Certified_Heterosexual
The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
Today, my friends, I will preach to you about inequality. I am going to explain why inequality is not just a fact of life but a virtue, and why we should cultivate, embrace, and strive for inequality.
When we look around us and we meet our fellow men and women, what drama do we see played out again and again but the tragedy of aimlessness and nihilism? The other day a friend said to me, "I feel like I'm basically a nihilist. I smoke weed, play videogames, drink, and fuck. I have nothing to live for." This is what it's like to be ruled by liberal ideas. Liberal ideas say a man and a woman are interchangeable, that people from different cultures are interchangeable, that any person is as good as any other person for any purpose—and we wonder why we feel so useless?
The appeal of inequality, the thing that you must understand is that a world of equality is a world devoid of meaning. The appeal of inequality and hierarchy is that everyone has a place, and they know it, and in that knowing is security. When you force people to imagine they're equal, you are destroying them with flattery. When you pretend you're as good as anyone else, that's when you stop trying to cultivate and improve yourself. And the moment you stop growing, you start dying. Hence, the inevitable nihilism of equality.
“But this is just a straw man of equality," you say. "We need some forms of equality.” Wrong. All doctrines of partial equality are unstable isotopes of total equality. They will decay in time.
Personal responsibility is only and ever a right-wing impulse, because only when we acknowledge and cherish inequality can we use our betters as models for improvement. If you have ever wanted to excel at something, if you have ever felt a desire to be a greater version of yourself, you have felt a right-wing impulse.
The Left imagines a world of perfect emancipation, an escape from hierarchy. It’s the idea that no one is better than you. That it’s morally wrong to be above someone else. If no one is above anyone else, then no one is above you specifically. There is some appeal to this, a certain gratification of pride. Emancipation, in leftist morality, is identical to equality. A commitment to a world without hierarchy is a commitment to equality.
Most people don't really think critically about what equality is, or what it must give up to achieve this miracle of “no one standing above me." But it comes with a terrible price. The claim "everyone is equal" does not stand up to even a moment of scrutiny. Some people are rich, and some are poor. Some people are smart, and some are stupid. Some people are strong, and some are weak. Some people are moral and some are evil, etc. Equality is not descriptive, therefore it must be prescriptive. And if equality is a moral prescription, then anything that increases inequality must be morally wrong.
The following may seem like a ridiculous strawman, but it isn't. If equality is to be a value, it must be a terminal value. If it is not a terminal value, then it will fail entirely, for hierarchy will creep in, and if you give it an inch it will take a mile. In order for something to be a good terminal value, it must survive being taken to its logical extreme. The logical extreme of equality is total equality. No one of high status. No one of good moral standing. No one who is a great artist or poet must be allowed.
To equality all difference must be nauseating, a great festering wound. All diversity must be sacrificed to equality. Any difference is a foothold for superiority, which is a foothold for hierarchy. To equality, there can be no beauty. For the existence of beauty demands the existence of ugliness, and no quality can exist except in the face of a contrast. Under equality, it is wrong to get stronger. It is wrong to save money, wrong to read challenging books, wrong to become famous, especially for a clever or brave deed. To do so is to oppress someone else with your superiority. From this we can see why equality must glorify the weak, lest strength become a virtue. It must adore the ugly, hence modern art and poetry. It must trust all betrayers, because trust requires judgement, and judgement creates inequality. Emancipation from the hierarchies of man is not possible because nature is red in tooth and claw, and the only emancipation worth a damn is ultimate emancipation—freedom from all material need, from all existential risk.
Smart leftists ask this question: in order to become perfectly free and equal we must put an end to material scarcity, perhaps through some kind of automated communism... perhaps by accelerating the techno-capital singularity.
But then what? Why, then no one will have to work! We will all be free to do whatever we want. But what will we want? Well, what do YOU want? Careful: if you do something creative or clever, you will subvert equality once again. Can't have that.
The only option to preserve equality is unadulterated hedonism and all entertainment produced by machine, so no human can take credit. Even most smart leftists have not realized that machines taking over from man is also inequality. Or perhaps equality is to be achieved, and then instantly transcended? It is once again okay to be unequal, now that we have tasted it? Or shall we refashion humanity to be transcendently equal through future magic?
All self-improvement and human achievement is fundamentally right-wing. The heart of Rightist thought is the desire to soar. The Leftist thinks he rises, but his goal is inexorably a type of fall. There can be no redemption or rehabilitation of the idea of equality—it is an anchor around our necks, a nemesis to flight.
