John C. Wright's Blog, page 6

Is there an additional step or stage further down the Morlock can descend?

I suggest that there is not. Nihilism is the philosophical belief that no universal truth exists, and thus philosophy as such is in vain. This is the philosophy to which one adheres, knowingly or unknowingly, once one has abandoned truth and reason, embraced the darkening of the intellect by becoming addicted to the self-righteousness of Narcissus, and devoted oneself to sadistic hatred of self-imposed enemies.

Nihilism is a halt-state: once one believes the philosophy that says all philosophy is in vain, one cannot use philosophy to reason oneself out of this position.

If the Morlock cannot change, what happens next?

Next he destroys himself. This is usually done indirectly rather than directly, but notice the enthusiasm which which Morlocks uphold and celebrate everything that is either foreign to them, hostile to them, or mutually exclusive to them. Islamic terrorism is an obvious example, but by no means the only. Even the support of such gentle institutions as schools that discourage learning, art that destroys beauty, and governments that cannot govern has its roots in this self destructive attitude which is the visible sign of nihilism in action.

Morlocks are, as a race, suicidal. They are allured, almost as if under an erotic allure, to images and symbols of death, destruction and decay, to things that are against nature, or that are sterile, vain, futile, and ugly. Go into a modern art museum or watch a gay pride parade to see visible displays of an invisible self loathing.

The flaw is spiritual rather than psychological. While theories about undeveloped amygdala, or the rabbit strategy of welcoming predators into an overpopulated meadow may have some merit, when you see a man who wishes to destroy himself and his homeland, look to the formation of his conscience for the answer to this dark and ugly riddle.

You see a man whose own values, whose own sense of right and wrong, has condemned him to death. Something in his conscience tells him he is unworthy of life.

Now, look next at what he believes, what he tells himself is true.

If he is a hard core Leftist, he believes he was produced by blind natural forces, out of nowhere, and for no reason, blown together by the wind like a sandheap for an hour, to die and blow away again, and never to again live or laugh or love for all the countless eons of eternity.

He thinks he is a meat robot, a thing without free will, without even the dignity of an animal. At least animals are not fools fooling themselves into believing in the illusion of free will. He is the weakest and saddest of beasts.

He also, if he is a hardcore Leftist, he believes that these same blind winds created an injustice so deeply ingrained into society that there is no reasoning with the powers that be, no way of peaceful reformation. Evolution works by the Darwinian law of the jungle, survival of the strong. This is true of social evolution as well (or so his perverse worldview tells him).

If the evils of society cannot be mended by sweet reason, violent overthrow (not merely of part of society, but of the whole rotten structure from top to bottom) is the only alternative.

Hence, for the hardcore Leftist, any love or loyalty to his homeland is a betrayal of his highest sense of goodness and righteousness, because then he is supporting the evils of mankind.

For him, any love of peace or desire for law and order slows the progress of social evolution for the same reason keeping the weak alive to reproduce slows racial evolution.

(Perhaps the Leftist hatred of America keeping the bloodbaths of fascists and communists contained has its roots in this same uneasy sense that violence is needed for progress: by maintaining civilization, the United States during the Cold War and after kept the weak old order alive, and did not allow world war to kill off the unfit so permit the superman to arise. )

Suppose instead of a hardcore leftist, you are merely a flabby moderate leftist.

You have all the same beliefs as the hardcore leftist, but are too weak and silly to call for the violent overthrow of the evil society blind evolution has produced. You lack the integrity to think through your philosophy and come to the harsh but logical conclusions.

You are too sentimental to sacrifice the weak and sick to the great progressive god of Darwin. But sustaining the sick and weak causes racial and social degeneration according to this sick worldview: and so again the conscience of the moderate leftist condemns him for his lack of fidelity. He is a disgrace to the forces of evil.

And so Leftism, the religion that replaced Christianity in Europe since the Great War of 1914, requires a man to believe that he is worthless, less than a beast, less than a dog, but the beneficiary of an evil world-system which must be destroyed, but which he lacks the strength and will to destroy.

Small wonder they want to die. It is a worldview perfectly designed to rob a man of all gratitude and hope, and without gratitude, there is nothing in life but resentment, envy, fear, and disgust.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Longtime reader Nate Winchester says:

I don’t know… I guess like the lovely Mrs Wright, I’ve known a few… I guess they weren’t full SJWs, but one might call them larvae… and they’re not bad people!

It’s like the zombie movies ya know? They’re infected, I get that we’ll have to shoot them in the head, just wish we could figure out some way to cure them before it gets to that point, ya know? Especially because they seem to fight it sometimes.

It just gets… old.

I agree. The SJWs are not bad people. Not at first. Even Lucifer was not totally wretched and evil at first.

That is the important thing to remember.

They are good people with a bad theory who are addicted, like a cocaine addict, to the rush of ego-gratification that comes from self-righteousness.

The Morlocks once were human, once dwelt on the surface, under the sun, and once ate wholesome meats, and did not feast on human flesh. It takes several steps pf evolution to go from being a good man to being a subhuman troglodyte cannibal. Not all have taken all the steps

It is a three stage trap into which they fall, and at each stage, for the best of reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Longtime reader Nate Winchester says:

I don’t know… I guess like the lovely Mrs Wright, I’ve known a few… I guess they weren’t full SJWs, but one might call them larvae… and they’re not bad people!

It’s like the zombie movies ya know? They’re infected, I get that we’ll have to shoot them in the head, just wish we could figure out some way to cure them before it gets to that point, ya know? Especially because they seem to fight it sometimes.

It just gets… old.

I agree. The SJWs are not bad people. Not at first. Even Lucifer was not totally wretched and evil at first.

That is the important thing to remember.

They are good people with a bad theory who are addicted, like a cocaine addict, to the rush of ego-gratification that comes from self-righteousness.

The Morlocks once were human, once dwelt on the surface, under the sun, and once ate wholesome meats, and did not feast on human flesh. It takes several steps pf evolution to go from being a good man to being a subhuman troglodyte cannibal. Not all have taken all the steps

It is a three stage trap into which they fall, and at each stage, for the best of reasons.

The first stage is an appeal to their sense of fairplay not to make a decision until all the facts are in, not to condemn the wicked until they are proved wicked, and to question everything, to question authority.

But this first stage trap closes when their sense of fairplay comes to the conclusion that no authority, not the authority of morality, not the authority of reason, not the authority of logic, can sit in judgment on any matter. They become so open minded that their brains fall out. They cease to reason in the name of fairplay.

Call this the Appeal to Equality. If all men are equal, no man’s opinion is better than any others’, and so there is no such thing as a right man and the wrong man, a right answer and a wrong answer, a civilized culture or barbaric one. The Appeal to Equality says that to think one answer correct and the other wrong, one behavior a vice and another a virtue, is a hasty judgment, even bigotry.

Reasoning becomes a hate crime.

Once they cease to reason, that is, cease to look at facts for answers, they are thrown back on their emotions and nothing else for a standard of judgment by which to organized their lives, and to build their model of the universe.

At this point, have lost the civilized gift of reason, they are barbarians.

At first, for their moral code, the barbarians will take the model of the surrounding Christian culture, by inertia, but since they have eschewed all authority, the authority of priests and prophets is suspect, and they must seek elsewhere: self-help gurus, political messiahs, fads, or the strange hybrid I call Saganists, who somehow believe that science can make moral judgments by means of mathematical measurements of matter in motion.

Such freakish Saganists do not do real science, and, if their online spokesmen and combox partisans are any clue, do not even understand the basics of the scientific method.

But what these science idolaters do is lend a glamour and a pretense of objectivity and expert wisdom to whatever fraud or nonsense the science idolaters are pretending this decade is part of science, anything from Darwinist explanations of morality to a denial of human free will to the tiresome global warming fraud to the endless environmentalist panic-stories.

