Posted on 02/09/2018 9:50:55 PM PST by aquila48
This past academic year we have seen a number of examples of political correctness “gone mad” on college campuses. We have seen many conservative speakers having to cancel their talks, we have seen Ivy League students becoming hysterical about some benign comments about Halloween costumes, and we have seen Emory students freaking out and protesting to the university president because someone scrawled Trump 2016 in chalk on the campus grounds.
...I certainly am not someone who dismisses “political correctness” in its entirety. We should indeed be attentive to issues of power and privilege approach these issues with reflection. However, over the past decade, I have found myself increasingly concerned with political correctness evolving into an oppressive righteousness that are in many ways deeply misguided and incomplete and there is definitely a need to push back against it when it spills over into absurdity.
I recently (re)discovered a wonderful frame that allowed me to crisply state what is wrong with modern academic leftist “political correctness” from none other than the eminent philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche. I was reintroduced to these ideas in the context of a course I was taking on Existentialism. After detailed study of many cultures, historical contexts, and various philosophies, Nietzsche articulated the view that there are two broad moral views or moral frames of mind, that of master morality and of slave morality. Slave morality is concerned with issues of justice, fairness and protection of the weak. It is called slave morality because its emphasis and focus is on those who are powerless, controlled or in positions of minority. From my unified perspective, especially that of the Influence Matrix (see below), slave morality can really be thought of as “horizontal”, red line, or affiliative-love morality. The emphasis is on placed on equality, sensitivity and connection.
(Excerpt) Read more at psychologytoday.com ...
Isn’t that what Nietzsche said about Christianity?
Yes he did. And he does have a point. Wealth, success, strength, independence are not seen as virtues in Christianity.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/nov/03/nietzsche-slave-morality-religion
We do, but that Amendment never dictated the form that the press ought to take. If one political faction is evolved to be on the interwebs and another opposing one is evolved to be on the cable media, what do we do.
The snappiest, easiest to read media will grab the eyes of the laziest. The forefathers never had to ponder that situation.
But we have a worse situation in that faith in God has declined overall. Other faiths replace fading faith in God — such as faith in the superficial.
They are spiritual virtues but their primary exercise is in a different sphere than that of this world.
We won’t have a good country again until its people have a good eternity again.
If there wasn’t any God of the kind that Christian faith posits, Nietzsche would be spot on, el correctomundo, accurately, precisely, right — as truly this world would be all there is. And it operates according to the rules you’ve elucidated.
Much of Christianity is an exercise in putting men in a position so as to be able to receive the real grace of a real God. When the Nietzschesque worldly clamor is quieted through self-control focused around a new trust and perspective on God, God is seen to pop forth from the background as a very competent operator. It’s like receiving radio, it is that stark. But unless the electrical circuits in the receiver are quiet enough, nothing intelligible will be received when they are tuned in. The sound heard will be that of all noise. Or as the bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.”
Trying to explain this to committed atheists is an amusing effort, as they are cocksure that there won’t be any “signal” or that at best it will also be a figment of the mind. But when the “signal” starts to show extrasensory communication characteristics, an entire hypothesis of the mind is opened up for challenge.
One thing I can say is that after I started going to church, I started guessing at some subconscious level what the preacher was going to concentrate on, when what I saw before me only spoke of generalities, I started to see that proof. How was I to know where his mind would go? There are plenty of possibilities for subject matter in the bible.
... I did this as a volunteer piano player in the church where I went, and I had to choose instrumental service music. When voila, what I played matched with his prepared message.
So, one might say, I got used to that preacher and just knew what he wanted to talk about.
Well years later, another church. I didn’t know the sermon topic. I had been asked to fill in for a vacationing pianist. I chose themes about heaven and forgiveness. The pastor came to the time for the sermon and said that the music had preached it... and it was going to be about hell. We never heard the hellfire that day. It’s like God had a sense of humor. Heaven is mightier than hell. Not to say that the topic shouldn’t be broached, but if it ends up being the main thing, we’ve gotten way out of proportion. If there was no heaven there’d be no God that could even damn, let alone bless. God’s presence is what makes heaven heaven.
“The pseudo-elites however have utter contempt for the brilliant and the average because they live only on jealousy and greed and assume that everyone is as inherently degraded as they are.
The social justice warriors are truly the least among us and should never be put in positions of leadership. They can only lead others downward.”
That is absolutely correct. I used to think that it was the poor and the downtrodden and the less capable that were seething with envy and hatred toward the rich and the successful and couldn’t wait to bring them down to their miserable level. But fairly recently I came to the realization that that isn’t true at all.
What I realized is that most poor and less capable folks understand very well that they are more limited in their abilities than successful people and they accept that and don’t think that it’s unfair that someone that does more, that is smarter, also gets better results. They intrinsically believe that the merit system is just, and they strive to do the most they can with the abilities they have and reach upward to get to a better place. The vast majority of them are not eaten by envy.
