Contemporary Values I Reject on Principle
When I think about the past and about growing up the past seemed like a much simpler time. In some ways, this is typical and false; we always think that things were better before now unless things were truly terrible or presently are much worse. But all my most sober analysis, and testimony from others who lived in those times, convinces me that some things really were better back then. In particular, there were prevalent attitudes, generally held and unspoken, which were simply more common. We now live in a time which may be called ‘The Time of Jacob’, for much of what was commonly and universally held to be true has been supplanted. We cannot delude ourselves by the uniqueness of our age, and we live in a unique time, by thinking that the ‘inner man’ has changed profoundly in the last 7 millennia. But notwithstanding, this combination of our excess and media has created a debasement of the human spirit on an unfathomable scale in the last 60 years. A new set of basic values and propositions have supplanted the old. My best guess as to the change is that the world has been getting progressively better on a material level during this time. The poor of the poor countries are much more realistic than the rich who are ‘westernized’, which makes me think that materialism is an enabler.
We all understand that these things are wrong and foolish when we see them written down or spoken explicitly. A great test of an idea is to write it down or say it aloud. The trouble is that this does not necessarily stop us from acting on ideas which we can tell are foolish. Only the outlining of explicit principles and the conscious understanding of nuance will save us from defaulting to foolish philosophy. One must have a well-defined philosophy which is known inside and out in order to fight the fanatical whims which stir inside us. Clear principles also aide the defense of one’s values. For example, I reject mandatory covid vaccination based on the principle of bodily autonomy. I reject gender confusion because I reject that our identity is based on who we feel like instead of what we are. Having well understood values is not only important for rhetoric, but it is invaluable to discourse.
“Whatever makes you happy”
This I can always remember being told. Whatever one does in life, he must do it in the pursuit of happiness. It is not wrong to seek out or have the right to life, liberty, and property, and even the pursuit of one’s own pleasure in moderation is not insidious. However, the use of such a maxim, as it always and inevitably is, to justify repugnant and hedonistic behaviour is the poison of this philosophy. I have spoken to alcoholics who justify their addiction based on the idea that binge drinking ‘makes them happy’. And of course, the use of this maxim to justify behaviour will allow someone to justify any behaviour; therefore, the application or the rule is false, and it’s not the application of the rule, so the rule is false. I do not discourage the avoidance of misery, however the purpose and aim of life is not to be ‘happy’, and certainly not to follow one’s heart in all its pursuits. The pursuit of happiness in righteousness is only acceptable. As in Rousseau’s philosophy the individual can and should be developed, but in a righteous direction. So where does the standard of righteousness come from, so that we may judge a pursuit as proper? Righteousness preceded every individual who ever was, and righteousness will exist long after he is gone. God and law are what we judge right and wrong, good and bad. I reject the notion that something is proper if the individual consents to it or is pleasured by it, and you should to.
“Society ought to be organized to accommodate everyone”
No greater proof that ‘common sense’ is a myth exists then the maxim that we must pursue pluralism and ‘inclusion’. Calls for exceptional levels of accommodation have piled stones onto our backs and built redundancy into every facet of public life. I reject that society ought to try its best to accommodate everyone. In Canada, some call for all government services to be available in our native American languages, of which there are more than 30,000. This is radical pluralism, however our government lauds its own radical inclusivity in the form of absurd accommodation of hysterical ideas about the inabilities of the nevertheless equal races and genders. For example, Justin Trudeau very happily hires ‘gender consultants’ at top dollar in order to write reports about the impact of highway construction on the women in the area. Likewise Democrats in the United States reject voter ID on the principle that some people do not live close to the DMV. There is never any data given to support these claims, and both groups do not sincerely push these ideas. Justin Trudeau understands that the idea that we can’t build a highway because sweaty men building roads might bother the local man-haters is hysterical, and Democrats understand that black people actually are capable of taking a bus and getting a driver’s license. These things are pushed in order to enrich useless consulting firms and in order to encourage illegal voting, but this is neither here nor there.
The values which underwrite hyper-inclusivity arguments exist and proliferate without nuance. Nearly every legal standard in print is written with the adjective ‘reasonable’, because we hold ‘reasonable standards’ and ‘reasonable doubts’ in order to dispel the unreasonable doubts and standards, but also to allow for nuance in our understanding of standards. This nuance has evaporated. Jazz hands replace clapping because of autistic individuals and government facilities now accommodate heroin addiction by providing smack from vending machines and providing storefront sitting space to shoot up with a registered nurse to resuscitate them. Disorders are no longer on the onus of the individual to live with. It is no longer one’s ‘lot in life’ that they were born slow or different, somehow the world must change for them, no matter the cost.
As much as a contract requires my ‘reasonable’ ability to perform its terms for it to be valid, our performance of accommodation ceases to be reasonable. Only confidence in our own way of life and the correctness of our ways can fight absurd pluralism. This stems only by relying on clearly defined and well understood principles and values. As much as I rejected the accommodation of heroin addiction on the state aiding the addict in his crime against himself and nature, I reject in secondly on principle that it is unreasonable accommodation. To give an example of rejection of accommodation on primary grounds, I reject academic waivers for tests based on Generalized Anxiety Disorder, along with radical time extensions for those exams. There is an academic standard which must be met and which labels the psychological community have given you have nothing to do with this. Supplanting the standards of qualification based on one’s personality is not a reasonable accommodation. I write this as someone who has GAD and never once took an exception despite their availability and the terrible stress testing brought me. A blind man may of course have his test orally, this is in the category of reasonable accommodation. I was told when marking assignments in graduate school that using the colour red was ‘too aggressive’, this allowance was made for the sake of a potential brilliant mathematician who would be discouraged by red ink. In order to grace the world with this mathematician’s genius, we must not use the wrong colour or he will not manifest. Suffrage as a value cannot be suffered.
