We’ve reached such a dark moment.

It’s so tempting to be flippant about this, to just kind of brush it off as stupidity, but honestly I find it terrifying on multiple levels.

The gross distortion of facts. The deployment of manipulative, inflated language. The worshipping of “the economy” over actual lives. The total disregard for others. The appalling abuse of history.

But most of all the elevation of individual, self-centred “liberty” to the level of death cult, by comparison to which *any* act of altruism or ethical behaviour is in fact fascist and dangerous.

And none of it is actually genuinely believed, i don’t think. All of it is in the service of self-aggrandisement, opportunism and brand-sustainment.

It’s so obvious that this is where the bullshit discourse around “virtue signalling”, which encouraged all ethical principles to be distrusted, would end up: in the literal refusal to safeguard the lives of others.

It makes a kind of awful sense in a way. The logical end point of opinion culture is that columnists will literally be the death of us.

When everything is a debate even life is a matter of opinion.

You know it’s so interesting to me that we ended up with such a calcified discourse around “virtue signalling” and “performative wokeness” or whatever. What I see is a universally accepted professional performative cynicism which prides itself on positing compassion as weakness.

Within that discourse a world in which people not only care about each other but take steps to embody that care in their actions is regarded as stale and moribund at best and downright tyrannical at worst.

But it’s obvious why that moral reversal has to take place: to obscure the utter moral bankruptcy of professionalising and monetising callousness.

Also of note I think is just how much discussion of the supposed breakdown in the discourse centres around nebulous entities like “twitter” and “the web”, which are conveniently hard to locate and boundary, when some of the very worst stuff going is in broadsheet newspapers.

Opinion culture is cruelty culture and cruelty culture is death culture and all of it is presented as entertainment.

Except of course until the hate-click payment model collapses and then suddenly it’s not entertainment at all but a vital and esteemed civic service for which, unless we want to witness the collapse of civilised society, we must all pay.