Political morals are not real. Or let me put it this way: among the possible forms of morality, there are at least two, and those are real versus political morality.
Real morality is obvious stuff like "don't murder people" and "don't rape children." That sort of thing. Almost everyone feels a visceral disgust or outrage when a real moral imperative is transgressed.
Political morality is not like that at all. Unlike real morality, which benefits everyone at some point in their lives, political morality always serves someone's interest at the expense of others. And people always disagree about it, or at least it never achieves completely universal status across the world. Every culture has a prohibition against murder throughout human history. Other moral prohibitions have found that a preponderance of cultures have more or less criminalized certain things. When most societies say something is wrong throughout human history, you can be pretty sure it is wrong. When the exceptions are freak cultures that burn their children or practice cannibalism, you know the exceptions prove the rule.
We have all been bombarded with political morality all our lives. Have you ever heard phrases like "my tax dollars," or "nation of immigrants," "support the troops," "American dream," "right side of history," "the current year," "but you're white!" "mansplain," "toxic masculinity," etc.?
I remember sitting in the airport wearing my uniform while traveling when someone walked up while I was talking to my family, interrupted us, and said "thank you for your service" and handed me a 20-dollar bill. I appreciated the money and didn't really mind being interrupted. But what made him act this way? What made this man give me money?
The "America Supports You" campaign did. Let me explain.
During the Iraq war, George W. Bush was afraid that troops returning home would have eggs thrown at them like the Vietnam Veterans did. He poured billions of dollars into a propaganda campaign, running ads on TV promoting support for the troops. Basically, you don't have to support the war, but you should support the troops. This had the added benefit of silencing a lot of criticism of the Iraq war because it could be interpreted as an attack on our soldiers. Social taboos mattered a lot more back then. Also, believe it or not, prior to that campaign, veterans held no special place in the American psyche, at least not in Los Angeles where I was.
Support for veterans was manufactured.
I use this example because it is one I have lived through, because it is a positive example in my opinion, and because it won't derail the conversation by provoking heated emotions. But I want you to realize something about every slogan and political moral imperative you have ever heard: at some point, it started out as a briefing on someone's desk.
Maybe it was a billionaire's desk. The libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. So has DEI, which has also been supported by all the names you hear on NPR (National Public Radio). Maybe it was Marx being sponsored by his rich patron Engels, or maybe it was King James having the Bible edited. In the Hindu text the Mahabharata, the character Arjuna grapples with the moral dilemma of fighting and killing his cousins, the Kauravas, in the Kurukshetra War. His charioteer and guide, Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu), argues that it is Arjuna's dharma as a warrior to fight for righteousness and uphold justice, even if it means engaging in battle with family.
The text introduces the concept of swadharma, which literally translates to "one's own dharma" or "one's own duty." It's basically one's professional duty that is allowed to contradict karma so that one can get on with the business of killing family members, because, you know, royal infighting and power struggles and whatnot.
Krishna literally makes political arguments in the Mahabharata, and this shows you that political morality goes back to at least 1500 BCE. This was not a briefing on someone's desk, but it was a person, definitely a priest, making up moral excuses for a prince to do what princes do and kill some family. Of course, the priest is now said to be an incarnation of a god, and I guess this proves that if the tale gets told often enough, eventually it becomes so tall that a political adviser becomes a god.
Ever seen the movie "All Quiet on the Western Front"? Imagine the sheer level of fanatical patriotism it takes to get millions of men to die in the trenches of Europe. That is another case of political morality, and now I am going to say something that hurts because I want you to question your values, and I want you to seriously consider the possibility that all your most sacred values have been manufactured. Or at least the political ones.
In time, the source of "support the troops" will be lost to the mists of time just like every other political-moral commandment. One may also envision a day when nobody remembers why Kim Jong Un is an ancient venerated pagan god. Today's political morality is tomorrow's religion, which probably means DEI as religion will keep blaming whites centuries after the state-supported apparatus dwindles away, unless culturally marginalized out of existence by counter-propaganda. (The real way to kill an idea is with decades of sustained mass media ridicule).
This brings us finally to the several points I am making. First, the only thing worse than a sociopath manufacturing your values is you believing them. Seriously, what kind of simp repeats the line "my tax dollars" to argue against Medicaid for able-bodied males? With trillion-dollar bailouts, we are long past valid concerns over chump change.
