what we merely think we know.

In the end, that may be the independent mind’s greatest contribution to a democratic society. Not certainty, but judgement; not tribal loyalty, but intellectual honesty; not the comforting illusion of possessing all the answers, but the willingness to ask difficult questions, follow evidence wherever it leads, and hold competing truths in tension without surrendering either one’s principles or one’s capacity for doubt.

There is, however, one final irony. A defence of judgement over certainty should not be mistaken for confidence in one’s own judgement. We are all prisoners, to some degree, of our experiences, our histories, our loyalties and our blind spots. None of us sees the whole landscape. The independent mind is not distinguished by superior wisdom so much as by an awareness of its own limitations. It understands that every perspective illuminates some truths while obscuring others. Its task is therefore not to eliminate doubt but to live productively with it; not to achieve perfect objectivity but to remain open to correction. If certainty begins with the belief that one cannot be wrong, judgement begins with the recognition that one might be.

It is in that uneasy space between certainty and cynicism, between conviction and humility, between passion and judgement, that citizenship is at its most demanding and, perhaps, at its most valuable. Democracy ultimately depends not upon the certainty of its partisans but upon the wisdom of its citizens. Wisdom begins with the recognition that reality is usually more complicated than our slogans, larger than our causes, and far too important to be entrusted to those who claim to possess all the answers. In an age that increasingly rewards certainty, the independent mind remains one of the few places where freedom, judgement and humility can still coexist.

In That Howling Infinite, June 2026

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation. What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, including: Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work and Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty

Author’s Note

The essays published in In That Howling Infinite reflect a lifelong engagement with politics, history, culture and public affairs. They are not intended as manifestos, nor do they seek to recruit readers to a particular ideological camp. Rather, they represent an ongoing attempt to understand a complex world while resisting the temptations of certainty, tribalism and intellectual complacency.

The views expressed in this essay are not therefore confined to these pages. Rather, they form part of a broader body of work that range from Australian history and politic, the Middle East,  and Russian history to contemporary activism, political discourse, identity, memory and public morality. They are connected by a number of recurring themes.

Among these is the belief that genuine understanding requires intellectual honesty: the willingness to follow evidence even when it challenges our assumptions, complicates our preferred narratives or discomforts our own side. Another is the conviction that moral clarity and moral certainty are not the same thing. One may recognise injustice, condemn cruelty and defend human dignity without imagining that any individual, movement or ideology possesses a monopoly on truth.

These essays also reflect a persistent concern with what I have elsewhere called moral capture: the process by which a cause becomes so central to personal identity that facts are no longer evaluated on their merits but according to whether they support or undermine the cause itself. Closely related is the phenomenon of conditional empathy, where compassion is extended selectively—depending on the identity of victims or perpetrators—rather than consistently across human suffering. Both tendencies, I would argue, diminish our capacity for honest inquiry and weaken our ability to navigate complex moral questions.

Readers familiar with One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance will recognise another recurring principle: the necessity of holding two truths in tension at the same time. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is perhaps one of the clearest examples of a subject that resists simplistic narratives, demanding that we acknowledge competing histories, competing grievances and competing aspirations without reducing either side to caricature. Yet the same principle applies far beyond the Middle East. It applies equally to debates about national identity, immigration, colonial history, religion, social justice, populism and democratic governance.

Throughout these essays runs a scepticism towards slogans, false analogies and the seductive simplicity of binary thinking. The modern information environment rewards certainty, outrage and performative moral confidence. It is less hospitable to ambiguity, nuance and self-questioning. Yet history repeatedly suggests that the greatest errors are often committed not by those troubled by doubt but by those convinced they possess exclusive access to truth.

For that reason, the essays collected in In That Howling Infinite should be read not as declarations of certainty but as exercises in inquiry. They are attempts to ask difficult questions rather than provide final answers; to explore tensions rather than dissolve them; and to defend the increasingly unfashionable proposition that intellectual independence remains both possible and necessary.

If there is a single thread connecting them all, it is the belief that democratic citizenship requires more than passion and more than conviction. It requires judgement. It requires humility. It requires the capacity to hold competing truths in tension without surrendering either one’s principles or one’s willingness to question them.

