It’s fair to say that the morbid fixation on mental health among a certain class of visible and voluble teenage girls has grown to be its own mental health crisis. Yet, the PR teams at psychiatric hospitals can say without laughing that people who would speak of mental health must first overcome a culture of silence, and that the people who do manage to pierce the layer of stigma, who defy the heavy shame to voice the forbidden theme, they are heroes. This includes those who celebrate the brave heroes mentioning mental health, since they also are mentioning mental health.

I’m generally torn when I hear these solemn, delusional pronouncements. On the one hand, I find them irksome. However sincere or sympathetic the intention, they express the interests and ways of thinking of powerful institutions that are, I think, increasingly destructive. On the other hand, in the sheer scale and clarity of their falseness, and the vaguely religious tenor of their repetition, they’re kind of funny. The devolution of psychotherapeutic expression from the clinic and the couch to the individual’s bedroom and his TikTok account, and the valorising of this common form of status-chasing as rare and brave, are undeniably comic, from a certain angle.

This undeniable comedy is something Michel Foucault captures about the moral melodrama through which our therapeutic age celebrates itself — especially in Volume I of his The History of Sexuality. I’m tempted to say that this book, along with his other main historical work of the early Seventies, Discipline and Punish, belongs to the formal division in classical theatre between comedy and tragedy — the traditional comedy being about sex (and ending with a wedding), and the standard tragedy being about death (and ending with, well, a death). Discipline and Punish begins (rather than ends), with an 18th-century prisoner’s prolonged and gruesome execution by a method I’ll call “enhanced dismemberment”. The History of Sexuality, on the other hand, begins with a quick paragraph that lets us know we’re descending into a lampoon, impish mockery of a familiar “story”: “For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.” Foucault sets out to show that this “story” is so distorted and self-serving it’s funny.

The “story” that Foucault wants to expose as a sort of kitsch, a corny inverse moralism, is often told by sex professionals (sex doctors and sex bureaucrats, that is, not prostitutes), as well as by the influential historians Foucault is making fun of in this book. It says that, thanks to habits and methods codified in Victorian times and then revived and intensified in the conformist years of the Fifties, we are heirs to a culture of sexual repression. Even today we struggle to cultivate open, authentic relationships with our own sexuality. Queen Victoria came to eponymise the themes and methods of this culture, indeed to embody them as the sovereign frump of a mighty empire. But she didn’t found this culture. Rather, the story goes, it began to take form a century and a half before her reign. And this — the dating of this culture to the 17th century by influential historians — is powerfully convenient. Foucault writes: “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century…, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.”

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With a droll professional insult — “one adjusts it” — Foucault places conventional histories of sexuality and repression within their own inherently comic narrative of desire. Unconsciously but earnestly and systematically, the historian makes certain pleasures available to himself by “adjusting” the history of repression to coincide with the history of capitalism. With this concurrence in place, he can cloak himself in “the honour of a political cause” simply in doing his job. If sexual repression emerged to serve capitalism, then merely talking or writing about sex “has the appearance of a deliberate transgression”. Such transgressions add up to a piquantly rewarding political programme — sex and sexual frankness as resistance to capitalism — that “combines the fervour of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for a garden of earthly delights”.

Attached now to a political programme, this erotic longing provides both the inner drive and the highest goal in a total vision of historical progress, which bears certain comic similarities to religious conviction. Conspicuous within the historians’ “discourse of sexual oppression”, Foucault writes, is “something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law”. In this discourse, “some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated”. The rousing lesson of this prophecy, its final message or promise about the future, is: “Tomorrow sex will be good again.”

Within this hopeful vision of liberation through sexiness and sexual frankness, however, Foucault locates a darker motive, a hint of puritanical loathing familiar to students of both religious enthusiasm and revolution. He asks: “Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our past, against our present and against ourselves, that we are repressed?” This resentment is also semi-conscious at best, fraught with irony and cognitive dissonance, and so Foucault can treat it in a comic register as well. Indeed, for almost a page he repeats his question in forms so overt in their jokey wordplay it’s like he’s doing — as comedians call it — “material”. “By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide?” “[W]hy [do we] burden ourselves with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin?” “How have we come to be a civilisation” that prudishly judges itself for having “sinned against sex?”

