Hanlon's Razor -v- The Frankfurt School

Policing's flirtation with critical theory can only end in tears

The police have embraced ideologies which, fundamentally, are hostile to the concept of policing.

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This Substack often ponders the genesis of bad decision-making. My experience of police decision-making leads me to broadly agree with Hanlon’s Razor, being;

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Which is to say I’m not, generally speaking, much of a conspiracy theorist.

Yes, I accept the occasional existence of sinister cliques, cabals and cadres - I spent a decade or so investigating such people. However, conspiracy fans, I found precious little evidence of Illuminati-style webs of global trickery and deceit. More often than not, I suspect, ‘conspiracies’ are usually the result of self-regarding elites succumbing to groupthink. More Hanlon’s Razor than astroturfing QAnon-style plots.

In fact, I suspect more substantive conspiracies are hatched by people who think they’re launching counter-conspiracies. Which is to say fringe political and extremist groups, reacting to perceptions of elite injustice.

Although, to be fair, sometimes they have sliver of a point.

Elites do create self-interested ‘directions of travel’. Of course they do. Elites of every flavour from the left, right and the centre. Self-interest? It’s as human as breathing, sleeping and eating. For example, do you think the well-heeled ‘citizens of nowhere’ who frequent Davos do so simply out of the goodness of their hearts? Or that the Soviets didn’t plan to destabilise the USA, or the USA never planned to destabilise the Soviets?

Here’s ex-KBG officer Yuri Bezmenov’s famous interview, in which he explains the process.

Therefore, I think the word process is critical. It might sound semantic, but there’s a difference to my mind between a process and a conspiracy. As I said, it’s a ‘direction of travel.’ The creation of a conceptual vivarium, one where the lizard of groupthink grows fat. If you’re on the Left, for example, you might hope Antonio Gramsci’s aspiration comes to fruition;

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

This isn’t a revolution. It’s an evolution. A process. I’ve never underestimated the cultish, stubborn, relentless commitment of the intellectual Left. If you’re a science-fiction fan, they’re the Bene Gesserit of radical politics.

Therefore, I’m hardly the sort of person who snorts at anything other than the official line. The type who instinctively trusts the ‘grown-ups.’ I’ve read the minutes of too many Gold Groups and seen how many ‘grown-ups’ suffer from terminal Dunning-Kruger effect. Which also helps explain why the police fell hook, line and sinker for modish political fads. Fads directly inspired (or infected, depending on your point of view) by Critical Theory.

So, today, I’m going to offer an example of how this not-quite-a-conspiracy by our elites led to an inversion of reality. An inversion which illustrates how UK policing’s disappeared down a rabbit-hole. Oh, and if you’re a philosophy graduate, you might want to stop reading now. I’m about to trample across your Happy Place in my size elevens. Which leads me to Surrey Police, Frankfurt, Semiotics and Skyla Stone.

Skyla Stone.

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Skyla Stone, who identifies as female, is nonetheless biologically male. Wanted for failing to attend court, Surrey Police insisted on describing Stone as ‘She’. This was, I think it’s fair to say, misleading. Not least, I’d argue, from a legal perspective; to wit, PACE Code D, which deals with the formal identification of suspects in criminal proceedings. I suppose the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 doesn’t feature on the reading list for senior police officers nowadays, but there you go.

In any case, and I can’t believe I have to point this out, but if you tell the public a wanted person is a woman, they won’t be looking for someone who, to the vast majority, resembles a man. I think the kids call this gaslighting, right? Insisting ‘A’ is ‘B’, when it’s quite clearly ‘A’?

We are now entering the very (post)modern territory of someone’s feelings versus reality, gender ideology and public safety. This was all too much for Surrey Police, bless their cotton socks, who had to be ordered to change their wanted appeal by their Police and Crime Commissioner. An aside; I think it’s entirely possible to be accurate, honest and even take into account Skyla Stone’s preferred gender identity. There will be compromises to be made, sure, that’s life. Alternatively, Skyla, why not attend court when you’re told?

In any case, this article isn’t really about transgenderism (I’m quite relaxed about how people choose to live their lives). It’s about the crumbling of consensus around what constitutes fact, a central tenet of our criminal justice system. It’s about how Critical Theory was adopted by public service elites as sort-of-gospel.

Incidentally, Critical Theory was specifically designed to explode our understanding of what constitutes truth and fact. One created, (you’ll be astonished to learn) by Marxists. No, I’m not going off on a Red version of The Da Vinci Code, one where I allege a cunning plan of global domination, hatched by bearded lefties in Frankfurt. Conspiracy? Hardly. The comrades were refreshingly honest about their intentions;

It seeks to dismantle the existing cultural hegemony by ideological subversion and opposition, challenging the legitimacy of existing super-structural institutions like family, religion, and political power.

Roger Kiska

Although, of course, there’s a delicious irony here. The ‘Great Wokening’, after all, was hijacked by devious capitalists. They repurposed it. As many on the sensible Left pointed out, workers were encouraged to fixate on pronouns and ‘white guilt’ instead of pay and conditions. And, yes, Marxist-inspired academics filled their boots advising on this stuff. It’s funny, in a fiddling-while-Rome-burns kinda way.

Still, critical theory’s like Polonium - it’s seldom deployed cleanly. It has a significant, albeit toxic, half-life. Which brings me onto Policing and Semiotics.

Semioticians might consider my crush on Betty Rubble to be deeply political. It’s not my fault she’s so lovely.