In an age increasingly organised around tribes, narratives and certainties, that may be one of the most important responsibilities a citizen can undertake. The essays are offered in that spirit. They do not ask the reader to agree with every conclusion. They ask only that the questions remain open, the evidence be examined honestly, and the conversation continue. After all, the purpose of independent thought is not to win arguments, but to understand the world a little better than we did before.

 

Meet the Crybully, a hybrid of victim and victor

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments
https://spectator.com/article/meet-the-cry-bully-a-hideous-hybrid-of-victim-and-victor/

In April 2015, The Spectator published an essay by British columnist and provocateur Julie Burchill entitled Meet the Crybully: a hideous hybrid of victim and victor.

Her piece is essentially an early diagnosis of a cultural type that has since become almost ubiquitous: the person who combines aggression with performative victimhood. Her central argument is that modern society has blurred what used to be clearer moral categories. Once upon a time, she says, with typical Burchillian exaggeration and sardonic nostalgia, bullies bullied and cry-babies cried. They occupied different social roles. The novelty of contemporary culture is the emergence of people who do both simultaneously: attack others while claiming emotional persecution the instant they are challenged.

Hence the “Cry-Bully”: “a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper.”

The article’s tone is very much old-school polemical journalism – caustic, theatrical, gleefully impolite, full of tabloid-energy metaphors and comic overstatement. But beneath the mischief lies a recognisable argument about contemporary moral culture.

Her broader thesis is that modern media and politics increasingly reward this fusion of aggression and grievance. The crybully uses claims of hurt feelings, victimhood, or marginalisation not merely defensively but offensively – as a weapon to silence critics, claim moral superiority, or evade accountability. The crybully’s sense of victimhood actually intensifies their feeling of entitlement to lash out. “I am wounded; therefore, I may wound. “Burchill sees this dynamic everywhere: celebrity culture, social media, political activism, and ideological extremism.

What makes the article interesting in retrospect is that it appeared in 2015, just as social media outrage culture was becoming fully institutionalised. Burchill intuited early that public life was shifting toward a strange emotional economy where claims of harm could become instruments of power. Victimhood was no longer merely a condition deserving sympathy; it was becoming a source of status, leverage, and immunity.

This links directly to what In That Howling Infinite has discussed earlier about moral capture and conditional empathy. Once victimhood becomes morally sacralised, people compete for it. The crybully therefore occupies a privileged rhetorical position: simultaneously aggressor and protected class, prosecutor and plaintiff. They can strike while claiming defence.

Burchill’s article also reflects a broader generational irritation with what many saw as the rise of therapeutic language in public life – the migration of emotional fragility into politics, media, and everyday discourse. Her complaint is not that suffering is unreal, but that public culture increasingly incentivises people to dramatise injury while behaving atrociously themselves.

What she perhaps underplays – partly because satire flattens nuance by design – is that some of this phenomenon emerges from genuine historical grievances. Not all claims of harm are manipulative performances. Real discrimination, exclusion, and trauma exist. The difficulty, as we discussed, lies in distinguishing authentic vulnerability from weaponised vulnerability.

Still, her phrase has endured because it captured something many people recognised instinctively but lacked vocabulary for. The “crybully” is not simply hypocritical. Hypocrisy at least tacitly acknowledges standards. The crybully goes further: they transform their own grievance into moral permission. Their suffering – real, exaggerated, or entirely performative – becomes justification for intimidation, censorship, cruelty, or coercion.

In that sense, the essay was less a passing cultural jab than an early sketch of a defining personality type of the social-media-political age: emotionally exhibitionist, morally absolutist, permanently aggrieved, and often surprisingly ruthless beneath the tears

While  Burchill is widely credited with the term “cry-bully” through this article, she almost certainly did not invent it outright. Variations of the word had appeared earlier in American political and online discourse, usually as an informal insult describing someone who bullies others while presenting themselves as persecuted.

What Burchill did, however, was crystallise and mainstream it. Her article gave the term a memorable definition and a vivid cultural framing at precisely the moment when social-media outrage culture was exploding into mainstream politics and journalism. She turned a loose internet epithet into a recognisable social archetype.

That often happens with language. Orwell did not invent every political tendency he described in “Newspeak”; Tom Wolfe did not invent the social climbers of Radical Chic; but certain writers capture a phenomenon so cleanly that they become permanently associated with naming it. Burchill’s essay performed that function for “crybully.”

