How The GloboLeft Uses Your Virtue Against You And Why It’s Killing The West

“Be excellent to each other.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I’ve never been to central Europe, but I might Czech it out one day. (all memes as-found)

“Then what makes a beautiful person?  Isn’t it the presence of excellence?  Young friend, if you wish to be beautiful then work diligently at human excellence.  And what is that?  Observe those who you praise without prejudice.  The just or the unjust?  The just.  The even-tempered or the undisciplined?  The even-tempered.  The self-controlled or the uncontrolled?  The self-controlled.  In making yourself that kind of person, you will become beautiful.  But to the extent you ignore these qualities, you’ll be ugly, even if you use every clever trick to appear beautiful.”
-Epictetus

Epictetus may have had some ulterior motives when he said this, since if history is correct he was lame, was missing an eye and an ear, and had hair only in patches on his skull.  Did I mention the burn scars?

I kid.  But Epictetus was lame.  I mean, not 1980s “lame” but rather had a limp.

The point he makes is a good one, though.  We are fundamentally the genes we are born with.  If I wanted to be taller, I suppose there is surgery I could get to lengthen my legs.  Yeah.  Really.

If I wanted to avoid being a blinding hazard when the Sun shines off of my scalp, well, I could get hair plugs or a toupee.

Neither of those, however, would make me a better person.  And I don’t know about you, but when I find out about the vile beliefs and practices of some Hollywood™ starlets, well, they start to lose a lot of their attractiveness to me.  In fact, I start to see ugly, just like the ugly I see with Jeff Bezos’ wife.

I mean, really.  Wow.  That’s a lot of plastic surgery.  Seriously, does she not look like an alien that was constructed out of a scaffold of lizard DNA in a Tupperware® factory?  If she and Bezos have kids I don’t know which they’ll look like:  dime-store rubber geckos or a tube of Saranwrap©.

I do think that Epictetus, despite the handicap of being dead as well as gimpy, has done a good job at sketching out some of the things that have made Western Civilization great.  There was a time that we nearly universally admired being just.  Our culture is one that’s based on guilt, rather than shame, so being just comes from within.

Shame comes from without.  In a shame-based culture (which describes most third world cultures) the idea is that cheating an old widow in Iowa out of her family fortune is acceptable unless you get caught.  It’s clever, and they feel guilt only in being caught.  Ever see any video of a foreigner getting caught doing something wrong on video?

I know you have.

What happens is that the shame kicks in.  They can’t and don’t feel guilt over doing evil, only shame for getting caught doing evil.  This explains why India looks like India and Nigeria looks like Nigeria.  Good actions aren’t valued.

Next, Epictetus talks about the virtue of being even-tempered.  Again, this is something that society selected for through its very construction.  People who impetuously committed crime were systematically executed in Great Britain for nearly a thousand years.

Don’t think that has something to with keeping tempers in a bottle?  It certainly does.  And when men like that become warriors, well, Heaven help you if you push one over the edge into rage and wrath.  That is something mythic, something that makes entire continents burn.

Lastly, Epictetus talks about self-controlled versus, well, not.

Again, this is a virtue that Western Civilization has lauded in its stoic male heroes who experience hardship yet come away stronger for the effort.  Our very fables talk about men who never cry because they understand that they are masters of their emotions and can select which ones the let to the surface when the stress is running high.

This is not a bug like Hollywood© would try to make us think:  this is a feature.

To one extent Epictetus is right:  these are all necessary values for beauty, at least for me.  They are also necessary values for everything that is required to move society upward, to keep us from being crabs in a bucket, drawing each other down for our own temporary gain.

And, Epictetus notes that these virtues are within our control, each and every one of them.  Sure, if you come from a place that’s not been selecting for these behaviors for nearly a thousand years (and I could argue that Europe as a whole has been selecting for these behaviors for thousands of years) then it might be difficult.

But not impossible.  And if it is impossible, then that person could rightly be called a savage.

All of Western Civilization is ultimately built on the idea that these are things that individuals can do, right here, right now through being virtuous.  They are True.  They are Beauty in themselves.  And they are Good.

This is, in my mind, a major disconnect and why Western Civilization is hated by so many in the third world.  They look at this wonderful cultural set of values of which we are exemplars (on our best days) through our own choices and feel envy.  They want a world that looks like ours, but yet don’t want to change their behaviors.

This is why they don’t build.

This is why we do.

Are there other cultures with similar values?  Certainly.  Japan appears to have undergone a similar winnowing with respect to honor.  Feel free to opine in the comments about other places that make the grade.

Like Western Civilization, though, cultures that have a large focus on just outcomes are susceptible to propaganda that plays on cultural guilt.  Ever wonder why GloboLeftists pimped the 1619 Project?  Like the entire Civil Rights movement, it was based on creating guilt in people who had committed no crime or offense.

And it was effective.

On white people.  But it wouldn’t be on them.

I think that there still exists a strong fear on the part of white people to say, “Hey, I’d rather live among other white people.”  It sounds scary to them.  Yet, those same people wouldn’t bat an eye if black people wanted their own dorms that excluded whites.

It’s guilt.  Our virtues have been weaponized against us.  It’s so effective that even British people feel guilt over slavery, even when they effectively ended the international trade in slaves.  Those who do this are, like Epictetus said, using every trick to be Beautiful to try to hide their true ugliness.

My guess is that’s why they really want the statues to come down.  To see Western Civilization and all it has created is the biggest slap in the face to them and fills them with shame, so they have to either destroy it, or come up with some reason why they have failed to assuage their shame.

Continue in your quest for excellence, and understand those that will try to drag you down or fill you with guilt.

Ignore them.

And, in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln,

“Party on, dudes!”