Douglas Murray's Insightful Exploration of The Madness of Crowds

Fia: I'm half way through but Murray is a delight to read as much to listen to. After not having read much the last few decades this is my return to proper reading with the aim to read more and screen less. Thank you Douglas for a great start in the right direction.

United Kingdom on Sep 25, 2023

Amazon Customer: Excelente! Chegou antes do tempo e muito bem embalado.

Spain on Jan 13, 2023

Michael X Smith: In his recent bestseller, The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray provides a readable critique of the “new religion” of “social justice” with its “identity group politics” and “intersectionalism” (2), the lumping together of different groups as if they had common or even identical interests. He criticises extreme positions on homosexuality, gender, race and transsexualism, particularly the intolerance and irrationality of those who take such positions. Throughout, he supplies substantial, fully documented evidence and makes a convincing case.
His opening chapter discusses homosexuality and the struggle for gay rights, the excesses of that struggle, the distinction between gay and queer, and some interesting if not entirely convincing speculation on the causes of “homophobia.” (The quotation marks are Murray’s.) For this reader, an “Interlude” after the first chapter was more interesting. In that interlude, Murray discusses the Marxist foundations of today’s political correctness, the lack of proof and logic in its claims and the deliberate incoherence of much of the academic prose that promotes these claims. As someone who, in student days years ago,...

United Kingdom on Oct 25, 2021

Rosemary Standeven: This book was recommended to me by a neighbour. The author is known to be right wing, and normally neither of us pay much attention to his thoughts. However, we have both become alarmed at the way discussion on any contentious issue has been shut down – either by the Alt-right or by the Woke Generation – and we feel there is a need – now more than ever – to listen to people with whom we would not normally agree, and to try to understand where views opposed to our own are coming from, and maybe to question why we so adamantly believe that we are right.
“The analysis of ideas is commonly replaced by political smears and personal attacks . . . The denial of human nature has spread beyond the academy and has led to a disconnect between intellectual life and common sense.”
“Social media turns out to be a superlative way to embed new dogmas and crush contrary opinion just when you needed to listen to them most.”
I don’t agree with everything that Murray says, but he does have some very compelling arguments. One of his main contentions, is that supposedly monolithic groups – such as BAME or LGBTQ+ – are not monolithic at all. People in them are deemed to...

United Kingdom on Jun 20, 2021

John Aspinall: Douglas Murray has written what will be another bestseller. He deserves his success. In his latest book, and his previous work on the migration crisis, he writes about a very worrying thing indeed which links the two works: the collapse of our ‘grand narratives’.

Under all the mattresses of Mr Murray’s logic, reason, research and dry wit there is a pea of pessimism lurking. It’s difficult, after reading both works, to have any hope for the future of our culture. One cannot slot-in a new foundation once the house is built. The house is in the way. The house has to fall before a new foundation can be inserted. That’s bad enough in itself. But once our culture has fallen what could the new foundation be?

In Europe the grand narrative was the Christian one. It was the narrative upon which European culture was founded and up from this percolated our traditions, our laws; our art and architecture and so on. In ‘The Strange Death of Europe’ Mr Murray writes of the Christian faith as possibly the greatest source of energy for the continent:

‘It drove them to war and stirred them to defence. It drove Europe to the greatest heights of human creativity....

United Kingdom on Nov 02, 2019

Richard B. Schwartz: This is a wonderful new book by the author of THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE. THE MADNESS OF CROWDS concerns the issues of gender, race and identity and the manner in which they have been weaponized and unendingly politicized, particularly in the west and particularly, as he notes, in those countries (the U.K., the U.S.) where the most progress has been made in countering original forms of prejudice. In contrast with societies where gay people are thrown off of buildings our societies are criticized as being homophobic to a catastrophic degree. How can this be so? How can we be accused of being most retrograde and reactionary when we are, in fact, most 'advanced' and 'progressive'?

This is the broad subject of the book. Some of the answers: when we come closer and closer to solving a problem the lingering existence of some aspects of that problem become progressively more intolerable. This is a fact of human nature. We continue to fight against as yet 'incurable' diseases but when we see individuals die of diseases which are quite curable we are enraged. This is an example of 'physical evil' being transformed into 'moral evil' where, for example, a curable disease kills people...

United States on Oct 18, 2019

Graham H. Seibert: Douglas Murray addresses four of the categorizations of humanity expounded by progressives/cultural Marxists that have defined our societies over the past few decades: gays, feminism, race and transgender. The result, as Murray says in his opening paragraph is:
"We are going through a great crowd derangement. In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes."

Murray is a rational man, an Enlightenment man. He points out the absurdities and internal contradictions in the arguments. At the same time he points out the very reasons why his logical approach is bound to fail. The winning arguments are emotional. While presenting themselves as rational, they are at the core profoundly irrational.

Progressivism, being "woke," or being a cultural Marxist is a religion to which adherents cling as doggedly as they once did to Christianity and now due to Islam. Murray writes:
"The explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion went...

United States on Sep 27, 2019