And the timing mattered. Around the mid-2010s, Western discourse was undergoing a marked shift toward what critics called “call-out culture,” “cancel culture,” or “performative victimhood.” Universities, media, and online activism increasingly framed disagreement through the language of harm, safety, and trauma. Burchill sensed – with her usual mixture of spite, wit, and instinctive cultural radar – that a new rhetorical type was emerging: people who could deploy the moral prestige of victimhood while behaving in domineering or vindictive ways themselves.

So while she probably didn’t coin the word ex nihilo, she gave it cultural traction and enduring shape. After Burchill, “crybully” stopped being just slang and became shorthand for a broader pathology of contemporary public life.

Let us look further …

The Age of the Crybully

One of the stranger developments of contemporary politics is how ubiquitous and indeed, iniquitous the phenomenon has become. It seems that almost everyone now claims to be oppressed, even – perhaps especially – those wielding considerable cultural, institutional, or social power. The old image of the bully was comparatively straightforward: the loudmouth in the schoolyard, the party apparatchik, the censorious cleric, the overmighty state. Bullies once tended to enjoy their own authority openly. They boasted of strength. They gloried in dominance.

The modern crybully is different. He (and increasingly she, they, and the algorithm itself) seeks not merely power but moral exemption. The crybully wishes simultaneously to strike and to claim injury, to silence while proclaiming persecution, to intimidate while insisting upon fragility. It is domination wrapped in the language of vulnerability. A clenched fist wearing a mitten.

The crybully is hardly confined to one ideology. In fact, one reason the term has gained traction is because nearly everyone recognises it in their opponents while remaining remarkably blind to it in themselves. The progressive activist who demands dissenting speakers be deplatformed because their words create “unsafe spaces”; the nationalist demagogue who attacks minorities while insisting his majority culture is “under siege”; the billionaire politician who controls vast media ecosystems while lamenting persecution by “elites”; the online influencer who launches mobs against critics before posting tearful videos about “harassment” – all belong to the same broad family. Different uniforms, same manoeuvre.

And manoeuvre is the right word, because crybullying is fundamentally strategic. Its psychological architecture resembles what psychologists term DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The aggressor denies wrongdoing, attacks critics, and then claims to be the real victim. The rhetorical reversal happens with such speed nowadays that public discourse resembles one of those old farces where everyone keeps running through different doors wearing each other’s hats.

We have discussed before how modern political culture increasingly rewards emotional performance over persuasion. In earlier democratic ideals – however imperfectly realised – argument involved evidence, logic, rhetoric, appeals to principle. One attempted to convince opponents or at least neutral observers. Now the primary objective is often moral positioning within one’s tribe. The goal is not to win the argument but to establish innocence and wickedness: saint and heretic, victim and oppressor.

Victimhood, in this moral economy, becomes a form of currency. Not always consciously, of course. Human beings naturally seek sympathy; suffering confers legitimacy. Historically, societies extended compassion toward the weak because weakness usually correlated with actual vulnerability. But modern media ecosystems – especially social media – have transformed victimhood into performative capital. Visibility accrues to outrage. Status accrues to grievance. Algorithms reward emotional escalation because fury and fear generate engagement. The crybully thrives in precisely such conditions.

One sees this particularly clearly in online political discourse. A person launches a vicious public attack on someone’s livelihood or reputation, encourages pile-ons, delights in humiliation –  and the instant they receive criticism in return, they present themselves as traumatised targets of abuse. The asymmetry is extraordinary. “Speech is violence,” they say while engaging in campaigns designed explicitly to destroy reputations, careers, and social standing. The old liberal distinction between disagreement and physical harm collapses conveniently whenever useful. Language becomes simultaneously powerless (“words don’t matter”) and apocalyptic (“this opinion endangers lives”), depending on tactical necessity.

There is, moreover, something deeply theatrical about the crybully phenomenon. Contemporary politics increasingly resembles moral melodrama rather than civic negotiation. Everyone must perform identity publicly; everyone must display emotional authenticity; everyone must signal wounds. Suffering itself becomes competitive. Oppression acquires a prestige hierarchy. Entire ideological ecosystems form around curating grievance narratives – national, racial, sexual, religious, historical – each group insisting its pain uniquely legitimises coercion against others.

