Let's
start with the buzzphrase du jour 'moral values.' What the hell are
conservative voters talking about when they talk about moral values
and why does it piss the liberals off so bad?
We'll start by
explaining the moral values that go with a liberal temperament because
it's easier! And since we here at prettyfedup.com have a damnably
liberal temperament at heart, we like easy.
Liberal moral
values are based on the perception of pain, which they're good at.
When someone with a liberal temperament does something that hurts
someone they perceive the pain it causes the other person and they
say "Ouch! I recognize that. That's pain! I don't like pain.
Doing things that hurt others is thoroughly unpleasant because it
causes pain which I can perceive. I'm not going to do that anymore
if I can help it. I don't like it."
Liberals can perceive
their own pain and that of others both. They then have the proper
human response to pain which is to try to get it to go the hell away.
Liberals, left to their own devices, run constantly around
the world perceiving pain everywhere. They perceive it as
bedeviling the poor, the war-torn, the people with AIDS, the little
kiddies on the block who have to work hard at school. They perceive
it in their neighbors, in their marriages, in their families, in society,
in romance novels, in other races, in the planet earth, in animals,
in Native Americans, you name it, a person with a strongly liberal
temperament can perceive it there. And they never like it. They always
want it to go away, because that's their job.
Pain, for those
with a liberal temperament, is the foundation of both action and morality.
A reasonable human being, in their opinion, should strive to make
him or herself as pain-free as possible, because pain is not good,
and should use their spare energy to making everyone else as pain-free
as possible, because everyone else's pain affects them. This is an
entirely common-sense approach to life from the liberal temperament
point of view and really shouldn't need explaining because it's self-evident
to anyone who can perceive pain! So they don't explain it, and leave
conservatives, who can't perceive pain, to guess and mock at their
underlying motivations and call them 'bleeding hearts.' Liberals
are bleeding hearts, and this is, in the liberal opinion
the natural foundation of all human morality - a bleeding heart.
The perception
of pain is, to the liberal temperament, a powerful inhibitor of immoral
actions. Immoral actions cause pain to others, which causes pain to
the transgressor, which makes the transgressor not want to transgress,
which makes everybody moral by nature! Liberals actually believe
this! That everyone is moral by nature, endowed by biology
or god with a natural impulse to do good and avoid bad because bad
hurts and good feels much better.
Liberals are consistently
confused and enraged by the conservative willingness to run around
causing pain and not even feel bad about it! From
the liberal point of view, conservative policies are enacted in deliberate
and totally irrational defiance of the Pain Principle and
are therefore obviously immoral. Little schoolchildren won't have
lunches! That's painful! Therefore it's immoral. Or at the least,
morally bankrupt and just plain fucking idiotic. Can't the goddamn
morons see their regressive policies are causing massive pain everywhere?
Are they fucking blind?
The answer
to this age-old liberal question is yes they are blind. Their
brains don't light up when poor little schoolchildren eat Cheetos
from the sidewalk for lunch because they don't have any money. Doesn't
really bother them. Can't feel it. Which makes cutting school lunch
funding not seem very immoral to them.
So liberals get
confused. They call conservatives morally bankrupt on occasion but
they don't really understand what is going on. They think that people
with the conservative temperament have the same biology they do and
for some unknown reason are ignoring it. They secretly suspect Conservatives
will be persuaded if they point out to them the pain caused by cuts
in social funding and so on. Conservatives won't. They don't
give a fucking crap about pain! It doesn't bother them. Not
theirs, not yours, not anyone's. They give a fuck about fear
and danger, which are different things. So you fucking moronic
liberals can just shut up for all they care because they don't and
your liberal arguments are supremely unconvincing.
Meanwhile, liberals
are busy constructing, or have accidentally constructed, due to biology,
a coherent and self-contained moral system. The equation
between pain and morality is so obvious to the liberal temperament
that if something doesn't cause pain, they don't see how it can be
immoral.
Sexual
behavior such as gayness and blow jobs and tits on TV doesn't
seem immoral to liberals because where's the fucking pain?
