The Shifting Locus of Morality: Secular vs Spiritual
Our understanding of morality - of meaning itself - has shifted from the absolute world of the Church, to the varying world of the secular - and even the churches have been brought low.
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So this video is about the shift of the locus of morality from the spiritual world of the church into the temporal world, the secular world of government and society.
Now it's part of a requested video, which is going to be two parts.
The second one is going to be more directly addressing how to find a good woman, how to be a man in today's culture.
But I need to set the groundwork for all of this, which is what this video is all about.
Because the standout thing of Western civilization, of Christendom, the reason that Christianity creates such advanced societies, it all boils down to the separation of church and state.
Now this was formalized in the formation of the U.S. government, but this is a long-standing tradition.
Since the inception, since the Roman emperors first converted to Christianity, there's been this divide between the world of politics and business, the marketplace, as they used to call it, and the world of philosophy, theology, morality, beauty, and valuation.
And it was the separation of the two that allowed Christian societies, not just in Europe, but in Africa, in parts of Asia, to absolutely thrive compared to their neighbors.
And here's what it comes down to, is that the church is talking about absolutes.
The study of theology, the study of science, which is what theology leads to.
These are about studying absolute quantities, perfections, mathematical forms.
And so the Catholic Church, when you examine the Catechism, it is speaking about the perfected form of morality, at least as best as we've managed to figure out so far.
Whereas the world of politics, of business, the world of the marketplace, is not about perfection and absolutes.
I forget who it was that said this, but there's a great point made that I read ages ago, that men of good character, honest temperament, and even the same education can have disagreements as to what we should do politically.
You can, in a business, businesses will disagree as to what the best new product is.
Because the world of politics, the world of business, of entrepreneurship, there are too many unknowns.
Okay, the same thing with the study of history or the study of art.
There are too many unknowns.
We can't predict what the next great business idea is going to be or what the next great artistic endeavor is going to be.
We can't know that thing until it's been created.
And we can't run scientific experiments on it.
You can't see what would have happened if the other person had got elected, if we've chosen that other policy, if we'd gone for this marketing campaign instead of that marketing campaign.
So the world of politics, the world of the marketplace, it is a world of relative opinion.
We all try and make the best decisions we can based upon the past when it comes to that, but we don't really know what's going to happen with any of these decisions.
So men of good character can disagree on politics.
When it comes to absolutes, though, there's no disagreement to be had on something like mathematics, on an objective scientific test, experiment, on derived principles.
There isn't any room for disagreement there.
These are absolutes, and yet they are almost like platonic forms.
They're idealized forms of what morality should be, how we should behave, how we should interact.
And so the church holds these things up as these ideals to strive towards.
And we're all going to falter, but we get back up and we keep striving towards them.
And this is what made Western civilization stand apart.
You know, if you look at something like the Islamic system, where God constantly plays dice, the Islamic God is capricious, changes his opinion, messes with your head, lies to you, and so you're not going to get any sort of scientific method deriving from that.
And the same thing.
The holiest person is the one with the biggest club.
If you look at Chinese civilization, which was absolutely one of the great civilizations out there, but again, they had this unification of valuation, of morality, and of the state.
And so the Chinese system, it stagnated because the entire system, well, it was the state, the government, the civilization, it was captured by a system.
The imperial schools, the imperial exam, was the only thing that mattered for your station in life.
If you want to advance forward in life, you had to score high on the exam, on the imperial exam.
And everybody, you know, could afford it.
And it actually wasn't that expensive even.
But everybody could take it.
So everybody had this opportunity to advance.
But then, because you're defining what is good by what the exam is, you are predicting, you are getting people that test well.
You have an established institution, a system in place that is not going to change.
Whereas in Western civilization, we had the politics of the day, and we had the church always saying, do better.
Do better.
Every single one of you, do better.
So we had the best of both worlds.
You know, we didn't pretend that the king was the most important layman in the church, but he was still a layman in the church.
So he could be fallible.
He would make mistakes.
But it doesn't change the valuation of morality.
Whereas what we've done over the past couple hundred years is that the system of valuation, our locus of morality, has gone from the church into the secular world.
So ironically enough, we actually have the exact opposite now.
It used to be that the church was where you got your sense of meaning, your identity.
It was the absolute.
Whereas the politics, that's like your opinion, man.
These days, we are deriving our identity, our morality, and our sense of valuation from the political sphere.
And your religion, like, that's just your opinion, man.
And the problem is that most Westerners, most Christians, even traditionalist Christians embrace this.
So your identity, your sense of meaning, whether you're libertarian, Republican, or Democrat, you know, this defines your absolutist worldview.
Even though politics is constantly shifting, this defines your worldview.
And as numerous people have pointed out in the alternative right and the alt media, the definition of the good life keeps shifting.
You know, a Republican would have been a Democrat 20 years ago.
And with the recent nonsense with Bill Nye, you can see him shifting his opinion as to what genes are, as to what sex is.
He's shifting his opinion like a rudderless ship in a storm.
Whereas the religious aspects become more and more about the rituals, the tradition of it all.
And so even the deeply religious person is still, because this is the reality.
This is what the world is made up of right now.
They are getting their valuation from their politics.
So the ritual, that's just like your opinion, man.
But the sense of valuation comes from the political sphere.