And yet genuine suffering is real. This is where the matter becomes morally complicated. Many movements now dismissed as “crybullying” originated in legitimate grievances: racism, antisemitism, sectarianism, misogyny, homophobia, colonial dispossession, economic collapse. We have discussed this tension in relation to Israel-Palestine, where competing historical traumas often become mutually weaponised. Israelis invoke centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust; Palestinians invoke dispossession, occupation, and statelessness, encapsukred in al Nakba and al ‘Awda, The Return. Both narratives contain truth. Both can also become rhetorical shields against self-criticism. Trauma explains behaviour; it does not automatically justify it.

The same dynamic appears across Western politics. Parts of the progressive left rightly identified real injustices – discrimination, police abuses, structural inequalities – but sections of the movement gradually drifted toward moral absolutism, where disagreement itself became harm. Meanwhile parts of the populist right, reacting against elite condescension and cultural dislocation, developed their own grievance-industrial complex: every criticism became “censorship,” every electoral loss “theft,” every demographic change “replacement.” Each side increasingly mirrors the other while imagining itself uniquely virtuous.

This mirroring effect is one of the great ironies of the age. The activist denouncing “fascism” adopts authoritarian tactics. The anti-authoritarian populist demands strongman rule. The defender of free speech cheers censorship when directed at enemies. The champion of tolerance displays extraordinary intolerance. The crybully exists because modern political tribes often derive identity less from consistent principles than from emotional narratives of injury.

The media environment intensifies all this. Traditional journalism, for all its flaws, once imposed certain filters: editorial standards, institutional caution, reputational constraints. Social media dissolved many of these barriers. Outrage now travels instantly, context arrives later if at all, and emotional certainty routinely overwhelms factual ambiguity. A claim of victimhood can mobilise millions before verification occurs. By the time nuance appears, the reputational execution has often already taken place.

One might call this the democratisation of accusation.

The result is a culture simultaneously hyper-moralised and strangely amoral. People speak incessantly about empathy while displaying astonishing cruelty toward designated enemies. Public shaming becomes entertainment. Humiliation becomes activism. Entire careers now revolve around ritual denunciation. The crybully does not merely seek victory but emotional submission: the confession, the apology, the compelled affirmation. Medieval heresy trials have returned wearing progressive HR language and algorithmic amplification. Torquemada with a podcast.

Nor is this confined to politics. Corporate culture absorbed the same instincts. Universities too. Institutions increasingly govern through therapeutic language –  “harm,” “safety,” “trauma,” “belonging” –  while exercising bureaucratic coercion beneath the soft vocabulary: power functioning most effectively when disguised as care.

Yet the phenomenon also reflects a broader civilisational anxiety. Modern Western societies, particularly affluent ones, have become psychologically uncomfortable with conflict itself. We possess immense material comfort yet display extraordinary emotional fragility. Ordinary disagreement is recast as existential threat. Politics becomes therapy; therapy becomes politics. The language of clinical distress migrates into every domain of life. One no longer simply dislikes a viewpoint; one feels “unsafe.” The crybully emerges naturally from cultures where emotional discomfort is moralised and resilience subtly pathologised.

But there is another side to this story. The rise of the crybully also reflects declining trust. People increasingly feel unheard by institutions, alienated from elites, suspicious of media, uncertain about the future. In such environments, grievance becomes identity because shared civic narratives weaken. If citizens no longer believe institutions will treat them fairly, they turn to emotional mobilisation instead. The loudest victim often wins attention. Politics becomes less about governing plural societies than about competing claims to injury.

The danger is obvious. A society where everyone claims victimhood eventually loses the capacity to distinguish between genuine oppression and manipulative performance. Real suffering becomes trivialised through inflation. If all disagreements are violence, then actual violence disappears into semantic fog. Worse still, reciprocal crybullying creates permanent escalation: each faction justifies its aggression as defensive retaliation against the aggression of others. Everyone becomes both persecutor and persecuted in their own mythology.

History offers grim precedents. Ethno-national conflicts frequently evolve through precisely such reciprocal narratives of victimhood. Each atrocity becomes justification for the next. Every side remembers its own dead more vividly than the other’s. The Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Levant, Rwanda – all contain examples of communities simultaneously capable of genuine suffering and genuine cruelty while insisting exclusively upon the former.

What, then, is the alternative?

Perhaps merely recovering the old unfashionable liberal virtues: proportion, reciprocity, scepticism toward one’s own tribe, the ability to distinguish discomfort from oppression, disagreement from violence, criticism from persecution. Perhaps also recovering a thicker skin. Democracies require citizens capable of enduring offence without demanding censorship and capable of exercising power without theatrically claiming helplessness.

