[Paracelsus]

(01-31-2019 09:40 AM)Avoy Wrote:  

(01-31-2019 09:20 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  

It's pretty easy to set a standard everyone likes when you never have to use the word "No".

For there to be morality, there must first be actions from which we refrain. Without this, we are at best directionless and at worst hypocrites.

To which I ask again: Are we a lost society because we lost our way or because we have not taken the time to state what matters and champion it?

You're overcomplicating the issue. We know what matters. Compete nuclear family units, the rule of law, personal integrity, and the acceptance that we are small cogs in a larger whole and always will be, no matter how individually successful we become. This latter is the most important of them all, but for reasons I've said in the past I think most people at a fundamental level cannot acknowledge this anymore - including a lot of people who go to Church every Sunday.

We don't "champion" any of these values because frankly, nobody wants to. The vast mass of people like shit exactly the way it is.

For example, everyone enjoys the fact they don't have to refrain from promiscuity or adultery with either sex. This forum is in part founded on that phenomenon. No policeman or priest is coming for you if you fuck your beta next door neighbour's wife with four kids. Nobody judges you even if she forms an attachment to you and breaks up the marriage as a result. All those Dads with their chests out and saying they'll be cleaning their guns when suitors come round to date their daughters? They won't do jackshit, because their daughter is already blowing Chad down the street in his car or because said daughter already looked at Dad's browser history and saw all the SeekingArrangement site hits. Nobody judges the daughter, or the son who's banging her.

Societal shame - not guilt, which is the problem - is the only thing apeing moral force in the West right now. If you can keep it quiet and private, you don't have to bear one smidgen of feeling bad. This is wrong. If you would be moral, you must have internal guilt for those times when you are immoral, driven by nothing more than the fact than you have behaved in an immoral fashion. Without this impetus, there is not one law out there on moral issues that will ever succeed.

For the most part when someone says that morals are individual to the person, they are playing exactly the same game as the Left is, falling into the same trap: because you'll never define a set of morals for yourself that is uncomfortable or which is other than self-serving. Morals are for the sake of others, not ourselves. They are firstly, but not exclusively, a restraint on our darker natures. That's the Silver Rule: do not do unto others what you would not have done unto them. At a higher level, morals becomes the Golden Rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you -- but most people in the West are too incompetent or too selfish to even do the Silver, much less the Gold.

Forget advocating for moral systems, follow one first, preferably not one you made up for yourself in the narcissistic West. Thus Jordan Peterson's invective: before you would save the world, clean up your room. I really don't care for the man anymore, but that's what he was talking about. Or if you'd like a slightly more genuine source: before criticising the mote in thy brother's eye, remove the plank in thine own first.