Equality robs us of the faculty of self-improvement because it destroys all possibility of self-improvement. Equality teaches that you are already perfect in every way that matters, and the ways you are deficient are no fault of your own. My friend the nihilist is not happy in his nihilism. The momentary hedonic rush that he feels from moment to moment is only in the end a grim reminder of the ultimate pointlessness of his life, because he has been robbed of all context in the universe. I believe that human beings are hard-wired for belief. In the past hundred years we have seen the collapse of religion, and inevitably therefore we have seen the collapse of structure and meaning and identity. Hierarchy is a structure which gives us identity, and identity gives us meaning.
Strength (which is a virtue) comes from belief in things that are philosophically grounded and which appear real to you. The tyranny of liberal ideas, which claim to want to dissolve all tyranny, is that they render all beliefs unreal, and in so doing render strength impossible. Why do you think leftists are constantly going on about how weak they are, how broken they are, how much pain they feel, how tired they are, ad nauseum? It's because their beliefs have transmuted strength from a virtue to a vice, and they rightly see strength as illiberal. We all want someone to look up to, whether it is a superior man or a God, but liberalism has defamed and criminalized this deep yearning of the soul.
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." I could never understand this Bible passage as a child, because liberalism renders it unintelligible.
If strength is criminal, then authority is criminal, which is why the Left is engaged in a permanent revolution to tear down all authority everywhere. Indeed, the authorities that rule over us have let us down—not because they possess authority but because they have done nothing to deserve their authority. We are ruled at present not by a military elite or a political elite, but a commercial elite. The crazy thing is that even liberals can see that greed and profit are not the proper objectives of morality. But in their morality, which is perverted, they think the problem is an excess of strength. Strength is not the same thing as authority, but strength conveys authority. Our elites invert all decency, because they call cowardice by the name of courage and call submission by the name of strength. In so doing they debase their authority and abdicate responsibility.
You can't have authority without morality, and you can't have strength without belief, and you can't believe in anything strongly so long as you believe in liberal ideas, because if everything is equal then nothing is better than anything else and all beliefs are meaningless. In order to escape from this hell—which is primarily psychological—we must find a way to believe in something. But in order to do that we must above all destroy the false idol of equality, for it saps us of our vitality and turns us into pointless wastrels.
Self improvement is only possible on the right. The Leftists, meanwhile, dispute the very concept of wellness as smacking of oppression. We want to create hierarchy because it tells us which way is up, a thing that the leftist is forbidden to know and everywhere obligated to conceal.
When we look around us and we meet our fellow men and women, what drama do we see played out again and again but the tragedy of aimlessness and nihilism? The other day a friend said to me, "I feel like I'm basically a nihilist. I smoke weed, play videogames, drink, and fuck. I have nothing to live for." This is what it's like to be ruled by liberal ideas. Liberal ideas say a man and a woman are interchangeable, that people from different cultures are interchangeable, that any person is as good as any other person for any purpose—and we wonder why we feel so useless?
The appeal of inequality, the thing that you must understand is that a world of equality is a world devoid of meaning. The appeal of inequality and hierarchy is that everyone has a place, and they know it, and in that knowing is security. When you force people to imagine they're equal, you are destroying them with flattery. When you pretend you're as good as anyone else, that's when you stop trying to cultivate and improve yourself. And the moment you stop growing, you start dying. Hence, the inevitable nihilism of equality.
“But this is just a straw man of equality," you say. "We need some forms of equality.” Wrong. All doctrines of partial equality are unstable isotopes of total equality. They will decay in time.
Personal responsibility is only and ever a right-wing impulse, because only when we acknowledge and cherish inequality can we use our betters as models for improvement. If you have ever wanted to excel at something, if you have ever felt a desire to be a greater version of yourself, you have felt a right-wing impulse.
The Left imagines a world of perfect emancipation, an escape from hierarchy. It’s the idea that no one is better than you. That it’s morally wrong to be above someone else. If no one is above anyone else, then no one is above you specifically. There is some appeal to this, a certain gratification of pride. Emancipation, in leftist morality, is identical to equality. A commitment to a world without hierarchy is a commitment to equality.
Most people don't really think critically about what equality is, or what it must give up to achieve this miracle of “no one standing above me." But it comes with a terrible price. The claim "everyone is equal" does not stand up to even a moment of scrutiny. Some people are rich, and some are poor. Some people are smart, and some are stupid. Some people are strong, and some are weak. Some people are moral and some are evil, etc. Equality is not descriptive, therefore it must be prescriptive. And if equality is a moral prescription, then anything that increases inequality must be morally wrong.
