To balance the scales, we must wield the sword. On the Genealogy of Morals: https://www.lotuseaters.com/premium-book-club-37-or-friedrich-nietzsches-on-the-genealogy-of-morals-19-08-22 Beyond Good and Evil: https://www.lotuseaters.com/premium-live-book-club-33-or-beyond-good-and-evil-08-07-22
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The answer, I believe, lies in the way that the left constructs its worldview and the presuppositions that underpin their philosophy, whether they are aware of them or not. | |
| As I've said before, classical liberals in the English mold, such as Hobbes and Locke, presupposed that entering into society was a conscious and rational decision made at some point by men in the distant past. | |
| This gave them certain claims over the course of events conducted by the great Leviathan of the state. | |
| Hobbes had a very peculiar impression that because man sacrificed his rights to form civil society and the state, that he had forgone any claim against unjust treatment. | |
| And because his tacit consent to live in society was theoretically the basis of the power of the sovereign, the sovereign therefore could never commit an injustice because the man would ultimately be the author of it. | |
| A less preposterous view was held by John Locke, in that because men came together into society and sacrificed a portion of their rights, they gained a right of revolt if the government they instituted did not function as expected and respect that remaining portion of rights such as life, liberty and property. | |
| This is the model of governance the US is based upon, and why it seems ridiculous for Democrats to suggest that an attempted insurrection is somehow un-American, when in fact it is the most American perspective one can have. | |
| However, as we know, Democrats are not Lockean liberals, they are in fact Rousseauian liberals, who believed that when man entered into society, he sacrificed all of his natural rights in exchange for civil rights, and therefore it was the state's responsibility to recreate the freedom he had in the state of nature in which man should be living, so that one man was minimally dependent on another and maximally dependent on the state. | |
| Literal quote, by the way. | |
| The absurdity of this aside, Rousseau did more accurately assess that there probably was no point in time where man decided to enter into society from the state of nature, and instead, society slowly but surely grew up around him, generation after generation, until civil society and the state were a fact of life. | |
| Nature, in this view, was the ultimate provider of all of man's wants, and ensured that nobody went without. | |
| It was, hypothetically, bountiful, and if society did not reflect that, not only was it failing in its moral obligation to replace natural rights sufficiently, it also had a duty to provide positive rights so that none might go without. | |
| This would break the metaphorical chains of social relationships that bind the otherwise free-born men to finally allow him to live free while also living in society. | |
| The savvy observer will already detect why this leads the left to the conclusion that the criminal is in fact the victim of society. | |
| In the Hobbesian view, man is bad and made civil by society. | |
| In the Lockean view, some men are good and some men are bad, and society is a pact that we form to deal with those bad men so that the good men might prosper. | |
| In the Rousseauian view, men are good and society makes them bad, because society happened to them without their consent. | |
| And consent is the key issue at play here. | |
| To Hobbes and Locke, man chose this life, and so can be expected to abide by its rules or be damned. | |
| To Rousseau, this life was imposed upon him, and so in some way, he is always the victim of it. | |
| The criminal, therefore, is someone who was originally good, and made bad by the law-abiding, tax-paying, respectable, virtuous people who make up civil society. | |
| The belief, whether they will admit it or not, is that in some roundabout way, you made them bad. | |
| This is why socio-economic factors are the perennial excuse that the left makes for criminality. | |
| Humans are, in the liberal view, undifferentiated blank slates until the cultural norms of society are impressed upon them, and if you benefit from and adhere to a system that can create criminals, then you are also culpable for the crimes they commit, and they are exculpated of the guilt of their acts. | |
| This is why, wherever you go, the left will always, in the last analysis, side with the criminal over the law-abiding victim. | |
| They will see that the state and its laws have permitted you to prosper and assume that you were always made to be this way. | |
| You, by succeeding in a system of boundaries between right and wrong, lucked into being on the right side of them, and the poor criminal lucked out of being on the wrong. | |
| Whereas the right looks at a man as the agent of his own destiny, and therefore responsible for his own behaviour, good or bad, the left will defend abominable acts every single time, because they honestly believe that the individual criminal is essentially powerless, and the society is essentially monolithic. | |
| The criminal therefore is truly the victim of society, and maybe in some cases there's an argument to be made for it. | |
| After all, who hasn't thought to themselves there but for the grace of God go I? | |
| However, this doesn't change the necessity of the application of morality. | |
| Even if this person's badness could be traced back to something in their past, is it appropriate that we then assign to them the moral status of an animal? | |
| Or should we consider them to be men? | |
