I am amazed at the discourse, such that it is, that is topical to the Russian and Ukrainian act that currently holds the spotlight at the center of the global stage. The vast majority of it that I have observed is best characterized as reactive, moralizing expressions of outrage and condemnations. It is in keeping with what has become a core aspect of our national character.
Everyone wants to condemn Putin. Who wants to take a sober look at the situation and assess what is happening and why? Who wants to look at their own actions and those of their representatives and see what parts may be ours that have contributed as catalyst and cause? Everywhere I see moral judgement and condemnation of the bad man out there. Everywhere I see histrionics and impotent finger pointing and shouting - down with that bad, bad man. Nowhere do I see sane and calculating people who, if confronted with a bad, bad man, would be served by reflection, analysis and reasoning through prescriptions for best dealing with him. I see guns out, pointed and blazing squarely at our own feet. Shoot first ask questions, later. It is quite a sound - round after round after round of moral outrage going off into the ground. It is time for reflection and for sense making, but for that, we need the correct moral posture.
Lao Tzu once said, “Where morals are talked about, there are none”. He must have lived through a time like ours. Everywhere you hear people passing moral judgements. Yet, the causes they support and the premises behind them are deeply immoral, though easily seen when even the smallest bit of scrutiny and logic are applied to analyzing them. This is not being moral, it is moralizing.
This moralizing is a paralyzing pathology that prevents us from thinking clearly and acting prudently. There are lessons to be learned by looking honestly at how we got here. There are effective actions to be discerned and taken by doing so.
It seems ironic that in a culture so steeped in decades of self help that in such a serious matter before us and our civilization, we can't remember to take the most basic and simplest of first steps. Rather than rushing to judgement, if raw emotional outbursts can be called judgements, the piles of self help books surely all have in chapter one the sage advice to first cast an inward eye and take a long, slow, honest look around our own house. What is the old hippie/globalist addage? “Be the change you want to see?”
Imagine how many piles of poop in the corners, nay in the very center of every room we would see with eyes open. The heads of our own government fomenting coups and having their progeny sitting upon the boards of the companies that extract the riches from the countries whose comedian leaders they installed to puppeteer. Laptops with direct arrows and maps on the trailheads to Bribery Lake, Sordid Associations Mountain, Treasonous Treetops Forest ... Some of these bribes may well have been taken by our representatives from our nation's rivals and the very governments that they claim to now oppose. Could that be why they want you losing your head to hysteria rather than finding it through sober reflection and analysis?
If moral and sober, we would now be aware and perhaps, appropriately, a bit repulsed. We might now be looking up and see, there, standing visible through the steaming piles strewn about the room, that great elephant and albatross; our fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Look around! Where is the rational sense making and clear thinking that is required to deal with it? Where is the moral courage required to look at it, admit to it and to willingly take responsibility for it?
It is our fiscal bankruptcy that is at the heart of the tectonic shifts taking place in our world. It is our moral bankruptcy that has led us to it. Our moral bankruptcy has as a primary symptom the constant grind of moralizing. This affliction seems nothing more than transparently desperate attempts to imagineer and redirect this dumpster fire of immorality into smoke signals of virtue. It is this incessant moralizing that ensures that we will not properly address our deep but manageable financial crisis with prudence and with our nation's and our citizen’s best interests at heart. This endless moralizing makes more likely with every passing day, that small, corrupt and wicked men will drive us to an unmanageable ruin. It further ensures that our nation and its rulers will become the very nation and rulers that the moralizing moralizers decry.
So what are we do then?
A moral people is a sober people. As a moral people we would be honest with ourselves and stop hating the flyovers and deplorables and sneering at them. We would stop lying about our history and who our ancestors are. We would not permit our ruling class to purge our military and institutions of patriotic citizens, then wonder why our enemies, who see this, strike with the hot irons that our decrepit rulers have heated and handed them. A moral people would be deeply grateful to inherit what tens of millions of our ancestor built from nothing. A moral people would be rightly ashamed for squandering such a rich political, legal and material bounty left by our founding fathers and our ancestors from the colonial and industrial ages. A moral people would reject and drive to the seas the advocates and executors of this radical and treasonous project that fill every one of our institutions.
A moral people would see their institutional pedigree not as a means to their personal and selfish ends, but as a duty whose fulfillment is a sacred honor and a call to serve with a deep and solemn sense of obligation. A moral people who can't balance their national checkbook would stop arrogating to themselves the power to change the climate and drive their children to hysteria and nihilistic despondence over a non-existent problem.
A moral people would stand themselves up to a sharp, cold mirror and look themselves squarely in the eye. They would look inward and take stock. They would see first their own failings and only then look to their neighbors and citizens to seek national and personal restitution. They would welcome and take responsibility together. They would solemnly pledge to themselves and to their ancestors a vow of atonement for the sake of themselves and their progeny.
A moral people would look at the odds that their ancestors overcame and take encouragement and inspiration that they could do the same with the challenges of their time and place. They would forsake looking abroad for monsters to destroy. They would look up and see the them right here at home. They would get about the business of identifying and slaying them.