The second point is that political morality is a weapon, and instead of believing it like a fool, you should be inventing it. Ask yourself: does this serve me? Does this make my country better? A value system that does neither is less than nothing. It is harmful, so dump it.
Third, we are drowning in "sacred values." Everyone has lost the plot. Morality is marketing for power. The purpose of power is to order the world constructively so that regular people can go about their lives without having to think about government. Things should just work. It's the job of power to make sure they work, or more commonly, to get out of the way and let them work. Power is the ability to get people to believe that power is worth serving. (I know it sounds self-referential). Basically, power is what happens when a man can pull the trigger and go home to his wife and kiss her on the lips without being slapped. If he is out bayoneting babies all day, that is going to be pretty difficult. Men are not afraid of dying. They are afraid of never getting pussy again. Political morality is directed at women because who women will fuck determines who men will kill.
The job of political morality is to keep women fucking their husbands so men keep shooting their guns at the government's enemies. The job of political morality is marketing for power. Corporations have commercials. Governments have official ideologies. Corporations prey on your insecurities with their advertisements: "buy this makeup or you are an ugly fat cow," "drive this sports car or you are an old loser." Governments prey on moral sentiment, shaping those sentiments until people will send their sons to die in any pointless war. "Aren't you a patriot?" "Are you liberal or racist?" "Don't you support women and minorities?"
The point is not to resent the process but to harness it. People are going to do it anyway, and it might as well be us.
The other thing you need to realize is that we are drowning in the moral imperatives of the past. At one point, those marketing messages were created, but now they persist like zombies. The great task of the Trump administration is not mass deportation or returning manufacturing (all good in its own right) but overthrow of the leftist moral imperative. People voted for this. They voted for a culture war, not an economic war. They voted for the overthrow of leftist values. They did this because the left has made dysfunction sacred. Everywhere you turn, you are not allowed to do what works because it would contradict some sacred value. They have various terms: rule of law, public input, stakeholders, equality, equity, marginalization, but somehow it always boils down to you can't do the thing that works because dysfunction is a sacred value, and that means a dictator was always destined to rise.
They are putting the cart before the horse. Principles do NOT come first in politics. What works comes first, and morality is invented to justify it. This is how it has always been done; this is how all those sacred left-wing values were invented to begin with. They worked until they didn't, and that is how every civilization undergoes a crisis. The crisis comes about when the values stop working, or maybe when they never worked and always depended on unprincipled exceptions that the new people are not willing to make. The universe is simply too complex for absolute principles to work, and there is more under heaven and earth than your ideology can encapsulate. The liberal ideology that does not bend breaks. The real constitutional crisis is not caused by Trump but by the left making dysfunction sacred. Since they believe whites must pay a penance for the crimes of their ancestors, they have abandoned the natural mutation that allows ideology to adapt to necessity, and dysfunction is no longer viewed as demanding change but as just punishment. You aren't safe on public transportation? Just punishment. Climate change? You deserve punishment. They have decided entropy is on their side.
And this isn't entirely left-wing. Endless wars? Young men can't find a date? Toughen up, buddy! Can't get a job because you're white? Why, just learn to code!
Change happens when dysfunction is no longer sacred, when it is no longer tolerated, when we make it taboo to even make an excuse. Values must once again prove their value instrumentally.
Because so many cling to sacred dysfunction, they are rigidly unable to compromise and adapt, driving ever more extreme behavior in service of their sacred goals. Ironically, this instrumental logic of "defeat the enemy at all costs" will lead to an arms race of values abandonment, such that only pure instrumental logic in service of power will remain, leading to dictatorship. The left could easily neuter the Trump administration by making legal everything he is doing, bending instead of breaking, saying that no, public safety will not be compromised in pursuit of racial justice for gangsters. The left could adapt and keep the Republic.
But to them, every trial is a potential lynching of a black man, and because of this mythos, the average murder trial now takes one to two years. This was not always the case, and in the Old West, judges would try cattle thieves one afternoon and hang them the next, and there is no evidence this form of justice was less accurate, or at least no evidence that reduced accuracy was not greatly justified by increased clearance rates.
