Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Civilisation of Vice

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Oct. 6, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

21:38

Civilisation of Vice

What happened to Western Morality? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw55Tso6iK4

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	So the following is a clip from a much longer discussion, almost an hour and a half long, that I had with Stelios at the Load Seaters about the fundamental problem with the moral systems and structures of the West as they are at the moment, writ large, just broadly.
	Because everything we essentially do regarding the problem of woke, the problem of socialism, the problem of globalism, the problem of hyper-reality on the internet, all of these things fundamentally are a product of a missing moral substrate that used to permeate not just our society, but just all societies, frankly.
	And the way that liberalism has deliberately destroyed and displaced at the very least, but destroyed at the worst and specifically attacked this kind of moral substrate is the real substance and essence of the conversation.
	And I really like framing it around Alastair McIntyre's thought experiment at the beginning of After Virtue, because I think he really has hit on something here.
	We use moral language all the time, but really we're not as moral as we think we are.
	And I think this is actually a real issue that will be something we will have to face in the near future.
	Because the question of rights claims, for example, is one you hear every day.
	Oh, it's this person's right, it's that person's right, it's this group's right.
	But this doesn't really speak to what actually morality is.
	And in fact, it kind of offloads morality onto other people to be the moral agents that you, as I was talking about in the last video, in fact, have kind of absconded your position from.
	And I think that the West itself cannot be turned around until we understand that actually morality not only resides within us, but it resides in what we do and how we treat other people and how we actually interface with the world.
	And again, like I said in the last stream, this has been on my mind for a long time now.
	This is just something you have to grapple with and actually have to realize, actually, we need to change.
	We need to become different men in order to become the equivalent men of generations past and in order to actually bring about the future that we want to see.
	We are not in our current present state sufficient.
	And it's okay to admit this.
	And in fact, admitting that we are not what we ought to be is step one of actually becoming that thing that we are trying to be, to bring back into existence the kind of world that was taken away from us little by little, very slowly and very gradually without our consent.
	And this understanding is the first step in that journey, in my opinion.
	And so I'll leave, I'll play a clip for you from it because it was an incredible discussion, absolutely incredible.
	And it's one of those things where you very rarely get to have a discussion of this depth and of a true understanding of what the actual problem is.
	But of course, Stedios is a PhD in philosophy and I've just finished my masters.
	I'm waiting to be graded.
	So I've arrived at a point where I can have these kind of conversations.
	And we're not trying to make the language esoteric or anything like that.
	We're trying to keep it very straightforward because we want people to genuinely understand what we are saying here because we're going quite far off the beaten path.
	And actually, it's not normal to be having these kinds of conversations in modern day.
	In fact, a lot of the sort of mainstream crowd are going to look at the conversation that we're having and not understand why we're having it at all.
	But if you're watching my channel, I'm guessing that you're one of the elect, those few people who understand that actually there is something deeply wrong with the moral structure of the West as it stands at the moment.
	And it has been subverted.
	And the only way to get that back is actually to put it back on its proper footing.
	And that means it lies with us and our behavior.
	So, without further ado, I'll play the clip and I'll leave a link to the video in the description if you'd like to watch the whole thing.
	And I recommend that you do.
	It's completely free, obviously.
	It's just on our YouTube channel and the podcast channel.
	And it's one of those rare instances where you can see, like in my face in particular, talking this through with Stelios.
	Because we haven't really properly, we don't generally plan the discussions that we're actually going to have.
	This one was sort of, you know, the premise was planned, but the discussion is always free-flowing.
	But you can see that I'm like, oh, yeah, connecting all this together.
	And I hope this will do the same for you.
	So without further ado, here's the clip, and there'll be a link in the description to watch the full thing.
	So it's become apparent that there's something wrong with modern morality.
	There is something wrong with what we think in which the good life consists and in the very nature of how we describe what is and is not moral.
	And this was the fundamental thesis of Alistair McIntyre's book After Virtue, in which he posits a thought experiment.
