the West decided evidence no longer mattered — if it got in the way of utopia. --Camus
from Camus,
The moment the West decided evidence no longer mattered — if it got in the way of utopia.
Melanie Phillips (former Guardian journalist):
“Objective evidence was cast aside because it was too inconvenient. The very idea of reason and rationality was dismissed.
All these ideologies — multiculturalism, lifestyle choice, deep green environmentalism, moral relativism — were utopian. They promised perfection. Anyone who brought facts against them wasn’t just wrong… they were evil.”
Result?
- Evidence became “right-wing”
- Dissenters were bullied, ostracized, fired, threatened
- The Guardian itself became the heart of this ideological machine… until she fell foul of it.
When ideology is sacrosanct and the world must be perfected, facts become the enemy — and truth-tellers become heretics.
Have you watched this shift in real time — where inconvenient evidence gets labeled “hate” or “misinformation”?
Which sacred ideology do you think has done the most damage to open debate?
Your honest take
Your honest take 
TRANSCRIPT
What was happening was that the very idea of objective evidence was being cast aside because it was too inconvenient when it got in the way of what people wanted, how they wanted to live their own lives, and as the years went on it seemed to me that not only was evidence being cast aside, not only was apparently objective evidence by University researchers becoming subjective and warped and wrong and false, but the very idea of evidence was being overturned, the very idea of rationality and reason were being dismissed. And this was all part and parcel of what only appeared to me the case after many years that on issue after issue after issue, family, lifestyle choice, multiculturalism, deep green environmentalism, moral relativism moral and cultural relativism all those isms they were all ideologies and the point about an ideology is that the idea is sacrosanct. Nothing can get in the way of the idea. That's the first thing. The second thing is that all ideologies were Utopian. They were all predicated on the belief basically in the perfection of the world. So multiculturalism would eradicate prejudice from the human heart completely. It would stop War. It would stop conflict. Lifestyle choice would eradicate bigotry and the bigotry of differences in people's lifestyles. So no longer would people look down on people who were divorced or single parents and all that kind of thing. They were all utopian. Deep green environmentalism was about saving the planet from frying and being destroyed completely. So anyone who disagreed with these ideologies, anyone who said, . . . well actually the evidence shows this is wrong factually wrong that couldn't happen because the idea ideology couldn't gain said and because these ideologies were all to do with the perfection of the world anyone who spoke against them was not simply wrong they were evil and it couldn't be said because it was such an evil thing and so you found that evidence became politicized it became called right wing Ultra right wing and all the rest of them those epithets and it became unsaleable and the people that dared to say it found themselves bullied and ostracized and persecuted and removed from their social all that they they lost their friends they lost their professional advancement they were threatened with their jobs some of them lost their jobs and so you have a situation that we have today and the reason I wrote that book guardian angel was because what had happened to me in my professional life when I started out I worked nearly 20 years with the guardian newspapers of this liberal Universalist ideological perspective and what happened to me over that period was as I fell foul of that world very badly but what happened to me seem to me to illustrate what had happened to the West what happened to Britain and to the West and so through the story of what happened to me issue by issue I could actually tell a bigger story what happened to us in the West.
More from Melanie Phillips. And her Twitter account.