Oh what monsters that open eyes would easily and unmistakably see. Those monsters openly revile and denigrate our nation - emboldening foreign enemies. They openly revile our founders, defile our heritage and denigrate We, The People. Their moralizing prattle can be heard in their constant, cultish refrains of diversity, inclusion and equity - a degrading and demoralizing set of catechisms and aspiration-less ideas that only the most indolent and degraded individuals can't see for what it really is - a discriminatory, exclusionary and inequitable caste system based on race and gender. It is a project aimed at displacing a people and their just systems of merit, accomplishment and equality under the law with a system of perverse incentives to endlessly encourage and elevate victimhood and degeneracy where the least of us anoint themselves to rule it. Its imagery foretells the eradication of the individual and the individual’s merits with the erection of a rainbow of faceless, compliant, deferential, vaccine passport wielding pin cushions in its place.
They revile parents, and brazenly arrogate to themselves ownership of their children. They tear down our statues and put warning labels on our founding documents. They stand down our armed forces, purging it of patriots under false pretenses, further emboldening foreign enemies and revealing themselves as the traitors and domestic enemies they claim to seek. They defund law enforcement and mock the honor of those who uphold their duties to protect and serve. They bend their knees to venerate violent criminals as heroes, donning clothes from foreign cultures in highly staged photo ops in our national capital.
They fly flags that are not the flags of our nation in embassies and statehouses across the nation and the world. This does not unite us in common cause seeking mutual benefits. It divides us into superficially defined, competing interest groups seeking zero-sum gains. They sanction and approve of false histories and teach them to our children. They callously seek to leave the public unprotected from law enforcement, and they have the gall to call it justice. They open their meetings by abrogating our nation’s claims to our land.
What cries they utter from our highest and most hallowed halls - chanting and cheering for the nationalism and patriotism of foreign peoples while they denigrate and criminalize the nationalism and patriotism of their fellow citizens - the ones who elected them their representatives. Behold their shrieks and squawks of outrage when denouncing the violations of national borders and sovereignty abroad, while they willfully violate the territorial sovereignty of our own nation and the individual sovereignty of our people.
In politics, optics are statements. They are always intentional in what they aim to convey. These monster’s optics announce domestically, ‘We own you now. The old moral order is gone. This nation is no longer yours.’ They announce to the world, ‘We will bend the knee and put the outside world above our own nation and our own people. It is our interests we serve and we talk to the highest bidders’ The world has watched these degenerate, profligate beggars who dare pretend to speak for us, and they have spoken in return.
‘You are weak. You hate yourself. You have turned on your own nation and your own people. We have come to cast out the comedic actors you have installed to loot our neighbors and who permit you to point your missiles at our borders. You are the debtor and the debtor takes orders; it gives them no longer. You beg us for money but put a gun to our head. We will do what you won’t. We will face economic hardship in the short term to decouple ourselves from your corrupt monetary system and its looming bankruptcy. If you won’t reform it yourself, we will do it for you.’ Looking at reality, that is what they seem to be saying with their actions.
They see a bunch of feckless, incompetents whose solution to an intractable national debt has for decades been the in-genius act of borrowing ever increasing amounts of money, and creating a Ponzi Scheme by driving interest rates below the rate of inflation. On top of that ingenious idea is something even more sinister - dismantling the high density energy systems that are the foundation for our wealth and replacing them with low density energy systems that consume more energy than they will ever produce.
Our enemies see these things and now they have moved against our nation whose so-called leaders have turned on its own people, and who attack its very foundations while further addling it in debts that it cannot hope to repay. They have moved against our nation whose professional class parties in the back of this bus to a burning man’s oblivion - feigning moral outrage between doses, sips and tokes.
Our enemies see this, so why can’t we? It is because we are too busy moralizing to be making sense and thinking clearly. We are too busy moralizing to be moral. The depth of Lao Tzu’s insight is remarkable. “Where morals are talked about, there are none.” This Janus headed insight is playing out before our eyes. I speak of morals in the absence of them. At the same time, the corrupt, as always, announce their moral superiority and welcome you into a familial embrace before their knife goes through your back. As for the tools, fools and knaves, the degraded and debased always proclaim their moral superiority when that is all that is left of a person once, if ever, formed or when they fear losing their place in proximity to power and prestige.
A moral people will see clearly while a moralizing people cannot. A moralizing people has no will but a people with morals does. Moralizing - blaming and judging - requires nothing while being upright and moral requires a human to summon and strengthen its will. A moral people will act to reclaim their adulthood and with it their individual and national sovereignty. They will set out on determined, just and proper courses of correction, consequences and renewal. They will earn their citizenship and its honor by reaffirming, and making manifest the glory of the proposition that is our great nation.
A moralizing people will carry on just as they do right now - straight down, in an oblivious nosedive toward the ruins that the immorality of moralizing have wrought.
A moral people will ignore the cries to denounce the monsters abroad and set about on the business of slaying the many that are firmly nested right here at home. A moral people will see these truths as self evident. A moral people people will reject these disgraceful indignities and those who perpetrate them. They will embrace the nobility of being a citizen of a republic of valorous, self organizing individuals. They will display their courage and their resolve by dissolving these bedeviling bonds; forging anew the scales of justice, making the fallow fertile, replacing folly with the forthright, punishing felony with the firm hands of consequence, and once again give flight to freedom and prosperity.
We, The Moral People are strong. We can and we will reclaim and reforge ourselves and with that our nation - the moralizers be damned.
The moralizers became the monsters they claim to be fighting, but are so blinded by rage they can't see it.