“John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.” – Demolition Man
What happens when you put a zebra in the lion cage? Well, me? I got fired from the zoo.
On Monday I put together a post on how toxic empathy is destroying the world. Really, it is. That was, however, just one, small bit of the picture. To go a little deeper, we have to understand the pathology of the most wretched hive of scum and villainy. No, I’m not talking The View®. Okay, I’m not talking The View™ exclusively, I’m talking about the minds of Leftists.
Jonathan Haidt is a PhD in something or other. To be an academic, they all have to write stuff down, and have other academics pretend to read it. If enough academics pretend to read it, then they can write books that the cosmopolitan elite buy and put on their bookshelves so other members of the cosmopolitan elite can see that they have the same virtuous books on the shelf.
As such, a lot of it is garbage. Case in point? Actual people who are professors at colleges talking about girls with outies and boys with innies as if that was somehow “science”, forgetting that we’ve known about the x and y chromosomes since Nettie Stevens was studying worm sperm at an all-woman college and found the y chromosome. Then, in the 1920s, the improbably named Theophilus Shickel Painter determined how the x and y chromosomes made boys and girls. And none of this paragraph is made up. Sometimes, history writes the humor for me.
My XY chromosomes are awesome. They look great in a pair of genes.
So, Haidt had to write something, so he came up with Moral Foundations Theory. I’ll spare you the details because you have a search engine, and can read. Originally, they broke the foundations into five. I think they added a sixth, changed the name of one, and following it is like following a soap opera, since Haidt has to write more books to keep that sweet, sweet money coming in from people who buy copies of his book to look smart to the other members of the cosmopolitan elite, and it helps if he does TED® talks. Here are the original five, with rough definitions:
- Care/Harm – this is really the empathy I discussed on a post (LINK) earlier this week. It is the real foundation for the toxic behavior of the Left. It’s a focus on a concern for the wellbeing of others, compassion, kindness, . . . sorry, fell asleep for a moment.
- Fairness/Reciprocity – this is really based on the idea that people should have equal outcomes in the test I took, regardless of their contributions. It’s pretty heavily skewed towards that. As a friend once told me, “We can treat everybody equally, or we can treat everybody fairly. It’s not the same.” As shown in the graph below, this is sort of blended.
- In-group/Loyalty – this is about dedication to your group, distrust of non-group, and self-sacrifice for one’s community. True patriotism is a part of this.
- Authority/Respect – it’s a respect for hierarchy, duty, and traditions.
- Purity/Sanctity – this is tied to religious sanctity, as well as some ideas or objects having an innate value and they are sacred. The flip side is a revulsion against dirty and degenerate things.
I hear he liked to vote by mail.
To be clear, I am not endorsing Haidt’s work uncritically. His is just one tool that we can use to slice the way the mind works via data to better understand ourselves, and how we as humans differ from one another. I took the test at yourmorals.org and determined that I am somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan. Not sure if anyone wants to know, but I have zero time for slackers, don’t care about hard luck stories, am more loyal than a Sardaukar, am huge into tradition, and my sanctity scores were really high. They added “proportionality” which meant, those who contribute, get rewarded, and that was very high, too.
I think this will surprise zero regular readers. I can imagine my FBI agent dutifully noting all this in my Permanent Record, though.
This, however, is not about me. Let’s take a closer look at what they did with the theory. In essence, they tested lots of folks along with their self-identified political leanings. The result is the graph below, which is enough for a TED® Talk:
So, I see 2chan and 5chan. Where is 4chan? Original by J. Haidt, CC BY-SA 4.0
Turns out that Leftists are fixated on empathy and on equity. They’re the kind of people that look at a pit bull that just ate an orphanage and say, “Awww, she’s such a sweety, I wonder what those orphans did to provoke her. We just need to give her one more chance – pit bulls are just as safe as any other dog.”
This is how the Left processes things – through those two small channels. Those are the filters they use, and every problem in the world is first filtered through a hazy gauze of empathy and equity. Why are there an unceasing horde of illegals surging through what used to be a border? The filter is, first, empathy – “They just want a better life,” and then equity, “Everyone deserves the life we have her in America.” As each one of my children will tell you, I find there is no word in the English language I despise more than the word, “deserve.” I guess it’s my inner Viking showing through.