Most importantly, they require moral consistency. If intimidation is wrong, it remains wrong when committed by one’s own side. If free speech matters, it matters for opponents too. If empathy is a virtue, it cannot operate tribally alone.

The crybully thrives where morality becomes entirely performative – where appearing wounded matters more than behaving decently. That may be why the phenomenon feels so omnipresent today. We inhabit cultures saturated with public displays of virtue but increasingly uncertain about virtue itself.

And so the age oscillates endlessly between aggression and grievance, outrage and self-pity, accusation and lamentation: societies shouting at one another in the language of trauma while quietly competing for power underneath. The schoolyard bully has not disappeared after all. He has merely discovered the therapeutic vocabulary of the guidance counsellor.

The Morality of the Crybully

What makes the crybully phenomenon so corrosive is not merely hypocrisy –  hypocrisy is ancient, almost a constant of political life – but the way it corrodes the very language by which societies distinguish justice from manipulation. In our discussions about moral capture, conditional empathy, intellectual honesty, and the strange contest between the “high” and “low” moral ground, the same pattern kept resurfacing like a half-visible reef beneath modern discourse.

Moral capture occurs when a person or movement becomes so emotionally or ideologically invested in a cause that the cause itself ceases to be examined critically. The tribe absorbs the conscience. One no longer asks, Is this true? Is this proportionate? Is this humane? One asks only: Whom does this help? Whom does this hurt? Morality becomes instrumental rather than principled. At that point, the crybully emerges almost naturally, because any criticism of the cause is experienced not as disagreement but as sacrilege.

And once criticism becomes sacrilege, coercion begins to feel virtuous.

This is where conditional empathy enters the story. We have spoken often about the peculiar narrowing of compassion in modern ideological life: how suffering increasingly counts only when experienced by the “correct” people within the “correct” narrative framework. The dead child in Gaza evokes tears; the murdered Israeli family becomes an inconvenient footnote. Or the reverse: outrage at Islamist terror paired with indifference toward flattened neighbourhoods and stateless civilians. Empathy becomes selective, curated, tribalised. One grieves not for human beings but for symbols.

The crybully weaponises precisely this asymmetry. “Your empathy for them proves your hostility toward us.” Compassion itself becomes grounds for accusation. Nuance becomes betrayal. And so discourse collapses into competitive grievance theatre, each side insisting exclusively upon its own wounds while minimising, rationalising, or outright mocking those of others.

Intellectual honesty is the first casualty.

Not because people necessarily become consciously deceitful, though some do, but because the emotional rewards for self-deception become overwhelming. It is psychologically comforting to believe one’s tribe uniquely moral, uniquely endangered, uniquely justified. The crybully mentality depends upon this self-absolution. One’s own aggression is always defensive; one’s own censorship is protection; one’s own intimidation is accountability. Every act becomes morally laundered through claimed victimhood.

This is why so much contemporary rhetoric feels simultaneously hysterical and curiously hollow. The language of existential peril is deployed constantly, often by people occupying highly privileged institutional positions. Editors, celebrities, politicians, academics, influencers — people with immense platforms and cultural authority — present themselves as besieged dissidents while actively policing dissent around them. The paradox would be comic were it not so socially damaging.

And this returns us to the distinction we discussed between the high and low moral ground.

The low moral ground is simple: naked tribalism, explicit hatred, open authoritarianism. History recognises it easily enough. The high moral ground is more dangerous precisely because it cloaks itself in virtue. The crybully insists not merely that opponents are wrong, but that suppressing them is itself an act of compassion. The language softens while the coercion hardens. One need not burn books if one can socially anathematise their authors. One need not imprison dissenters if one can algorithmically erase them, professionally ruin them, or morally quarantine them.

The old tyrannies often announced themselves with drums and banners. The new ones frequently arrive wrapped in therapeutic language, carrying diversity statements and safeguarding protocols.

That does not mean all claims of harm are fraudulent, nor all activism manipulative. Far from it. There are real injustices, real exclusions, real cruelties. The difficulty lies precisely in disentangling authentic suffering from performative victimhood — and in resisting the temptation to excuse cruelty merely because it is rhetorically framed as justice.