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The received histories of sex deserve this comic summary because their story of repression is not just errant or wayward, a little off in its critical heading, but diametrically wrong. The real story as Foucault tells it points in the exact opposite direction. The 300 years that the historians circumscribe as a time of repression actually saw an “explosion” of talk about sex. This time is marked by the furious, incessant creation and multiplication of sexual discourses, as an intensifying scientific spirit of observation and classification discovered people’s hidden sexual worlds in their infinite potential as objects of study. Far from being silenced or repressed over this period, people were increasingly prompted and prodded and harassed to name and describe the sexual truths they bore in their souls, by priests, doctors, psychologists, government bureaucrats, and employers, whose power grew with the sexual details they collected and collated. After you read The History of Sexuality, the classic scene in which a repressed person is freed into psychosexual hygiene — “empowering” herself against the forces of shame and repression by divulging her sexual secrets to a professional psychotherapist — appears in a very different light. You’re newly inclined to see empowerment happening not in the speaking — as our melodrama of psychotherapy would have it — but in the listening.

This reversal of the political valence of sexual discourse and sexual silence, and Foucault’s killing mockery of the sexual ideology of the New Left, have recently won him admiring readers outside his original fan club of literary academics and other postmodern Leftists. But a deeper affinity between him and his new readers owes to the fact that Foucault was 50 years ahead of his time in emphasising the deep moral power of administrators and bureaucrats, doctors and psychologists deputised by sovereign and corporate authority to burrow inside people’s minds and bodies, extracting secrets and implanting helpful suggestions. He showed how institutions deploy a sort of relentless inquisitorial energy that remakes their charges into new and more pliant types of institutional subject, more agreeable to administrative power precisely because they’ve been rendered more open about their inner selves.

Diversity training is a telling recent example of this sort of power, a vivid analog of the forms of sexual study and discipline Foucault describes, resting as it does on a pageantry of confession, of redemption into moral fitness through acts of self-narration and self-description. It would be simpler and cheaper, and almost certainly more effective, for employers to minimise racial offence among their white employees by simply telling them what their non-white co-workers are likely to find offensive or racist, and perhaps why. But the idea of piercing the understandable reticence on racial matters of their nervous employees, goading them to “open up” about the racism they hide inside themselves, is simply too attractive to pass up. These records of racial resistance and confession are a source of immediate pleasure and value and power for the department of human resources and its partners in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) consulting world.

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For my part, I came to a curious realisation two decades ago, while researching the politicised, dim-bulb scholarship prominent in teacher-training programmes in the US. The more an educational approach bore the influence of supposedly Foucault-inspired postmodernism, the more “critical” or “constructivist” it was, the more its retail methods resembled the models of institutional power that Foucault describes in History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. Educational relativism reverses the flow of language in a classroom. Instead of receiving agreed-upon knowledge from a stable authority (an arrangement that, let’s be clear, is not without its disciplinary potentials), prone students are induced to produce discursive performances for an authority who, instead of lecturing and overtly prescribing, is now observing, listening, notating, patiently waiting through awkward pauses, prodding the student to keep talking when useless silence threatens to dominate.

When content and curriculum are demoted as teachers’ duties, what tends to replace them is a therapist’s probing interest in inner states, attitudes, and dispositions. This is the direction of virtually every faddish innovation in education. Instead of students learning about the outside world from teachers, it is teachers learning about the inner selves of students, from the students’ own confessional output. I always imagine Foucault hearing the popular slogan from teacher-training programmes, “the child-centred classroom”, and shuddering.

The growing centrality of this psychotherapeutic outlook to our moral culture and the perpetual, self-fuelling revolution of sexual expression and identity continue to make Foucault look like a visionary 40 years after his death. As I note above, therapy-minded young people now commonly perform — upon themselves, often for a public audience of social media followers — the main psychological operations, the patient’s confession as well as the clinician’s diagnosis. They (and we) have internalised not only the expressive imperatives of the clinical setting but also the analytical biases, the drive for identifying and classifying and subdividing human types, that marks the human sciences to which psychology belongs. In this analytical process, the ambiguous, changeable matter of human behaviour is translated into legible categories of human person.