| Animals that bite get put down without remorse because we are aware that they are not rational creatures who should have known better. | |
| A bad animal will bite again. | |
| Ought we treat criminals that way? | |
| Obviously not. | |
| The criminal understands that what he did was wrong, and if he doesn't, he can be made to understand through a sufficiently forceful punishment. | |
| But it is also important that we prove to the criminal and to wider society that we have the courage to enforce the correct moral order upon the wrongdoer. | |
| Personally, I have come to a rather Nietzschean position that punishment is not about rehabilitation. | |
| Punishment is about a correction of the distribution of the weights of the scales. | |
| I came to this conclusion in 2020, after 25-year-old Darius Sesams decided that he would shoot his neighbour's five-year-old son in the head for playing on his lawn. | |
| At the time, my oldest son was five, and I don't even know what kind of hell that Cannon Hinnant's family must have gone through. | |
| I can't fathom it. | |
| But sometimes at night when I can't sleep, this story will come back to haunt me. | |
| One neighbour years later was still bewildered. | |
| They said this, quote, I just don't understand why he did it. | |
| How could you walk up to a little boy point blank, put a gun to his head and just shoot him? | |
| How could anyone do that? | |
| And as Cannon's mother said, after it was concluded that Sessams would not receive the death penalty for this boy's murder, closure is not there. | |
| No, I don't suppose it is. | |
| The cosmic scales are not in balance. | |
| Someone must pay the price of this life with their own, and that debt is yet unpaid. | |
| No amount of socio-economic factors can be blamed for this murder. | |
| It was just that Darius Sassams is evil, utterly and irredeemably evil, and he still walks the earth, albeit in a jail cell. | |
| But that he is allowed to breathe freely is a crime against the very concept of justice. | |
| In any previous age, his hanging would not have taken long, and the catharsis of seeing the moral balance restored would have at least brought some peace of mind to his family. | |
| It is sufficient for the left that the criminal is rendered as harmless as possible, rather than have the just society take from the criminal that which he took from society itself. | |
| The criminal is, of course, the true victim of his actions, and society will long endure after he is gone. | |
| Why should he be punished really? | |
| Nietzsche expounds on this impulse in Beyond Good and Evil. | |
| He says, quote, To punish, it appears to it, society, to be somehow unfair. | |
| It is certain that the idea of punishment and the obligation to punish are then painful and alarming to people. | |
| Is it not sufficient if the criminal be rendered harmless? | |
| Why should we still punish? | |
| Punishment itself is terrible. | |
| Punishment is indeed terrible, but also morally necessary. | |
| I know, as a father, I despise having to punish my own children for transgressions. | |
| However, I also know that I will be abdicating my duty to them as men if I fail to instill the proper discipline and respect for boundaries that good men have. | |
| It is not sufficient that we allow morality to abolish itself by rendering men harmless. | |
| We must not avoid questions of right and wrong. | |
| Nietzsche also believed that the greater the strength and size of society, the more society would believe itself to be distant and advantaged over criminals and so be lenient with them. | |
| In On the Genealogy of Morality, he explains that the powerful society would view criminals as less revolutionary to the moral order of the community, and so would be less inclined to remove these parasites from itself out of a misguided sense of goodness. | |
| He says quote, It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrongdoers go scot-free. | |
| What do my parasites matter to me, might society say? | |
| Let them live and flourish, I am strong enough for it. | |
| The justice which began with the maxim, everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off, ends with connivance at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape. | |
| It ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself. | |
| The self-destruction of justice. | |
| We know the pretty name it calls itself Grace. | |
| Nietzsche believed that the less proximate you consider the crime to be, the more you may find yourself empathizing with the criminal. | |
| As anyone who has dealt with an online leftist knows, this will eventually turn into active defence for monstrous acts and the condemnation of the privilege of the victim. | |
| Is this what our forefathers wanted for us in the present? | |
| Is this what we want for our descendants in the future? | |
| Or should we be more concerned in what it is to bring into existence a just order which knows right from wrong and is prepared to impose it on the man who attacks justice itself with his criminal acts? | |
| Nietzsche had thoughts on this too. | |
| As the power of the good tribe increases, the respect for the spirit of their ancestors increases in proportion. | |
| As a society declines and degenerates, disrespect for these ancestors increases. | |
| Indeed, it becomes desirable. | |
| Weak forefathers should be disrespected, because their weakness is what brought about the abolition of justice in the first place. | |
| We, the inheritors of the moral burden to impose a righteous order, have failed. | |
| And so the people who came before us must also have in some way failed. | |
| And it's not surprising that the people who come after us cannot be proud of who they are. | |
| Just some thoughts on the issue. | |
| If you're enjoying the return of this channel, please do consider supporting me on Lotuseatas.com. |