Applying the Broken Windows Theory to Ideology

Applying the Broken Windows Theory to Ideology

Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash

The Broken Windows Theory, made famous during Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor of New York City, was simple yet profound: if you allow small crimes like vandalism or public disorder to go unaddressed, you create an environment that invites greater lawlessness. A single broken window, left in disrepair, signals that no one cares, that order has been abandoned; soon enough, the neighborhood descends into chaos.

Today, that theory applies just as powerfully to ideology as it ever did to crime. We are surrounded not by shattered glass, but by shattered truths. The moral fabric of our culture is fraying, not because of a single grand act of evil, but because of countless small compromises, neglected principles, and tolerated lies. The ideological “broken windows” of our time, ideas that once would have been unthinkable, now stand unchallenged, and the result is a growing moral decay that threatens to collapse the foundations of our civilization. When a society stops defending truth at the margins, it soon finds it has nothing left worth defending at all.

The First Cracks: When Compassion Loses Its Compass

Every culture must have non-negotiable truths. Without them, moral reasoning becomes a popularity contest, and virtue is whatever trend dominates the headlines. Yet in the name of compassion, we have begun to confuse empathy with enablement.

Consider the policies that attempt to address drug addiction by distributing “safe” needles or creating “supervised injection sites.” The idea is that, by making drug use safer, we can reduce overdoses or disease transmission. But in practice, such policies normalize addiction rather than heal it. They treat the symptom but ignore the sickness. We would never give a pyromaniac a “safe match” or a kleptomaniac a “secure wallet,” yet somehow, when it comes to drug addiction, we suspend reason and call it mercy.

This is an ideological broken window, a moral crack left in disrepair under the banner of kindness. True compassion calls people out of bondage, not deeper into it. It offers redemption, not resignation. It is not love to affirm a lie or reinforce a wound; it is love to tell the truth even when it hurts.

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The Disorder of Disorder: The Homelessness Crisis

The same pattern appears in our cities’ struggle with homelessness. We are told that to criminalize camping on public property is cruel, that to clear encampments is to deny people their humanity. Yet what could be more dehumanizing than leaving men and women to live in squalor, surrounded by filth and despair, under the illusion of freedom?

When courts rule that cities cannot clear tent encampments, they are not protecting liberty; they are preserving decay. A tent is not a home, and asphalt is not a sanctuary. By tolerating this visible manifestation of social disorder, we send a message to our children that dignity and accountability are optional, that chaos is simply another lifestyle choice.

The moral cost of this complacency is staggering. Every sidewalk shantytown is a broken window, a symbol of our unwillingness to hold ourselves and our neighbors to higher standards of responsibility, work, and community.

The Ultimate Broken Window: The War on Creation Itself

But perhaps the most dangerous ideological crack in our modern wall is the denial of biological reality, the rejection of the truth that male and female are not social constructs, but divine design.

To claim that gender and biological sex are disconnected is to shatter the most fundamental window of all: the truth about who we are as created beings. We have entered an era in which young people are told that if they feel discomfort in their bodies, they were “born in the wrong one.” Under the guise of “gender-affirming care,” children are being given hormones that sterilize them and surgeries that mutilate them, all in the name of self-expression.

When I was growing up in Ghana, there were several public service announcements primarily funded by NGOs in the West condemning female genital mutilation as a barbaric violation of human dignity. It was unthinkable that any civilized society would sanction the cutting or altering of a child’s healthy body. Yet today, in the name of progress, primarily Western doctors who swore to “do no harm” perform similar procedures on children—removing healthy breasts, altering reproductive organs, and prescribing puberty blockers that cause irreversible damage.

What was once condemned as barbaric is now celebrated as brave. This is not progress; it is regression. It is a moral delusion, a window not just cracked, but shattered, through which a cold wind of confusion and suffering now howls.