The Cowardice of Moral Ambiguity

I’ve learned that often times a person’s response to a challenge to their comfort zone is illuminating. Tell someone something they don’t like and you generally get denial, acceptance, or it provides a further impetus to induce change. The former two pretty much sum up 90% of the people I interact with, but it does give me data points to work with, helping me map out a person’s or group’s character. My last article here was no different. While it pains me to admit that stating the obvious and previously uncontroversial point that atheism is a wholly anti-social ideology that is antithetical to western civilization, it brought out one thing of interest to me. Namely, it exposed that the right has become so limp-wristed and feminized, even among the so-called patriot movement, that many have surrendered even having a standard, let alone dying for one.

I admit I am at a certain disadvantage in attempting to understand the depths of philosophical and intellectual dishonesty required to be morally ambiguous.  Even as a child I knew I was willingly choosing to do the wrong thing, and could be honest about it to myself. It could be that Teutonic certainty that never quite managed to get beaten out by American pseudoculture, or something else entirely. Either way, this bumper sticker ideology of ‘you do you, and I’ll do me and it’s all good bro’ is leftist philosophy under the guise of freedom. Similar to the left, the right is free to criticize the morals of Islam, the Great Bogeyman™. Islam is a threat to be sure, but while we scream about the degradation of children, women, knowledge and just about everything else under Islam…if you mention something not on the Official List Of Things The Right Can Criticize, then all of a sudden you’re an intolerant zealot. This from the same people who were so morally stalwart they failed to prevent anything up to and including ritualized child sacrifice.

Some things are black and white. Good and evil. Particularly so when it concerns the principles we live our lives by. By and large, many on the right have accepted the left’s moral framework and rather than say ‘X is wrong’ we take the coward’s route and shrink a universal truth to one that is applicable for little old us…but for everyone else it’s negotiable. Many of the same people on the right who claim to be pro-life, who believe that abortion is the murder of a child, would somehow never dream of “imposing” that belief upon others. Apparently we are expected to believe that it’s only murder if certain people do it.

‘Just leave us alone’ is a passive statement, uttered by the weak and timid. It’s victims pleading for mercy from the victor. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a borderless state. Without dividing lines between what a society believes is moral and immoral, socially acceptable and socially unacceptable, orthodoxy and heresy, there exists no society. Not that the vapid politicos harping on moral supremacy have any real answer, but why exactly would anyone be inspired to fight and most likely die for something that is not demonstrably different than what we have right now? I realize I’m in not any way part of the patriot movement, but is the idea of no taxes and the freedom to look off the front porch and watch your neighbor molest farm animals whilst shooting heroin really the future you’re trying to sell? The lack of any coherence to this approach and really any differentiation between it and the current tack of social degradation the communists on the left are using is precisely why those under 40 are laughing at the RNC and those who still believe conservatism is anything other than a kinder, gentler socialism.

The efficacy of this pivot away from any moral component has had enormous political implications. Once Roe v. Wade had ensconced child sacrifice into the national list of ‘rights,’ the Republican party became the party of Gordon Gecko. It no longer represented a competing future with the socialist wing of the liberals, it fully embraced a kleptocratic moral wasteland. Who cares if we kill the ‘unfit’ in the womb, out of the womb, wherever, so long as you could afford an S550 and a McMansion? Iceland got rid of Downs Syndrome didn’t they? (By killing all the kids with Downs Syndrome) Who cares about the nuclear family so long as you can paper over the crippling mental abuse you’ve put your children through by sending them to therapy? What’s a few school shootings compared to pumping your child full of SSRI’s to make him a manageable zombie instead of a kid? Education?! Well let someone else teach my kid, I’m sure they won’t fill him with communist indoctrination and beat any critical thinking skills out of him. As long as that money train keeps rolling and I’m putting fat stacks of cash in my 401k!

The most interesting thing to happen socially and politically in my lifetime is not the election of Trump, but the realization of many in Gen Z and more than a few Millenials that money is nice but a functioning culture and society is better. The people who grew up in the farcical prosperity and utter absence of culture in the 80’s and 90’s want a refund. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be the Baghdad Bob of Congress, but the people voting for her do want a radical change. I respect her more than the cowed, weak men on the right who won’t even stake out a position. At least she’s willing to draw a line and fight for her moral standard, no matter how twisted and wrong it may be. The alternative to AOC? What is the alternative? There is none. Well, a few people have presented alternatives, but despite being the norm even six or seven decades ago, we have evolved past that on the right.

This lack of a standard, any standard on the social and philosophical front by the right, including the hard right, has rendered us with utter silence when asked about what kind of future we want. Some mumble incoherently about a return to the 18th century of lily-white Anglos a generation away from Europe, or the more progressive take it all the way to 1950 when the roots of Communism were already bearing fruit. Nearly to a person, the right insists on being backward gazing luddites. None have an answer to the changing economy…the manufacturing jobs are NEVER coming back and if you thought that was a trip in the 80’s and 90’s, wait until automation gets really going…and their answer to Musk, Brin, Zuckerberg and Bezos is to get a flip phone. They have no grand vision of the future, no answers for the actual issues facing the majority under 65 today. Their answer is simply, do what you want. There is no right, no wrong, so long as you make money and pay taxes. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition to assume the sole driving force of the average person is simply money. I work to provide for my family, nothing more. I enjoy what I do and believe there is a religious component to work, but none of my motivators are money. It is a means to an end, not the end itself.

We absolutely must stop equivocating on 90% of the things that are truly important and start focusing on things that actually matter. The priorities of those under 50 are NOT the priorities of the people in the 90’s. We grew up under the absentee parents and watched the BMW or Corvette get more love and attention that we did. We enjoyed material prosperity and withered in a social and moral wasteland. Why is it that grunge was a thing and the Gen X’s claim to fame is rampant nihilism in the books they write, the movies they make and the music they sing? Their kids are not that, they resent it and are willing to burn two millennia of civilization to change it. Change is coming. Ours or theirs. Currently what we have to offer the father who’s looking at his kids going to school with feral humans, getting emasculated by angry women screaming for his cis-gendered misogynistic existence to be terminated, and losing his job to stockholder demands for third world slave labor is…lower taxes. Is it really any wonder why we’re losing?