Two Case Studies in Political Solipsism
By Richard Martin | The Strategic Code
The new politics of the self finds its most revealing expression in two areas: gender identity and sexual violence. Both reach into the deepest layers of personal experience. Both have been transformed by the contemporary belief that inner feeling possesses absolute authority over outer reality. The result is a collision between emotional truth and the structures of society, between what is felt and what can be known.
The first and most visible case is that of gender identity. The phrase “a man trapped in a woman’s body,” or its reverse, expresses the central claim of the new metaphysics of interiority: that the truth of the self is purely inward, independent of biology, language, and social form. For a mature adult, this conviction may guide personal action. Adults are free to interpret and live their lives as they choose. The ideology becomes dangerous when it seeks to universalize this belief and to inscribe it on the bodies of children. The sexual imagination of childhood is fluid and undirected. It is filled with fantasy, imitation, curiosity, and play. Adolescence brings turbulence and uncertainty, but also the gradual consolidation of identity through experience. To treat this imaginative and formative process as evidence of a fixed inner truth is to mistake development for destiny.
What is now unfolding in schools, clinics, and online communities is not the liberation of children but their conscription into a metaphysical struggle they cannot possibly understand. Ideologically committed adults, animated by a belief in self-creation, project their own convictions into the imaginary life of the young. The child’s world of play and possibility becomes a site of political affirmation. What was once the natural ambivalence of growing up, feeling both boy and girl, neither, or something beyond, has been reinterpreted as a sign of permanent identity. The social movement that began as a call for compassion has drifted into a form of recruitment. The reaction of ordinary parents is not simple prejudice. It is a defence of the distinction between guidance and indoctrination, between nurturing development and imposing ideology.
The second domain where interior truth confronts public reason is sexual assault. The Me Too movement began as an outpouring of solidarity among victims of coercion and abuse. It exposed patterns of impunity that had long hidden behind fear and silence. In its early phase it was a moral awakening that gave many women the courage to speak. As the movement expanded, it began to clash with the principles that sustain justice itself. The law does not operate on belief; it operates on proof. To convict or punish without evidence is to abandon the presumption of innocence that protects everyone from the passions of the moment. Criminal justice is necessarily public, procedural, and restrained. It cannot be governed by empathy alone because empathy is neither consistent nor impartial.
The desire to honour the experience of victims is humane and legitimate. Yet the legal system cannot be rebuilt on the foundation of personal revelation. The rules of evidence, the burden of proof, and the right to defence are not obstacles to justice but its substance. A society that abandons these standards in the name of compassion trades fairness for feeling and ends by eroding both. The belief that pain, however real, can define guilt without corroboration is a reversion to pre-modern forms of moral judgment. It turns law into ritual, replacing deliberation with denunciation.
These two cases reveal the same underlying pattern: the elevation of inner truth over shared reality. In both, the private experience of the self is treated as self-validating and self-sufficient. Yet human beings do not live only within themselves. We live among others, within institutions, bodies, languages, and histories that give shape to our freedom. When inner conviction is allowed to overrule those outer forms, compassion turns into coercion. The politics of feeling becomes the tyranny of sincerity.
The task is to restore proportion. The inner life is real, but it cannot dictate the terms of the public world. Childhood imagination is not political revelation, and suffering is not legal proof. Society depends on the conversation between the inner and the outer, the personal and the common. Without that balance, empathy collapses into ideology and justice into vengeance. The defence of reason, restraint, and shared truth is not a denial of experience but its only reliable protection.
About the Author
Richard Martin equips leaders to achieve strategic alignment through nested hierarchical action, harnessing initiative for maximal effectiveness with minimal friction.
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