The following may seem like a ridiculous strawman, but it isn't. If equality is to be a value, it must be a terminal value. If it is not a terminal value, then it will fail entirely, for hierarchy will creep in, and if you give it an inch it will take a mile. In order for something to be a good terminal value, it must survive being taken to its logical extreme. The logical extreme of equality is total equality. No one of high status. No one of good moral standing. No one who is a great artist or poet must be allowed.
To equality all difference must be nauseating, a great festering wound. All diversity must be sacrificed to equality. Any difference is a foothold for superiority, which is a foothold for hierarchy. To equality, there can be no beauty. For the existence of beauty demands the existence of ugliness, and no quality can exist except in the face of a contrast. Under equality, it is wrong to get stronger. It is wrong to save money, wrong to read challenging books, wrong to become famous, especially for a clever or brave deed. To do so is to oppress someone else with your superiority. From this we can see why equality must glorify the weak, lest strength become a virtue. It must adore the ugly, hence modern art and poetry. It must trust all betrayers, because trust requires judgement, and judgement creates inequality. Emancipation from the hierarchies of man is not possible because nature is red in tooth and claw, and the only emancipation worth a damn is ultimate emancipation—freedom from all material need, from all existential risk.
Smart leftists ask this question: in order to become perfectly free and equal we must put an end to material scarcity, perhaps through some kind of automated communism... perhaps by accelerating the techno-capital singularity.
But then what? Why, then no one will have to work! We will all be free to do whatever we want. But what will we want? Well, what do YOU want? Careful: if you do something creative or clever, you will subvert equality once again. Can't have that.
The only option to preserve equality is unadulterated hedonism and all entertainment produced by machine, so no human can take credit. Even most smart leftists have not realized that machines taking over from man is also inequality. Or perhaps equality is to be achieved, and then instantly transcended? It is once again okay to be unequal, now that we have tasted it? Or shall we refashion humanity to be transcendently equal through future magic?
All self-improvement and human achievement is fundamentally right-wing. The heart of Rightist thought is the desire to soar. The Leftist thinks he rises, but his goal is inexorably a type of fall. There can be no redemption or rehabilitation of the idea of equality—it is an anchor around our necks, a nemesis to flight.
Equality robs us of the faculty of self-improvement because it destroys all possibility of self-improvement. Equality teaches that you are already perfect in every way that matters, and the ways you are deficient are no fault of your own. My friend the nihilist is not happy in his nihilism. The momentary hedonic rush that he feels from moment to moment is only in the end a grim reminder of the ultimate pointlessness of his life, because he has been robbed of all context in the universe. I believe that human beings are hard-wired for belief. In the past hundred years we have seen the collapse of religion, and inevitably therefore we have seen the collapse of structure and meaning and identity. Hierarchy is a structure which gives us identity, and identity gives us meaning.
Strength (which is a virtue) comes from belief in things that are philosophically grounded and which appear real to you. The tyranny of liberal ideas, which claim to want to dissolve all tyranny, is that they render all beliefs unreal, and in so doing render strength impossible. Why do you think leftists are constantly going on about how weak they are, how broken they are, how much pain they feel, how tired they are, ad nauseum? It's because their beliefs have transmuted strength from a virtue to a vice, and they rightly see strength as illiberal. We all want someone to look up to, whether it is a superior man or a God, but liberalism has defamed and criminalized this deep yearning of the soul.
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." I could never understand this Bible passage as a child, because liberalism renders it unintelligible.
If strength is criminal, then authority is criminal, which is why the Left is engaged in a permanent revolution to tear down all authority everywhere. Indeed, the authorities that rule over us have let us down—not because they possess authority but because they have done nothing to deserve their authority. We are ruled at present not by a military elite or a political elite, but a commercial elite. The crazy thing is that even liberals can see that greed and profit are not the proper objectives of morality. But in their morality, which is perverted, they think the problem is an excess of strength. Strength is not the same thing as authority, but strength conveys authority. Our elites invert all decency, because they call cowardice by the name of courage and call submission by the name of strength. In so doing they debase their authority and abdicate responsibility.
You can't have authority without morality, and you can't have strength without belief, and you can't believe in anything strongly so long as you believe in liberal ideas, because if everything is equal then nothing is better than anything else and all beliefs are meaningless. In order to escape from this hell—which is primarily psychological—we must find a way to believe in something. But in order to do that we must above all destroy the false idol of equality, for it saps us of our vitality and turns us into pointless wastrels.
Self improvement is only possible on the right. The Leftists, meanwhile, dispute the very concept of wellness as smacking of oppression. We want to create hierarchy because it tells us which way is up, a thing that the leftist is forbidden to know and everywhere obligated to conceal.