Without any authority to guide their thinking in matters where they remain ignorant, and without any reason to banish ignorance, the barbarians become overly vulnerable and overly gullible to mere salesmanship. Step by step they move out of the sunlight and into the darkness of the caverns of the mind.

The rejection of authority not reject science idols as authority, because science is allegedly the study of the physical universe without any bigotry or prejudice, just recourse to the facts.

However, the mental troglodytes abandon the facts, but are still gullible about any claims issued under the guise of science, because it is unbigoted, ergo not a hate crime, ergo does not offend their Appeal to Equality that makes their brains fall out.

But the Appeal to Science, or, rather, the Appeal to Progress, has nothing to do with real science, and in fact hates real science and flees it, especially when real science shows some politically inconvenient fact about the differences between races or sexes or the nature of the weather or of the environment.

This appeal to science is merely an advertisement ploy, like a Madison Avenue huckster telling a gape-mouthed child that Wonder Bread builds bodies in Twelve Ways, or that scientific studies show most dentists drink Coke, or whatever.

It is meaningless, merely a way of lowering sales-resistance by playing on the self-doubt of dolts with no scientific training.

And so the second part of the trap closes: the salesmen prey on the barbarian sense of worthlessness and helplessness their abandonment of reason inevitably creates in them, and lards whatever self-help guru, political messiah, fadmongers, or science-idolaters they wish to have as their messiahs with the promise of being able to make their worthlessness into worth, their helplessness into power.

That is why,and the barbarian intellects get darker and darker, and they turn into cave dwelling Troglodytes, the next step hoves into view. The Troglodytes are obsessed with power, think of nothing but power, worship nothing but power, cast all their thoughts and expressions in terms of nothing but power.

But power to do what? Well, obviously the barbarian is a noble savage, and he wants to save the world, to mend what is wrong with the human condition. They take vestiges of Christian ideas, such as compassion for the poor and downtrodden, and the deep pity for victims that is unknown in the pagan world, or in any land whose God never suffered as a victim, and affix that idea out of context to their obsession over power relations.

The conclusion that turns the barbarian into a troglodyte, the one idea that shoves him into the subterranean darkness that robs him of his remaining natural nobility, is the idea that all misery comes from want of power.

The troglodyte theory of the fall of man goes like this: back in the primordial state of nature before civilization arose, all men were equal in power hence all were happy. Now, not all men are happy. This must be due to a power imbalance: the strong are oppressing those who lack power.

The reason why the poor are poor is not because of their bad work habits or lack of a two-parent family, but because of their lack of power. They are oppressed by the stronger rich.

The reason why the inner city is a bastion of crime is not because of Leftwing sabotage of the Anglo-American legal system, but because of racism, which is defined as a lack of power of Blacks. They are oppressed by the stronger whites.

The reason why the heathen world is a bastion of terror and injustice is not because non-Chrisitian have a cruel and primitive worldview based on despair and fatalism, it is because the Third World lacks power. The Christians are oppressing the weaker heathens.

The reason why women are unhappy is not because the sexual revolution has made them all valueless and unprotected from male predators, while at the same time forcing them into unnatural and unsatisfying roles which they do badly, and discouraging them from following roles they do well, it is because they lack power. Males oppress the weaker females.

The reason by sexual perverts and the victims of neurotic or psychotic sexual malfunctions are unhappy is not because of their mental diseases or the obvious unnatural and illogical contour of their sexual desires. It is because they lack power. The straights are oppressing the alternates orientations and cross dressers.

Why are White, Straight, Christian Males unhappy? Answer: they cannot be, because they have power!

See how absurdly simple and absurdly stupid life becomes once all questions have only one answer? No matter what is wrong with your food, add salt. Lack of salt will fix all recipes of all foods no matter who is eating what nor what mistakes where made in preparing it! No matter what your disease is, take snake oil! Snake oil cures all disease known on Earth, and half the diseases known on Mars! All you need to solve all the complex historical inequities and injustices of fallen man is not virtue, truth, and beauty, but power, power and power!

If only, so the Troglodytes reasoning goes, the invisible and mystical conspiracy of the powerful and privileged could be overturned, the powerless would become powerful, and the human condition would be corrected, all would be well, and your meaningless and senseless life would be make meaningful and sensible. Progress will cure everything!

Such is the promise of the Appeal to Progress.

So falls the third stage of the trap. The salesmen and gurus and messiahs of their empty lives have to fill the emptiness with power. It is clearly not personal power for themselves the Troglodytes want. They want their messiahs to have power, their party, their political leader, not them for themselves.

They merely want anyone not a member of some defined victim group to lose power. They want to destroy the current world and its power structure. The degeneration reaches the final stage. The Troglodytes turn into Morlocks.

It is an appeal to the Crusader instinct, the desire to be a martyr or a hero. The Morlocks are not so inhuman that they lack the human instinct for self-sacrifice, and the craving to correct great wrongs.

But having left reason behind in the name of equality, and having left Christian humility as well as pagan honor behind in the name of progress, they have no reason to expose themselves to self sacrifices of real martyrdom or real heroism.

What they do instead is act like spoiled brats and sick degenerates, antimoralists, who, when decent society shuns them for the sick self indulgence in sin and perversion, can claim to be brave (brave enough to give in to their darkness and sickest desires) and can claim to be martyrs (as if being mildly criticized for public displays of disgusting behavior is the same as death by torture).

And for the same reason so real injustices are never selected for correction. People who hold real power (Oil Sheikhs funding international terrorism and funding regimes that slay homos, kill rape victims, and make women wear bags over their heads) are never the targets for Morlock outrage.

Fighting real power would require real courage and real sacrifice. The Morlock wishes to make only pretend sacrifices and get the applause for being courageous when he is not.

And soon he finds the softest targets are those who preemptively surrender. The Morlock prefers those who are willing to bow to ‘white blackmail’.

White blackmail is when you use a man’s own good nature against him: putting a grenade under a wounded man while flying a white flag, asking for equal time but not granting him time to speak, being a bully while being a crybaby, and so on.

White blackmail is the Saul Alinsky tactic convincing your opponent to abide by the rules you yourself are breaking: to convince the foe to tell the truth when you tell only lies, to convince the foe to be a chivalrous gentleman when you are a harlot, to convince the foe to bind and fetter himself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the Constitutional technicalities of civilian law courts when you are a terrorist out of uniform targeting innocent civilians. White Blackmail is shrieking with insane indignation over the photos from Abu Graib.

This is the Appeal to Self Righteousness, also called the Appeal to Satanic Pride. It is Narcissism, pure and simple.

But then two odd and horrible things happen to the Morlocks to confirm they will never, absent the miraculous grace of God, ever extricate themselves from the trap. These two horrid things brick shut the exits, and there is no escape from the Morlock world.

The first horrid thing is that the the gullible dunderheaded Morlock who seeks meaning in fads and progress-worship finds that progress usually means progress away from the normal strictures and rigors of morality.

In the progressive world, you are free to sleep with whores and betray your wife in the name of women’s rights, and progressivism gives you the ability to denounce moral, decent, honest people who do not betray their wives, as bigots on the grounds that decency is ‘slut shaming’.

The conscience of the Morlock is smothered.

The odd reason why the Morlocks all talk as if they are as innocent and pure as Adam in Eden before the fall is that, like animals, they pretend to have no consciousness of sin.

At that point as one falls deeper and deeper into the trap, the salesmen and fadmongers need only invent new and ever more meaningless phrases to cast a bad light on good things while using equally dishonest vocabulary to cast a good light on bad things.

Thus, what is actually correct falls by the wayside in favor of false advertising techniques.

