moral non-equivalance

odd musings on an odd article

you never know quite what to expect from an atlantic headline like this one. have they finally figured it out? will this be some new absurdist take?

well…

so here we go. i must confess, i found myself nodding along to the first paragraph.

this is actually good stuff with which i find ready agreement.

rules are not for following just because they are rules. that’s the ethos of the slave and the simp. the ability to be ungovernable and to manifest ungovernability is the essence of the free human and the sort of society where people yell at you for jaywalking across an empty street is indeed a stupid and a flabby place.

and this sort of flabbiness carries massive risks. i would never have believed that the world would go so quietly into lockdown sacrificing businesses and economic function, breaking education and society, leaving loved ones to die alone of despair. but it happened. and that’s some very dangerous failure.

we need to do better.

but the direction in which the hosted guests rapidly took this struck me as absurd and meaningfully bereft of the morality of actual ungovernability standing rather as its antithesis.

this is not civil disobedience, it’s self-centered rights violations - i have concocted grievances about you and as such i get to take your things.

worse, it conflates voluntary association with tyranny (if you don’t like whole foods, don’t shop there, don’t work there) but do you seriously want to live in a world where property rights are all qualified by “unless someone doesn’t like you?”

i wonder how piker would respond to his own car being stolen because “it seems fine to steal from people who approve of and steal from others, they have explicitly placed themselves outside the social contract.” that actually seems a coherent and defensible view: the thief has failed to be bound by the contract and therefore has forfeit its protection and stands outlaw. the state of nature pertains.

but folks like this are never like that. they’re the first to howl if someone snakes their oatmilk matcha latte off the barista bar and absconds squawking “mine! robber!”

to his credit (and my amusement, he writes well) graeme wood, the atlantic author, is having none of this and lampoons the ralph lauren radicals and their entitlement to organic avocado toast heists.

he lands in a useful place:

“Fretting over trivia such as using a plastic cup, then treating weighty matters such as murder with the same gravity, may be a source of the moral vertigo.”

and this is something i’d like to expand upon as both a sign of the creeping and unpleasant totalitarian practice of “politicizing everything” that has become so stiflingly pervasive in recent decades and of the utter collapse of the sense of proportion and scale that has accompanied it, both carried and catalyzed by the dogmatic doctrines of post modern conversion into “woke” by the addition to the philosophe’s deconstrutionist parlor game the idea of the non-interrogable salient, that which may not be questioned.

this made everything political, and the core beliefs that underpinned the politics into sacrosanct sentiments that you got canceled for doubting. it ran riot in the self refuting fields of moral relativism where the absurdity of “all moral systems are subjective and therefore equal” not only ignored the obvious refutation of “well, my moral system says they are not equal, is that not equal to yours?” but allowed the kinds of people who posit a right to purloin avo-toast because “we think whole foods is bad” to generate what wood fetchingly calls “moral vertigo” by conflating all manner of false equivalences.

if you are the sort of person whose identity is rooted in political belief instead of some core self (a person who is their ideas rather than a person who has ideas) this is heady stuff. you get to wield your identity like a mace and no one is allowed to strike you back.

and i think, if we’re going to look back through the last 20 years and ask: where did all this newfound taste for political violence and rights violation rise? i think we will find it precisely there.

it started the moment people were told that their politics were their identities and that the core tenets of those politics were not open to debate and that any who try are bad people, immoral, unenlightened, stupid, and increasingly, evil.

that last one, evil, is the kicker because it grants license to suspend empathy and morality. as soon as you say “literally worse than hitler” you are putting them outside a moral contract and making them look like the aggressor.

it’s hatred cast as self-defense.

and if you are willing to append that epithet to pretty much anyone who disagrees with you, you’re basically at war with anyone not within your own utterly homogenous echo chamber and think that you are the good guy for doing so. quite the ironic outcome for the puprortedly peaceful pluralist…

this goes bad and violent because those whose identity is rooted in their politics experience political disagreement as personal attack because the self and the political are not separated.

this allows a really simple hop to the most dangerous of false equivalences:

speech is violence; violence is speech.

specifically, your speech against me is violence, but my violence toward you is speech.

it’s the perfect way to frame “disagreeing with me is violence” and it renders the free speech of others apparent tyranny to those who succumb to this frame.

quite literally, every time you say something that i find disagreeable, i feel “threatened” and demand “safe spaces” from your “violence.” you are evil and immoral and i percieve your very existence and expression as assault and grievance. simply denying me constitutes attack.

there is no way to share a social contract with such a person. they demand a right not to be offended that cannot exist with a speech right, so your speech right must be curtailed. and if you don’t, then they feel entitled to use physical violence against you and claim “self defense” because your words and their fists are seen as the same and “you fricking started it.”

and if that is not authoritarian and totalitarian, then i don’t know what is.

it’s the deliberate and cultivated place where talking stops and violence starts.

it’s a trap where speech of others is seen as violence if it runs counter to your views and where the people who believe this mantra are inculcated into views so bizarre that most people are going to disagree with them.

an unsustainable and externally validated identity is convinced that anyone who tries to stabilize it is attacking it.

that’s actual murderbot insanity.

at that point, you’ve basically socked the monster to life and sent it tottering down to destroy the village.

none of this is complicated, but the insidiousness of the trap is noteworthy. these people are losing their minds because they feel beset by enemies because anyone not just like them is (obviously) an enemy.

and if you try to tell them, it just proves them right.

it’s like an insane asylum inside of a kafka trap.

getting through the last of this deprogramming is going to be some interesting times…