Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Liberal Morality Emasculating, argues noted Political Pseudoscientist

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Horace Mollycoddle, political pseudoscientist at the Machiavelli Institute, has theorized in his interview with Subversion Magazine, that being morally right on the political issues is correlated with being a wimp or a sissy, which is why politicians who need to best each other in the bloodsport of politics either can’t justify their policies or are unwilling to fight for what’s right.

Quoting Yeats, Mollycoddle said, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Liberalism is more rational and ethical than conservatism, according to Mollycoddle, and liberalism entails assigning equal rights to women and minorities “whose feminine interests and slave morality rub off on liberal men, draining liberals in general of the strength to wage war on the manifest villainy of so-called conservatives.”

Thus, in the United States, Republicans trounce Democrats and “push their odious ‘free-market’ policies of plutocracy and their anachronistic and incoherent family values to evermore insane extremes. Alternatively, liberals somehow scrape together a victory, but lack the stomach to apply their progressive principles, as in the case of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.” Mollycoddle added that Hillary Clinton would likewise have governed as a neoliberal centrist, had she defeated Donald Trump in 2016.

Mollycoddle therefore posits a Wuss Factor that renders liberals “girly-men,” as Arnold Schwarzenegger called them. “This is the flip-side of Obama’s famous lack of ‘drama’: he didn’t create any drama while in office only because he didn’t care about anything, which is why, in turn, he didn’t fight for anything.

Obama’s defenders have said he’s cerebral rather than spineless or nihilistic, but Mollycoddle contends that “intellectualism, as in Woody Allen’s perennial movie character or Dostoevsky’s ‘mouse’ in Notes from the Underground, can provide cover for cowardice.” Instead of admitting to “a lack of the irrational inner strength that’s often needed to take decisive action, the hyper-aware intellectual will rationalize in an endless cycle of doubts and half-measures.”

Obama didn’t fight for a public option in the healthcare debate, said Mollycoddle, and so he will “suffer the irony that ‘Obamacare’ may be repealed even though Obama’s Affordable Care Act wasn’t at all a progressive alternative but was a conservative, Romney-style non-solution to the problems with the American healthcare system. And when he discovered that Vladimir Putin was waging cyberwar against the US in its 2016 presidential election, Obama dithered and choked instead of punishing Russia.

“Ultimately,” Mollycoddle continued, “this is because it’s impossible to be both moral and manly. To be sure, the liberal’s heart will always be in the right place. Unfortunately, this means Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, or any other liberal leader necessarily lacks the killer instinct to destroy his or her enemies.”

Ordinarily, in a healthy democracy, politicians would have “no need for battlefield virtues, no need to attempt to systematically annihilate their rivals,” because both sides would have the common welfare in view and would gladly compromise to retain the nation’s dignity.

But the twenty-first century American political system is “evidently dysfunctional” and “the so-called conservatives are actually radical anarchists who seek to further impoverish the majority of Americans to benefit the wealthiest one percent who have no need of any social safety net, since they live in their own worlds.” 

Mollycoddle then cited Lewis Mumford on the Rabelaisian culture of the sixteenth-century Country Houses in Europe: “The conditions which underlie this limited, partial good life are political power and economic wealth; and in order for that life to develop well, both of these must obtain in almost limitless quantities. Honest labor cannot achieve such wealth or command such leisure: it is possible only through privileged exploitation of the resources and labor of an entire country, for the benefit of a minority. The ease, the grace, the dignity, the spacious days of this society are therefore purchased at the price of the toil, the constriction, the ceaseless economic anxiety of the mass of the population: not only at home but in the exploited territories abroad. Under all its patent refinements goes a ruthless monopoly of land and political power. Force and fraud, either remote or recent, are the twin foundations of Country House existence” (The Condition of Man).

“The reason conservatives rig the American economy,” said Mollycoddle, “is to recreate that grotesque inequality. It’s a war of princes, lords, or plutocrats against the planet in general, but particularly against the majority of mere ordinary mortals.

“So conservatives haven’t a prayer of being anywhere near right on the issues. Their political views are so many loathsome, decadent monstrosities or bestial sneers and postures. But they inevitably end up on top because liberals are pussies, and the reason liberals ‘lack all conviction’ is precisely because they’re in the right.

“Morality itself is the Wuss Factor.”

