For several years, there has been growing concern about the tenor and aggressiveness of a particular class of activists who relentlessly assert their own moral authority through public denunciations and emotional theatrics—what are now commonly labeled “virtue signals.” Their rhetoric often feels less like moral insight and more like a performance of superiority, backed by a willingness to shame, silence, or even physically confront those who dissent.
One early emblematic moment came during the 2015 protests at the University of Missouri, when communications professor Melissa Click called out, “I need some muscle over here,” while attempting to block a student journalist from covering the demonstration. She lost her job at Mizzou, yet eventually landed a full professorship at Gonzaga, a trajectory that speaks to how certain institutions now reward ideological zeal over genuine commitment to truth and open discourse.
When Reality Itself Is Contested: This moral aggression is tied to a deeper contest over reality itself, especially on questions of sex, gender, and the body. During recent Supreme Court arguments on transgender participation in women’s sports, Justice Samuel Alito pressed the obvious but increasingly forbidden question: for equal protection purposes, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman?
The attorney, Kathleen Hartnett, ultimately conceded that she had no definition to offer the Court. That brief exchange is more than a procedural moment; it is a metaphor for an age in which institutions demand sweeping social re‑engineering while denying any stable account of human nature on which law, custom, or morality could securely rest.
Misplaced Empathy and Public Rage: These tensions surface every time a tragic event becomes a stage for political theater. In the recent protests in Minneapolis over the shooting of a woman who tried to run over an ICE agent during a lawful operation, the rhetoric quickly shifted from the complexity of the incident to a narrative of pure victimhood and pure villainy.
The woman, a mother of two, has become a symbol in the hands of activists who claim a kind of faux empathy—grief and outrage amplified for political purposes rather than directed toward serious moral reflection. This raises painful questions: when does a mother’s love for her children become more important than political activism, and when do the obligations of motherhood and fatherhood supersede the demands of the ideological cause?
Orwell, Lewis, and the Abolition of the Private Self: These modern dramas echo themes that anti‑totalitarian writers warned about decades ago. A recent review from Hillsdale College revisiting C. S. Lewis’s critique of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm highlights an often‑overlooked thread in 1984: the erotic undercurrent and its relation to power.
In Part III of 1984, Winston is a shattered man—starved, electroshocked, isolated—while O’Brien, the Party’s agent, explains the regime’s philosophy: power is the only goal. To gain full power, the Party must control all reality, which means controlling every aspect of human nature, including romantic pleasure, private desire, and the bonds of love that create loyalties outside the state.
O’Brien envisions a future where children are “obtained” by artificial means and sex is merely mechanical—no romance, no spiritual dimension, no private life. The infamous phrase “We shall abolish the orgasm” is shocking by design; it crystallizes the Party’s ambition to dominate even the most intimate and involuntary aspects of human life.
The point is not mere provocation; it is metaphysical. If a regime seeks absolute power, it must destroy the private self, which is to say it must destroy the soul. Winston and Julia’s fragile, illicit relationship is not a model of ordered love, but it is a protest against the Party’s total claim, and it is precisely that private loyalty that the regime ultimately crushes, leaving Winston to love only Big Brother.
In C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the technocratic state likewise aims at a de‑sexed, disembodied humanity, but Lewis offers a different pattern of resistance. The story centers on Mark and Jane Studdock’s journey from fractured, self‑protective sexuality toward a fruitful, mutually self‑giving marriage, a picture of ordered love that both reflects and participates in a higher, divine order.
Where Orwell shows erotic love being broken by ideology, Lewis portrays rightly ordered love as a sign and instrument of ultimate allegiance. Later writers have rightly described That Hideous Strength as a kind of proto “theology of the body,” where sexual difference and marital union become an icon of God’s relation to the world rather than a threat to it.
The Holes in Our Hearts: Marriage is not the only covenant that can fulfill a man or a woman; many single people—historically, especially religious—have found their deepest identity in a communal relationship with God that shapes how they treat others. But in all cases, it is that vertical relationship that rightly informs the moral predicates of our actions toward our neighbors.
By contrast, the furious confrontations with ICE agents, including incidents where mostly young women scream, jostle, and sometimes assault officers, suggest a profound lack of such guiding commitments. These women do not “need a man” to complete them, but neither are anger and resentment adequate to fill the holes in the heart that Blaise Pascal described as a God‑shaped vacuum.
In 1984, Julia captures this dynamic in earthy, memorable terms when she explains that genuine love leaves a person content and disinclined to march, chant, and rage on command. Totalizing movements “cannot bear you to feel like that,” she says; all the marching and flag‑waving are “simply spiritual love gone sour, a counterfeit zeal that feeds on emptiness rather than interior peace”.
The parallel to today is uncomfortable. Misplaced passion is dangerous; empathy untethered from truth and charity devolves into rage theater, and rage theater easily becomes a tool of control. The holes in our hearts must be filled with love of God and neighbor, or they will be colonized by resentment, ideology, and the will to dominate.
When hatred is allowed to fester—for reasons real or tragic, such as a bad childhood, an abusive parent, failing health, or lost love—the actions that flow from that bitterness rarely heal anything. They serve, instead, the purposes of the very powers—whether one calls them the devil or the totalizing State—that wish to abolish the private self and the soul.
That is the quiet, subversive claim beneath all the noise: authentic love, rightly ordered, is the most radical resistance to any regime that seeks to own us entirely.