This is political correctness, and its point is to smother the workings of the conscience, and dull the awareness of sin, under a blanket of self righteousness and self congratulation.

The Morlocks lose the gift of speech.

They can no longer call things by their right names, and what names they use for things are mere jabberwocky, squawking noise signifying nothing. Like the wretches in Orwell’s Oceania, they have no words by which to express themselves. The slaves can only talk in their master’s voice.

The second horrid thing is the retreat into Unreality, the delight in falsehood for its own sake.

You see, as the Morlock with his jabberwocky speech and darkened intellects seeks to get the thrill of being righteous without doing the actual work of being right, he seeks out only imaginary problems, like global warming, to solve, and ignores real problems, like a global war on terror masters.

The Morlocks lose their eyes.

In order to sustain this fragile bubble of unreality in which the addicted Morlock can picture himself as a bold crusader for justice and an imposed upon victim of oppression, the addict must lie and lie and lie again, and must accept the lies sold to him by the salesmen and ad-men and fad-mongers and attention-seekers,and his own wee circle of like-thinking narcissists.

It is for this reason that Morlocks always lie.

They feel about lies they way honest men feel about truth. Truth sets honest men free. Truth cages Morlocks from their wild freedom of unfettered make believe into the narrow ambit of what is real. Lies promise escape from reality. Lies give Morlocks power, or so they imagine.

Since, at this point, the poor fool is so far down the throat of the trap, he had no use of reason to correct these lies, no honest or uncorrupted emotions left, no healthy instincts untouched by the attempt to smother his conscience, that he has no one but salesmen, flatterers, and grievance-mongers to turn to for advice and help. And all they do is stuff him further down the hole.

He is facefirst in the throat of a fishtrap, and every wiggle drives him further down.

Whatever the original generous or happy impulse toward fairplay, openmindedness, or compassion for the poor once governed him is gone, replaced by the addictive desire to lie and to be told lies, in order to sustain the fires of self-righteousness.

His humanity is replaced with mere sadism, a desire to hurt the alleged enemy of his alleged crusade.

Unreality becomes a mark of virtue and a badge of courage to them. They admire those in their hive who tell the biggest lies, and the more shocking and outrageous the lie, the better it is.

Honest men pride themselves on their ability to look truth in the face, no matter how humbling the experience, or how painful to their emotions. Morlocks pride themselves on their ability to maintain their false pride and avoid pain to their emotions, and pride themselves on their ability to flee truth as rapidly and entirely as possible.

It is for this reason Morlocks never apologize, never retract a false statement, never correct themselves. Morlocks always double-down on a bad bet. To apologize or to admit wrong would be to grant power to the truth, their enemy, and to admit that a lie is powerless — yet lies (according to their sick thinking) are their friends and saviors.

But the horrid addiction to unreality, combined with the horrid loss of the power of speech and thus of reason, the love of lies for their own sake, leads to one more and darker step.

When one has the authority, at least in one’s own mind, to rewrite the rules of reality to suit your own darkest desires, what you naturally desire, if you are addicted to self righteousness, is an excuse to hate without limit, without regret, without any scraps of decency or chivalry giving the enemy a chance to speak for himself. You want to punch a gagged victim, someone so evil he is not even owed a fair fight. You want a Nazi to hate. You demand a devil.

And this unleashes sadism, the pathological desire to inflict pain for its own sake.

Hate is permitted when one hates a total devil who is beyond all pity, and so the creature addicted to morlockery must generate devils, one after another after another, to keep the failing fires hot.

Soft targets are always preferred over those who might fight back, and snark and sarcasm are not merely preferred over reason and logic, reason and logic are unavailable because they are incomprehensible.

And so people who do devilish deeds, as Mohammedans who throw homos off buildings, are never criticized. Instead, innocent bystanders with no reason to enter into a lengthy and wearisome fight, such as science fiction writers who have no particular desire to write stories full of homos and lacking all science, are mugged.

In order to paint the innocent target as a devil, he must be accused of every evil one can imagine or concoct. Unfortunately, now that the Morlock is blind to facts and his language is nothing but stereotyped or mimeographed jabberwocky phrases of no particular meaning, the only evils of which he is aware are his own. And so he accuses others of his own evils.

A personal aside: I have found it surrealistic to be on the receiving end of the vomit of Morlock accusations, only to discover that their thought process consists of nothing but accusation, which they need because morlockery consists of nothing but hate, and the accusations justify the hate.

But never once, not even by accident, did any Morlock accuse me of any evil of which I am all-too-acutely aware in my own dark heart. I am not a kindly man, and not a paragon of virtue. I am, however, virtuous in two areas: I am abnormally intelligent, rational, just and fair, dispassionate as a Houyhnhnm, or, more to the point, as emotionless as a hanging judge. I am also honest to a fault. If this sounds like boasting, you misjudge my character: sounding like boasting is one of the faults of an honest man.

Naturally, I heard myself accused only of things I have never done and never felt the least impulse to do: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, being bigoted, unfair, or being dishonest.

Good grief.

I have far darker sins on my soul than those of which I am falsely accused.

No accusation, naturally, was supported by evidence. Morlocks don’t do evidence.

But the Morlocks for whatever reason cannot imagine any sins other than their own. And so they accuse a snow man of being scalding hot and dark, when his true sin is his hueless whiteness and his coldness.

It is for this reason the Morlock always projects his flaws and his motives on all other men.

Nor is the fight ever fair, ever straightforward, masculine, direct. Sadism does not work that way. The approach is always en mass, a sneak attack, under the color of negotiation or friendship, always elliptical, cowardly, craven. This is because self-righteousness based on falsehood seeks the maximum self-congratulation for the minimal effort.

If you are fighting a devil, lies are not only permitted, they are meritorious. All becomes fair. Everything is permitted. And so the Morlock turns the rest of humanity into Eloi, merely food animals, whom he can torment for his amusement, but also for the humorless rush of self-righteous indignation which is the most addictive of all possible human and posthuman emotions: the invincible belief of one’s own total purity, total rightness, and total justification, at the same time linked to a total abandonment of all scruples, fairness, wholesomeness, courage, and honor.

At this point, all virtue is gone. The man goes from subhuman to troglodyte to Morlock, and there is no way he can climb out of the trap under his own power.

Therefore, good men, pray for them.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Longtime reader Nate Winchester says:

I don’t know… I guess like the lovely Mrs Wright, I’ve known a few… I guess they weren’t full SJWs, but one might call them larvae… and they’re not bad people!

It’s like the zombie movies ya know? They’re infected, I get that we’ll have to shoot them in the head, just wish we could figure out some way to cure them before it gets to that point, ya know? Especially because they seem to fight it sometimes.

It just gets… old.

I agree. The SJWs are not bad people. Not at first. Even Lucifer was not totally wretched and evil at first.

That is the important thing to remember.

They are good people with a bad theory who are addicted, like a cocaine addict, to the rush of ego-gratification that comes from self-righteousness.

The Morlocks once were human, once dwelt on the surface, under the sun, and once ate wholesome meats, and did not feast on human flesh. It takes several steps pf evolution to go from being a good man to being a subhuman troglodyte cannibal. Not all have taken all the steps

It is a three stage trap into which they fall, and at each stage, for the best of reasons.

The first stage is an appeal to their sense of fairplay not to make a decision until all the facts are in, not to condemn the wicked until they are proved wicked, and to question everything, to question authority.

But this first stage trap closes when their sense of fairplay comes to the conclusion that no authority, not the authority of morality, not the authority of reason, not the authority of logic, can sit in judgment on any matter. They become so open minded that their brains fall out. They cease to reason in the name of fairplay.