“The will of the majority is supreme”
We live in a nominally democratic society, and we go to government-run schools. Thus, it is no surprise that many of us grow up with an innate alligiance to democratic ideas. But the majority is not supreme and cannot be, and the founders of our ‘democracy’ never believed or taught this. The American example is well known for its Montesquieu division of powers and the electoral collage (which is very fashionable to hate). These augmentations to a democratic system were made specifically to curtail the recognized shortcomings of direct democracy. Thomas Hobbes translated the Peloponnesian War into English because it illustrated the shortcomings of a gridlocked and fanatical democratic system versus the fascistic Sparta. A proverb reads, “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner”.
The majority would vote that one man on the boat must be killed to save the rest, whether he wants to or not. The majority of rapists would vote to rape a woman in their midst. If the majority of pedestrians believe that black man cannot lay with white woman, then he will be lynched. And if the majority of people decided to round up and forcibly inject anti-vaccination activists, whether you agree with them or not, it would not be any less perverse. The will and whims of the crowd must be continually curtailed by both overarching moral standard and by the atomization of the decision making process by empowering localities. The bane of America will be the inevitable and impersonal forces which tend toward centralization of power for this reason. Joe Biden rejected a bill whose purpose was busing black kids into white schools based on the fact that it was federal overreach into states’ rights; and he was right and proper to do so. This was cited by Kamala Harris during the democratic primary as evidence of Biden’s racism, but they have since resolved their differences.
The majority may one day be whipped into hysterics and endorse wholeheartedly a lockdown over a virus which does not do much harm to all but a select few instead of simply protecting the vulnerable. This rash decision, spurred by the best social scientist-engineered conditioning techniques in the media, would ruin countless lives through poverty, loss of savings and business, suicide, and abuse, despite being endorsed.
There is what is right and what is popular, what ‘feels good’, and majority vote is valuable as a means of resolving conflicts within small groups, but cannot be worshiped as the source of truth. Defining right and wrong by the contentions of a people is absurd on its face. George Orwell’s 1984 discussed the idea that reality (viz. right and wrong, true and false) by what the state thinks, demo-olatry, the worship of the majority rule, is simply this phenomenon except by definition democracy holds the opinion of the people as the opinion of the state itself. Orwell’s observation what not unique or his own, fascist Italy was based on the idea that the state is the source of all value. Whatever is good for the state is what is good. Mussolini wrote (likely it was an underpaid Hegelian ghost writer) on fascism that if democracy is defined as a system of government which carries out the will of the people, then fascism is the purest form of democracy.
“Groups should be shown partiality based on history and condition”
I reject any form of affirmative action for the same reason that I reject racism: I believe partiality is immoral. The pretext for much of the cultural blitzkrieg is ‘historical oppression’. The black, the gay, the woman, all mistreated by the white straight man. What’s worse, the groups still do not measure up to this day, and therefore even after we eliminated the oppression we could see, there must also be oppression which we cannot see. And therefore, we ought to rule favorably in all matters, with all things being equal, against an allegedly privileged party. Partiality is by no means permissible. A judge ought to rule in a manner as unbiased as a stick rules on which field is longer in length. Anything else is equal.
I spoke once with a university administrator at a forum over their new sexual assault policy before it was ratified. My concern over the policy was the fact that it used a ‘survivor-centrism’ paradigm. This is an affront to the concept of natural justice, which guarantees the right of the accused to a hearing and the right to impartial tribunal because, among other things, this policy began with the supposition that the accuser is a ‘survivor’, and therefore guilt on the accused is presumed, denying both these rights. The concern for the downtrodden accuser has persuaded my university to show partiality in its judgement, which is perverse to us who think the policy through. But the desire to endlessly accommodate the accuser to the fault of administrative justice resulted in appalling policy. The sympathy for one party abolished justice. In Leviticus, we are told that the judges must not rule in favor of the poor out of sympathy, or for the rich because they are respected, but instead that cases are only to be judged on their merits.
Later in my conversation with the university official, we generalized to the idea of affirmative actions. She explained that we all have a level of oppression which we hold from our circumstance and that affirmative action makes up for this differential scoring. She, was not able to explain how to calculate these scores precisely, or how to explain how giving a license to judge unjustly would avoid terrible levels of corruption and injury to innocent parties. No one is able to do this because not only is this policy evil, but it breeds evil.
Conclusion
Simple and uncontroversial standards dispel whims and hysterical pluralism. The key is to learn and understand the underlying propositions with which we are presented, and to respond to them by principle. This list is by no means exhaustive, however it illustrates many tendencies of the last dozen years, which have been brewing for far longer, that are objectionable all on similar and sensible grounds, but they are nonetheless held to by many. Believing in something means being prepared to suffer for it, either suffering by adhering to principle on pain of persecution or by forsaking our passions and choosing what we believe is true over what feels good. My charge to the reader is to live with radical honesty and to sacrifice anything you are asked on the altar of truth. Know your principles, and live by them even when its difficult.
