Amerika

Inversion occurs when we ban some methods (killing, drinking) instead of re-orienting toward a goal. If you say that war is forbidden, then you have said that avoiding war at any cost is your most important goal, and your actual goal takes second place, which makes it forgettable.

In the world of politics, moral inversion occurs when you grant license to do bad in the name of good, as Aldous Huxley reminds us:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause,” wrote Huxley, “is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone… To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

In this case, the banning of cruelty makes it the most important goal, which means that in order to get anything done, first that goal must be suspended with a license to invert. This only happens in extreme cases, and so when frustration rises, thoughts turn toward murder.

The frustration drives the cruelty. While cruelty may have many causes, in ordinary people it only takes form when impulses have been restrained for so long that rage has built up. This can only be discharged through extremely transgressive acts like sadistic murder.

People normally say of the Left that they are ends-over-means because to them, any action is justifiable or rationalizable if it leads to Equality Utopia. Really what you are seeing is inversion: they lift the ban on violence as a gift to lure others into their orbit.

Tags: aldous huxley, leftism, violence