Picture today’s quintessential TikTok star with her (or is it “zer”?) unheard-of gender identity, unpronounceable pronouns, and glorified mental illness.
Listen to modern relationship “experts” who basically just say ignore all traditional mores, be as promiscuous as possible, never get married, and never have kids.
What do all of these people have in common? What binds them all with one unifying worldview?
In a word, transgression, the doctrine of transgression.
In 2023 left-wing America, transgression is all the rage. Personal autonomy has been unmoored from reality, and now we’re free to pursue authenticity at the expense of tradition and order. Anything that stands in the way of that pursuit must be cast down. Anything that dares impede on the deified self is called repressive and evil, and therefore, to transgress it—whether it be a social or religious standard, norm, or expectation—is seen as inherently virtuous.
As defined by commentator Ben Shapiro, transgressivism is the “philosophy of identity [that] revolves around ... destroying the boundaries and roles and rules of social acceptability, all in the name of ‘liberating’ the passions.”
It’s an ideology that involves the rejection of all norms (societal, cultural, religious, moral, and artistic). It explains moral decay, pervasive libertinism, radical gender ideology, the rise of religious “nones,” declining birth rates, decadence, and so much more about modernity.
Transgressivism’s only standard is authenticity. Its only regulatory principle is consent. As long as no one is harmed (this is where consent comes into play) and the self is appeased, nothing can possibly be wrong.
Except, of course, for anything that implicates the individual of wrongdoing, anything that suggests that man should suppress and control his appetitive soul. The virtue isn’t in transgressing for the sake of transgressing, although it often appears that way. The virtue is in being true to one’s own self.
Transgressing societal norms, standards, expectations, and traditions are merely seen as steps in the noble pursuit of being true to one’s own self. They’re obstacles that must be overcome.
In other words, when authenticity is god, transgression is a necessary sacrament.
This way of thinking marks a seismic departure from how mankind has traditionally thought of itself.
“Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.”
But individualism changed all of that, according to Wolfe.
“They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history,” he wrote of those who we today might call transgressives. “All rules are broken!”
Indeed, our modern transgressive thinking is born out of our hyper-individualism. When the self became sovereign, superior to all else, when each individual became his or her own standard of perfection, rules and boundaries became impermissible. This is why woke apologists now argue that losing weight is “fatphobic” and that gyms have “white supremacist” origins.
Of course, this is a deeply flawed way of thinking about man. When we liberate the libido, far from liberating man’s soul, we condemn him to animalism.
“Man is the only animal that blushes,” Mark Twain joked.
But if nothing can make us blush—in other words, if nothing makes us feel shame—what then sets us apart from the animals? Are we not unlike cattle driven by our basest desires? This is the inevitable outcome if we’re to have no boundaries and no self-control.
C.S. Lewis warned about our bent toward such a hapless condition decades ago in his “The Abolition of Man,” a philosophical treatise against subjectivism.
When men lose their chests (seats of virtue-seeking sentiment) and seek to skirt all absolute truth (the laws of nature and nature’s God), they themselves are ultimately conquered. Enslaved. Egged on by promises of “freedom,” they find themselves bound to an unyielding master: the human impulse totally unfettered.
“Nature,” Lewis concluded, “untrammelled by values, rules ... all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”
“Within the next generation,” Huxley wrote, “I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
The inoculation against such a fate is responsible self-governance. It’s self-control.
“But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection,” wrote Paul the Apostle.
But for as long as these things are seen as impositions on the “good” at which authenticity is aimed, all self-discipline will wither. Boundaries will exist only for the thrill of crossing them. Our “new normal” will be one of no norms at all.
