Table of Contents
David Betz and Michael Rainsborough
David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London; Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.
A curious feature of the modern condition is the sheer volume of what passes for “discussion” that contains almost no thought at all. One encounters, with weary regularity, pronouncements from supposed thought leaders, policy figures and assorted enlightened voices that are not driven by argument or evidence, but by emotion.
In a manner of speaking, we now live in an ‘emotivocracy’, a setting in which informed debate gives way to performance, self-righteousness, affective spillage, angry moralising and the felt need to convey the ‘correct’ moral stance. Variations of this observation have for years circulated under the headings of virtue-signalling, gesture politics and the preference for feelings over facts. What appears new is the scale, the confidence and the range of institutions in which this habit has taken root. It is now everywhere.
One finds it in the low theatre of programmes such as the BBC’s Question Time, where conviction reliably outruns comprehension, and in policy and intellectual circles that once at least tried to adhere to evidence-based argument. Most strikingly, it flourishes within universities and the higher education sector, places in which one might assume that reasonably thoughtful people would lead with their heads and support their positions with facts. One would be wrong.
In our professional lives, we have both encountered this preference for moral exhibitionism over reasoned analysis, now firmly embedded in precisely those places where higher intellectual standards are supposed to prevail. The shift is neither subtle nor well disguised.
Our first encounter with this tendency came in 2019, when we published an article, ‘The British Road to Dirty War’, on the fracturing of British politics and the implications this held for future civil strife. The essay was analytical, historically grounded, based on our specialised knowledge of the subject area and attentive to long-term trends in declining trust, polarisation and factional consolidation following the Brexit referendum.
Despite appearing in a modest publication, it attracted the attention of several of our so-called colleagues, who, rather than engage in argument or offer a counterview, defaulted to the reflex of the emotivocratic mind: they ran to management to complain. The offence lay not in the argument being wrong, but in its having been made at all.
There is something faintly ridiculous about watching supposed academics revert so quickly to this mode of behaviour. The appearance of an unwelcome idea produces discomfort; discomfort demands intervention; intervention is sought from authority. The possibility that one might simply argue the point, the very purpose of their vocation, does not arise.
The university management, for its part, behaved exactly as such complaints invite it to behave: submissively and without a trace of backbone. Rather than insisting upon the elementary standards of academic life, senior administrators chose instead to appease those who had taken offence. One of us (Rainsborough) was forced from his leadership role within the Department of War Studies, not because the analysis had been refuted, but because it unsettled a handful of fragile egos unwilling – and, plainly, unable – to defend their views in public.
The episode, trivial in its mechanics, was instructive. An otherwise straightforward piece of analysis, one that now reads less as provocation than as mild understatement, was enough to trigger a chain of events that bypassed reasoned engagement entirely and moved directly to emotional reaction. The issue was never intellectual. The article had simply wandered into territory others preferred to keep under emotional quarantine.
We have noted these episodes before, including in the pages of the Daily Sceptic, but the pattern has not receded. If anything, it has become more prominent. It surfaced again, in rather more histrionic form, at a recent conference in Budapest.
The End of the World, so Long as it Doesn’t Offend My Feelings
If our experience over an innocuous essay offered an illustration of emotivocratic behaviour within the university, the events encountered at a recent World Adaptation Forum in Budapest provided something closer to a full theatrical production. The forum has become a key gathering for the growing “collapsology” movement – that is, individuals who anticipate the near-term unravelling of large-scale human civilisation.
Most participants were animated by visions of ecological collapse driven primarily by climate change and its ever-imminent cascading catastrophes. As one of the invited participants (David Betz, who is, for the record, not a “collapsologist”) introduced the more immediate and more probable concern of the risks of civil war in the West, attention turned to the explosive social and political reality that we had first identified in ‘The British Road to Dirty War’: an increasingly ethnically factionalised society, an indigenous majority that correctly senses it is being downgraded and demographically replaced and a profound collapse in the legitimacy of governing institutions.
Compared to the civilisational extinction scenarios imagined by the other panellists, this focus on civil conflict, ironically, offered one of the more optimistic scenarios. If the idea of a “polycrisis” is accepted, then it would be unsurprising if it first manifested in the social sphere in the classic human manner: through organised violence. War, after all, is quintessentially adaptive social behaviour.