So it's actually the Republican Party that is behind morality, not the church.
Even though most traditional churches are going to be more Republican-leaning, it's actually the Republican Party where the values are coming from.
And the secular morality that we have right now is a very effeminate morality.
Effeminate, as in it decries male sins while ignoring female sins.
Not feminine, okay, but it's a degenerate form of the feminine.
And so, you know, think about any lecture you've heard at church.
Think about what sins are focused on in churches, even in the most traditional churches.
You know, you certainly get lust is a big one.
Violence, you know, that's another thing we don't like in our society.
And hate speech or rude speech that offends somebody.
These all tend to be more male sins.
You know, they are failings in masculinity.
You know, getting hot under the collar and starting a fight for the wrong reason, pursuing women in a wanton manner, and telling people like it is, even when you're not being particularly polite or civil or gentlemanly.
These are the sort of sins that men are more prone to than women.
And it's important to remember that there's a case of having the virtues of your vices.
Somebody that gets hot under the collar too often gets into fights.
Well, no, that's not a good thing.
But it's better than being a milquetoast that can't even defend your family if you have a home invasion.
Part of being a man is being aggressive at the correct times.
And so the guy that gets too hot under the collar, he's being aggressive at the wrong times, but he's got the virtues of his vices.
He is going to protect his family when the chips are down.
And yet these are the virtues that we punish, or these are the sins that are connected to virtues.
They are part of virtue.
They're just an imbalance of virtue, and we punish those.
And very frequently in the church, we talk about all of this.
But what we don't talk about are female sins, the sort of sins that women are more prone to.
And you've got something like gossip is a great example.
Gossip is extremely vicious.
It's very scandalous, as in it's a sort of dishonesty and immoral behavior that drives people away from the truth, away from faith, away from the church.
Gossip is downright horrific.
And yet we have, anytime you go to the grocery store, you've got an aisle of gossip magazines.
Same thing with vanity.
Vanity tends to be more of a female sin than a male sin.
And you will very seldom hear vanity talked about in the churches.
And, you know, even when it comes to lust, the way we approach it is we punish the men, we blame the men for pursuing women for sleeping around, etc.
When the irony being, a guy that can get away with sleeping around, he's doing that because he's displaying a lot of male virtue in other areas, even though he's being intemperate with his sexuality.
So we punish that, but we don't look at romance novels.
You go into any major bookstore, and there are going to be two aisles full of romance novels.
And the false narrative being pushed forth by those romance novels are just as false as the false narrative being pushed by pornography.
To put simply, you know, the narrative of pornography that, oh, there's just this fun-time girl, she doesn't want any commitment, and you're just going to get your rocks off.
Absolute lie does not happen in real life.
That is not what women are.
If a woman's offering that, she has an ulterior motive.
Whether it's to get back at daddy or because she's emotionally intemperate and will lash out at you the next day, you know, it's a free lunch.
Run from that.
The narrative in the romance novel is that the woman can capture the bad boy and tame him.
Whether it's the pirate captain, whether it's a steel magnet like in 50 Shades of Gray, she can capture him and subdue him and punish him.
The irony being that by doing that, she actually loses interest in him.
And by the way, that is the narrative of all three 50 Shades of Grade books.
Okay, it starts off with BDSM, but by the end of it, she's got him wrapped around her finger.
These are the sins that we don't talk about, not all that often in the church, because our locus of morality is secular.
And our secular civilization has become a very, very effeminate one.
So we punish the male sins that are connected to male virtues while ignoring and encouraging the female sins of gossip, vanity, and the feminine form of lust.
And the great irony of all this is that one of the consistent themes throughout the New Testament is that the Pharisees were engaging in all of the trappings of religion.
all of the rituals of religion.
They were observing all the details.
They were obeying the letter of the law while completely ignoring the spirit of the law.
And the sad thing is, and this is not just from the person requesting this video.
This is other sources, Catholic forums I've been on, where, you know, a male talks about getting divorced.
They say you need to man up.
Woman talks about getting divorced, an annulment, annulment.
And it's not an annulment if you feel like it.
An annulment means there never was a marriage.
If you just get sick of the other partner, you're not getting an annulment.
But no, when the female talks about it, they, you know, they blame the husband, as opposed to saying she needs to woman up.
This is happening throughout traditional circles because our locus of morality is rooted in the secular world.
And the secular world is fundamentally a variable one.
It's a world of shifting opinion.
And so yes, ironically, even the most traditional of churches, you are going to find that it's people obeying the rituals, obeying the letter of the law, but getting their morality from somewhere else entirely.
So when it comes to finding people of good character, if you're looking for a wife of good character, this isn't to say you shouldn't look for her in the church, but that you should be casting your net to capture people who are oriented in the right direction, who are not interested in the popular,
the easy, the marketplaces definition of good, but who are genuinely pursuing the good.
And I'd like to think there's more of those people in the church than outside of it, but let's not pretend that all of them are inside of the church, because a lot of them aren't.
So that needs to be what you're looking for, fundamentally, is people that are genuinely pursuing the good and letting the chips fall where they may.
Abandon the secular morality, genuinely seek after God himself, and learn to master yourself in the process.
So the follow-up video to this, we're going to be discussing more of the individual struggles that young men face and specifically how to pursue women that aren't waiting until they're 30 or 35 to get married.