Call this the Appeal to Equality. If all men are equal, no man’s opinion is better than any others’, and so there is no such thing as a right man and the wrong man, a right answer and a wrong answer, a civilized culture or barbaric one. The Appeal to Equality says that to think one answer correct and the other wrong, one behavior a vice and another a virtue, is a hasty judgment, even bigotry.

Reasoning becomes a hate crime.

Once they cease to reason, that is, cease to look at facts for answers, they are thrown back on their emotions and nothing else for a standard of judgment by which to organized their lives, and to build their model of the universe.

At this point, have lost the civilized gift of reason, they are barbarians.

At first, for their moral code, the barbarians will take the model of the surrounding Christian culture, by inertia, but since they have eschewed all authority, the authority of priests and prophets is suspect, and they must seek elsewhere: self-help gurus, political messiahs, fads, or the strange hybrid I call Saganists, who somehow believe that science can make moral judgments by means of mathematical measurements of matter in motion.

Such freakish Saganists do not do real science, and, if their online spokesmen and combox partisans are any clue, do not even understand the basics of the scientific method.

But what these science idolaters do is lend a glamour and a pretense of objectivity and expert wisdom to whatever fraud or nonsense the science idolaters are pretending this decade is part of science, anything from Darwinist explanations of morality to a denial of human free will to the tiresome global warming fraud to the endless environmentalist panic-stories.

Without any authority to guide their thinking in matters where they remain ignorant, and without any reason to banish ignorance, the barbarians become overly vulnerable and overly gullible to mere salesmanship. Step by step they move out of the sunlight and into the darkness of the caverns of the mind.

The rejection of authority not reject science idols as authority, because science is allegedly the study of the physical universe without any bigotry or prejudice, just recourse to the facts.

However, the mental troglodytes abandon the facts, but are still gullible about any claims issued under the guise of science, because it is unbigoted, ergo not a hate crime, ergo does not offend their Appeal to Equality that makes their brains fall out.

But the Appeal to Science, or, rather, the Appeal to Progress, has nothing to do with real science, and in fact hates real science and flees it, especially when real science shows some politically inconvenient fact about the differences between races or sexes or the nature of the weather or of the environment.

This appeal to science is merely an advertisement ploy, like a Madison Avenue huckster telling a gape-mouthed child that Wonder Bread builds bodies in Twelve Ways, or that scientific studies show most dentists drink Coke, or whatever.

It is meaningless, merely a way of lowering sales-resistance by playing on the self-doubt of dolts with no scientific training.

And so the second part of the trap closes: the salesmen prey on the barbarian sense of worthlessness and helplessness their abandonment of reason inevitably creates in them, and lards whatever self-help guru, political messiah, fadmongers, or science-idolaters they wish to have as their messiahs with the promise of being able to make their worthlessness into worth, their helplessness into power.

That is why,and the barbarian intellects get darker and darker, and they turn into cave dwelling Troglodytes, the next step hoves into view. The Troglodytes are obsessed with power, think of nothing but power, worship nothing but power, cast all their thoughts and expressions in terms of nothing but power.

But power to do what? Well, obviously the barbarian is a noble savage, and he wants to save the world, to mend what is wrong with the human condition. They take vestiges of Christian ideas, such as compassion for the poor and downtrodden, and the deep pity for victims that is unknown in the pagan world, or in any land whose God never suffered as a victim, and affix that idea out of context to their obsession over power relations.

The conclusion that turns the barbarian into a troglodyte, the one idea that shoves him into the subterranean darkness that robs him of his remaining natural nobility, is the idea that all misery comes from want of power.

The troglodyte theory of the fall of man goes like this: back in the primordial state of nature before civilization arose, all men were equal in power hence all were happy. Now, not all men are happy. This must be due to a power imbalance: the strong are oppressing those who lack power.

The reason why the poor are poor is not because of their bad work habits or lack of a two-parent family, but because of their lack of power. They are oppressed by the stronger rich.

The reason why the inner city is a bastion of crime is not because of Leftwing sabotage of the Anglo-American legal system, but because of racism, which is defined as a lack of power of Blacks. They are oppressed by the stronger whites.

The reason why the heathen world is a bastion of terror and injustice is not because non-Chrisitian have a cruel and primitive worldview based on despair and fatalism, it is because the Third World lacks power. The Christians are oppressing the weaker heathens.

The reason why women are unhappy is not because the sexual revolution has made them all valueless and unprotected from male predators, while at the same time forcing them into unnatural and unsatisfying roles which they do badly, and discouraging them from following roles they do well, it is because they lack power. Males oppress the weaker females.

The reason by sexual perverts and the victims of neurotic or psychotic sexual malfunctions are unhappy is not because of their mental diseases or the obvious unnatural and illogical contour of their sexual desires. It is because they lack power. The straights are oppressing the alternates orientations and cross dressers.

Why are White, Straight, Christian Males unhappy? Answer: they cannot be, because they have power!

See how absurdly simple and absurdly stupid life becomes once all questions have only one answer? No matter what is wrong with your food, add salt. Lack of salt will fix all recipes of all foods no matter who is eating what nor what mistakes where made in preparing it! No matter what your disease is, take snake oil! Snake oil cures all disease known on Earth, and half the diseases known on Mars! All you need to solve all the complex historical inequities and injustices of fallen man is not virtue, truth, and beauty, but power, power and power!

If only, so the Troglodytes reasoning goes, the invisible and mystical conspiracy of the powerful and privileged could be overturned, the powerless would become powerful, and the human condition would be corrected, all would be well, and your meaningless and senseless life would be make meaningful and sensible. Progress will cure everything!

Such is the promise of the Appeal to Progress.

So falls the third stage of the trap. The salesmen and gurus and messiahs of their empty lives have to fill the emptiness with power. It is clearly not personal power for themselves the Troglodytes want. They want their messiahs to have power, their party, their political leader, not them for themselves.

They merely want anyone not a member of some defined victim group to lose power. They want to destroy the current world and its power structure. The degeneration reaches the final stage. The Troglodytes turn into Morlocks.

It is an appeal to the Crusader instinct, the desire to be a martyr or a hero. The Morlocks are not so inhuman that they lack the human instinct for self-sacrifice, and the craving to correct great wrongs.

But having left reason behind in the name of equality, and having left Christian humility as well as pagan honor behind in the name of progress, they have no reason to expose themselves to self sacrifices of real martyrdom or real heroism.

What they do instead is act like spoiled brats and sick degenerates, antimoralists, who, when decent society shuns them for the sick self indulgence in sin and perversion, can claim to be brave (brave enough to give in to their darkness and sickest desires) and can claim to be martyrs (as if being mildly criticized for public displays of disgusting behavior is the same as death by torture).

And for the same reason so real injustices are never selected for correction. People who hold real power (Oil Sheikhs funding international terrorism and funding regimes that slay homos, kill rape victims, and make women wear bags over their heads) are never the targets for Morlock outrage.

Fighting real power would require real courage and real sacrifice. The Morlock wishes to make only pretend sacrifices and get the applause for being courageous when he is not.

And soon he finds the softest targets are those who preemptively surrender. The Morlock prefers those who are willing to bow to ‘white blackmail’.

White blackmail is when you use a man’s own good nature against him: putting a grenade under a wounded man while flying a white flag, asking for equal time but not granting him time to speak, being a bully while being a crybaby, and so on.

White blackmail is the Saul Alinsky tactic convincing your opponent to abide by the rules you yourself are breaking: to convince the foe to tell the truth when you tell only lies, to convince the foe to be a chivalrous gentleman when you are a harlot, to convince the foe to bind and fetter himself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the Constitutional technicalities of civilian law courts when you are a terrorist out of uniform targeting innocent civilians. White Blackmail is shrieking with insane indignation over the photos from Abu Graib.

