The Zeitgeist Is Dissociation — Statecraft

In NRC of 22 May 2026 Christel Don makes an observation sharper than her opinion genre allows. The appeal to the Zeitgeist with which the Amsterdam Court of Appeal acquitted the state and the adoption intermediary in the Butink case is not a neutral historical reading but an instrument of power. It shifts the burden of proof onto victims. That observation deserves an institutional next step. The appeal to the spirit of the age is dissociative in its very nature, and it is already taking shape today in cases that will come before the courts twenty years from now.

The argument does three things at once. It freezes the norm in the past, it anonymises responsibility by delegating it to an impersonal temporal entity, and it declares present-day moral judgement to be a form of anachronism. No one acted wrongly. The times were simply like that. Whoever judges it now is projecting. The victim is thereby not only denied but made epistemically improper, charged with breaching the rules of temporal courtesy by assessing the past with the criteria of the present.

The more precise term is doxa. Bourdieu uses it for the universe of the unspoken, that which need not be said because it goes without saying. The Zeitgeist argument retrospectively fabricates a doxa that did not exist at the time. In 1992 there were already critical voices about intercountry adoption from Sri Lanka; it was not a silent consensus. The plurality of the moment is erased after the fact into a single voice, and that single voice is then called the spirit of the age. This is more than a rhetorical trick. It is dissociative because it severs action from moral judgement by delegating that judgement to an entity without a face. The organisation no longer listens, because by its own reconstruction there was no one with anything to say.

Here lies the real price. Every doxa built today supplies, twenty years on, the material for the next Zeitgeist defence. How the system handles dissent now determines how credible its alibi will sound tomorrow. Whoever marginalises the dissenting voice in today’s files is writing the silent consensus that the court will accept in 2045 as the prevailing norm. The embedding of moral judgement therefore requires that dissent be recorded in real time, not only once legal proceedings compel it.

Three cases show the pattern.

The childcare-benefits scandal. The warnings were there. Specialists within the Belastingdienst, the Tax Administration, alongside lawyers, members of parliament, journalists at Trouw and RTL, and the victims themselves. They were not heard; they were denied and pathologised. The doxa that followed the so-called Bulgarian fraud declared the combating of fraud an overriding priority and built an institutional consensus around it. That consensus has since been recognised as dissociative: a trias in which legislature, administration and judiciary each slid away from the principle of proportionality within its own valid logic, and none of the three invoked the human measure as a binding counterweight. What we now know as unprecedented injustice was, at the time, real dissent that was switched off institutionally. The doxa broke only when the lower house of parliament set up a parliamentary inquiry into it.

Youth care. The pattern is repeating now. The out-of-home placements in the wake of the benefits scandal have been under fire for years. Inspectorate, ombudsman, professors, parents, and at times professionals too. The Act on Improving the Availability of Youth Care, now entering implementation, codifies frameworks that are at this very moment already being criticised by the professionals who must carry them out. When that criticism lands in a courtroom twenty years from now, the Zeitgeist defence will be ready: the understanding of the day, the frameworks then in force, the information then available. The design of the alibi runs parallel to the design of the law.

Puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors. The most controversial example, and for that reason the most clarifying. Internationally the evidence is shifting. The Cass Review in England (2024), the tightening of position by the Karolinska Institute, and revisions in Finland, Norway and Denmark point to a growing reserve towards these interventions in minors. In the Netherlands the original protocol remains largely intact while it comes under pressure abroad. Dissent is amply present, including from professionals within the field. The question for Statecraft is not who is right. The question is how the present doxa is being constructed. Is dissent discussed on its merits, recorded, weighed? Or is it depathologised and marginalised within a rhetoric of diligence, science and humanity that brooks no contradiction? When the first lawsuits arrive twenty years from now, brought by people who underwent irreversible treatment as minors and who regret it, the answer to that question is already fixed in the way the dissent of 2026 is handled today.

This is not a plea for a position on any of these files. It is a plea for a single institutional practice: the recording and weighing of dissent in real time, without the urge to neutralise it at once. Not as a participation ritual, not as a procedural box to tick, but as a principle of governance. It is what the Strategic Triangle asks for at the corner of legitimacy: not the fictitious unity of a Zeitgeist, but the real plurality of a moment. It is what the Aiki method asks for, directed at the collective interest: moving with what presents itself, even when it is inconvenient. And it is what embedding asks for in the sense that is decisive for Statecraft: what still holds morally in twenty years, not what runs smoothly in law.

Whoever fails to hear the dissenting voice today will not, twenty years from now, need to invent the Zeitgeist argument. It will already be lying ready, written with the same pen that signed the law.

Jacob Huibers · Statecraft · May 2026 · v0.2 Prompted by Christel Don, ‘Erken moreel onrecht, ook als het in de tijdgeest van toen door de beugel kon’, NRC, 22 May 2026.