We live in a time of ideological exhaustion. Our doctrines and ideals lie broken in pieces all around us and never fit into a whole. Jagged bits of Marxism and anarchism, nationalism and liberalism, clutter the landscape, tear at our feet and impede our way as we stagger onward in search of some promised land. Yet there can be no promised land, no future, no past, in such a psychotic jumble of first principles. All we can muster is rage at the structures around us, so inexplicably shattered, and the urge not to repair but to obliterate them totally — to negate them into dust.

Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine. Any piece of it, such as racial justice, can make perfect sense, but the whole dissolves into incoherence when it becomes clear that the highest ideal, equity, is a weasel word used to mask an inability to reconcile opposites.

Definitions of equity, whether provided by the White House or by elite universities, are baffling, I suspect intentionally so. Terms such as “fairness” and “anti-racist” are thrown around — but somehow this adds up to “investment” and “allocating resources” favouring designated grievance groups. Equity, in practice, means absolute equality of outcomes in all transactions, measured not in the liberal tradition, between individuals, but harking back to a more primitive outlook: between castes to which we have been assigned by birth and fate.