Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
Couldn’t resist.
i’m surprised to learn that disco elysium is so woke. lol
Disco Elysium has a lot of banger quotes since the writers were communists.
another quote (although the person that speaks this one is a spoiler from late game)
It was real. I’d seen it. I’d seen it in reality. The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the word. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
Don’t trust any further projects though, I think the franchise got sold.
Once an opponent has been categorized as immoral, they will be interpreted as simply aggressive when they escalate and weak when they are restrained.
Reminds me of Parenti’s line about the unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
Strategic thinking dies under moralism because strategic thinking is about setting objectives with limited resources. This entails thinking in terms of priorities, trade-offs, motivations, capabilities, and the perspectives of the other side to predict how they will respond. A hegemon does not need to prioritize, and a moralist hegemon will encourage people to think solely in terms of right and wrong, good versus evil. We no longer ask what the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians want; we only discuss what kind of people they are as opponents of our liberal democracy that will allegedly serve all of mankind.
💯 I’d also add that strategic thinking often gets framed as a false dichotomy with moralist thinking, i.e. it gets framed like “you either use cynical strategy with an absence of morality, or you use moralism and destroy the cynical views in the world, including strategic ones.” But Iran is a great example of how this dichotomy is false. They have clear moral lines that they draw in what kind of targets they are willing to attack, but they are nevertheless strategic both in preparation for a conflict such as the one they’ve dealt with this year, and in carrying out military operations during it.
Morality without strategy is just wishful thinking. Strategy without morality is psychopathy. The west as hegemon acted like the psychopath and used moralist language to cover for its moral emptiness, but by now has reached a stage where it starts believing its own lies and is more just the language of moralism without the strategy and with moral emptiness behind it. I think putting it this way helps me understand the hollowness of imperial core society.
Thanks for sharing! Cleanly articulated some points which I think many of us understand to be correct, but might lack the language to communicate effectively.
Yup, sometimes you have these thoughts percolating in your head, and it’s helpful for it all to click together when somebody states it in a well articulated way.
I agree with this completely.
Another issue:
False binaries
False choices (“you can’t have x if you choose y”)
It’s the problem with the west being completely ideology driven.
In a way:
Western rationalism is too, well, reductionist
“If my ideology is correct, then all I have to do is debate someone with facts, logic, and reasoning and show them how wrong and stupid they are for believing what I don’t believe in.”
Cue endless debates on the Internet or “debunk” videos that literally last 6 hours or so, never mind the endless 100-page debates on various Internet forums and social media and/or reply videos and/or rampant debate-bros
And to be honest?
Marx was right about people’s motivations and reasoning for doing things.
It’s not just what you believe
It’s also about what your interest or class interest is
I would also argue that your position or positionality also matters (where you are in society, though I somewhat keep that distinct from class and interest).
If you are in the lower classes, your interest is to basically better you and your own.
And if the bourgeois are essentially starving you or slowly killing you, it is basically your interest to prevent that from happening lol
It’s not about your ideas necessarily (though that could be a factor, sure)
“If my ideology is correct, then all I have to do is debate someone with facts, logic, and reasoning and show them how wrong and stupid they are for believing what I don’t believe in.”
Cue endless debates on the Internet or “debunk” videos that literally last 6 hours or so, never mind the endless 100-page debates on various Internet forums and social media and/or reply videos and/or rampant debate-bros
I mean… guilty. I’ve done that to combat bigotry targeting many of the minority statuses possessed by my friends and me. I learned the hard way that fascists were going to be bigots no matter how much evidence I compiled from scientists saying that my people and I weren’t dangers or inferior or aberrant phenomena. But I didn’t know what else to do. My fault for forgetting that Americans are given a sabotaged education and thus largely can’t read. Or they won’t read. Or malice and stupidity are a false dichotomy.
’ve done that to combat bigotry targeting many of the minority statuses possessed by my friends and me. I learned the hard way that fascists were going to be bigots no matter how much evidence I compiled from scientists saying that my people and I weren’t dangers or inferior or aberrant phenomena. But I didn’t know what else to do
I grew up with this too.
I am Latina and trans so I get this completely (never mind Autistic).
Maybe a conservative or liberal might change their mind
But some people just don’t care at all, they have a class interest not to care and a class interest to lord over you
I’m trans and autistic as well. Those two demographics aren’t as universally misunderstood as they used to be but it’s still very bad because their oppression is under threat and reacting like crazed animals.
They aren’t the progressive endpoint. There are less palatable mental illnesses that are hated and misunderstood even by otherwise progressive people, for example. Like cluster bs. Public understanding of them mirrors public understanding of trans people 15 years ago.
To me, being trans and Autistic affects me in every single way imaginable
I did not realize it fully at first.
I definitely do now.
Allistics and cis people hurt me though.
It’s not being trans and being Autistic that hurts me so.
It’s the stigma and the discrimination against me.
The lack of empathy, understanding, and the ensuing social ostracization.
Even being brown hurts me in so many ways it’s unfathomable.
But it’s not being brown itself; it’s the people who silently or overtly hate you for being brown.
I agree with all of this. But there are others. I think from the eyes of those 50 years from now even the two of us will be seen as bigots and that’s for the best.
Like people think „the ones who walk away from omelas“ was about „utopia“ requiring a costly sacrifice and not about modern humans not be able to comprehend a utopia without.
Okay but the West is still evil. 😋
Qualifier
At least the parasite class
Y E S