This is the Appeal to Self Righteousness, also called the Appeal to Satanic Pride. It is Narcissism, pure and simple.

But then two odd and horrible things happen to the Morlocks to confirm they will never, absent the miraculous grace of God, ever extricate themselves from the trap. These two horrid things brick shut the exits.

The first horrid thing is that the the gullible dunderheaded Morlock who seeks meaning in fads and progress-worship finds that progress usually means progress away from the normal strictures and rigors of morality.

In the progressive world, you are free to sleep with whores and betray your wife in the name of women’s rights, and progressivism gives you the ability to denounce moral, decent, honest people who do not betray their wives, as bigots on the grounds that decency is ‘slut shaming’.

The conscience of the Morlock is smothered.

The odd reason why the Morlocks all talk as if they are as innocent and pure as Adam in Eden before the fall is that, like animals, they pretend to have no consciousness of sin.

At that point as one falls deeper and deeper into the trap, the salesmen and fadmongers need only invent new and ever more meaningless phrases to cast a bad light on good things while using equally dishonest vocabulary to cast a good light on bad things.

Thus, what is actually correct falls by the wayside in favor of false advertising techniques.

This is political correctness, and its point is to smother the workings of the conscience, and dull the awareness of sin, under a blanket of self righteousness and self congratulation.

The Morlocks lose the gift of speech.

They can no longer call things by their right names, and what names they use for things are mere jabberwocky, squawking noise signifying nothing. Like the wretches in Orwell’s Oceania, they have no words by which to express themselves. The slaves can only talk in their master’s voice.

The second horrid thing is the retreat into Unreality, the delight in falsehood for its own sake.

You see, as the Morlock with his jabberwocky speech and darkened intellects seeks to get the thrill of being righteous without doing the actual work of being right, he seeks out only imaginary problems, like global warming, to solve, and ignores real problems, like a global war on terror masters.

The Morlocks lose their eyes.

In order to sustain this fragile bubble of unreality in which the addicted Morlock can picture himself as a bold crusader for justice and an imposed upon victim of oppression, the addict must lie and lie and lie again, and must accept the lies sold to him by the salesmen and ad-men and fad-mongers and attention-seekers,and his own wee circle of like-thinking narcissists.

It is for this reason that Morlocks always lie.

They feel about lies they way honest men feel about truth. Truth sets honest men free. Truth cages Morlocks from their wild freedom of unfettered make believe into the narrow ambit of what is real. Lies promise escape from reality. Lies give Morlocks power, or so they imagine.

Since, at this point, the poor fool is so far down the throat of the trap, he had no use of reason to correct these lies, no honest or uncorrupted emotions left, no healthy instincts untouched by the attempt to smother his conscience, that he has no one but salesmen, flatterers, and grievance-mongers to turn to for advice and help. And all they do is stuff him further down the hole.

He is facefirst in the throat of a fishtrap, and every wiggle drives him further down.

Whatever the original generous or happy impulse toward fairplay, openmindedness, or compassion for the poor once governed him is gone, replaced by the addictive desire to lie and to be told lies, in order to sustain the fires of self-righteousness.

His humanity is replaced with mere sadism, a desire to hurt the alleged enemy of his alleged crusade.

Unreality becomes a mark of virtue and a badge of courage to them. They admire those in their hive who tell the biggest lies, and the more shocking and outrageous the lie, the better it is.

Honest men pride themselves on their ability to look truth in the face, no matter how humbling the experience, or how painful to their emotions. Morlocks pride themselves on their ability to maintain their false pride and avoid pain to their emotions, and pride themselves on their ability to flee truth as rapidly and entirely as possible.

It is for this reason Morlocks never apologize, never retract a false statement, never correct themselves. Morlocks always double-down on a bad bet. To apologize or to admit wrong would be to grant power to the truth, their enemy, and to admit that a lie is powerless — yet lies (according to their sick thinking) are their friends and saviors.

But the horrid addiction to unreality, combined with the horrid loss of the power of speech and thus of reason, the love of lies for their own sake, leads to one more and darker step.

When one has the authority, at least in one’s own mind, to rewrite the rules of reality to suit your own darkest desires, what you naturally desire, if you are addicted to self righteousness, is an excuse to hate without limit, without regret, without any scraps of decency or chivalry giving the enemy a chance to speak for himself. You want to punch a gagged victim, someone so evil he is not even owed a fair fight. You want a Nazi to hate. You demand a devil.

And this unleashes sadism, the pathological desire to inflict pain for its own sake.

Hate is permitted when one hates a total devil who is beyond all pity, and so the creature addicted to morlockery must generate devils, one after another after another, to keep the failing fires hot.

Soft targets are always preferred over those who might fight back, and snark and sarcasm are not merely preferred over reason and logic, reason and logic are unavailable because they are incomprehensible.

And so people who do devilish deeds, as Mohammedans who throw homos off buildings, are never criticized. Instead, innocent bystanders with no reason to enter into a lengthy and wearisome fight, such as science fiction writers who have no particular desire to write stories full of homos and lacking all science, are mugged.

In order to paint the innocent target as a devil, he must be accused of every evil one can imagine or concoct. Unfortunately, now that the Morlock is blind to facts and his language is nothing but stereotyped or mimeographed jabberwocky phrases of no particular meaning, the only evils of which he is aware are his own. And so he accuses others of his own evils.

A personal aside: I have found it surrealistic to be on the receiving end of the vomit of Morlock accusations, only to discover that their thought process consists of nothing but accusation, which they need because morlockery consists of nothing but hate, and the accusations justify the hate.

But never once, not even by accident, did any Morlock accuse me of any evil of which I am all-too-acutely aware in my own dark heart. I am not a kindly man, and not a paragon of virtue. I am, however, virtuous in two areas: I am abnormally intelligent, rational, just and fair, dispassionate as a Houyhnhnm, or, more to the point, as emotionless as a hanging judge. I am also honest to a fault. If this sounds like boasting, you misjudge my character: sounding like boasting is one of the faults of an honest man.

Naturally, I heard myself accused only of things I have never done and never felt the least impulse to do: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, being bigoted, unfair, or being dishonest.

Good grief.

I have far darker sins on my soul than those of which I am falsely accused.

No accusation, naturally, was supported by evidence. Morlocks don’t do evidence.

But the Morlocks for whatever reason cannot imagine any sins other than their own. And so they accuse a snow man of being scalding hot and dark, when his true sin is his hueless whiteness and his coldness.

It is for this reason the Morlock always projects his flaws and his motives on all other men.

Nor is the fight ever fair, ever straightforward, masculine, direct. Sadism does not work that way. The approach is always en mass, a sneak attack, under the color of negotiation or friendship, always elliptical, cowardly, craven. This is because self-righteousness based on falsehood seeks the maximum self-congratulation for the minimal effort.

If you are fighting a devil, lies are not only permitted, they are meritorious. All becomes fair. Everything is permitted. And so the Morlock turns the rest of humanity into Eloi, merely food animals, whom he can torment for his amusement, but also for the humorless rush of self-righteous indignation which is the most addictive of all possible human and posthuman emotions: the invincible belief of one’s own total purity, total rightness, and total justification, at the same time linked to a total abandonment of all scruples, fairness, wholesomeness, courage, and honor.

At this point, all virtue is gone. The man goes from subhuman to troglodyte to Morlock, and there is no way he can climb out of the trap under his own power.

Therefore, good men, pray for them.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Longtime reader Nate Winchester says:

I don’t know… I guess like the lovely Mrs Wright, I’ve known a few… I guess they weren’t full SJWs, but one might call them larvae… and they’re not bad people!

It’s like the zombie movies ya know? They’re infected, I get that we’ll have to shoot them in the head, just wish we could figure out some way to cure them before it gets to that point, ya know? Especially because they seem to fight it sometimes.