In fact, murder clearance rates have fallen all the way to about 50%, meaning that about half the time, they are getting away with murder. If you bring this up, you will encounter all the excuses of sacred dysfunction. They will tell you it can't be done, that keeping the wrongly convicted out of prison matters more, blah blah blah. Sacred dysfunction always has an excuse, a sacred excuse. Even questioning it generates outrage.
The inevitable destination of sacred dysfunction is single-digit murder clearance rates because keeping the wrongly convicted out of prison will matter more than the so-called rights of criminals matter more than the victims, who are not even thought of.
A central problem is that insane people are attracted to education the same way bullies are attracted to the police. The insane live in a state of isolation where nobody understands them, so they seek to become educators so they can inflict their madness on a captive audience. They make society's flexible and adaptive values into rigid quasi-religious mandates, and they turn trials from fact-finding missions into procedural rituals where the "correct" outcome is whatever followed the procedure. The fact that you can even exclude evidence in a trial is wild. Moreover, sacred dysfunction believes in a Right Side of History, a concept that has the same toxicity as Might Makes Right mixed with a ratchet towards communism. This concept essentially asserts that history must go in only one direction, towards the left, that any other direction is automatically fascist and invalid, and that mentally ill college professors will determine what constitutes the correct direction of History.
The constitutional crisis that leftists complain about was always inevitable. The moment you combine mentally ill college professors with the manufacture of popular consent and make values sacred and inflexible, you have an inevitable ratchet not towards the Right Side Of History but towards the collapse of the system. Trump is simply trying to keep it going, but the judiciary is so thoroughly corrupted, so indifferent to its own dysfunction that it must be dissolved and reformed. All its sacredness must be smashed because sacredness is the problem, and mad professors made sacredness antithetical to pragmatism by taking it to seriously.
Values are made the same way that law and sausage are made, and it is gross, and it is how things OUGHT to be. Law MUST serve practical ends, and taboos must not get in the way or must serve the same ends. There is no higher morality than what works; there never has been, but for some weird reason, it is not enough to tell the average man "do this because it works"; he needs a moral excuse, so you fabricate one. This is how it will always be done; this is how it has almost always been done in the past, and the only societies that put values first were the ones that were dying. Reality is too messy for absolutes. You may fear that if we accept the truth, it will lead to a world of lawlessness, but we already live in that world. I believe that if humans are less self-deceptive, they will behave better, and I believe this starts with acknowledging the source of our values. As long as we deny the crass source of values, we give power to overly serious people, people without joy or humor, people who live only to scold and seek power, and I want to live in a world that is more fun than that.
The reader needs to understand that political morality is historically astroturfed. It is nearly always a top-down project, it is also why the old world seems to suffer from so much more dysfunction than the new. When a country like the United States is new to the world it has the chance to leave much of its baggage behind focusing on pragmatism as a foundation for building civilization. The old world is mired in ethnic hatreds, ancient taboos, and mystical ideas. It's sacred dysfunction is much deeper than ours. Sacred dysfunction accumulates as social taboos are manufactured relentlessly, it accumulates as political power one generation after another tell the public to support this or to oppose that, to hate this and to love that. Just like the law it accumulates generation after generation like so much gunk in the pipes. In these societies it becomes increasingly hard to do anything without rubbing against the friction of social control, and the law mimics that, so even if you might not be punished socially you will legally. When these societies fall apart through the dead weight of all their taboos and superstitions they fall into dictatorship.
Right now the engine of dysfunction is the ongoing battle between left and right. Each side articulates a vision of its values in reaction to the other. Since it is a vicious competition and thoughtfulness has largely been abandoned, the left takes up the opposite position and pretty soon doing anything vaguely right wing coded becomes taboo. A similar process happens on the on the right wing as well the accum. The accumulation of taboos create as their negative a sacredness of the opposite, since the opposite of what is profane must be holy. The good news is that ideas can often be killed by naming them, and the term "sacred dysfunction" and the discussion around it can be an engine for ending behavior. Values should be deconstructed, but not haphazardly; first articulate a positive vision of what you want the world to be, taking care not to mess with Chesterton's fence, and then both create values and deconstruct old ones not as a form of vengeance or reactivity to the existing order but the creation of a greater happiness for everyone. Values creation must come from pragmatism. What kind of world do you want to live in? How could things be better? Please stop merely reacting to what you see around you. It must be a positive vision.