	And I wanted to take you through this because I think there's something, I really think there's something to this.
	He suggests that imagine there was a complete collapse of science.
	And not only was science not done, there was an anti-science movement that spent its time trying to tear up what science had discovered and cast it to history.
	So it's completely lost.
	And then once this madness had passed, people tried to reconstruct the lost science.
	They would find parts of textbooks, they would find old recordings, they'd find certain studies and slowly but surely begin to reconstruct what science was out of the ashes of these ruins.
	But they would only be partial.
	There would never be a full understanding of the theories.
	And so they would use words like, you know, atomic theory or whatever.
	I'm not a scientist.
	They would use scientific words, but they wouldn't really have a full understanding of those scientific words.
	And so once they'd at least partially reconstructed all of this, would you be able to call that science?
	And the answer is, of course, no, because these new reconstructed scientific theories would probably not have the same qualities and effects that actual proper science does.
	And Alistair McIntyre's contention was that this is what has happened to morality in the modern world.
	At some point in the last few hundred years, morality has actually been under attack.
	It has been deconstructed.
	It has been essentially lost to history.
	And we still now, in the modern era, we are now trying, for some reason still, to reconstruct morality.
	We are trying to understand what morality is.
	And you hear this from the left all the time.
	They're constantly talking about the progress of their politics and their morals.
	And you think, okay, but it's been thousands of years.
	How have we not worked out what it is to be a good person yet?
	And the answer is, of course, that we have.
	This was just destroyed in the paradigm shift from the traditional way of being into liberal modernity.
	And now the liberal moderns have a very weird view on what it is to be a good person.
	In fact, you'll notice that instead of the judgment-based morality that dominates, if you read anything from a few hundred years ago, you realize that they are very, very judgmental in their language.
	And it's because they themselves are trained to make judgments of their own about what is right and wrong, what is good and bad.
	And you'll notice that this is something that we just don't do now.
	What we have now is a kind of rules-based morality, the morality of the civic bureaucracy, which in and of itself is fundamentally exculpatory, as if to say morality is not your personal judgment.
	So you are the person upon whom the judgment ultimately lies.
	If you judge right or wrong, you might make a wrong judgment and you might make a bad call and you might have to apologize for that.
	Then it's you that's the person who is the agent there.
	Instead, morality has become externalized.
	It is a series of rules imposed by an authority.
	So you personally can't really be judged right or wrong for following these rules because this was what morality was taught to you as.
	And I think this is just fundamentally incorrect.
	I just think this is completely fundamentally incorrect as to what morality actually consists in.
	But moreover, I think it makes bad people.
	I think this is the formula to create people who are, at best, just compliant rule followers who can exist within a giant bureaucracy without causing any disturbance to the bureaucracy itself.
	But I don't think it actually makes the people good.
	I don't think it makes them happy.
	And I don't think it makes them moral.
	And that's why I asked Stelios to write me a course on how to be moral.
	Because thankfully, we happen to have a long history, written history of morality that we can actually call upon here.
	And we can actually reconstruct it ourselves.
	So I asked him to do me a course on ancient Greek virtue ethics, because I'm sure you're all aware I'm quite besotted with Aristotle.
	And I think that basically all of moral learning ends there.
	And everything since has been a waste of time.
	Although he might correct me on that, but I genuinely have come to that conclusion.
	And so I asked him to write me a course on ancient Greek virtue ethics because he happens to be an Athenian philosopher with a PhD in philosophy.
	So who better to do it?
	Well, thank you very much for this.
	The course and the preparation for it and recording it was an incredible experience and I'm very grateful for this.
	So I think that you mentioned some really important points that definitely need addressing.
	And they are things that I saw when I was teaching philosophy and there were problems that I encountered while I was in academia.
	And I'm actually writing a book for some time now about how the dominant intellectual trends of both analytic and continental philosophy, that is Anglo-Saxonic philosophy and also continental European philosophy of the 20th century are literally sabotaging people from understanding themselves as beings of worth and as beings with rights and responsibilities.
	They usually think of the former instead of think of both.