Such a perspective was one that was possibly unusual in such a setting but, at the same time, it was entirely consistent with the theme of the forum. Yet, after the event, the WAF organisers let it be known that they had “come under considerable pressure” from several speakers to retroactively remove the talk and parts of the panel discussion.
According to the organisers:
We did not fully comply. However, it was made clear that unless certain sentences were removed, some participants would no longer associate themselves with the WAF, potentially jeopardising the future of the initiative. We therefore had to compromise. A few sentences referring to mass sexual violence were cut.
The offending passage came in a section discussing migration policy, the single area that has done most to destroy social capital in Western countries. The research of Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam on diversity and social trust was cited, alongside the repeated dishonesty of governments and their migration intentions.
The passage that, apparently, caused most offence read:
No other failing of government – not terrorism or foreign wars – has done more damage to the social fabric than the mass rape of predominately white working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani, multigenerational sexual torture networks. Governments, as the Casey Review, the Jay Report and recent inquiries have shown, created the conditions for this to occur. In many cases, authorities looked away; some police and officials actively abetted or participated in these crimes.
These are grim but verifiable, well-documented and now publicly reported truths. What was stated was grounded in evidence. Yet, the reaction on the part of some was revealing, as the WAF organisers relayed:
It’s important for you to know that at the end of the event, after the panel, physical intervention was needed to prevent Leon [Simons, a Dutch environmentalist] from approaching you in a confrontational manner and to stop the closing moments of a wonderful event descending into chaos.
According to the organisers, two other participants – Gaya Herrington and Florian Ulrich Jehn – apparently also applied pressure.
Leaving aside the comical image of some environmentalist who devotes himself to diagnosing global instability being rendered incapable of maintaining his own, the episode raises more important questions about what it is with strains of people unable to contend with uncomfortable realities, reasoned debate or an honest confrontation with the evidence, to the point that they are unable to physically control themselves.
What the episode reveals is that a great deal of public dialogue operates under conditions of emotional acceptability. One may describe prospects for future collapse, provided it conforms to an expected moral narrative. One may not introduce material that complicates the narrative, particularly if it implicates contemporary policy choices or undermines the preferred moral framing.
The WAF organisers indicated privately that some participants remain “strongly influenced by prevailing norms around political correctness” and expressed the hope that their perspective might shift toward reality before it is too late.
In our view, as we have noted in other works, this is already too late. Reasonable people have tolerated a combination of formal and informal censorship, moral grandstanding and willed ignorance over issues like multiculturalism and unconstrained migration for too long, and the pressure is systematically building to a point where it will, at some point, break out into the open. This is the course which all civil wars take. It is not idle speculation. It is demonstrable in practice and is what all serious scholarly literature on the subject has articulated for decades.
The irony in Budapest was that here were people who routinely describe humanity as a blight on the planet, yet they cannot tolerate mention of actual human-made atrocities taking place in front of their eyes, in this case the industrial-scale sexual exploitation of children – exploitation enabled by the very policy failures they refuse to scrutinise. They are so invested in the narrative of climate-driven civilisational collapse that they cannot acknowledge how elite-instigated migration policies are actively fracturing Western societies in ways that make violent rupture increasingly plausible.
But truth remains truth, however inconvenient. Scandals like the grooming gangs in the UK represent one of the worst outrages in modern times. Ignoring it does not make it go away, but only exacerbates the loss of trust that makes civil conflict more likely. If we cannot even speak honestly about what is happening to our societies today – about the disintegration of social capital, about the actual statistics related to realities of crime and violence, about differential standards of justice, about governance that prioritises newcomers over natives – then we are not forestalling collapse. We are accelerating it.