Will Smith, what a giver, always helping comedians work on their punchlines.
On the other side, on what Haidt labels “conservatives, the values converge. The empathy and equity are tempered with tradition, group health, and respect for hierarchy. In this much, much healthier worldview, values are kept in proportion with one another, not in this maladjusted split that drives the far Left.
I’ll admit, my values have changed as I’ve gotten older – this is a normal process people go through. It’s crazy. It’s call wisdom. I have a few gray hairs, but I don’t pluck them out. I’ve earned every one of them. And I’ve lived long enough to see that the wheels of justice go slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. Me? I’m not sure anyone under 35 should be allowed to vote. But I also am in favor of Congresscritter’s kids being bussed to the front line in the event they send our troops off to fight.
Imagine the inauguration: “I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voice suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
There are several lessons here:
- Leftist really are crazy. Like a pit bull chewing through a school of orphans, I’m sure they mean well. They’re such sweethearts. But their morality is worse than Robert Downey Jr. and Charlie Sheen fighting over a pound of cocaine back in 1997. Oddly, Charlie Sheen was only arrested for being Charlie Sheen.
- Keep life in balance. Me? Genghis Khan was, according to stories, a legendary horseman. That takes balance. That’s enough for me.
- I appreciate The View©. Where else can you go to watch a segment called, “Should You Let Your Kids Go to the Mall” where the topic was debated between a transgender Eskimo and Muslim drag queen?
Conservatives will obey any law a liberal passes. Conservatives complaining about liberal laws or liberal politicians is irrelevant, because the power transfer to leaders is caused by obedience, not happiness. Some guy rants in a bar, and soon conservatives are following Adolph because they think truth is determined by passion and beliefs of certainty, not observation of reality.
Getting on the boxcars is a conservative behavior. Obeying a senile president who didn’t win the election is a conservative behavior. Sacrificing virgins to volcanoes is a conservative behavior. Recently this has taken the form of sacrificing young men to meaningless army makework in the Middle East.
If you want to get off the conservative boxcar, start determining truth by observing the track record of political systems, rather than believing what your monkey instinctual programming tells you ought to be.
Best comment of the post. Thank you.
Didn’t know about the hilarious story of the X and Y chromosomes, thanks for that. Your writeup reminded me about the Case Of The Missing Chromosomes which I learned about as a teen decades ago from reading The Andromeda Strain, and upon researching that now with a modern search engine (hey, I can read!), it turns out that Painter was involved in THAT, too!
https://geneticsunzipped.com/transcripts/2019/4/25/the-case-of-the-missing-human-chromosomes
I went off and took the yourmorals.org test and have two things to say. First, IMHO that is one slanted test based on the wording of the questions. I truly believe that is closer to a push poll than a scientific survey. Second, I really hope that I am allowed on jetliners in the future once the FBI gets my results. Looks like I’m the kind of guy that would stand up in school board meetings.
It is slanted, but it’s more important for you to get on planes than me . . . congrats!!!
How about a debate between Ashley Force & a Muslim Drag Queen?
May the best dragster win.
Or Monty Python? My vote’s on Monty.
Comrade Leftoid has to erase reality in order to burn it all down better.
They don’t have a Plan B besides purging deplorable kulak untermenschen by any means necessary.
Creating is not in their skillset so it really does only get worse until the cleaning of the bog of eternal stench tables in the district of cesspool.
Righty is always more content, he has no fight with reality and is quite comfortable with it.
That’s why the Right always wins – they are on the side of reality.
Grossly misplaced empathy and destructive altruism are indeed forces for evil, as all right-minded trad/cis/het/ goose-stepping Hitler youth with original factory equipment know. If blacks/gays/troons/furries/feminists et al had any self-respect at all they would deeply resent the fact that their lefty-loosey boosters give them no credit whatsoever for agency in promoting their own causes. And they certainly make the case conceding that those of us on the right are literally swimming in a toxic sea of it. (Agency! Agency, everywhere!)
