Black Hole Utopianism
It ends not with a bang, but with corporate memphis
I am not much of a physicist, to put it extremely mildly. I’ve seen The Theory Of Everything and can just about grasp the difference in quantum mechanics and general relativity (little stuff in the universe like atoms vs big stuff in the universe like laws of gravity). I also have a shaky grasp on singularities and how they frustrate all rules physicists have designed around matter and its limits. Black holes specifically, continue to stump our finest mathematical minds as, beyond the measurable limit of the event horizon, they host a space in which no limits exist, and in doing so call attention to the limits of human comprehension of…well, limits.
I sympathise with such frustrated physicists. For a long time I have made the mistake of trying to impose reasonable limits on my expectations of just how stupid progressive ideology is capable of getting, only to discover time and time again just how infinite the proverbial black hole of nonsense really is. For instance, in 2024, the following image went viral, generating incredulous and mocking belly-laughs online.
Where do you start? The concept of solo polyamory is nauseatingly tedious enough, never mind the flabbergasting choice to use a muslim-coded woman as representative for a deviant sexual identity. And the cherry on the cake, throwing in a prosthetic leg because…I suppose she was just too realistic otherwise.
Solo polyamorous hijab amputee lady (as she became catchily known) was the ne plus ultra of looney progressive mascots. The limit had been reached. Such was the informal consensus.
In the last week though, the HR department at a renowned children’s publishing house collectively said “hold our bubble tea” and posted the following on their instagram page.
Now, at a glance this picture doesn't seem any dafter than solo-poly-hijab-amputee lady. In fact, it’s arguably a smidge more palatable - at least no one’s spuriously sporting an eye patch or an ileostomy bag. However, I would argue the idiocy limit has yet again been pushed to new realms. My reasoning is as follows:
The creator of solo poly (etc) lady was one Ebony Hagans. According to Hagans’s instagram bio, she is an advocate for “polyam education”. The image first appeared on her instagram page back in 2020 before it was propelled into the Twitterverse spotlight years later and gained meme status. However, while the image got circulated widely because it resonated so aptly with cultural lunacies infecting sectors of society at every level, Ebony Hagans is just a solo (poly) content creator. The image was not part of an official campaign nor, from what I can gather, is Hagans affiliated with any kind of TQIA+ quango or lobby group. She posts in a personal capacity, as is her right, to spread the good news about non-monogamy via her terrible corporate Memphis-style artwork. Fill your prosthetic boots, Ebs.
The trending image of the interracial, interfaith lesbian couple, however, which has been making waves in the first week of Pride Month, was posted by Ladybird publishing house, one of the most well-known producers of literature for children in the UK. I myself owned and cherished slim, hardback copies of beautifully-illustrated Ladybird classics as a small child in the 90s. What a depressing contrast.
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My nostalgia is irrelevant here. Putting aside the soulless, rancid rainbowfied mess that modern children’s publishing is now, the connotations of the picture are self-evidently ridiculous. The comments on the Instagram post echo such scepticism. There’s a fair bit of vitriol and not just from the scoffing woke-fatigued. The angriest responses are from members of the muslim community who find the implications of the picture disrespectful to their religion and customs. And, whatever my personal feelings about Islam and its compatibility with Western values and customs (not wildly optimistic, as it were), this does make sense. You don’t have to have read the Qur’an to understand that a devoutly muslim woman who dons head-to-toe religious modesty garb - decreed as a symbol of sexual subservience to men - is highly unlikely to be in a co-parenting relationship with a liberally-tattooed lesbian. Even the daftest of my woke-adjacent friends would call this a far-fetched scenerio.
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Once upon a time in the land of three/four years ago, I’d have found the irony hilarious: that in a bid to manufacture preposterous standards of integration, a company would end up alienating the very community they were trying to forcibly integrate into their vision of society. Now though, I’m all out of chuckles, even dark ones.
For longer than I care to admit, I saw the normalisation of media - be it entertainment, adverts, or campaign materials - portraying this rainbow-washed multicultural utopia as purely delusional rather than deliberate. It took me an embarrassingly long time to click that this aggressively enforced vision of British society in which drag queens and Islamists skip merrily hand-in-hand, was calculated gaslighting. But it’s crucial to understand, the goal isn’t to get the general public to actually believe it’s an accurate reflection (all but the most far-gone of us know it’s fantasy). The goal is to trick the average, semi-realist citizen to wonder if enough people believe it’s an accurate reflection of society that they’d be fighting a losing battle to raise any objections to it.
I find it particularly telling that Ladybird have not (yet) deleted the post and issued a wimpy apology, as organisations are prone to doing when a sacred caste of marginalised groups kick off. Some may put this down to the boardroom automatons at Ladybird as not wanting to risk offending the LGBTQIA+ caste in turn or, indeed drawing any unnecessary further attention to omnicausal incompatibility. I’m not even sure it’s as a deep as damage control though, but simply empty silence following empty meaning.
To riff very loosely on one of Oscar Wilde’s most famous quotes: modern progressives understand the aesthetic of everything and the meaning of nothing. Whoever cooked up this instagram post at Ladybird publishing (and I have very, very strong suspicions of what demographic they belong to…spoiler: they’re not working-class and, I’m sorry to say, probably not male) reveal their insipid utopianism in the words even more so than the picture.
Everyone should be free to be themselves, no matter who they are or who they love.
To clarify or define each of the words that make up these schlocky sentiments would be to instantly make it collapse on itself and expose the black hole ideology beneath. The old classically liberal adage, which was short-sighted enough, was along the lines of “live your life freely as long as you’re not hurting anyone”. The harm disclaimer does not even come into play for progressives anymore, and not because it’s assumed self-explanatory. Because it doesn’t matter. Nothing beyond the veneer of rainbow-washed, EDI slop matters - there is no matter. We are past virtue-signalling and now in the new phase of virtue vague-posting.
Why despite every attempt at reason, at dialect, at presenting evidence, do institutional tastemakers and policy-makers still cling to ideologies that so obviously will destroy society and our moral values, not enrich them? This feels particularly excruciating to plead in a week where we have seen an attempted beheading of a British citizen in Belfast be played down, and the horrifying video of Henry Nowak bleeding to death while an ambivalent police officer dismisses his agony is still fresh in our minds. Since the Southport killings in summer 2024, why has nothing shifted for progressive ideologues?
To be asking this in 2026 is to make the mistake of thinking we’re still straddling the event horizon. No, we’re deep in the void now. Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back from behind its corporate Memphis camouflage. This is not about misguided morality or money or anything definably meaningful. Progressivism has long immunised itself from material reality and, with this, any and all limits that pose a challenge to its all-consuming existentialist suction. We are not fighting a monster with an agenda anymore but a self-reinforcing singularity. And that’s far more terrifying.