Inversion of Values, Part 2: The Roman Empire

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

What’s black and white and red all over?  A victim of an industrial accident at a newspaper printing press. (All memes today are as-found)

The inversion of virtues:  I’ve written on this topic recently, but decided I needed to have another go at it.  Part of the blogging theme is that my posts are limited in space.  No one wants to read a 10,000-word post on PEZ™ on Friday morning as they drink their coffee.

Virtues make a civilization worth living in.  I’d rather live in a poor civilization with great values than a rich one with poor values, and both of those sound better than what we’ve got going on now.  And I’d suggest that our current free-fall is due to that loss of virtue.

What were Epstein’s last words before he committed suicide?  “You don’t have to do this!  I promise I won’t talk!”

Let’s compare values at the peak of Roman Civilization, the peak of Western Civilization, and what the Left is shoving down our throats right now.  For instance:

  • Rome: Worshiped gods.
  • The West: Worshiped God.
  • The Left: Worship man (atheism) or the State.

See?  Inversion.  Who did the cultures idolize?

  • Rome: Worshiped heroes.
  • The West: Worshiped heroes and Saints.
  • The Left: Worship victims.

See, that’s not hard, and yet more inversion. What about sin?

  • Rome: Sin of hubris.
  • The West: Sin of pride.
  • The Left: Sin of privilege.

I’ll just quit making inversion comments, because this is a slam dunk.  Who are the spiritual leaders?

  • Rome:
  • The West:
  • The Left: Professors, Leftie politicians.

Ideals?

  • Rome: Ideal was glory, excellence (Areté).
  • The West: Ideal was holiness, modesty, courage.
  • The Left: Social Justice, victimhood.

Ideal social class?

  • Rome: Warriors and those who served their fellow men.
  • The West: The middle class.
  • The Left: The lower class, victims, victims, victims.

Even a virtue, charity, has been turned from a voluntary act that provides spiritual growth in the terms of the classic West, to taxation to provide forced “charity” to the (often) undeserving.

I’m thinking I don’t want to know how my tax dollars are spent because I’m afraid all mine went to buy crack pipes in San Francisco.

This inversion bleeds over into all of society.  “Drag Queen Story Hour”?

Wonder why they don’t read to old folks in nursing homes, or to the blind?  Whenever I hear about that, my mind sees:

And then there are questions that are more difficult to answer:

Inversion, of course, shows up in the obvious things:

Jazz Jennings is a transgender person who feels no need to change with no sense of irony:

And their goal is that you will live and produce and that you should be okay with not being meaningful or having any joy, so live in the pod, and eat the bugs, wagie.

And we now have a Marine Corps who worries about people’s feelings.  Perhaps they’ll land with Nerf™ guns so that they won’t have their feelings hurt.

But the pushback is well underway.  Or overweigh:

But there’s a catch:

And I think this has broken the Left, mentally:

And the internal contradictions in their “victimhood” matrix are starting to show:

Canada has shown that it certainly can’t be trusted with the power of life and death:

The inversion has hit, but people (and maybe Higher Powers) are pushing back.  And, I think we will win.  Why?  Because we’re so very pretty.  And?  PEZ®.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

21 thoughts on “Inversion of Values, Part 2: The Roman Empire”

  1. … I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind:
    Ha! Eternity! She is an eternal grief …
    Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,
    Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,
    Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,
    So that there shall be something to ruin …
    If there is a something which devours,
    I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-
    The world which bulks between me and the Abyss
    I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
    I’ll throw my arms around its harsh reality:
    Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
    And then sink down to utter nothingness,
    Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!

    Karl Marx

  2. I don’t suppose that it is coincidence that Nietzsche proposed a TRANSvaluation of values (“Umwertung aller Werte”) as a solution for the “depravity” of Christianity. Think how much better off today’s college students would be if he had properly finished his quadrilogy instead of leaving us with just _The_Bill_Gates_.

  3. I’ve never recovered from the shame and embarrassment suffered when my mother found my collection of classical lit under the mattress. I indulged it all – Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Austen, Hardy. Baudelaire, for pity’s sake! I’ll never forget the look of keen disappointment on her stern face as she confronted me with my tattered copy of Paradise Lost, held out at arm’s length as if she were handling a dead skunk. There was no way to deny that the trove was mine, what with incriminating Harvard Classics “This books belongs to” bookplate label templates inside every dust jacket. I had even tried my own hand at iambic pentameter and left the damning foolscap out in plain sight! Dolt!

    In therapy for 12 years now and yet I still feel no closer to acceptance and self-forgiveness. Just when I thought I was making progress I weakened, stealing into a used bookstore in another state and purchasing the collected works of Oscar Wilde (for cash, no paper trail). I walked out of the shop with the enormous tome badly hidden beneath my trench coat, feeling dirty and ashamed.

    Is there truly no hope for me?

    – Name Withheld –

    /s – Do I really need to add this?

    2. I hope you don’t! Yeah, I’ve actually seen Reddit posts where Lib moms were worried their sons had too much virtue. 2023.

  5. Sideshows always attract attention, and people will pay to see the freaks. Eventually, the sideshow leaves, and if it doesn’t, it leaves anyway.

  6. It’s a great thing, actually.
    They are being honest about how much they hate us instead of hiding it while still stabbing us in the back. If people still don’t get it, they are dead weight and deserve to join the ones that hate them while they still preach colorblindness and worship MLK.

  7. As usual John, on the mark. One thing that may be different is that as society continues to press its “modern values”, other parts of society are simply dropping out of the mainstream. It is starting to happen already and I anticipate it only increasing. And the reality is that such people that drop out are often productive members of society with needed skills (as well as a tax base).

    1. ‘One thing that may be different is that as society continues to press its “modern values”, other parts of society are simply dropping out of the mainstream.’

      Well if ‘other parts’ = men, then yes, other parts are disengaging from their gynarchies.

    2. They are – and it’s being noticed. But why would a 20 yo dude not play video games if he’s locked out of the dating market???

  8. ‘The inversion has hit, but people (and maybe Higher Powers) are pushing back.’

    No maybe about it. This is just the expeditionary force.

    Up to now it’s just been a beatdown. Soon, it’ll be a fight.

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