This demands intellectual consistency, which is perhaps the rarest civic virtue of all. It requires the uncomfortable ability to apply one’s standards equally to allies and enemies alike. To condemn dehumanisation even when committed by one’s own side. To acknowledge suffering without immediately converting it into political currency. To resist the narcotic pleasures of outrage and self-righteousness.

Because ultimately the crybully phenomenon reveals something larger about our civilisation: a profound confusion between moral status and moral behaviour.

To suffer does not automatically make one virtuous. To belong to a historically wronged group does not sanctify every action. Nor does possessing power automatically invalidate every grievance. Human beings remain morally complicated creatures, capable of both victimhood and cruelty, often simultaneously. History’s most unsettling lesson may be that the oppressed do not become angels when circumstances change; they become human beings with power.

And perhaps that is the hardest truth modern politics struggles to admit. We prefer melodrama to ambiguity. Saints and monsters are easier to process than flawed people navigating impossible histories. Yet once societies lose the capacity for moral complexity, they drift toward permanent mutual denunciation, each faction simultaneously convinced of its innocence and its persecution.

The crybully is therefore not merely an irritating personality type of the social media age. It is the symbolic citizen of a culture that increasingly confuses feeling wounded with being right, visibility with virtue, and accusation with truth.

A civilisation cannot survive indefinitely on those terms. Eventually reality intrudes. Actions still have consequences. Power remains power even when exercised tearfully. And no amount of therapeutic vocabulary can entirely conceal the ancient human temptation underneath it all: to dominate while claiming righteousness, to wound while insisting one is wounded, to occupy both the throne and the scaffold at once.

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation. What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, including:: Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work and Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty 

Postscript 1. The biggest Crybully of them all?

The term “crybully” usually describes someone who presents themselves as a victim while simultaneously wielding considerable power, attacking opponents, or intimidating critics. Donald Trump is often described that way by critics because his political style combines grievance and dominance in almost theatrical tandem: he portrays himself as persecuted by “elites,” the media, courts, universities, bureaucrats, foreign allies, even election systems – while also projecting strength, retaliation, and triumph.

What makes the label stick for many observers is the contrast. He is, after all, one of the most powerful and protected figures on Earth: billionaire celebrity, former president, political movement unto himself. Yet much of his rhetoric is built around betrayal and victimhood. The emotional engine of Trumpism is often not “we rule,” but “they are cheating us.” That sense of embattlement is politically potent because it invites supporters to feel both aggrieved and righteous simultaneously.

But the phenomenon is hardly unique to Trump, and that is where things become culturally interesting rather than merely partisan. Modern politics across the spectrum increasingly rewards performative vulnerability married to aggression. Institutions, movements, and leaders now compete not just for power but for moral victim status. The language of injury has become a form of authority. In that sense, Trump may be less an aberration than the loudest, most gifted practitioner of a broader age of grievance politics — part WWE heel, part populist tribune, part tabloid Jeremiah railing against the storm while selling tickets to it.

The image itself captures that familiar Trumpian mode: mouth open mid-declaration, fingers pinched in emphasis, occupying the room entirely. It is performance as politics, politics as performance – the old television instinct that attention is oxygen. Whether one sees him as a demagogue, a showman, a symptom, or a political genius often depends on whether one thinks the grievance which he channels is fabricated, exaggerated, or fundamentally real.

Postscript 2. Outside looking in

One of the more curious spectacles of contemporary politics is the rise of the insider who markets himself as an outsider: the millionaire broadcaster presenting as a battler, the nationally syndicated columnist lamenting that “people like me aren’t allowed to speak”, the television panellist with a nightly platform insisting he is being silenced by “the elites”. It is a performance now so common that it barely registers as contradiction.

In Australia, this phenomenon is especially visible in parts of the Sky News ecosystem – Rowan Dean, the opinionated, contrarian editor of the Spectator Australia portal and host of Sky News’ Outsiders programme, being an obvious example – where commentators cast themselves as tribunes of the “forgotten people”, channelling the language of suburban grievance and cultural dispossession while operating from within one of the country’s most powerful media networks. The rhetorical trick is not new. What is new is the intensity with which institutional power now dresses itself in the clothes of marginalisation.