Like the institutions that observe and nurture and mould us as we pass our days within them, we are impatient to specify what human type we belong to. We are keen to nestle into a nice category, match ourselves with a diagnosis, map ourselves on the great taxonomy. This is a lot of things besides funny, but it’s also funny. Foucault is taken to be a great inspiration for the sort of “queer theory” that informed, or at least provides a stockpile of quasi-academic jargon for, the ongoing revolution in sexual and gender identity. To its ideologists, I imagine this revolution appears in dialectical terms, suppressed or hidden “subjectivities” pushing against the harm and violence of outdated understandings, emerging into the light of dignity and recognition, properly seen, finally, for example, as asexual.

But Foucault didn’t buy into the dialectic of history. Anyone truly inspired by him would watch as another pastel strip is added to the gender flag, as the quivering “+” at the end of the list of initials invites a new identity into the official fold, and see something very different from history being steered toward ultimate justice by ever-freer self-expression. They would see the techniques of the human sciences — now devolved to us, internalised by our suggestible selves — doing the unending work of analysis and classification and discipline. Remembering their reading of Foucault, they would find this all so absurdly familiar they’d have to laugh.

I have worked in a government department for the past 33 years, but it was only in 2008 that I became aware that the unions not always on the side of their members. HR had sent round an intimidating email urging us all to complete our online diversity data: if we didn’t complete it by a specific date, we were told that out names would be added to “a list of non declarers”. That list would then be passed on to senior management. “In addition,” it said, “HR may contact non declarers by phone to update their details on the system there and then.”

Many of us immediately forwarded the email to our union, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), both to complain about the threatening tone of the email and to ask why the department needed to know such things as our “sexual orientation” or “religious belief”. Many of us also logged into our online HR profile and removed any existing diversity data we’d already completed.

The majority of us heard nothing in response. But one regional union rep in our building not only received a reply — that essentially this was voluntary data management which then union would also like us to complete — but the message also contained some of the disparaging emails being sent between senior union officials.

One exchange read:

“Clarification does need sending out as soon as possible. The members who have raised this with me are, at the moment, quite adamant that they will not supply this information especially given the way the e-mail was worded. This attitude will obviously soften with time especially when the “non-compliants” are interrogated over the phone by HRS.  If a reasoned argument can be provided by us as to why they should freely give the required information, but explaining that you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, then HRS will still get their answers. But at least we don’t look like we are supporting the way they’re carrying out this caper which is the impression people are getting…”

Once the email came to light, our HR department apologised and emphasised that the data grab was voluntary. But in many ways, that was only the start. Fast forward to 2014 and the roll-out of unconscious bias training (UBT) throughout the civil service. This, as with the supplying of diversity data, wasn’t mandatory, though many were led to believe it was. Again I contacted my union to complain that management was forcing some kind of Orwellian thought-training upon us, that I was refusing to do it, and to ask them if they would back me if I faced pressure to complete it or was threatened with disciplinary action for refusing.

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In response, a PCS official phoned to tell me that the union backed the introduction of UBT. I was told the union’s officials had completed it, didn’t see my issue with it and would not support me if I faced any action from management. To which I replied: if that was the case, then he and the union were part of the problem.

But it was only after searching through the PCS website that I realised how much of the problem the union really was. I quickly came across several articles and even a conference motion from 2013 that demanded UBT be made mandatory for all staff. In effect, PCS were demanding intrusion into our very thought processes and, in the process, handing employers a means of disciplining us based on highly politicised, subjective and flawed evidence of “unconscious bias”.

Then, fortunately, in December last year it was announced that that UBT was to be scrapped throughout the civil service in England, after a Government Equality Office investigation found that it can actually “backfire” and reinforce stereotypes and biases. In any normal world, the scrapping of UBT would have been praised by those who value freedom of thought and conscience in the workplace.

Not so the deputy general secretary of Prospect, a union for civil service professionals, who told the Guardian: “While there is a debate as to the effectiveness of unconscious bias training, simply scrapping it without setting out alternative ways to combat discrimination in the work place is not acceptable.” His concern was shared by the assistant general secretary of the senior civil service FDA union, who told the BBC’s Politics Live that “to remove it without replacing it with anything seems absolutely illogical”.

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But the story doesn’t end there. Perhaps in anticipation of UBT being scrapped, or aware of its discrediting, the civil service unions were busy behind the scenes collaborating on a replacement — in the form of a new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) eLearning module, which was rolled out to us in September 2020. However, unlike with its predecessor, at least this time the collaboration between the unions and management was stated openly; we were informed that we had until the 31 December 2020 to complete it. (I am yet to do so.)