4 comments:

  1. 1)much truth is spoken as if in jest

    2)through the courtesy of the indian institute of technology in bangalore, i have just obtained an electronic copy of mumford's "the condition of man" (written before i was born, even though i also date from the first half of the twentieth century)

    3)i think i will check out the youtube video on secular humanism and eckhart tolle's mysticism mentioned on the side of this page as i type - but before i do here is a summary of mysticism's postulates i once heard (again, these words were put in this order during the 20th century - sometimes i call myself a time traveler, although by a slightly more gentle method than in the netflix series 'travelers' - the method i use is unidirectional and at a uniform rate)

    1)the universe is here on purpose
    2)human beings have, or could have, some connection with that purpose
    3)it is possible to improve your ability to perceive this purpose and act to further it

    any or all of these 3 postulates might be wrong, of course

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    1. Mistah Charley, thanks for your comment.

      There's not much jesting in this article, which is why I didn't post it to Glossynews, like I do with my other satires. That's to say I'm not going for laughs here. But I'd say there's at least a kernel of truth in all my blog's satirical news reports. This article is really just a Nietzschean take on morality, which I try to express here with much bluntness. So it's more a question of candidness than jesting.

      Lewis Mumford is great. I highly recommend his two-volume Myth of the Machine, especially the first, shorter volume.

      My video on Tolle's mysticism is a companion piece to an article I wrote on that subject, which you might be interested in (link below).

      I reject all three of those points of mysticism. Awe-inspiring, sublime transcendence is still possible, but it's much stranger and more tragic than what you'd find in an old-fashioned anthropocentric or deistic ideology.

      Mystics should begin with cosmicist, atheistic naturalism. Contrary to Taoism, which I also write about, we shouldn't strive to connect to the cosmic flow. Our duty as awakened beings is to oppose nature's mindlessness, to fill the universe with the value-laden products of our imagination--until nature wins out in the end and extinguishes all life and all hope for the emergence of sentient creatures that can recognize the horrors of nature and heroically overcome them.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2014/05/dark-mysticism-tragic-heroism-and-fear.html

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/08/daoist-pantheism-natures-tragedy-and.html

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  2. i wonder if you are familiar with the thought of culadasa/john yates, author of a recent book "the mind illuminated"

    i am reminded of culadasa's take on the pain of existence - that what finally overcomes it is the realization of interconnectedness

    a transcript of part of a talk by culadasa, and a link to the video, is found at

    https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/59bq8x/theory_culadasa_on_insights_first_stage_of/

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    1. I wasn't familiar with him, but I am familiar with Buddhism. I'd agree with him that certain lines of thought land you in a dark night of the soul, which I've called the knowledge of our existential predicament.

      But I don't think our ultimate goal should be the avoidance of suffering, nor do I think interconnectedness is an ultimate truth that carries the prescription that we ought to annihilate much of ourselves in the Buddhist manner (or overcome the "illusion" of our separateness). Buddhism is quite opposed to Nietzschean existentialism in that the Buddhist advocates a kind of anti-heroism, a retreat from suffering that's made possible by the destruction of parts of the self. Regardless of how all things might be metaphysically or physically interconnected, the division between the intelligent, sentient self and everything else is real enough. A consequence of that division is indeed the dark night of the soul, and I'd agree we should find a way to make the best of that profound suffering.

      The author says, "When you have insight into emptiness and you realize that all you ever see are the projections of your own mind..." Given that the author is a neuroscientist, this is bound to be claptrap as it stands. What he means to say is that our perceptions are models that arise out of our _brain_, and so he presupposes the objectivity of scientific truth. As I said, we should start our philosophizing from naturalism, not from first-person intuitive experience. But any recognition of at least the special utility of scientific models vitiates the author's invitation to a supposedly more authentic way of living--because it's science, too, that posits the self's separateness. My brain is not your brain, for example.

      The author says, "When you have that insight that you are not a separate self---That the self that you had perceived is as empty as any other perception that you've ever had--" meaning "empty" in that it's an illusion, an appearance projected by the mind which isn't what's really there.

      This is untenable from a scientific perspective. Yes, everything is interconnected at some level of explanation, but the moon isn't the sun, and a human self isn't the same as a slug or a rock. Everything is interconnected, but concepts that carve up the world are useful in making sense of experience, as demonstrated by the systematically-successful predictions made possible by scientific theories.

      Buddhism may be useful as well. In particular, I wouldn't deny that parts of the self can be destroyed by Buddhist techniques. I'd just question the ethical justification of that course of action.

      But I've always found this Buddhist line of thinking intriguing. I'll read some more by this author or listen to the YouTube talk.

      You might want to check out my article on Buddhism. It’s several years old, but it addresses these interesting questions.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2011/11/buddhism-and-existential-angst.html

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