It just gets… old.

I agree. The SJWs are not bad people. Not at first. Even Lucifer was not totally wretched and evil at first.

That is the important thing to remember.

They are good people with a bad theory who are addicted, like a cocaine addict, to the rush of ego-gratification that comes from self-righteousness.

The Morlocks once were human, once dwelt on the surface, under the sun, and once ate wholesome meats, and did not feast on human flesh. It takes evolution to go from being a good man to being a subhuman troglodyte cannibal.

It is a three stage trap into which they fall, and at each stage, for the best of reasons.

The first stage is an appeal to their sense of fairplay not to make a decision until all the facts are in, not to condemn the wicked until they are proved wicked, and to question everything, to question authority.

But this first stage trap closes when their sense of fairplay comes to the conclusion that no authority, not the authority of morality, not the authority of reason, not the authority of logic, can sit in judgment on any matter. They become so open minded that their brains fall out. They cease to reason in the name of fairplay.

Call this the Appeal to Equality. If all men are equal, no man’s opinion is better than any others’, and so there is no such thing as a right man and the wrong man, a right answer and a wrong answer, a civilized culture or barbaric one. The Appeal to Equality says that to think one answer correct and the other wrong, one behavior a vice and another a virtue, is a hasty judgment, even bigotry.

Reasoning becomes a hate crime.

Once they cease to reason, that is, cease to look at facts for answers, they are thrown back on their emotions and nothing else for a standard of judgment by which to organized their lives, and to build their model of the universe.

At this point, have lost the human gift of reason, they are post-human.

At first, for their moral code, the posthumans will take the model of the surrounding Christian culture, by inertia, but since they have eschewed all authority, the authority of priests and prophets is suspect, and they must seek elsewhere: self-help gurus, political messiahs, fads, or the strange hybrid I call Saganists, who somehow believe that science can make moral judgments by means of mathematical measurements of matter in motion.

Such freakish Saganists do not do real science, and, if their online spokesmen and combox partisans are any clue, do not even understand the basics of the scientific method.

But what these science idolaters do is lend a glamour and a pretense of objectivity and expert wisdom to whatever fraud or nonsense the science idolaters are pretending this decade is part of science, anything from Darwinist explanations of morality to a denial of human free will to the tiresome global warming fraud to the endless environmentalist panic-stories.

Without any authority to guide their thinking in matters where they remain ignorant, and without any reason to banish ignorance, the postumans become overly vulnerable and overly gullible to mere salesmanship. Step by step they move out of the sunlight and into the darkness of the caverns of the mind.

The rejection of authority not reject science idols as authority, because science is allegedly the study of the physical universe without any bigotry or prejudice, just recourse to the facts.

However, the mental troglodytes abandon the facts, but are still gullible about any claims issued under the guise of science, because it is unbigoted, ergo not a hate crime, ergo does not offend their Appeal to Equality that makes their brains fall out.

But the Appeal to Science, or, rather, the Appeal to Progress, has nothing to do with real science, and in fact hates real science and flees it, especially when real science shows some politically inconvenient fact about the differences between races or sexes or the nature of the weather or of the environment. This appeal to science is merely an advertisement ploy, like a Madison Avenue huckster telling a gape-mouthed child that Wonder Bread builds bodies in Twelve Ways, or that scientific studies show most dentists drink Coke, or whatever.

It is meaningless, merely a way of lowering sales-resistance by playing on the self-doubt of dolts with no scientific training.

And so the second part of the trap closes: the salesmen prey on the Troglodyte sense of worthlessness and helplessness their abandonment of reason inevitably creates in them, and lards whatever self-help guru, political messiah, fadmongers, or science-idolaters they wish to have as their messiahs with the promise of being able to make their worthlessness into worth, their helplessness into power.

That is why the Troglodytes are obsessed with power, think of nothing but power, worship nothing but power, cast all their thoughts and expressions in terms of nothing but power.

But power to do what? Well, obviously the Troglodytes want to save the world, to mend what is wrong with the human condition. They take vestiges of Christian ideas, such as compassion for the poor and downtrodden, and the deep pity for victims that is unknown in the pagan world, or in any land whose God never suffered as a victim, and affix that idea out of context to their obsession over power relations.

Their conclusion is that all misery comes from want of power. The reason why the poor are poor is not because of their bad work habits or lack of a two-parent family, but because of their lack of power. The reason why the inner city is a bastion of crime is not because of Leftwing sabotage of the Anglo-American legal system, but because of racism, which is defined as a lack of power of Blacks.

If only, so the Troglodytes reasoning goes, the invisible and mystical conspiracy of the powerful and privileged could be overturned, the powerless would become powerful, and the human condition would be corrected, all would be well, and your meaningless and senseless life would be make meaningful and sensible. Such is the promise of the Appeal to Progress.

So falls the third stage of the trap. The salesmen and gurus and messiahs of their empty lives have to fill the emptiness with power. Now, real power is not available, not to people who do not reason and who are particularly gullible. Instead they seek the false appearance of power by savaging other men better then themselves. The degeneration reaches the final stage. The Troglodytes turn into Morlocks.

It is an appeal to the Crusader instinct, the desire to be a martyr or a hero. The Morlocks are not so inhuman that they lack the human instinct for self-sacrifice, and the craving to correct great wrongs. But having left reason behind in the name of equality, and having left Christianity behind in the name of progress, they have no reason to expose themselves to self sacrifices of real martyrdom or real heroism.

What they do instead is act like spoiled brats and sick degenerates, antimoralists, who, when decent society shuns them for the sick self indulgence in sin and perversion, can claim to be brave (brave enough to give in to their darkness and sickest desires) and can claim to be martyrs (as if being mildly criticized for public displays of disgustingness is the same as death by torture).

And for the same reason so real injustices are never selected for correction. People who hold real power (Oil Sheikhs funding international terrorism and funding regimes that slay homos, kill rape victims, and make women wear bags over their heads) are never the targets for Morlock outrage.

Fighting real power would require real courage and real sacrifice. The Morlock wishes to make only pretend sacrifices and get the applause for being courageous when he is not.

And soon they find the softest targets are those who preemptively surrender. The Morlock seeks out only those who are willing to bow to ‘white blackmail’.

White blackmail is when you use a man’ own good nature against him: putting a grenade under a wounded man while flying a white flag, asking for equal time but not granting any opponent time to speak, being a bully while being a crybaby, and so on.

White blackmail is convincing your opponent to abide by the rules you yourself are breaking: to tell the truth when you tell only lies, to be a chivalrous gentleman when you are a harlot, to be bound and fettered by the niceties of the Geneva Convention when you are a terrorist targeting innocent civilians. White Blackmail is shrieking with insane indignation over the photos from Abu Graib.

This is the Appeal to Self Righteousness, also called the Appeal to Satanic Pride. It is Narcissism, pure and simple.

But then two odd and horrible things happen to the Morlocks to confirm they will never, absent the miraculous grace of God, ever extricate themselves from the trap. These two horrid things brick shut the exits.

The first horrid thing is that the the gullible dunderheaded Morlock who seeks meaning in fads and progress-worship finds that progress usually means progress away from the normal strictures and just judgments of morality.

In the progressive world, you are free to sleep with whores and betray your wife in the name of women’s rights, and progressivism gives you the ability to denounce moral and decent people, honest people who do not betray their wives, as bigots on the grounds that decency is ‘slut shaming’.

The conscience of the Morlock is smothered. The odd reason why the Morlocks all talk as if they are as innocent and pure as Adam in Eden before the fall is that, like animals, they pretend to have no consciousness of sin.

At that point as one falls deeper and deeper into the trap, the salesmen and fadmongers need only invent new and ever more meaningless phrases to cast a bad light on good things while using equally dishonest vocabulary to cast a good light on bad things.