	I mean, if you look at our entire political discourse at the moment, it is nothing but rights claims.
	Yes.
	I have a right to this because.
	Exactly.
	That's again, where is the morality in this?
	Where is the judgment in this?
	Where is the actual argument about right and wrong?
	Exactly.
	And in contemporary culture, especially in alternative spaces, we have people constantly talking about the evils of continental philosophy, such as critical race theory, neo-Marxism, postmodernism.
	But very few people talk about analytic philosophy.
	And very few people talk about what's there, which isn't so much directly problematic as it is fundamentally indirectly problematic.
	I think that this is what destroyed the defenses that we as Westerners had against the subversion that many people consciously, consciously try to do coming from continental philosophy and other areas of the world.
	But just a quick thing on that as well.
	A third point is there's no alternative.
	No one ever seems to actually create a substantive alternative to these structures.
	Well, that's the idea we are destroying with this course.
	And we are trying to recapture the spirit of antiquity and one of some of the fundamental pillars of Western civilization.
	A civilization we are told constantly that is being uniquely guilty and also that it doesn't exist.
	Yes.
	So the fundamental problem I find with analytic philosophy is ontological materialism.
	There's no other way of saying it.
	When people enter the stage where they start thinking about things and want to form a worldview and ask themselves, right, how do I guide my thinking about becoming a good person and about becoming a good moral agent?
	Chances are that they're going to walk into a bookshop or watch a video on YouTube by people telling them that essentially the deflated view of humanity is unproblematically true.
	That all there is to human beings is just a meat machine and just there is no value there.
	That the self doesn't exist.
	The self is an illusion.
	Well, if it's an illusion, who is deluded?
	That's not a question that they ever care to answer.
	And also the idea that morality just doesn't fit well into the materialistic universe.
	And let me just be very clear because I want to be very exact and precise in what I say.
	I think that I don't say that every person who's a materialist is immoral.
	I am saying that to the extent that they are moral, they're moral despite their materialism, not because of it.
	I think I often view a lot of these people as neither being moral nor immoral because it's all focused around harm reduction and the obedience to the bureaucratic rules.
	And so that doesn't actually require them to make any particular judgments or actually positively act in a way that we could consider moral.
	And so, okay, you didn't do anything wrong, but what did you do that was good?
	Yes, I think that this is fundamentally the template for becoming a crazed fanatic ideologue.
	I agree.
	The rules account for everything.
	If the rules don't account for it, it doesn't exist.
	When reality clashes with theory, so where is for reality?
	Yes.
	That's the mind template of a fanatic ideologue.
	But also, you can see how it gives them license to invade every space that doesn't follow these rules.
	I have essentially sanctified the rules.
	The rules are my entire moral universe.
	And so if you're not following these rules, then they think of us in the same way that the conquistadors thought of the Aztecs sacrificing children.
	They view us in that way.
	And that is, I just, like I said, I just do not think that is a moral stance.
	I think that's actually a bureaucratic stance.
	It is not a moral stance.
	I think it's the extreme manifestation of the stance we're talking about.
	And essentially, it gives us license to forego judgment, to stop judging.
	And one of the reasons...
	That's the entire point of it, in fact.
	The entire point is to prevent us from judging, to impose this repressive tolerance in which literally everyone is allowed to do anything as long as it's within the rules.
	Even though the things they're doing themselves might be completely degenerate, just utterly immoral in every way, shape, or form.
	Exactly.
	And there is something that is simultaneously metaphysical and ethical there.
	According to this point, according to which we can just forego judgment because the rules unproblematically apply on every situation, there's a metaphysics according to which no particulars exist.
	It's only universals that exist.
	Every specific thing that possesses any kind of particularity doesn't exist unless it can be understood as a just bundle of relations.
	And the thing is, as well, it's intrinsic to the very nature of following and setting rules that they have to be for all people in all times.
	You can't have a rule for Mike Smith that stipulates him and rules for him alone.
	That's not a rule, then.
	That's a privilege, actually.
	Something else.