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Semiotics is the study of ‘sign processes and the communication of meaning.’ This includes how language impacts on our perception of reality. For example, when I say ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ what images are conjured in your mind? Right now? And how did they get in there? What cultural-socioeconomic influences made me just think of, I dunno, Betty Rubble from ‘The Flintstones’ when I pondered the word ‘Woman’?

I’m sure Noam Chomsky might posit how it’s something to do with the hyper-sexualisation of cavewomen, and how that perpetuates capitalist patriarchy (I actually endured this stuff in college, back in the 80s).

Anyhow, when someone says ‘woman’, an image that doesn’t naturally pop into my head is Skyla Stone’s.

Eventually, some radical semioticians eventually asked the question - how do we change people’s near-Pavlovian responses to words or symbols? What if we could? Imagine what we might achieve (cue evil laughter)! Let’s explode the very notion of ‘gender’. Question everything. All the time. Forever (more evil laughter)!

Earlier, I mentioned Code ‘D’ of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Identification of suspects.’ Law (often an ass, but better than the alternative) turns on ‘Bourgeois cultural constructs’ like facts. Truth. Evidence. The courts, too, are wrestling with this identarian stuff. What is a woman? To what extent should factors like race affect hitherto sacred principles like true equality before the law?

Remember, postmodernists overwhelmingly view 'facts’ as concepts through the prism of economic exploitation by one group over another - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Those old chestnuts. It’s an intellectual Swiss army knife of an argument; Everything I Don’t Agree With Is A Social Construct. A social construct, ultimately, they consider designed to reinforce oppression.

Again, I’m not convinced the modern, DEI-compliant version of this stuff constitutes a conspiracy per se. I see it more as a bunch of leftist philosophy nerds playing with fireworks. They’ve let off firecrackers in HR departments and the civil service and corporate boardrooms. And now the curtains have caught alight.

The elites who welcomed this ideology into our lives seem to have missed the point; Critical Theory was implicitly designed to deconstruct society, enabling its replacement by a Marxist utopia. Which, to me, is pretty fucked-up. Every time humans try to create utopias, it seems to end with secret police, internment camps and people swinging from lampposts. Politicians, many of whom are allegedly taught PPE at elite universities, should get this. If a polytechnic-educated schmuck like me did, why didn’t they?

The unlikely possibility of armed communist insurrection aside, what of the lingering damage critical theory-tainted ideologies does to organisations like the police? When will they accept the theories they’re embracing were specifically formulated to render society ungovernable?

Which brings me back to Surrey Police HQ and Skylar Stone.

Promoting any ideology seems incompatible with the concept of policing 'without fear or favour.’ Which, I suppose, is a social construct, right?

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Surrey Police is not even remotely unusual in this. Most forces have tied themselves in knots by adopting intersectional politics inspired by critical theory. All it’s achieved is to set groups of officers against each other and the public they serve.

What did Surrey Police say when asked about their inability to offer concise, accurate information concerning a wanted offender? It should be quite simple, really. The Deputy Chief Constable offered this excuse, which is right up there with ‘the dog ate my homework.’

‘There remains no national guidance on this matter.’

Huh?

The force ‘awaits instruction’ from the National Police Chiefs Council on ‘contextual guidance’ for ‘use of language.’

There you go. It wasn’t our fault! We’ve subcontracted commonsense to the National Police Chief’s Council.

A deputy chief constable can be paid as much as £178,686 (2023 figures). More than the Prime Minister. Despite this, Surrey’s DCC was unable to make a decision about a suspect’s gender on a wanted poster? Wow. That College of Policing National Decision Making model wasn’t a complete waste of time, was it?

No, this isn’t about advice from the centre. It’s about cravenness. Surrey Police are more scared of upsetting a diversity commissar or a staff association. More scared than they are of public they’re paid to serve. And therein lies the rub. The single most acute problem facing our elites across the board.

It’s funny. Again, in a dark, end-of-days sort of way.

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How and why this happened is a long story, one which I’ve touched upon elsewhere on this Substack. In short? The culture war partisans achieved a partial victory, inasmuch as their ideology took root. Take ‘allyship’, for example, a triumph of if-you-aren’t-slavishly-with-us-you’re-against-us politics.

Partly, this is due to the emotional genius of intersectional critical theory. It makes disagreement morally questionable. Not nice. It transformed luxury opinions into luxury beliefs. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a Non-Crime Hate Incident to sell you. It also means compromising the principle of neutrality before the law. Although the law, increasingly, appears to be gerrymandered to fit this new orthodoxy.

Look, the police shouldn’t be like trendy vicars. They should be stolid, neutral and reassuring. Boring, even. Yes, this is an aspiration. History shows us police will sometimes fail. They require effective internal vigilance and external accountability. That also means not taking sides in contested areas of politics.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction; the woke revolution has spawned its own counter-revolutionaries.

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Then there’s the inevitable backlash, the fault of those who failed to run due diligence on critical theory. Or were obsessed with monetising grievance and kulturkampf point-scoring. Or were plain damn scared, pretend to wait for ‘contextual guidance.’

An entire generation of ‘New Right’ Gen Z writers and thinkers have been forged in the crucible of these 21st Century culture wars, with its moralising and gaslighting and double-standards. The hypocrisy of the Boomers who brought us triangulation and third ways and the end of history disgusts them too. As does the flagrant generational injustice, dooming them to be poorer than their parents. The social contract has crumbled - a contract critical theory was implicitly designed to undermine.

What does this mean for the future? Well, let’s just say I doubt tomorrow’s revolutionaries will be the flavour Marxist professors imagine.

And hopefully, by then, Surrey Police will have received proper guidance from the NPCC. At least they’ll know the centrally-approved language to describe the disaster-to-come.

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