But today, as in the past, there have been enormous conflicts of the poor vs the rich. So how does that happen if, as we both agree, the poor are not typically or naturally envious?
Well, beside the rich and the average/poor there is a third animal. Nietzsche called it the tarantula, Jean Raspail in his “Camp of the Saints” called it “the Beast” and Tocqueville called it a “depraved taste for equality”.
Here’s Tocqueville’s beautiful quote which I found to be succinct, profound, poetic and mostly correct.
“There is a passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”
The reason I say “mostly correct” is because he seems to be saying that it is the weak that is afflicted with a “depraved sense of equality”. But as I indicated above (and I think you agree as well) the weak mostly accepts that he really doesn’t merit to have the same as what the “strong” has.
So if the weak doesn’t have the “depraved sense of equality” and the strong doesn’t either, who does? Who are Nietzsche Tarantulas and Raspail’s Beasts?
They can span the socio economic range, but are mostly in the mid to upper strata. They are the “bleeding hearts”, the “Pathological empathizers”, the “virtue signalers”, the “charlatans”, the “poverty pimps”, the “preachers with the diamond rings”.
You call them pseudo-elites, but I think that’s too broad a term in that it misses the essence of their nature.
They can be divided into two types. The first type is those that truly feel for the downtroddens and the less fortunates, i.e. the bleeding hearts, the pathological empathizers - the equality mongers. Their physical/mental (genetic?) makeup is such that they truly feel an intense personal pain at seeing the inequality between weak and the strong, and they are consumed with the need to assuage that anguish. The fact that the weak aren’t all that bothered by their own circumstances is immaterial to the equality mongers, because it’s not really about helping the weak, it’s about relieving themselves of the pain they feel.
We all know who these types are - Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, perhaps Mao, Pol Pot and many other egalitarian utopians, as well as todays neo-marxists and postmodernists. These are people that are totally offended and hurt by the inequality they see and go about relieving themselves of that sense of injustice they feel by agitating the masses into feeling that same sense of injustice and promising them a wonderful utopia at the end of the struggle. Generally speaking money is not their big motivator.
The other type are the opportunists - the virtue signalers, the charlatans, the poverty pimps, the shakedown artists. Unlike the previous types who do genuinely feel a pain, though unwarranted, these latter types don’t feel anything for the weak. What they’re after is to exploit them so they can get wealth and power from the strong.
They use the same tactic as the first group. They preach to the masses how awful they have it, how unfair the system is toward them until they enrage enough of them to riot and cause mayhem and scare the strong enough to shake them down for a good chunk of their wealth and power. Leaders in this camp are the “Reverends” Jackson and Sharpton, the Clintons, the Obamas, Algore, Pelosi, and all progressives, SJW, BLM, most college faculty.
So the bleeding hearts and the opportunists have managed to weaponize the “weak” against the “strong”. So the $64K for the strong is, how do they go about turning the tables on the bleeding hearts and the opportunists?
“slave morality” = Detroit
Dalrymple nailed it. Great post.
I wouldn’t recommend resting any argument on that twisted Neitzsche’s prnouncements.
Yes, it’s so obvious once you see it, like a tiger hiding in the tall grass. It was there all along.
Precisely. Nietzsche is no purveyor of morality. His Machiavellian ethics stand in opposition to the relationship of God and man. Jesus asks the poorest and most aggrieved to raise their eyes to heaven, the true source of comfort and strength. The Bible is filled with the history of people who rose from nothing to become great and Godly leaders. Jesus is by no means a SJW. Nor is he one who separates into classes of haves and havenots. All morality is vertical, man to God.
Democrats read Iceberg Slim’s book Pimp where he explained the way to keep a money making hoe from running out on you (and leaving the ‘plantation’) is to make her forget that Lincoln ever freed the slaves.
Big Daddy will keep you getting a small welfare check if you don’t try runnin’ out on him or bettering yourself.
Here’s some more ponderings for you; what political has the longest history of slavery inaction, all the while claiming the opposite. As well as being the Party to foster PC on US all?
thanks - saved
Great response.
If the US Constitution was adhered to in spirit as well as the letter, political correctness would barely be a concept in American culture.
So would out of control government taxation and spending.
And so would senseless and endless wars and foreign entanglements.
That’s the simplest and best explanation of the difference between the outlook of conservatives and liberals I’ve seen. Thanks for the post.
If he has nothing against “social justice” he either does not understand what is meant by the term or he doesn’t appreciate the consequences of instituting it.
And it doesn’t matter the motive or the method used to install it, the end result will be equally miserable. In other words, whether it’s an opportunist or a well-meaning bleeding heart pushing it, the final result is the same bad one.
Social justice as Tocqueville pointed out, is “a depraved taste for equality”.
See post 26.
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