Sunday 3 July 2011

Inability to make tough decisions - the monomania of kindness

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As C.S Lewis often remarked - the one virtue that modern society has above all previous societies is kindness: our most hated vice is cruelty.

Since any virtue pursued in isolation or excess leads to sin, then naturally it is the West's primary and only virtue which is about to destroy the West.

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Kindness has painted us into a corner from which the only way out is extreme unkindness.

The West could be saved, could save itself - but only by making some extremely tough decisions, by being cruel in the short term in order to promote Good in the long term.

Therefore The West will not save itself, will not even allow itself to be saved.

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Yet modern kindness is a fake.

Modern kindness is not personal kindness to specific people; the people who feel kind are not paying the price nor are they taking responsibility.

In the past, kindness meant using your own resources to look after some particular person or group.

Now kindness is about 'rights' which means using other people's resources to look after defined categories of persons.

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And beyond this kindness as a right means coerced confiscation - serfdom.

Needs trumps everything for the monomaniacally kind.

If any needy people present themselves, then the state will take from the serfs and give to the needy; with no limit because the alternative is cruelty.

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The serfs are forced to support the needy and the state will take the credit for kindness.

The only alternatives to serfdom are either to join the state or become one more of the needy.

Very obviously this will destroy society.

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Yet of course, the state could stop this at any time - but only by cruelty.

The bottom line is that things are at the point, long past the point, when the tough decision is to stand and watch people die in very large numbers (and in some scenarios to kill people in very large numbers - directly or indirectly - if they will not otherwise desist) in a situation when these deaths could actually be prevented (temporarily, in the short term) by further confiscations from the serfs.

That is what I mean by very tough decisions.

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And we are in this situation purely because we would not make tough (but much less tough) decisions in the past, on the way to this.

Tough decisions are not at all about the end justifying the means (that is evil): tough decisions are about making the right decisions in the face of temptations from short-termism. 

Tough decisions are about being wise rather than expedient; Good rather than popular.

But tough decisions could not and will not happen because we are ruled by democracy and bureaucracy; and both (being non-personal) are intrinsically incapable of making tough decisions, because intrinsically incapable of truth, wisdom or Goodness.

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2 comments:

The Crow said...

Yes! Nice one, senor, to tell this thing the way this thing is. Societal Suicide in a nutshell.

Anonymous said...

Social services work is predominately female.

I have said somewhat in jest that social services is like me giving a social worker a twenty, they keep 15 and give the victim a 5. It is the forgotten man thing, where the social worker gets the credit. It never ends and is just a form of encouraging a two way dependency between the social worker and client. The early libertarian William Grahm Sumner's Forgotten Man essay is one of the best secular descriptions of this contemporary waste of resources in the name of compassion.

I am a firm believer in the importance of the masculine and feminine created order. If a young man being raised by women develops a warped idea of masculinity in the way of machismo behavior, then it makes sense that a society that is nourished on feminine ideas will also develop a machismo culture that can be cruel.