If it doesn't hurt anyone, how can it rationally be considered immoral.
Liberal temperament brains are more sensitive and reactive to violence
than sex anyway. Sex is fun! But not particularly alarming, because
their brains don't react to it that strongly.
Meanwhile, drugs
are not immoral to the liberal temperament to the extent they don't
cause pain. If they do cause pain, the pain should be stopped.
Drug addicts should be rehabilitated so their pain will go
away because pain is bad. Criminals probably commit crimes because
either a) they need assistance in correctly perceiving the pain that
will deter their criminal acts or b) they are already in so much pain
that their behavior is essentially a reaction to pain and therefore
that pain should be eliminated so they will stop acting criminal.
For example, poverty can be painful, because to the liberal temperament
almost anything can. Therefore, many criminals may be motivated by
the desire to alleviate the pain of poverty with desperate criminal
acts. Eliminate the poverty that is causing the pain and the
aforementioned criminal will undoubtedly stop commiting criminal acts
because DUH! people are essentially moral in nature and pain is a
primary determinant of their behavior. Only an idiot couldn't
figure this out from the liberal temperament point of view and it's
really quite tedious that they have to run around advocating for the
point of view when any moron with an IQ pushing 35 or more should
get it.
Now very few people
are exclusively liberal or conservative in temperament, most have
at least some ability to perceive both pain and danger and not all
liberals are so explicitly pain-focused in their reasoning. But any
goddamn liberal worth his or her salt should be able to recognize
the underlying reasoning. Pain is a reality in the liberal
temperament world and they adjust their opinions, morals, beliefs,
and actions accordingly. They know they think this way, what
they don't understand is that Conservatives think differently because
they are perceiving something entirely different. The truly liberal
temperament rejects anything outside the Pain Equation as irrelevant,
creating a closed, self-referential and logical system insensible
to anything outside its own frame of reference.
Conservatives
are completely different in how they derive their moral values.
Conservatives do not react particularly strongly to pain, their own
or anyone else's. Therefore, logically, pain is not an effective
inhibitor of immoral action. It doesn't work. It never has
and it ain't gonna. Conservatives, being much more adept at detecting
danger, naturally perceive FEAR to be a far more
effective inhibitor & motivator of action. You will see the effects
of this reasoning throughout the policies they favor. Conservatives
understand fear, therefore it makes sense to them to use this god-given
gift to mankind to regulate behavior.
Both temperaments
recognize the necessity of the social virtues - benevolence, charity,
getting alongness, cohesion, not murdering each other willy-nilly,
etc. But they recognize the necessity for these things via a different
route. People with a strongly liberal temperament recognize an innate
kinship with any entity that experiences pain. This is the source
of their compassion and emotional orientation to matters of public
import. Conservatives, on the other hand, orient their emotions around
attachments. They experience attachment to their
families, their communities, their sports teams, their nation, perhaps
their friends, anything that can be reliably classified as 'mine'
as opposed to 'theirs.' Conservatives are naturally oriented
around us vs. them because us vs. them is the natural wellspring of
the danger perception they're so good at. Attachments are
necessary and highly valued for their emotional content because the
Conservative temperament correctly perceives that attachments are
necessary for protection and defense. And protection is the name of
the game when you are good at perceiving danger.
This perception
has far-reaching consequences for the Conservative worldview and perception
of morality. The natural impulse of mankind, from the Conservative
point of view is to protect, defend, and favor oneself and one's attachments
by any means necessary no matter how much pain it may cause because
how the hell fucking else is anyone to survive? It completely
does not make sense to look at it any other way. Fight for your family.
Fight for your church. Fight for your homeland. If you don't, jesus
if you don't, everyone you know is a goner. Life is dangerous, compete,
protect, guard, and if necessary, destroy.
