Rational Morality
The Tyranny of Thought
The next draft chapter in the upcoming book, “Rational Morality”. Comments are welcome. I’ll publish the final version through the usual book stores and channels when it's all been released online. Enjoy!
As traditional religions have lost influence in the modern world, one might expect that their decline would be followed by greater freedom of thought, broader moral diversity, and deeper personal reflection. Instead, something else has happened. In place of religion, new belief systems have emerged—systems that do not rely on gods or sacred texts but still demand allegiance, define morality from above, and punish dissent with increasing severity.
This shift has not brought liberation. It has simply replaced one form of orthodoxy with another. The old doctrines may no longer dominate the public square, but their structure lives on in modern political and cultural ideologies that claim moral authority without room for doubt or discussion. Instead of faith, we now have slogans. Instead of priests, we have activists, bureaucrats, and thought leaders. And instead of heresy, we have hate speech, misinformation, and social deviance—terms used to shut down conversation rather than encourage it.
At the center of this new moral landscape is the belief that speech, and even thought, must be regulated in the name of safety and progress. Language that challenges prevailing narratives is recast as violence. Questions are treated as threats. Dissent becomes dangerous not because of what it actually does, but because of what it represents—an unwillingness to conform. In this environment, moral courage is replaced with moral submission, and clarity is sacrificed to preserve comfort and control.
Nowhere is this demand for enforced belief more clearly illustrated than in the legacy of Marxist and communist regimes. While these ideologies claimed to liberate the oppressed and deliver justice to the masses, they often replaced one form of tyranny with another. Under the guise of class equality and worker emancipation, these systems created environments where thought itself became a threat, and where deviation from the approved narrative was treated not as dissent, but as betrayal. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and other communist states, the party’s ideology became moral law, and failure to conform—even in private—could lead to imprisonment, exile, or execution. Loyalty was measured not by deeds but by beliefs, and suspicion fell hardest on those who dared to think independently.
The mechanisms of control were comprehensive. Schools, unions, media, and community organizations were repurposed to reinforce the party line. Language was redefined, and history rewritten to serve ideological goals. People were trained to monitor one another, to report on friends and family members, and to treat disagreement as a danger to the collective good. The individual was dissolved into the will of the party, and moral integrity was redefined as obedience to a political vision.
This is not a relic of the past. Elements of the same dynamic are increasingly visible in modern institutions that claim to promote justice while enforcing rigid ideological conformity. Today, many of these ideas re-emerge under the banner of progressivism, often through leftist organizations that present themselves as defenders of inclusion, equality, and human rights. Their language is carefully chosen to disarm criticism—who wants to be seen as opposing fairness or justice? But behind the rhetoric often lies a familiar structure: moral absolutism masked as compassion, enforced consensus disguised as equity, and the marginalization of dissenters through social, economic, or legal pressure. These groups may not wear uniforms or carry weapons, but their influence is felt in hiring decisions, speech policies, academic programs, and legislation.
What makes this especially difficult to confront is the moral framing. These movements do not appeal to force directly. They appeal to conscience. They assert that if you are a good person, you will agree. If you are a decent person, you will comply. And if you question the dogma, you are no longer simply mistaken—you are morally suspect. This is the same logic that powered every authoritarian ideology of the last century, and it is just as corrosive now as it was then.
In many parts of the Western world, this control is no longer hypothetical. It is real, it is growing, and it is targeting the most fundamental freedoms people once took for granted. In the United Kingdom, individuals have been arrested for silently praying in public. In Canada and Australia, laws are being passed that treat disagreement over gender ideology or government policy as a form of hate or disinformation. In the US, laws have been passed that allow children to be removed from parents who fail to support whatever gender their children think they are at the moment.
What was once described as totalitarian in fiction is now unfolding, piece by piece, in democratic societies. George Orwell’s 1984 was not a blueprint, but it increasingly reads like a manual. The surveillance state is no longer just about cameras and microphones. It is about monitoring beliefs, punishing deviation, and forcing conformity not only in behavior, but in thought.
What makes this moment more insidious than previous eras of repression is that much of it is being carried out in the name of virtue. Those who impose restrictions on speech and belief do so while insisting they are on the side of compassion and justice. They do not call themselves censors. They call themselves protectors. And in doing so, they hide the authoritarian nature of their actions behind a veil of moral superiority.
This is not new. The history of moral enforcement is filled with people who believed they were acting for the greater good. The Inquisition burned heretics to save their souls. Revolutionary regimes in the twentieth century imprisoned or executed dissenters to protect the revolution. The pattern is always the same: when belief becomes mandatory, freedom dies in the name of righteousness.
Today, this pattern continues under different names. It shows up in universities that claim to champion critical thinking while silencing debate. It shows up in corporations that promote diversity while practicing reverse discrimination. It shows up in governments that invoke public health, national security, or social cohesion to justify increasingly aggressive control over how people speak, gather, and think.
The result is a population that becomes afraid to speak plainly, to question publicly, or to hold private convictions that differ from those being pushed by the dominant institutions. People learn to self-censor, to remain silent, or to echo what they do not believe, to avoid punishment. This is not freedom. It is not enlightenment. It is not progress. It is moral regression—an abandonment of the very principles that made open societies possible.
In the absence of a shared moral foundation rooted in virtue and reason, we have turned to moral performance enforced by power. We no longer ask whether an action is right or wrong based on principle. We ask whether it aligns with the narrative of the day. The consequence of this shift is not greater justice, but greater fear. Not a greater understanding, but a greater division.
What we are witnessing is not simply cultural decay. It is a systematic replacement of moral clarity with moral coercion. It is the emergence of a new moral regime—one that punishes reflection, rewards conformity, and thrives on confusion. And it is precisely because of this environment that a new moral foundation is needed. Not another ideology. Not another system of enforced belief. But a return to something older and stronger: a morality based on virtue, reason, and individual responsibility.
The goal is not to win an argument. It is to live with clarity. It is to see through the slogans, to resist the manipulation, and to reclaim the freedom to think, to speak, and to live according to a code that does not bend to intimidation. This begins by understanding how the collapse of traditional morality did not lead to liberation, but to a new form of bondage. One that must be named before it can be resisted.