Amerika

Let us stop, as hikers do, to consult the map to be sure of our course.

We are looking down on a valley we left. It is a pleasant green place but it is sure to flood and in fact, signs are that the floodwaters are coming and all who are there will drown. Therefore we have climbed above, but want to find a place that is not too far above water, but not so close we drown.

To get up the mountain, we must wind around the cone so that we ascend at a reasonable pace and are buffered against falls. Surely, we could race up in a straight line and get there faster! But then, if something goes wrong, it is a tumble back into the valley which we surely will not survive either.

First, however, we must choose a destination, one which is both able to see the ground and the far-off horizon. This requires climbing out of the valley and yet avoiding the peaks, since to peak is to set oneself up where the only path remaining is descent.

This puts us into the realm of values, not the moral kind, but the existential one: as Plato asks, “what is the good life?” And as our ancestors remind us, we are not just asking for ourselves, but our kinsmen and children, our wives and friends, future generations and the voices of our ancestors, even something larger than ourselves.

To find these values, we must look into the nature of socially-determined good to see the cause-effect psychology behind it:

ACEs break down to 10 categories, including having divorced caregivers, substance abuse in the home, physical abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and neglect. ACE scores range from 0 to 10. The homeless services workers in the study’s sample had an average ACE score of 2.9. More than three-quarters had at least one ACE, and more than one-third experienced four or more ACEs, a number associated with physical and emotionally detrimental outcomes.

In other words, most of those helping the homeless come from broken homes themselves. There is a component of self-pity here: because they identify as victims, they seek out others they think are victims. Those who feel they are victims of life seek other victims of life in order to rationalize their own identity as victims.

Through this we see the split in what we might call “social values” versus “order values.” (Good / Self-Pity / Externalization) Versus (Evil / Autonomy / Internalization) plays out in the human mind because it justifies self-pity; without the need to feel good about feeling bad, it would have no utility.

“Good” refers to a moral judgment on an action, whether it pleases the humanistic impulse or not, instead of the more pragmatic pagan “good” which referred to results: whether something increased excellence (arete) in the world (Kant’s “universal maxim”) or not.

The self-pitier needs to judge things as good or bad in order to play into the victimhood narrative. That which reduces victimhood is good, so you help the homeless, raise up the oppressed, and tax the rich. That which does not acknowledge victimhood and sees it as a fantasy is bad, evil, and terrible.

Not surprisingly, those who feel bad about life and themselves tend toward finding fellow neurotics to share the good news about how everything is bad news:

Girls spend a lot more time on social media than boys. Liberal girls spend a lot more time than conservative girls. That didn’t used to be the case, but as we get into the 2010s, when everything gets so politicized, we get into the Great Awakening, we get into the polarization, the illiberalism that you and I have really been writing about and talking about for a long time.

As we get into the era, the feeds of the liberal girls gets much more taken over by how terrible the world is, everything’s sexist, you’re not gonna get ahead. And this is like the greatest era of female progress that we’re going through. But liberal girls are sort of caught in a set of disempowering ideas.

And my previous book, The Coddling the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff was exactly about that. Here’s three terrible, terrible ideas. And if you believe them, you’re almost guaranteed to be a failure in life: [W]hat doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. And life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Life is a battle for good people to do good things while everyone else tries to hold them back. Most of humanity are nasty people who want to use victimhood as an excuse to steal from others. The few who do not fall into self-pity spend their time increasing excellence, trying to step over the obstacles raised by the self-pitiers.

Tags: moralism, morality, self-pity, victimhood