No doubt HR thought that highlighting the unions’ collaboration would give the training greater credibility. But to me it was evidence of our unions’ insultingly low opinion of their members and the wider workforce. That is, rather than seeing us as a collective solution to workplace problems, including in tackling discrimination, we are made to feel like would-be bigots who need to be saved from ourselves.

So, to return to the UCU’s disgraceful lack of support for Kathleen Stock, I would have been more shocked if her union had supported her right to think what she likes and express those opinions freely. But until the unions overcome their own conscious prejudices against the workforce, and stop collaborating with management to impose increasingly discredited diversity initiatives upon us, don’t expect them to defend freedom of thought and conscience in the workplace anytime soon.

Calvinism was an energetic and revolutionary creed which found its epicentre in Geneva. Here, as elsewhere, Calvinists showed themselves devoted to education, enthusiastic charity givers and generous to refugees.

They also proved to be violently intolerant, with Jean Calvin’s Geneva imposing extreme punishments for perceived sinners, including the death penalty for pregnancy out of wedlock. They also had a tendency to smash up statues and burn down abbeys, or anything else that was associated with the old religion. Perhaps most puzzling of all to religious conservatives, Calvinists saw the world being divided between the damned and the saved — and the doubt this caused in believers often led to extreme psychological stress, to the point of breakdown.

It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and so just over 400 years ago, a group of English men and women with Calvinistic leanings, feeling that their homeland wasn’t Godly enough, set sail to start a new country. This they did, pretty successfully, and today the new religion spreading from America displays that country’s strong Calvinist roots, and with the zealot’s indifference to local customs.

Today the faith is spread not by preachers, or even teachers, but through the institutions that wield the most power in the 21st century; corporations, and their Human Resources departments. For the practitioners of what is generally known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” are teaching nothing less than a modern form of political Calvinism, one that paints a pessimistic picture of humanity destined to be damned. And their strength is growing.

Our economy may be in deep trouble following the pandemic, but one area which is already enjoying a roaring 20s is the diversity industry, which has significantly increased its presence in many companies since the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. All around, in hushed tones, people in a variety of careers, from academia to medicine to finance, grumble about the increasing encroachments on their workplace by newly empowered D.E.I teams. And the grumbling is always private; no one wants to go on record.

For some it’s a mere time-wasting exercise, with occasional Zoom conferences adding to the day’s workload. For others it goes much further, with HR-led diversity teams now even deciding who can be hired for what role. But almost everywhere there has been a significant ramping-up since last June.

The usual pattern is that a well-meaning manager, bombarded with images of BLM and racial justice from every corner of social media, will suggest that the organisation needs to alleviate concern about racism. The company or department, aware that racism is seen as the number one social evil and that anti-racist courses might also act as insurance against any discrimination lawsuit, will hire a professional anti-racist activist from outside.

It is rarely initiated by human resources, but HR embrace it because it gives them a role as priests of the new faith. There is also a whole outside industry that benefits too.

A middle manager at a medical professional body told me how, following the summer protests in the US, “it was [considered] a matter of urgency that we ran a series of mandatory diversity and inclusion training sessions for our staff”. There hadn’t been any problem at the company, which was pretty diverse and had good morale.

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The sessions were run by professional diversity consultants, and were “quite different from previous E&D training I had attended at past jobs. Whilst those ones tended to focus more on how to avoid breaking the law, these sessions felt a lot more like an induction into their ideology.” They said that equality meant “treating people differently and acknowledging their race” and afterwards participants were told to research “ally behaviour” and “to educate ourselves about the British Empire”.

As with many of these courses, some very questionable claims were made: “We were told that high levels of diversity were in all cases a great thing and can only lead to good outcomes,” when numerous studies point to the opposite. They were told the gender pay gap was in large part caused by people using the word “girl” instead of “woman”, a claim that fails to take into account the overwhelming influence of child-rearing on the gender pay gap.

There was a talk about unconscious bias testing, even though it’s been shown to be largely bogus, and as with so many of these sessions, almost all the examples and talking points came from the US, “and there didn’t seem to be any kind of recognition from the trainers that these are two very different countries with very different histories”.