	So the very nature of the thing has to be universalizable.
	Exactly.
	And when we're talking about universality, let's say that obviously not all forms of universality are wrong.
	But when we talk about a universality that doesn't recognize and in fact is hostile to the irreducible particularities of human life, such as individuality.
	I mean, literally every person's actual life.
	Exactly.
	The actual content of their lives is irreducibly particular.
	No one has your life.
	You don't have anyone else's life.
	And so you can't just assume there is an abstract set of rules that answers every question in every scenario that you will ever encounter.
	Exactly.
	And when we do this, it's not just individuality when we're talking about a person.
	It's also the individuality of one's family.
	The individuality of one's community.
	I mean, it's literally an idea.
	The individuality of one's nation.
	It's your entire history leading up until that point and everything that has happened in it in any way conceivable.
	And even those things that you don't really conceive of, that happened to you without your knowledge.
	All of these things.
	And this is because to a very large extent in materialism, if we combine this kind of materialism with the other kind of idealism, which says only universals exist, it's a very dangerous mix.
	Some people call it dialectical materialism.
	It's not just that, but there are more trends that lead to there.
	We lose what is fundamentally true about every human life, individually speaking, and we treat everyone as the same, as being just weight.
	Well, this is how you arrive at the sort of modern liberal experience of humans being interchangeable, fungible widgets that can just be swapped over.
	Yes, exactly.
	And modern liberalism has the idea of lack of dessert for one's actions.
	It's not a coincidence that John Rawls, who is basically the patron saint of modern liberalism, with his 1971 published A Theory of Justice, he fundamentally disagrees with the notion that we have free will in any important sense.
	And he thinks that we don't deserve the fruit of our labor.
	Because if we produce more than others and earn more than others, for instance, in the economic reality, that is just a feature of things that we cannot control.
	We had a better upbringing.
	We had a better, we were more lucky.
	And everything revolves around that idea, that we are not the authors of our own action.
	I don't disagree with the idea that we are shaped by our environment.
	Sure, but that's not what he's saying, is it?
	Because this goes far further than this.
	Because, of course, you know, okay, yeah, you have to have a certain material base, as Aristotle might think of it, to be able to achieve and accomplish certain things in life, like to become a philosopher, for example.
	But it still was your personal agency and your technique, your practice, your learning, your discipline, and your knowledge that gets you to where you are.
	You are entitled to that.
	And if you're not entitled to that, why am I able to say that someone else isn't entitled to what you have?
	And so basically, you strip away that thing from the people who are actually deserving, but you also create a space for the people who are undeserving to lay claim to this as well.
	Exactly.
	And let us say this.
	It's again the metaphysics behind it that is sabotaging people from understanding themselves as moral agents with rights and responsibilities.
	Because if we see the implication of it, draw the inferences from the materialistic assumptions, we'll see that agency itself is way more passive than we think of it.
	Agency is just billiard ball-like movement.
	If I move and I'm an agent, it's because I'm entirely necessitated or caused by factors that are not apt to me.
	You were deterministically pre-exact and pre-configured to become what you are now.
	And the thing is, I mean, I've just finished my master's degree in philosophy.
	And man, I'm telling you, congressional.
	Thank you.
	I've got to do my exam yet.
	There's nothing predetermined about or necessary about me having done it.
	It was a lot of work.
	I had to slog through God only knows how many books and think very deeply about the subject that I was covering.
	And so the fundamental idea that actually agency isn't a core part of humanity and a core part of morality is just wrong.
	It's just fundamentally wrong.
	That's the issue.
	And that's what happened in the beginning of modernity.
	Because modernity and the Enlightenment are a combination of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.
	And the Renaissance does have the element of returning to antiquity, which was very problematically fused with the scientific revolution.
	That's why I think that a lot of Enlightenment philosophy is actually very good, but it's completely problematic in how it synthesizes into a whole vision of life.
	That's why what you mentioned in the beginning as an idea from Alice de McIntyre, fragmentation of the modern worldview is very much correct.

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