It began with concerns about “Inclusive Language”, where people began to fret about whether usages which had always been the gender-inclusive versions of words (in most languages defaulting to masculine or sometimes neuter when gender is unclear or mixed) were really inclusive, or did they exclude women? No one had considered that before. It had always been assumed women were included in such uses, but suddenly people were saying they weren’t. People started replacing He with a specific He or She and the all-inclusive archaic term brethren with the made-up brethren-sisteren even though the word sisteren has never existed and even if it had would probably have been sistren.

Feminists of the time simply claimed they were making women visible, which, if you think about it is literally absurd. Words are about sound rather than vision. The word visible was being used metaphorically, but women had never been invisible and even metaphorically no one was unaware of their existence or the fact they make up half the human race. There was a crumb of reality in the way society was organised and the lack of thought as to how privileges were weighted within it, but then privilege was also not evenly distributed throughout society as a whole, and possibly never can be completely. Others, including myself, dismissed it as nonsense – a failure to understand the real meaning of words and a pandering to ignorance and therefore counter-educational. However, we were very much in the minority among those who thought about such things at all. At least, it seemed so.

Was this, though, a beginning of a departure from the solid realities of the world into a concern centred on imagination and perception as opposed to intention and fact? Was this when the intellectual class began to forget understanding should be about the real world and not a world only existing in our heads?

Philosophically, the question of what was objective and what merely subjective had been around for decades or even centuries. We could go back to Descartes and his famous oven experiment addressing that same problem. However, the 1980s could be the moment it entered the popular intellectual mind. No longer were people worrying about the real solid world around them, but about the way they thought about it and described it. Language moved from being a tool for discussing the things which mattered to the thing which mattered itself. Thought had turned in on itself.

That trend seems to have continued until thought has become all that matters with actual reality almost pushed out to the margin. We now live in a world where politics is all about persuasiveness and showmanship and truth is of little consequence. Both left and right have lost touch with reality as they posit their very different views of the world, neither of which actually matches the real world as it is. So it is that the right, certainly in its more populist expressions, presents a world where nations are not just sovereign, but self-contained and exclusive clubs, with exclusive identities and capable of infinite expansion and loyalty to one strong leader who expects and deserves the allegiance of all citizens and wields absolute power in the name of the people. Science is viewed as a hoax trying to hoodwink society into foregoing its full potential and truth is twisted and selected to suit the ruler’s objectives. That vision is doomed because it ignores the real limitations the world imposes. Not everything a ruler imagines is achieveable just because he thinks and says so.

Meanwhile, the left also sees no need of fact or reality. For them, the realities of the world are negotiable and to be decided by the individual’s desires and fears. You don't like what you are? Choose to be something different. You feel guilty about your privilege? Choose to belong to an oppressed group. You are what you say you are, and you deserve to be recognised as such. Anyone who disagrees denies your right to exist and is therefore evil, committing a form of personal genocide. The idea of an objective reality has been forgotten. All that exists is what we imagine. Of course, this extreme individualism leads to conflicts when one person’s imagined reality clashes with anothers, and “cancellation” then ensues.

While it is true we all rely on our brain to interpret the world to us, that is a far step from mistaking our perceptions for reality itself. The purpose of the brain is to keep us alive by identifying and avoiding hazards. If it fails in that purpose we’re in real trouble. Hence, we need to recognise the lion stalking through the undergrowth. We need to see a cliff in front of us. We need to know we can’t fly however much we desire otherwise. The vision our brains present to us must of necessity be a very close approximation to the reality beyond if they are to do their job. There can be small differences in how that material is presented internally, as in the language in which we think, but those differences must not change the significance of the information received. In any language it still has to make sense. It still must be an accurate report of what is actually out there beyond our senses. In other words, our perceptions need to match reality, not the other way round.

The real divide in our society is not a polarisation between left and right, but between the intellectual class which lives in an imaginary world and the ordinary people who live in the real one, and are desperate for something different, because the intellectuals are leading us off a cliff they imagine isn’t there.

Unfortunately, neither left nor right can help us with that one. We need at least one party of reality which faces issues with all the messiness of the world and doesn’t simply tell people what it thinks they want to hear.