The Missing Truth and Our Messed Up Morality

There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world at the moment.

The events in New York over the last few days serve to highlight an unrelenting trend of terrorists killing civilians in our streets. An unprecedented number of terrorist attacks have taken place in the UK as well – hundreds have died, hundreds more have been injured and the security services are stretched to their limits as numerous would-be terrorist atrocities are foiled seemingly on a daily basis.

In the United States alone there have been 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days. 2017 has seen the worst mass shooting event in US history when on 1st October, Stephen Paddock, fired hundreds of rounds of semi-automatic ammunition into a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more before blowing the antidepressants out of his own messed up brain with a revolver.

In equally depressing news, notorious Hollywood pervert, Harvey Weinstein sits atop an increasing mountain of human detritus as an endless stream of celebrities and politicians are discovered to have been abusing their power for decades to leverage sex with the weak or to profit from corruption.

Harvey, it appears, was just the tip of the whole sh*tty iceberg – the details of his salacious depravity cultivating courage amongst the victims of others to speak out about their abuse at the hands of the elite - the hashtag #metoo going viral as more victims stand up to join the derogated hoard.

Weinstein follows in the footsteps of Jimmy Savile in demonstrating how those in power or with money are able destroy lives and then buy silence. Despite the growing number of victims’ voices and the public admissions of “impropriety” or “indiscretions” by those accused – it is noteworthy that no arrests have been made and nobody has handed themselves over to the police.

For some reason, society (like all those who knew of Weinstein’s crimes but turned a blind eye) acquiesces these crimes: “Don’t worry Harv, check yourself into rehab and get yourself fixed you sick f*ck”.

So accustomed have the downtrodden, the deprived and the under-privileged grown to the absence of any real justice, that it would appear that we have become too tired and too weak to demand it anymore. Our collective voice has faded and grown hoarse with all the p*ssing and whinging we have done over the years to highlight our suffering and to underline our status as victims.

The prison population of the UK has doubled in the last 25 years as the problems that come with an increasingly poor population and a growing disparity between the richest and the poorest in society are essentially ethnically cleansed away by incarceration. I guarantee you won’t find many of those born into privilege in the jails that are full to bursting.

Our society, maligned, broken, defeated, lays down on the bloodstained ground and quietly resigns itself to its impending death – be that at the hands of radical Islam, “the powers that be” or North Korean Nukes or – as is likely – a combination of all three.

How did we get here?

How did we end up like this?

I am reminded of the 2009 post-apocalyptic film “The Road” starring Viggo Mortensen and based on the beautifully crafted 2006 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. The action of the film sees Mortensen and his son travelling across a United States that has been desolated by some undescribed disaster or event. The starving survivors hunt each other in cannibalistic packs – starvation and despair thrive in the absence of the law.

The take away point of the movie for me was that we are all just one disaster away from shrugging off our humanity and reverting to the animal, primal state that we evolved from.

We convince ourselves that we are civilised. We wrap ourselves up in a blanket of lies and derive an artificial comfort from the ‘unimpeachable’ truth that our evolution has liberated us from suffering. Then some c*nt blows himself up or opens fire on a defenceless crowd or rapes a child and in that moment the blanket is torn away leaving us cold, weak and crying out for our mothers like injured babies.

It has not always been this way.

I think I have identified the problem.

Take Harvey Weinstein as an example. The problem is not the answer to the question “Has Harvey Weinstein done anything wrong?” – the problem is the very fact that I can ask the question in the first place.

Any reasonable, sane, moderate human being would look on what Harvey Weinstein is accused to have done in disgust. If I asked you “Has Harvey Weinstein done anything wrong?” the answer in the majority of cases would be a resounding and unequivocal “yes – of course he has”.

But then, has he?

What is it Weinstein is accused to have done? At one end of the spectrum, he has probably strongly suggested that he could make certain doors open for aspiring young actresses if they were to get naked or perform sex acts on him – the Hollywood casting couch experience if you will.

At the other end of the spectrum, he has been accused of forcing himself onto vulnerable women and raping them – coercing them to have sexual intercourse without their consent.

We would all condemn these actions and rightly so, but what as a society have we been prepared to let go? What unpalatable aspects of our society do we wilfully turn a blind eye to each and every day?

Harvey Weinstein tells women that they will be successful if they sleep with him – BAD.

Society shows women that they will be successful if they strip to their underwear and pose provocatively in newspapers and magazines – OK?

Harvey Weinstein forces himself onto women and makes them have sex with him – BAD.

Society allows the poor and the damaged to fall into prostitution and women, who probably don’t want to have sex with men, do so because they are offered money – OK?

Harvey Weinstein promises fame and fortune to those who visit him in his hotel room and say nothing? – WRONG

The destitute and the have nots are promised a better life if they go with people traffickers to work in the sex industry of more affluent countries – OK?

