On speaking your mind

And performative activism

There can be no truly humane society that is alienated from the act of sincere speech. The only remedy for a society sick of lies and manipulation is sincerity—speaking the truth quietly but clearly.

Professor Mattias Desmet, Clinical Psychologist and author of the bestselling book

The Psychology of Totalitarianism

I wish I could say I know how to do that thing of speaking truth quietly and clearly. I tend to get carried away, come across as intense and even scary. Or I’m not sure what the truth is, so I keep quiet. I’m not good enough to pull off fake sincerity, as activists, paid by shadowy interests, routinely do. And Politicians, not to mention ‘reality’ TV stars.

Fake Sincerity began with this abomination called ‘reality TV’ because it first taught us that you can be ‘real’ in a totally fake, performative way. While everyone knows it’s totally unreal, we nonetheless buy into the delusion of authenticity. It had a profound effect on the culture. Everyone learned that you can perform a self that you don’t have. Especially young women proved susceptible. The blurring of lines between the real and the unreal has turned politics and especially its extremist branch, activism, into a highly staged theatre of the absurd.

Even the august Oxford Union thinks that ‘This House Believes Modern Youth Activism is Primarily Performative’, and held a ‘debate’ about it which, of course, was primarily performative. I take performative to mean insincere, inauthentic and fake. We’re certainly rife with activism of all kinds so forgive me if I say This is the Age of Performance and woe to those looking for truth or meaning in the public sphere. I might look askance at people waving Palestinian flags in our streets while totally ignoring Queen Victoria at the Victoria Day Parade. Others don’t even notice. It’s very confusing and nobody really understands what all this means. Like Louis the Sixteenth, the Sun King, often blamed for the French Revolution, we’re not really getting the message. This is dangerous: historians say that

Louis found himself in a situation if not beyond his control then certainly beyond his understanding.

That’s it exactly. Like him, we’re unable to read the signs, and often misinterpret what we’re looking at. Need I remind you that Louis lost his head. He thought that the revolutionaries couldn’t possibly mean it. Unlike him, we imagine we understand what’s happening in an age of carefully managed lies, but we don’t engage. It’s all much too complicated! And we don’t want to lose our heads, not even metaphorically.

Knowing this, I watch myself shy away whenever the opportunity for real disagreement arises. Like most of us, I have a deplorable need to be accepted rather than stared at with horror. Or argued with and shouted down. All of these are possible reactions to the views I truly harbour. They’re not welcome, not in this town brimming with far left ‘progressives’ and utopians. Consequently, I struggle with alienation. I wake up every day wishing I was living in a society less twitchy and censorious. And then I recall that it wasn’t like this in the ‘before time’.

Before the Pandemic, that is. That dystopian event was the end of free speech in the west. Since then, hardly anyone dares to ‘speak their mind’ in Canada. Like poor King Louis, we lack the judgement and wisdom to understand what we’re witnessing. What we witnessed. And I believe we lost our heads entirely.

Living in the Now Time, we carefully monitor what we say. We’re terrified of being labeled ‘racist’ or worse, a Trump follower. An anti-vaxxer. If you dare to criticize the bizarre situation in BC where a tiny aboriginal minority rules what our so-called Premier does or does not do, you are clearly racist. So instead of discussing what has become a dystopian situation regarding the legal rights of people who pay their mortgages but might be forced out of their homes because a tribal elder says so, we basically shut up. According to Desmet, this has devastating emotional consequences.

Extreme alienation is the first stage of Mass Formation. According to Desmet, whenever people no longer feel able to ‘speak their mind’ they become lonely, cut off from their fellow humans and when people are lonely, they start looking for something to replace the human connection they crave. They start embracing lies, propaganda, and distortions emanating from an ‘official source’. They tend to fall headlong into the arms of a charismatic leader.

For example, in Canada, a disturbing number of people believe that Mr Carney is a man they can trust, someone who will save this country from a decade of wrong headed decisions under the Liberals. Of which he ostensibly is one. Of course, that is a lie. Everything about this man is a lie, a mask, a distortion, a calculated performance, but Carney is riding high in the polls. This arch globalist and Net Zero Zealot has duped Canadians with a brilliant performance of false authenticity. They are buying his carefully crafted performance of gravitas and caring for this country. It’s maddening to watch. And I dare say this is a sign that we’re already developing another Mass Formation in Canada. Maybe this country with its crazy quilt of people from very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds breeds a lack of trust and connection, making us more vulnerable to Mass Formations than more cohesive societies.