Spite is No Substitute for Strategy
Also, to be clear, this is not strictly a left-right matter either. The same reflex now manifests itself in quarters where one would expect cooler, more hard-headed analysis to hold sway. For example, when Lord Robert Skidelsky, a thoughtful man of the centre-left, died in April 2026, Jonathan Eyal, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), took to X to proclaim: “It is with great joy that we mark the passing of a Russian shill, in receipt of money from Russian oligarchs, who justified the Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
Skidelsky’s principal offence had been to argue for pragmatic engagement with Russia rather than perpetual confrontation, a coherent and plausible intellectual position. Yet, for Eyal there was only vitriol. There was no analysis of Skidelsky’s arguments, no attempt to weigh a dissenting view, no acknowledgement that a serious scholar had simply reached a different, evidence-based conclusion, let alone that, whatever one’s views on Ukraine, the man had left behind a grieving family. Instead, there was the unvarnished expression of personal animus, offered as commentary from someone associated with Britain’s pre-eminent forum for strategic and defence affairs.
Of course, by now one is well accustomed to self-styled intellects losing the plot, particularly in the aftermath of Brexit, from A C Grayling to Jolyon Maugham, Will Self, Timothy Garton Ash and Fintan O’Toole. The field is a pretty crowded one. But RUSI represents the strategic world where one expects its denizens to observe a degree of composure. Yet here on display was the same emotional maturity of a teenager on TikTok, reducing the reputation of a serious institution to the same puerile theatrics witnessed in Budapest or in the corridors of King’s College London. It is precisely because one would not expect this from a senior member of RUSI, as one might with some DEI-addled social-science department, that it stands out. This is not strategic analysis: it is adolescent spite.
Activists Not Analysts
What to make of all this? Justified as it is to feel affronted, even personally disgusted, by these trends, suggestive as they are of a deep-seated allergy to dissenting views combined with a childlike tattletale instinct that runs off to the teacher to denounce you from a safe distance. There is also the distasteful spectacle of dark triad manipulation in the background, petty and cowardly, designed to exclude and marginalise without ever having to defend itself in direct intellectual exchange.
However, what interests us here, in analytical terms, is what lies beneath the surface. Why do these people, and the environments they inhabit, so reliably encourage this recourse to emotional incontinence over reasoned discussion and analysis?
It is more useful not to get angry, but to treat these people exactly as they deserve: not as intellectual equals, but as laboratory specimens to be examined, probed and jabbed. That is the genuinely academic response. The question, then, is: what accounts for their evident inability to argue openly, and their preference for petulant outbursts, furtive institutional sniping, complaint-running and indirect attempts at suppression? The usual explanations – cancel culture, virtue-signalling, hypocrisy – are not wrong, but they remain at the level of symptoms. The more interesting puzzle is why this reflex toward emotional responses, up to and including the ghoulish eulogisation of the deaths of people who hold different views, has become so widespread in contemporary public debate.
So, placing these people where they belong, under the analytical microscope, the first thing that becomes apparent is that they are not academics or thought leaders at all, but activists. The collapsology conference in Budapest provided a particularly clear example, where eco-zealot panellists were, if anything, rather proud of the label.
Likewise, across large parts of the contemporary university, especially within the arts and social sciences, this same disposition is simply dressed up as scholarship. Activism operates behind the veil of academic practice, embedded in journal gatekeeping, promotion committees, grant allocation and the wider bureaucratic machinery that now defines much of the modern, DEI-inflected university.
The point is, if you are an activist, whether individually or institutionally, you are not disinterested in the object of your inquiry. You are committed to a worldview. Once that commitment is in place, the conclusion is already decided. What follows is no longer analysis but a predetermined stance. This is why listening to politicians on Question Time, or to any number of post-colonial historians like Priyamvada Gopal or Kehinde Andrews, or journalists like Mehdi Hasan, or indeed the more fervent climate collapsologists, so quickly becomes an exercise in tedium. There is no attempt to weigh evidence or engage competing views. The script is fixed, the lines well rehearsed, and the conclusion arrives exactly where one knew it would before a word was spoken.
For this reason, we do not regard them as analysts of anything, because they do not analyse. They assert. They advance a position already decided and defend it as an article of faith. That stance may be common enough in contemporary academia and among a certain type of journalist, but it is not one we share.
Proper academic work rests on a different disposition: the recognition that conclusions are provisional and, crucially, falsifiable – open to challenge, revision and, if necessary, abandonment in the face of stronger argument or better evidence. On that basis, one argues, tests and revises. On theirs, one declares and repeats. If our own interpretations on the likelihood of civil war, grounded in data on declining trust, inept elites and intensifying factional and interethnic competition, can be overturned by more compelling evidence, then so be it.