Many diversity and equality sessions instruct employees to read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, a runaway bestseller that has become the Little Red Book of the diversity industry. White Fragility is mainly tasked with teaching white liberals that the polite ways they talk about race to avoid offence are actually proof of their deep-seated sin. Whites, says DiAngelo, are able to “infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not”, and being unconscious of this racism is merely proof of how insidious it is.

In this world, greater white average wealth in any area is a priori evidence of this racism, even though over a dozen or so ethnic minority groups in the United States are wealthier than the white average. This central inequality, according to the book, “represents power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society”.

It is an incredibly bleak worldview, and as Matt Talibi said, “sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors”.

And this is what is being taught at workplaces across Britain, a new American religion proclaiming that, whatever we do, we are damned. It goes largely unopposed partly because the British are so unused to politics intruding in these areas of life, but also because workers are scared for their jobs; the rise of woke capital has given large corporations more power over their precarious employees.

One of the things I find so alien about the new religion is the absence of humour. So much of what is called identity politics is funny in its absurdity, because fanatics are intrinsically ridiculous — but only when they can’t get at you. But most people feel that they can, they can get them sacked or publicly humiliated, and so all the humour is told in DM groups or Slack channels. True believers certainly can’t laugh at themselves, and are determined to take the public realm’s sacred space for themselves.

There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everything is about politics. What you do in your spare time has political implications, and so no area of life is free of political discussion. The traditional English cultural taboo about not discussing religion or politics in the pub reflected a deep-seated aversion to fanaticism; the idea that workplaces might be settings for political instruction would once have struck people here as positively demented.

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A friend who works for a Russell Group university in the north of England described how, since June last year, there have been “constant invitations to regular Race Equality sessions and Diversity and Inclusion sessions”. Even in department-level meetings on completely unrelated topics there are now talks “educating us about the slave trade” with videos and slides. She describes these as “just complete non-sequiturs since the majority of the meeting is about new research grants, new students in the department, recruitment for next year”. It’s not that it’s a great intrusion, it’s just that it’s…. weird.

They are also made to undergo unconscious bias training before being allowed on interview panels for new staff and students, and are told things which are either questionable or outright false. At one of the meetings a diversity and inclusion officer told faculty that “if you only have one woman on your job shortlist there’s statistically no likelihood you’ll recruit her”, and this went unchallenged, even though this is not only untrue, it’s obviously untrue. Strangest of all, they were also told to “start every lecture with a picture of a black scientist and say that they have a voice and that it’s being heard”. She finds it embarrassingly patronising.

Universities are particularly vulnerable to this sort of activism, because by nature they are political. Many privately despair, including academics who aren’t especially right-wing; whatever your politics, conformism can become intolerable in a workplace. Talking about politics all the time is tedious. And activists can be disagreeable people.

Another academic, working at a politics department, recalled that things ramped up after the death of George Floyd when a committee was set up to look at diversity and decolonisation. It ended with activists from outside the department hiring students to “review” their reading list and blaming the inclusion of John Locke and David Hume for the BAME attainment gap. The conclusion was the demand that they separate “colonial and non-colonial” political history courses, which meant in effect separate courses for white and non-white political philosophers.

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The strangest thing about all this expanded HR is that there is almost no evidence that diversity officers improve outcomes for underrepresented minorities. Indeed there is even evidence of the “pharisee effect”, that people made to recite a platitude about diversity and gender equality were less likely to hire a black or female candidate; it just made them feel like they’ve done their bit, a criticism that has been made against upper-class activism since Tom Wolfe’s day.

None of this stops it expanding. Even the royal family are on board, or as it was reported last week, “Queen to appoint diversity tsar”, one of those headlines that would truly baffle someone waking from a long coma. This will not improve the life of a single BAME person except for the actual tsar, or tsarina, who gets the job; everyone knows it, it’s just the royal family conforming to the state religion, just as their ancestor George I did.

The companies hiring diversity consultants probably aren’t improving people’s lives, and they aren’t encouraging tolerance, let alone “diversity”; quite the opposite. They’re doing what people in positions of power have done since the first states were formed, ensuring that their gods and saints are the ones being revered by the subjects they rule. As for the individuals who do not believe in the new faith, they do what people in totalitarian societies have always done – they keep quiet and retreat to an inner world where the intolerance and conformity of the powers-that-be cannot reach them.