Krenkelsesfellesskap

There is nothing like public outrage to bring a neurotic population together. It provides, for a short moment during its outburst, not only an easy access-point to the moral high ground, as the casual observer might be lead to believe. It also creates a sense of community, of belonging, however ephemeral. Moreover, the warm feeling we get when we are offended together has attracted an offense industry staffed by smug journalists who specialise in providing the population with stories of people using the wrong word or otherwise stepping over a moral boundary, easily shareable through social media. In size and intensity, the resulting hurricanes of self-satisfied rage at the person “called out” usually dwarfs the initial offense as everyone's bad conscience is projected upon the culprit.


Neither bourgeois sentimentality nor access to high-speed internet suffice as to explain the power of the krenkelsesfellesskap. As class conflict was given up by the Left in favour of a myriad of smaller, particularistic identitarian talking-points, all lead by increasingly professionalized advocacy groups, the end result was an imagined axis of Consensus-as-Such through which all the particular communities were supposed to tolerate each other. Not only did this leave out all the people who are not diverse enough to be tolerated (mostly males with no sanctioned minority status to commend them), it also signalled the end of what had been a Universalist struggle, leaving a gaping void behind. It's as if in this so-called post-ideological world we have gone “back to basics” only to discover that there are no basics to which we can return. This frightens us and we cannot explain why or even how.

As usual with liberalism, the symptom is now interpreted in individual and moral terms – only these are left in our theoretical toolbox as to explain why this era of tolerance and diversity has not made our societies more just, our lives more fulfilled, the people kinder, the children brighter and our neighbourhoods more vibrant, colourful and dynamic (in the marketable sense, of course, not the drug-addled gangland one). Something is off, and it's somebody's fault, so no matter how much we speak about “structural causes” of such ills as racism, sexism, ageism, lookism or whatever offense, we ritually scream out neurotically over so-called microaggressions and then celebratorily pat each other on the back for it, followed by apologies and a gradual return to the humdrum of post-political public discourse until someone else offends our postmodern sensibilities and the cycle begins again.