In other words, our academic disposition does not operate as a substitute religion, nor is it bound up with our identity. It is simply a method. Activist academia, by contrast, is now widespread across much of the university sphere, but we do not regard its practitioners as academics in any meaningful sense. They may hold doctorates and professorships, but titles do not confer intellectual seriousness. If one is unwilling to entertain pluralism, to submit one’s ideas to scrutiny, and to accept that they may be falsified, then one is not engaged in thinking at all. One is engaged in ideology.
Onward Vegan Soldiers
An ideology is a worldview already fixed, intent on moving the world in its own direction rather than understanding it. For that reason, we attach little intellectual weight to what is being said by such people. If the answer is known in advance, and the lines are already written before they open their mouths, then there is nothing to engage with. One is not listening to thought, but to performance.
What remains of interest is not the content, which is entirely predictable, but the mechanism. How does this mindset operate, and why has it become so prevalent? Its spread across contemporary public life resembles less a mode of reasoning than a social reflex, something that circulates easily, attaches itself readily and proves remarkably resistant to correction.
How, then, should these pseudo-intellectuals, be they eco-collapsologists, post-colonial theorists, emoting politicians and the rest, be dissected? At one level, there is an obvious cynicism. The activist mindset has learned how to convert moral posturing into social capital within the modern liberal order, accumulating influence by reciting the approved platitudes of the day. Hence the familiar spectacle of Tarquins and Henriettas, products of privilege and private schools, gluing themselves to works of art in the name of planetary salvation, before repairing to their next exotic holiday.
That level of hypocrisy is hardly new. What is more interesting, and rather more revealing, is the impulse behind it. As the Budapest episode makes clear, the activist mindset is not merely ideological but quasi-theological. It operates less as a framework for analysis than as a form of belief – a modern political religion, complete with its own orthodoxies, its preferred narratives and its marked intolerance for dissent.
Once this theology is confronted with evidence and argument, the response is almost liturgical. The ideologue does what all such zealots do: isolate, expel, marginalise or, where possible, banish the heretic. Thus, the prospect of some nebbish Dutch doomster preparing to square up (an encounter unlikely to trouble anyone on physical grounds) is fascinating nonetheless in its intensity. The point is not the theatrics, but the reflex: a belief system being defended with the fervour of a faith.
The issue is not that these manoeuvres are threatening – they are transparently infantile – but that the intellectual content behind them is vapid or non-existent. From a properly academic perspective, the ideologue presents himself or herself less as an intellect demanding engagement than as a pattern of behaviour to be observed and, where possible, enjoyed for its absurdity.
The collapsologists merely make the tendency unusually explicit. Even the term gives the game away. It carries all the hallmarks of an end-times sensibility: a modernised vocabulary for one of humanity’s oldest recreational pursuits, namely announcing the apocalypse while expecting to survive it, preferably spiritually vindicated, professionally upgraded and, with luck, on a better speaking circuit.
By contrast, we are not bound to any ideological system as a substitute religion. If our theories are shown to be wrong, then we accept the evidence, revise the argument and examine where our reasoning fell short, how it might be improved or, if necessary, discarded altogether. That is the point of adhering to rigorous academic standards, even if the modern university treats the idea as an eccentric legacy practice.
The Only Collapse in Sight
The contrast could hardly be clearer. We are not like these people, be they habitués of the modern progressive university, think tank Russophobes or the eco-zealot conference circuit. We are not activists. We do not engage in histrionics when our assumptions are challenged. They do. What one is dealing with in such cases is a form of emotional fragility in which ideology functions as a substitute religion, supplying certainty, identity and moral consolation in place of argument. Faced with contrary evidence, the response is not reconsideration but defensiveness: manoeuvring, bile, denunciation and the familiar attempts to exclude or silence those who refuse to conform. The behaviour has less to do with reasoning than with emotional self-preservation, which is why even mild disagreement can provoke scenes more suited to the school playground than intellectual life.
In that sense, the real collapsology on display has nothing to do with civilisational breakdown. It is the more immediate spectacle of the emotional collapse of individuals unable to withstand contact with facts they do not like.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