Thus, what is actually correct falls by the wayside in favor of false advertising techniques. This is political correctness, and its point is to smother the workings of the conscience, and dull the awareness of sin, under a blanket of self righteousness and self congratulation. The Morlocks lose the gift of speech.

They can no longer call things by their right names, and what names they use for things are mere jabberwocky, squawking noise signifying nothing. Like the wretches in Orwell’s Oceania, they have no words by which to express themselves. The slaves can only talk in their master’s voice.

The second horrid thing is the retreat into Unreality, the delight in falsehood for its own sake.

You see, as the Morlock with his jabberwocky speech and darkened intellects seeks to get the thrill of being righteous without doing the actual work of being right, he seeks out only imaginary problems, like global warming, to solve, and ignores real problems, like a global war on terror masters.

In order to sustain this fragile bubble of unreality in which the addicted Morlock can picture himself as a bold crusader for justice and an imposed upon victim of oppression, the addict must lie and lie and lie again, and must accept the lies sold to him by the salesmen and ad-men and fad-mongers and attention-seekers,and his own wee circle of like-thinking narcissists.

Since, at this point, the poor fool is so far down the throat of the trap, he had no use of reason to correct these lies, no honest or uncorrupted emotions left, no healthy instincts untouched by the attempt to smother his conscience, that he has no one but salesmen, flatterers, and grievance-mongers to turn to for advice and help. And all they do is stuff him further down the hole.

He is facefirst in the throat of a fishtrap, and every wiggle drives him further down.

Whatever the original generous or happy impulse toward fairplay, openmindedness, or compassion for the poor once governed him is gone, replaced by the addictive desire to lie and to be told lies, in order to sustain the fires of self-righteousness. His humanity is replaced with mere sadism, a desire to hurt the alleged enemy of his alleged crusade.

Unreality becomes a mark of virtue and a badge of courage to them. They admire those in their hive who tell the biggest lies, and the more shocking and outrageous the lie, the better it is.

Honest men pride themselves on their ability to look truth in the face, no matter how humbling the experience, or how painful to their emotions. Morlocks pride themselves on their ability to maintain their false pride and avoid pain to their emotions, and pride themselves on their ability to flee truth as rapidly and entirely as possible.

But addiction to unreality, the love of lies for their own sake, leads to one more and darker step. When one has the authority, at least in one’s own mind, to rewrite the rules of reality to suit your own darkest desires, what you naturally desire, if you are addicted to self righteousness, is an excuse to hate without limit, without regret, without any scraps of decency or chivalry giving the enemy a chance to speak for himself. You want to punch a gagged victim, someone so evil he is not even owed a fair fight. You want a Nazi to hate. You demand a devil.

And this unleashes sadism, the pathological desire to inflict pain for its own sake.

Hate is permitted when one hates a total devil who is beyond all pity, and so the creature addicted to morlockery must generate devils, one after another after another, to keep the failing fires hot.

Soft targets are always preferred over those who might fight back, and snark and sarcasm are not merely preferred over reason and logic, reason and logic are unavailable because they are incomprehensible.

And so people who do devilish deeds, as Mohammedans who throw homos off buildings, are never criticized. Instead, innocent bystanders with no reason to enter into a lengthy and wearisome fight, such as science fiction writers who have no particular desire to write stories full of homos and lacking all science, are mugged.

Nor is the fight ever fair, ever straightforward, masculine, direct. Sadism does not work that way. The approach is always en mass, a sneak attack, under the color of negotiation or friendship, always elliptical, cowardly, craven. This is because self-righteousness based on falsehood seeks the maximum self-congratulation for the minimal effort.

If you are fighting a devil, lies are not only permitted, they are meritorious. All becomes fair. Everything is permitted. And so the Morlock turns the rest of humanity into Eloi, merely food animals, whom he can torment for his amusement, but also for the humorless rush of self-righteous indignation which is the most addictive of all possible human and posthuman emotions: the invincible belief of one’s own total purity, total rightness, and total justification, at the same time linked to a total abandonment of all scruples, fairness, wholesomeness, courage, and honor.

At this point, all virtue is gone. The man goes from subhuman to troglodyte to Morlock, and there is no way he can climb out of the trap under his own power.

Therefore, good men, pray for them.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

When I first heard of this, I thought it was an Onion parody.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426260/halloween-colleges-costumes-consultants

olleges are hanging flyers around campus with phone numbers of officials that students can call to consult with about whether or not their Halloween costume is perfectly politically correct. “Unsure if your costume might be offensive?” asks a poster that’s been hung around campus at State University of New York at Geneseo. “Don’t be afraid to ask questions.” The poster contains the phone numbers and e-mails of five (five!) campus officials that students can contact and discuss the very important issue of whether or not what they will dress up as to get drunk in will be advancing social-justice causes. Wesleyan University has been hanging similar posters around the school — but with six (six!) numbers listed.

It’s a good first step. Maybe next year, the schools can deploy cultural-sensitivity control officers to bust into parties and round up anyone spotted in a sombrero or afro wig. To make the world, you know, better.

My comment: The irony here is, first, that these are college age students, that is, men old enough to serve in the military and be placed in charge of multi-million dollar vehicles and ordinance, women old enough to bear children and be in charge of a family; and, second, that they are college age students are a college, an institution allegedly devoted to the education of the young, a process requiring intellectual discipline and academic freedom.

And yet the campus will not prevent fornication between students and coeds, unwed motherhood, or other matters far more ruinous.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I just read this review of Jim Butcher’s latest book:

1 of 106 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars

I’m just going to rate this a 1/5 on principle…

By Zoe S. Galaitsis on October 6, 2015

I’m just going to rate this a 1/5 on principle, after Jim Butcher got nominated by Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies. Not sure what’s going on there but Butcher hasn’t come out and said a thing, not even to deny their platform of reviling women, gays, and non-Christians. I’m generally wary of reading anything by him or giving him any money at this point.

Hmm. Funny. I do not recall our platform reviling women, gays and non-Christians. I recall our platform was to support books on their merit and entertainment value, regardless of political correctness, and to give science fiction awards based on their skill at telling a science fiction story, not to give science fiction awards based on political party loyalties.

I do recall being in the receiving end of actionable libels from major international news organization, and I do recall thinking that no one was stupid enough actually to believe such obvious and clumsy lies, but in this case I overestimated the intelligence of the reading public. I thought that they would be smart enough to, you know, read.

Therefore the principle that this reviewer is upholding is the unreality principle, that principle that lies are better than truth, and outrageous lies are better than lies; the principle that injustice is better than justice, so judging books based on the fact that someone you arbitrarily and unjustly decided to hate likes those books is better then reading the book and judging on the merit.

Have you wondered why award-winning SFF books and stories, the kind sold to libraries and touted as best sellers, are all so bland and bad?

Consider the simple logic of it. A community must either judges stories on the merit or not on the merit.

If the community judges stories on the merit, then the most meritorious works will be lauded, assuming the community has any taste at all. (And if you do not agree with the tastes of science fiction readers, why read science fiction?)

If, on the other hand, the community judges stories not on the merit, as when, for example, you judge the story on the political correctness of the message or of the author’s private life, then not the most meritorious works will be lauded. Bland and bad stories will be promoted and feted, and your, the reader, will not hear if there are any good stories out there.

Do you want to know why brilliant hard-core science fiction like THE MARTIAN by Weir did not win awards but boring and predictable lecture-fiction with little science fiction in it, or none, won instead? It is because fairplay is not in fashion among the termites who have eaten their way into positions of influence in the award-nominating structure.

