Left-handed politics would not be where it is today without a little help from cultural relativism, one of the most central approaches to left minded thinking. All groups within a society, big or small, central or peripheral, should be free to express their cultural and moral identities, as long as this falls within the laws and values of the society at large. Even if the values of one group appear to be the most tragic accumulation of incoherent babble, or even psychopathic cruelty, there is in principle, no way of claiming one group’s intrinsic correctness over another. There is no standard to compare. There is no objective truth. Politically speaking, this calls for a government that strives for tolerance, diversity of opinion, and opposition to absolute authority. And so we awaken warmly each morning, democracy battering its eyelashes from under the covers.

So why, instead, does Senator Penny Wong greet me on the early news insisting that, if the issue of same sex marriage were to be put to a plebiscite, the Australian people cannot be trusted to vote morally? More specifically, Wong believes the vote will open up a platform for hate speech, and should therefore not enter public decision-making. Since when did the Senator get exclusive rights to the inner thoughts of every Australian? Since when did opposing the issue automatically become hate speech? Since when did morality become matter of fact from a left perspective? It seems awfully clear that a) members of the Labor party now wield the enthusiasm to categorically shut down differing cultural and moral claims if they are in disagreement with their own, and b) that Penny Wong is attempting to convict the Australian population of thought crimes. Moral absolutism and thought crime. Nope, nothing creepy or totalitarian to see here…

How interesting. The original force field of cultural relativism that was meant to protect differing opinions now gives the Left the ability and protection to go right ahead and shut down differing opinions.

On virtually any issue, a seething pit of moral outrage, political correctness and hypersensitivity awaits any poor soul willing to express a counter, or God forbid, unique opinion. Here’s my proposed formula (with apologies to one A. Einstein): as tolerance to opposing thought approaches zero, the density in the skulls of those politicians tends to infinity, and no intelligible information is permitted to escape from the event horizons of these political black holes.

Why is this happening? In short, some people are easily offended. Somewhere along the way, taking offence has become a rather virtuous pursuit. It comes about when you assume to know someone’s argument, and then imagine that it is constructed with the sole purpose of upsetting you. Once you have been offended, and once your wave of self-righteousness, anger and pride crashes theatrically down onto your opponent, along the way, you may have just missed the actual intentions of what was said. Indeed always assuming the worst, and imagining people’s motives as entirely negative, successfully immunises any discourse from genuine empathy, civility and meaningful agreement or disagreement.

In keeping with her new absolutism, Ms Wong was recently filmed refusing to greet Joe Hockey. If you can’t even say hello to the opposition, what chances do you have of any sort of conversation?

The phenomenology of offence is weirdly related to this thing we call democracy. In a brewing pot of opposing views, which will be found in most democratic societies, offence should come as no surprise. Then why is battling offence becoming a driving force in politics? To any thinking person, this must represent an erosion of at least a handful of democratic principles. So it comes as no surprise that Labor are staunchly opposed to the Coalition government’s proposed same sex marriage plebiscite, when, as nobody should need reminding, a plebiscite is essentially the core unit of democracy.

What we are seeing here is a complete breakdown, or at least erosion, of the founding democratic principles of the Australian Labor party. An institution once built on relativism, is now foaming at the mouth in absolutism.

Labor started with cultural relativism and have journeyed backwards in time to arrive at totalitarian authority.

Einstein would be impressed.