how we got to here

how moral relativism destroyed sanity and how objectivity can bring it back

and machiavelli wept, for there were no princes left to mock…

given the abject absurdity of so much of our current situation, it becomes perhaps inevitable that the question of “how on earth did we get here?” arises.

and it’s a good question.

a needed question.

how did we break politics and academia and society to the point where the madmen are running the asylum and the joker has become police commissioner of gotham?

how have we descended to the point where mayors of major cities are suing car companies because “cars that dress like that are asking for it!”

we legalize crime, criminalize dissent, and elevate literal lunatics as luminaries and leaders.

everything sane and sound is under assault and the biggest problem these “intellectuals” see is that it is not being attacked hard enough.

i mean, this is not even a joke:

they would seriously have us believe that the two parent nuclear family is somehow an attack upon “the marginalized.”

“i experience your happiness as assault.”

this is well over the line of inversion and into insanity.

many have made claims like this

and to some extent this is surely so but as an explanation for this sudden surge of stupidity, i find it unsatisfying and incomplete.

something else has been going on and a great deal of this new “all the rabidly anti-social actors are the heroes and society must shift to accommodate rather than eliminate them” seems to derive from relatively recent emergent issues.

all this division and vilification and rage farming is coming from somewhere, and it really is new over the last 15 years or so.

we can play at ideas of info war and deliberate subversion and manipulation, and i’m sure there are folks out there trying it, but honestly i just don’t think they are that smart or effective and the level of self-immolation they currently seem set upon smacks not of the cunning svengali so much as a runaway process robbed of reason and righteousness starting to spin ever faster in some sort of ouroboros-like self annihilation.

and i think that process is moral relativism.

once you start accepting ideas like “there is no objective morality” you’re pretty much done for. this is how you start the avalanche of debasement by deviant demagogue.

it’s the gateway drug to societal collapse.

consider:

in the absence of any shared collective notion of objective morality, there can be no clear path to virtue or status. you can say “it’s good to stick around and raise your children” and some quack can pipe up that “that’s just white heteropatriarchal family supremacy” and call you an oppressor who must be put down.

the self-refuting silliness of moral relativism (all viewpoints are equally valid. ok, what about my view that all viewpoints are not equally valid? is that equally valid?) does nothing to slow or even stop this because this entire milieu selects for those who cannot rotate shapes or reason by valid analogy.

they even start attacking the idea of shape rotation, logic, rational thinking, and (astonishingly) cause/effect relationships. (that one really gets me, i mean, honestly, what’s the alterative? people just do stuff and things just happen but none of it is related? how would you even put your pants on?)

how does a poster like this wind up in the smithsonian?

it gets there because once you give up on the idea of objective morality or virtue, you get aggrievement culture because humans will always seek status and the only durable status in a morally relative world comes from claims of grievance. there can be no “good” only “above” or “entitled;” no absolute rectitude or honor, only relative position.

you done me wrong so you owe me. i am superior to you because you oppressed me. i get special privileges and treatment and honor because i am marginalized.

and ultimately, no one is more marginalized than actual crazy people, the barking mad, the literal loons, people of such mental malfunction and values derangement that they demand that you apologize for them robbing you and claim that they are the victims here as they shave their beards in your daughter’s locker room.

these become the pinnacle of professed probity, the acme of ethical ascendance: we have rendered actual madness and anti-social assault as virtue and the weapon of choice for this terrorist brigade is the cudgel of absurdist empathization where all their “feelings” no matter how debased, deranged, or contrived must be accommodated.

it’s your job and duty to make me feel safe and seen no matter how febrile or facile my protestations or fragile my constitution. my mental health is your obligation.

it’s the squalling of a colicky baby writ large as crybully government.

such a system selects for hurtling balls of out of control emotional instability whose histrionic demands wax ever upward.

they cannot control themselves so they seek to control you.

this is the inevitable outcome of aggrievement culture where professed marginalization is mistaken for status.

it's an iterative negative sum game where to stay on top, you always need to be "more oppressed than thou" and so it rapidly selects for the most broken, damaged, and bereft people and shunts them to the top by acting as though they are somehow virtuous for being disastrous human failures.

i mean, how can that possibly end save the calamity of rule by the mentally ill?

and this is why we need a return to objective morality, because perhaps marginalization is a feature not a bug. perhaps the whole point of being a healthy society is that we take those who steal or rape out of circulation instead of calling them “ victims of property inequity” and “libidinously challenged” and begging their forgiveness that they felt driven to do these things to us.

perhaps marginalizing bad actors and those of poor morals is, in fact, what makes society work. we can argue about how and how much, but it seems essentially tautological that to some degree this must be so.

maybe marginalization is not always a bad thing.

maybe, in fact, it can be useful, even vital.

it certainly seems superior to centering the sociopaths.

elevating the worst at the expense of the best is not the path to a civilization you want to inhabit.

it’s a one way ticket to bonkerstown.

the thing about crazy people is they tend to be so convinced of whatever they are afflicted by that they present as somehow trustworthy. they do not evince the cues of mendacity because they don’t feel like liars, they don’t know they are crazy or that they have succumbed to externalized identity. pile up enough of it and it starts to work like gaslighting. it starts to make you question your own sanity and makes it seem like maybe you’re the crazy one.

you aren’t.

it’s not wrong to want beauty and sanity and trust.

it’s wrong to despise them.

such hatred is a near perfect shibboleth for mental malfunction. the vampires reveal themselves when beauty burns them. others are uplifted. only the undead are so afflicted.

know them by their screams.

calling the ugly beautiful and the beautiful ugly is not progressive, it’s pathology. it’s the broken sputtering of a machine bent past use, the desperate grasping of desperate people devoid of virtue but endlessly covetous of its trappings and determined to burn the world if it means they get to have a little authority and power.

these are the failures elevated by mistaking protestations of marginalization and grievance for quality of character.

you can have objective morality and beauty or you can have abject failure and hideousness.

there’s really no middle way, no accommodation, no safe dosage.

it may have looked that way for a while, but that’s just because the disease was not yet in full flower.

but now it is.

and it just keeps getting worse because that is all it can do as the greasy pole stays greasy and the next cadre of the “even more marginalized” start demanding something even more outrageous because they are even madder than the last bunch.

ideology is not merit.

committed craziness is not character.

viciousness is not virtue.

all these things fall apart when called by name, when objectivity is re-established and this subjectivist slide into a sewer of societal subversion is arrested and reversed.

it’s time to stop accepting these rancid ideas and weaponized empathy as social justice canon. they are nothing of the sort. they’re societal strychnine.

that which we lionize and reward is that which we’ll produce.

if you desire better, value better.

you really do not want to go the other way.

to merely participate in a race to the bottom is to lose.