Envy the Morlock! How simple it becomes to live in a world with no right or wrong, which are subtle and silent and require a nicety of judgment and wisdom to discern: but party loyalty is obvious, self-aggrandizing and loud, and any idiot can see who is a member of the groupthink collective, and who is an unperson scorned by Big Brother.

Humans think. Morlocks hate.

They hate whoever the two minute hate says to hate. It does not matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein is real or not, or whether Jim Butcher writes well or poorly. The target is created for the sake of the hate; the hatred is not a reaction to some hateful thing, real or imaginary the target has does or is.

Be that as it may, this review was a sufficient incentive to buy a copy of Mr Butcher’s latest book. Money permitting, I shall buy two copies.

I don’t know and I don’t care what Mr Butcher’s political leanings, sexual preferences, denomination or race is. I have not examined his Ahenpass, or discovered is he has a quatroon as a greatgrandfather. I am not a Leftist. I care if he can perform the job for which I pay him, that is, write a good story in return for my hard earned book buying dollar.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Cinder-Spires-Aeronauts-Windlass/dp/0451466802/

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Best movie all year. No science fiction fan has a valid excuse not to like this movie. I was sure they would mess it up, but it was a remarkably faithful adaptation from the book.

I will write up a longer review in days to come, time permitting. In the meantime, go see it. Take your muggle friends, and they will understand the appeal of hard SF.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Never apologize to the Morlocks, for they will only take the apology as a confession, and, sensing weakness, fall upon you, and drag you underground to their lair and feast on your living flesh.

This advice applies not merely to the enemy in the culture war attempting to get you mocked, reviled, and fired for your political incorrectness, but also to the enemy in the Jihad, attempting to get you to die, to surrender to slavery or submit to Islam.

Vox Day in his new book SJWs ALWAYS LIES includes the excellent advice that one must never apologise to a Social Justice Warrior, never attempt to ameliorate nor appease them, never appeal to their better nature. His experience (and mine) shows this is futile as well as counterproductive.

A civilized man, hearing an apology or a request for quarter, will interpret it as a request for forgiveness and a request for a return to the peace the existed before the dispute broke out: an SJW, hearing an apology, will take it as a surrender, will sense blood in the water as a shark does, and redouble the attacks.

This is because the civilized man regards other men as real people and seeks to live in peace. An SJW is a creature who regards peace as intolerable, and thinks of other people as mere shadows, mere puppets on the stage of his own internal psychodrama.

A civilize man attacks enemies in order to restore civilization, and hence attacks those who threaten it, and hence takes a proffer apology as a sign that the threat is ended. An SJW, on the other hand, is a witchhunter who attacks the witch not because he believes you (or anyone) is a witch. Your name could have been picked at random out of a hat. He attacks because he wishes to be seen by the warren, his peers, as zealous and loyal, and because whichever witchhunter hunts the most witches gains a high status.

Such is the disagreeable truth and tactical necessity of the culture war, and it has an even more disagreeable sequel: a whole cadre of so called moderates arises who, while claiming to agree with you and to abjure the foe, makes calls for peace and compromise never directed at the witchhunters, always at the witch. One such recent display was being debated over at Vox Day’s website:  http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/10/dialogue-with-moderate.html

This led to a question we have heard debated frequently in conservative and Christian circles, which is, namely, when is it right, if ever, to fight an enemy without remorse, without quarter, without adherence to the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, savagely, and totally?

The answer to that question falls into two opposite errors: the Scylla of those who answer “always” and the Charybdis of those who answer “never.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

We celebrate the first year of the superversive literary movement with the second half of last week’s essay by that brilliant essayist, Tom Simon.

This essay I think is one of his best, and since I think he is perhaps the best essayist since essayist since Montaigne, that is saying quite a bit. Of course, I happen to be particularly interested in this topic, and his essay makes clear to me a personal puzzle touching why a writer I once respected and read avidly now bores and offends me.

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/10/27/superversive-blog-life-carbon-and-the-tao-part-two/

Here is a collection of his essays:

A collection of Mr. Simons excellent essays on Tolkien and our craft.

And here is the first part:

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/10/15/superversive-literary-movement-anniversary-essay/

Let me quote a teaser:

Life, Carbon, and the  Tao  – Part Two

by

Tom Simon

What’s so special about the Tao?

Here I am using the term Tao the way C. S. Lewis used it in The Abolition of Man: meaning the basic principles of morality on which all civilized peoples have generally agreed. Here are some of the perennials: Don’t murder your neighbour, don’t steal from your neighbour, don’t mess around with your neighbour’s wife, don’t perjure yourself. Men have differed on the definition of neighbour, and some  of the wide variation in human cultures is accounted for by that  difference. Some peoples apply the Tao only to members of one’s own  tribe, or one’s own nation. Some try to apply it to every human being  without exception. And of course there are differences of detail, such  as whether a man should marry one wife or four. But every culture that  survives is based on the Tao, just as every life form is based on  carbon; and the reasons, at bottom, are similar.

What the Tao does is to establish a minimum basis for safe dealings  between human beings. If, every time you went into Starbucks, you had to  seriously question whether the barrista would sell you a cup of coffee  or shoot you on sight, I fancy that Starbucks, as a business, would not  have lasted long. Fortunately, both you and the barrista subscribe to  the Tao. Even if you don’t understand the reasons for the rules, you  obey the rules, at least most of the time, because that is the only  way that you can get along and do business together. Even to live  together in a community requires the Tao. My neighbours lock their  doors when they go out, it is true. But if I did not accept the Tao,  locks would do them no good; I would smash the doors with an axe and  help myself to their belongings. And if they did not accept the Tao,  they would have no grounds to complain. No human being can live as a  solo army, at war with the whole world. We are born weak and helpless,  and most of us are weak and helpless again before we die; and we all  have to sleep in between. The Tao literally keeps us alive when we  cannot defend ourselves.

The basis of the Tao, in one word, is reciprocity. “Do unto others  as you would have them do unto you.” Or if that is too strong for you,  take the formula of Confucius: “Never do to others what you would not  like them to do to you.” Over tens of thousands of years, in the  laboratory of daily life, in tribes and villages, cities and nations, we  have boiled down the art of reciprocity; we have codified the things  that none of us (when sane and healthy) wish done to us, and we agree  not to do them to others. In almost every culture, this code is  reinforced by the prevailing religion; but it is quite possible to  accept the Tao without any religion at all. It is the common moral  currency of humanity, and with the caveat noted above, it passes  everywhere. Societies that reject the  Tao  do not hang together; and  individuals who reject the  Tao  soon find themselves without any society.

When I turn from real life to fiction, I find a curious difference. In  the stories of the past — in nearly all fiction before, say, the late  nineteenth century, and all  popular  fiction until a much later date —  the  Tao  is taken for granted; only there is a class of people who do  not observe the  Tao.  These people are called  criminals,  or   outlaws,  or  villains.  In the older kind of fiction, the villain  upsets the  Tao  to take advantage of a weaker party, and the hero  restores the  Tao  by avenging the victim.

Consider the  Odyssey.  Odysseus was a sharp operator, maybe, but still  a hero; he restored the  Tao.  Old Polyphemus, the Cyclops, violated the   Tao  in a pretty straightforward way: he ate his house guests. The  Greeks set great store by the laws of  xenia,  or hospitality; and even  we degenerate moderns, when our friends invite us to dinner, do not  expect to  be  the dinner. Later, he restored the  Tao  in the matter of  adultery, dealing with his wife’s suitors in a brusque but exemplary  manner. (No, he could not have called the police. Odysseus was the King  of Ithaca; he  was  the police.)

It is only we moderns, for the most part, who try to write fiction  without the  Tao.

 

Read the rest:

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/10/27/superversive-blog-life-carbon-and-the-tao-part-two/

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.