According to a study I
just made upread, the world is going to run desperately short of participation trophies as early as this summer with no hope of meeting demand at any point in the next election cycle. The thought of even one of their precious pets going bereft and trophy-less is striking fear in the bleeding hearts of condescending, patronizing Karens everywhere, portending a coming tsunami of petulant tweets that could well break the Internet faster than the next Taylor Swift treacly tune drop.Imagine the horror of expending all that self-righteous outrage with nothing to show for it but four more years of Joe Biden soiling himself on the world stage (*Shudder*).
You know who literally got a participation certificate? Audrey Hale, before she went on to shoot up a school.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/03/28/03/69184427-11909317-Audrey_Hale_receiving_a_certificate_at_Nossi_College_of_Art_in_N-a-1_1679971549270.jpg
This confuses mass shooter cause and effect analysis greatly. In addition to SSRIs, now budding criminologists like Bryan Kohberger have gotta consider the effects on self-esteem of getting just a piece of paper instead of an actual trophy.
Somebody really needs to get on this and produce a hard-hitting, in-depth analysis of the causal relationship between participation trophy award v. denial and its apparent nexus to violent psychopathy. I clearly smell Pulitzer on the breeze.
Have we ended up at . . . Peak Trophy???
This essay at the Hillsdale Imprimis journal talks a bit about this subject. Liberals want to do something, so they feel better about themselves but not necessarily accomplish something. Very interesting.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-case-against-liberal-compassion/
Wow, that article is good.
Liberals don’t get up every morning asking, “What can I do today so that there’s a little less suffering in the world?”; they get up each day wondering how they can move the human species, which they loathe with the heat of a thousand feminists, closer towards extermination by habitat reduction.
Thank you! I remember reading that the first time around, after re-reading it. Thanks!
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. That, and the tolls are expensive.
Very, very expensive. Unless someone else is paying for them.
The difference between “we have to do something” and measured policy is that just doing something seems to release the doers from any of the consequences of their actions (“Who knew that going soft on crime encouraged it?). In that sense hierarchy/in-group/purity make sense in at some level, it may based on real world experience.
That said, given the current environment the “hierarchy” concept is quickly wearing thin. Political and economic systems, history tells us, hold together so long as everyone agrees to them. When the contract is broken, it usually the people at the top that are the most shocked.
Excellent comment – it does release them from the “cause and effect” because they meant well.
I think all five of those should be titled with the word sanctimonious
Now that, I agree with.
Genghis Khan was a totalitarian. Progressives have slipped that one in on us.
But he probably had higher empathy than I do.
More like a GLOBAL TOXIC EDICTS.
“an official order or proclamation issued by a person in authority:” (1st Definition, inherently lazy)
‘Left’ or ‘Right’ ? Too many/myriad subjects/arenas, from emigration/immigration – Tranny nation
Again, Globally.
‘Democrat’/’Republican’ ?
EVIL. Or EVIL-Lite™,
VOTE HARDER!
SINcerely, Admiral rachel levine, XOXO 😘
https://www.hhs.gov/about/leadership/rachel-levine.html
Admiral . . . . hahahahaahahhhaahahaha
Your DESERVE take is spot on. What EVERYONE deserves is to burn in hell forever. GRATITUDE is the hill the left dies on.
Amen. It’s a weakness with me. I react poorly to the word “deserve”.
If we got what we “deserved”, we would all roast in hell.
Yes!
I’d add that to my kid speeches, but they’re old now.
I first read Haidt a few years ago, and thought that, for categories that he made up himself, he got a pretty good handle on the types of things that affect how people make judgments and/or interpret other people’s actions. The part that I think is missing from Haidt’s work is turning his analysis around — instead of asking people to self-identify their political belief and then fitting them on the 5-level spectrum, how about making them take the test and then see if their scores actually match their political self-identification. If we could use it for predicting somebody’s value system through a ‘simple’ questionnaire, that would go a long way to validating his work.
The other thing that I took from Haidt’s work is that someone who identifies as ‘liberal’ will quite literally not grok where I’m coming from, whenever my judgments include anything except empathy (care) and equity (fairness). If Haidt is correct, then there really is a divide between two populations in our modern society that does not, and will never, have any common ground. We fundamentally are different, and there’s no way to persuade ‘the other side’ to see our point of view.
The test I took was easily gameable – I could have made the results come out however I wanted. I’m not sure his theory holds a lot of water, but it is a good tool to gather more data on how we differ.
Yup, the hard Left can’t be redeemed.