The upshot of
this is that the natural human desire to favor one's close attachments
at the expense of everyone else is to some degree not so good for
getting alongness. Conservatives can tolerate a lot of not getting
alongness if it's helpful to their own family and interests, but too
much of it is destructive to society. Human beings, by their
nature are selfish and destructive. Therefore, logically
and obviously, they need some sort of deterrent that will channel
their selfish and destructive impulses into a structure and system
that will protect the community and nation. That deterrent
is morality. Morality, by its very nature, cannot come from
human beings, because human beings are by nature selfish and destructive.
Therefore, the morality must come from outside oneself. God
is therefore a natural source of morality. This is why religion
naturally creeps into conservative politics. Unlike liberals, who
instinctively believe that morality comes from within, conservatives
know it doesn't. Some conservatives have posited that morality can
come from the state, the community, an enlightened elite, or anybody
fucking else that isn't a regular human being because human beings
naturally fucking suck at being moral.
The morality of
God, therefore, should not be comprehensible and common-sense from
a regular person's point of view, because humans naturally know jack
shit about morality, don't like it, aren't supposed to and will never
develop it on their own. They can't. The whole point of morality
from the Conservative POV is to keep people from doing whatever it
is their own impulses would make them want to do. This is,
from the Liberal POV completely insane becaue goddammit, it is precisely
those impulses to avoid and alleviate pain from which all morality
must necessarily spring. Both sides think the other side is completely
fucking insane! And, in their own way, each side is. Neither side
can perceive with any reliable insight what the reality of the other
side's experience is.
We can see from
this, that just as the liberals always expected, Conservatives
are selfish! Of course they are. Liberals are bleeding hearts
and conservatives are selfish. The stereotypes are true - and at a
basic biological level.
You can
see why, with a Conservative temperament, believing in a God that
repeatedly expresses the opinion that the species you belong is inherently
wicked, sinful, bad, and rotten, would not only make sense to the
you but would be downright comforting. The last thing you
would want to do as a person with a Conservative temperament is be
left to your own moral devices. That would be terrible! Your life
would be an extremely unpleasant chaos of fierce passions to possess,
defend, fight, compete, fuck, cause trouble, be selfish. There would
be little to your life but constant fear, as your everpresent perception
of danger prompted you to take ever more drastic actions in defense,
leaving you with nothing to turn to. It would be awful. Occasionally,
people with the Conservative temperament write movingly and quite
descriptively of exactly what this is like before they had their conversion
experience or whatever it was that rescued them. People with
a strongly conservative temperament naturally believe that all men
are sinners because they themselves are sinners!
Again, the system
makes perfect sense from within its own biology. It is logical, coherent,
effective, and dismissive of anything outside its own premises. And
its premises are powerful because they're backed up by experience,
the kind of experience that the biology a Conservative temperament
inclines one to have. The fact that Conservatives are 'in touch' with
their own sinning nature does not make them inherently worse as human
beings than Liberals, although you would have a hard time convincing
a die-hard Liberal of this. It simply makes them realistic about the
nature and proclivities of approximately half the population at any
given time. Where the Conservative temperament falls down is that
it is not able to be realistic about the other half of the population.
Whom it naturally despises for indulging in a wimpy pain-fest it does
not give in to itself.
Conservatives
make a choice to endure suffering to alleviate fear. Most
conservative branches of religion whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish,
and for all I know Buddhist and Hindu, strongly promote the idea that
it is not for man to judge, but to submit to a higher authority which
knows a hell of a lot more about morality than man does. This submission
will entail suffering, pain, denial of desire but in return it offers
protection. Eternal life, protection from fear, structure, it tells
you how to do things so you do not have to rely on your chaotic passion-driven
inner self to fuck things up, and all these aspects of Conservative
religion come as a real goddamn relief to a person with a strongly
Conservative temperament. Thank God for saving me from myself. It's
a win-win situation from the Conservative point of view because suffering
is not that big a deal to the Conservative temperament compared to
the goddawful vagaries of fear, uncertainty, danger, and lack of structure.
All praise Allah, or God, or Jehovah or whoever the hell. God
is good. God is very very good.
One of the few
things better than God, though, if you have a strongly Conservative
temperament is a gun. So let's talk about guns next! It'll be so much
fun!
Guns
are a Conservative's best friend!
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