This is where the idea of the “crybully” becomes useful. The crybully combines aggression with perpetual claims of victimhood: attacking, denouncing, ridiculing, demanding consequences for opponents — while simultaneously insisting they are the ones under siege. They are not merely critics of power; they are often participants in it, sometimes beneficiaries of it, but they derive moral energy from presenting themselves as embattled dissidents standing against a corrupt orthodoxy.

The irony, of course, is that many of these figures possess enormous cultural reach. They dominate newspaper columns, television panels, radio slots, publishing circuits, and increasingly lucrative social-media ecosystems built on outrage and resentment. Yet every criticism becomes “censorship”; every disagreement, proof of persecution; every loss of cultural dominance, evidence of oppression.

There is also something profoundly theatrical about it. The old conservative self-image was one of authority, stewardship, and institutional confidence. The new populist pose prefers the aesthetics of rebellion: the leather jacket of anti-establishment defiance worn over the tailored suit of establishment access. The outsider identity becomes less a sociological reality than a branding exercise.

And so we arrive at the peculiar modern spectacle: insiders cosplaying as insurgents, powerful voices speaking endlessly about their powerlessness, media elites railing nightly against “the media elite” – a hall of mirrors in which grievance itself becomes both commodity and shield.  For more on this subject in In That Howling Infinite, see: Outside Looking In. Although written ten years ago, it remains relevant.

Rowan Deane

Postscript 3. Solid Rock

I am reminded of the Dire Straits song Solid Rock, featured on their 1980 album Making Movies: “When you point your finger ’cause your plan fell through / You got three more fingers pointing back at you “Written by Mark Knopfler, it focuses on themes of accountability, authenticity, and avoiding illusions. It’s a critique of blaming others for personal failures, highlighting that when you blame someone else, the majority of your hand is actually pointing back at yourself.

It is relevant here insofar as it reminds us in its lyrical simplicity about accountability and of how The crybully mentality depends upon the permanent externalisation of blame. Failure is always someone else’s oppression; criticism is persecution; consequences are violence; disagreement is abuse. The self becomes morally untouchable because it is permanently aggrieved. But, as Solid Rock suggests, reality is less accommodating. The line quoted is almost proverbial in its clarity, yet it contains an older moral wisdom modern culture increasingly resists: the possibility that one’s own failures, excesses, delusions, or moral compromises might actually contribute to one’s predicament.

That is precisely what ideological movements captured by grievance struggle to admit. Every setback becomes evidence of conspiracy or persecution rather than occasion for introspection. We see it across the spectrum. Progressives unable to understand why ordinary voters recoil from moral hectoring conclude the electorate is bigoted or “misinformed.” Populists unable to sustain coherent governance blame “deep states,” traitors, immigrants, globalists, or cultural saboteurs. Each side points furiously outward while refusing the quieter, more difficult question: what if part of the problem is us?

Knopfler’s lyric also matters because it quietly rejects the seduction of moral theatre. Making Movies is full of people constructing performances, illusions, romantic myths, cinematic versions of themselves. The crybully does something similar politically: they curate a self-image of perpetual innocence. Yet the hand itself betrays the illusion. Three fingers point back. Human beings remain implicated in their own stories.

That idea has become oddly countercultural. Contemporary discourse rewards certainty, not self-scrutiny. To hesitate, to admit contradiction, to acknowledge one’s tribe capable of cruelty – these are treated as weaknesses. Yet intellectual honesty begins precisely there. We discussed earlier the distinction between the high and low moral ground: the low ground brutalises openly, while the high ground often disguises domination as virtue. Knopfler’s line punctures both forms. It reminds us that moral seriousness begins not with denunciation but with reflection.

There is almost something biblical about it. Before condemning others, examine yourself. Remove the beam from your own eye before pointing out the speck in another’s. The old religious traditions understood a truth modern politics often forgets: self-righteousness is one of the most dangerous intoxicants because it makes cruelty feel deserved.

And perhaps that is why the line lingers. It is not merely a rebuke to blame-shifting; it is a warning against the human tendency to transform disappointment into accusation. The crybully points outward incessantly because looking inward is painful. Self-examination threatens the entire emotional architecture of victimhood. If even part of the responsibility lies within, then the performance collapses.

Knopfler, characteristically, says it with understated elegance rather than ideological bombast. No manifesto, no therapeutic jargon, no grand theory of oppression – just a hand, a finger, and the uncomfortable geometry of blame. Three fingers pointing back. An old truth hiding in plain sight, solid as rock.