Preferring willful blindness to confronting unpalatable truths, is rumored to be a Canadian Affliction. But I believe it’s a universal reaction to the avalanche of disinformation that empties over our heads daily, like a bucket of slop for pigs. Make no mistake, we’re the pigs getting fat on propaganda, finely tuned BS and outright lies. Real information, useful insights, truth—that’s something you must search out and laboriously discover for yourself. It’s like finding gold seams glinting in the bedrock of BS and Propaganda.

But having discovered some precious truth, we wonder if it’s advisable to share it. In this year of 2026, speaking your mind feels dangerous, so we hesitate. We now live in a society where almost everyone is editing what they say. Very few people have the thick skin as well as the verbal fluency to say what they know to be true out loud. They reserve their hard-won insights for their closest friends.

This is the Woke Virus infesting our society, despite several experts insisting that we have reached ‘peak woke’ and that the virus is now in retreat. That we’re speaking our minds, once again. That Truth is winning.

But is it?

Here is The Spectator Columnist, Rod Liddle, weighing in on how truth got sacrificed on the altar of digital newsfeeds, social media, clickbait and now, God help us, AI known to ‘hallucinate’ on occasion. Nowadays, says Liddle, we’re fine with our delusions; please do not disturb!

A whole bunch of studies have shown that an awful lot of people who spend their time online have a marked preference for fabrications and fictions. This has been noted even – I say even but, God help us, that qualifier is entirely redundant – among academics, who while they might recognize findings that contradict their idiotic assumptions, will shelve those findings because they’re not ‘useful’ politically.

-Rod Liddle, The Spectator, May 19, 2026

So, the great fake performance continues. Maybe one day I will find the strength to speak freely again, as I used to do in the ‘before times’. As we all used to do. When the bond between us and the world we lived in was something we took for granted, the way fish take for granted the water they swim in. But that world has disappeared. We are now a decadent society, much like pre-revolutionary France, suffering from financial chaos, going broke on far away wars, and sometimes wondering if we will recover from the body blow of the Pandemic and all the lies our institutions broadcast as the truth.

The Pandemic was the most ‘performative’ event in modern history, everybody playing a prescribed role and very few daring to question its validity. Desmet is correct in identifying it as an example of Mass Formation resulting from performative fear mongering.

If we tell ourselves that the pandemic was just a fluke, a momentary ‘mistake’, we’re not telling the truth.

I can’t forget the idiotic performance we were forced to act out: the wearing of useless masks, the six feet of ‘social distancing’, the banging of pots in ‘support’ of our ‘healthcare workers’. The enormous pressure to get vaccinated with a dangerous, barely tested substance by people who had legal immunity. I didn’t succumb and I am proud of that. But I wonder if a job had been on the line, would I have resisted? I’m not so sure.

The Pandemic memory lingers and the pressure to buy into the various performative cults in our streets and our politics continues. Unlike many of my fellow citizens, I have already left, escaped via an internal emigration process well understood in totalitarian states like Nazi Germany. They even had a handy phrase for it:

Ohne Mich, Without Me.

So that’s where I have arrived: Whatever your brand of performative ‘truth’, I’m not buying. It may not be mentally healthy, but neither is believing in the lies, the fake news, the utter cynicism of our so-called Leaders and the rabble waving flags and shouting slogans.

It is a sickening spectacle. And it has historically been the precurser to the collapse of freedom. During the late thirties, the streets of Vienna and other major cities in the German Reich were ringing with the jackbooted performance of the Nazis and counter protests. The police were caught in the middle, vainly trying to keep ‘order’. We are witnessing similar scenes today, all over the west, especially in Britain. I wonder if History is rhyming, once again. I wonder if a sizeable chunk of the population has come to the same conclusions as I have. I wonder if like the poor Sun King, our performative, sneering Elites simply fail to read the omens correctly.

And if they too will get their heads chopped off.