Harvey Weinstein grabs a woman by the p*ssy – WRONG.

A man elected to the highest office in the whole of western civilisation talk about how it is ok to grab women by the p*ssy – OK?

It is a dangerous thing to vilify Harvey Weinstein for his sordid crimes when we, as a collective, are also arguably guilty of terrible things on a huge scale.
[CONTINUED]

a reply to: Inc_9x
[CONTINUED]
Hypocrisy is the problem and Stephen Paddock proves this point.

Stephen Paddock decides that he is going to kill a large number of people that he, for whatever reason, thinks should die. That has to be wrong – right?

Stephen Paddock opens fire on a crowd killing many – injuring more – ruining lives with every bullet fired. Wrong? Yes?

A United States drone flies over the desert and fires a hellfire missile into a crowded market place to take out a “bad guy”. Hundreds die, but justice is done?

A woman gets drunk and has sex with her colleague at the Christmas party – she falls pregnant but decides that having a child would be bad for her career and so terminates the pregnancy by lawful means.

A police officer shoots and kills a black teenager who was running away from the scene of a robbery.

If the universal truth is that killing is wrong – then killing is wrong.

If, as a society, we declare that killing is ok in certain circumstances or when certain conditions are met, we create a moral grey area where the terrorists and the Stephen Paddock’s of this world can decide if their actions fit the criteria that society requires for something to be considered morally right.

Suppose Stephen Paddock killed because he thought he was defending himself, his way of life or his constitutional rights – does that make a difference to how history views him?

It might do – but it shouldn’t.

For Socrates, the truth was something not to be discussed, but lived.

Socrates challenged us to examine the world around us to arrive at the fundamental truth of our morality and then to build our society around those truths.

It is a failing of liberalism and an indictment of the hypocrisy of the modern world that we have allowed our understanding of the truth to be manipulated.

When you leave it to the individual to live their life by a moral framework of their own making – you cannot blame them if that moral framework does not accord entirely with your own.

It occurs to me that our collective morality is like a spider’s web. Each delicate strand of the web represents an unquestionable moral truth that intertwine together to make an intricate and complex whole.

Say, for arguments sake, that one of those truths is “killing is wrong”. When we look to justify killing by reference to certain circumstances or conditions, we essentially snip away at the moral web – the strand breaks and the whole thing becomes weaker.

The same can be said of hypocrisy. When society arrives at a truth and declares that something is wrong – say the objectification of women for example – that strand in the web becomes broken the moment we turn a blind eye to certain examples of the objectification of women that we do not have the balls to challenge, e.g. Prostitution, pornography, the portrayal of women in the media etc.

Linked to this idea of hypocrisy is the damage that we are prepared to do to ourselves. For every woman who may have been raped by a Hollywood producer, I bet there is at least one more that has had consensual sex with that producer to get ahead of her rivals.

It is a terrible reality that it becomes harder for a woman to object to prejudicial treatment because she is being sold out by other members of the sisterhood.

To illustrate this point further, consider that I arrive at the universal truth that “bullying is wrong” – I think that is an idea that we would all go along with and as such it becomes a strand in the moral web.

Now let us consider that I am at work and I see my boss bullying someone. I have arrived at the truth that bullying is wrong and I know that I should say or do something, but I know it is likely to be to my detriment the next time a promotion becomes available or the next time there is a pay review and so I elect to say nothing. In that moment, I take the scissors to my own web. Bullying stops being something wrong and becomes something that is permissible in certain circumstances or when I stand to benefit from it.

This is the problem with modern liberalism – it allows people to cut away at the moral truth that makes up the web from which our society is precariously suspended. The more strands we cut away, the bigger the holes in the web and the more perilous the future of our civilisation becomes.

As the holes in the web grow bigger, we allow bigger *rseholes and greater evil to pass through. There was a time when perverts, paedophiles, terrorists and murderers would not have been tolerated – now they pass amongst us freely and unimpeded – such are the holes in our moral fabric.

What is the future?

As I look to the future I do so with caution and with a degree of pessimism.

There is much in the world to be celebrated, it is not all doom gloom; however there is a desperate need to make morality relevant again in the 21st century.

Every time we turn a blind eye to the evil in the world, we become a little bit less humane and take a step closer to the desolate wasteland depicted in “The Road”.

I don’t know if the web can be repaired or if it needs to be unravelled and built again from scratch. What I do know is that now is the time for good men and good women to stand up for what they believe in and to rediscover the truths common to all walks of our human existence.

a reply to: Inc_9x

Every time we turn a blind eye to the evil in the world, we become a little bit less humane and take a step closer to the desolate wasteland depicted in “The Road”.

Hard to blame average americans for this 'blind eye', we have been conditioned to it by murder death kill on TV, film and gaming.

This is by design, so we don't 'mind' as much.

a reply to: intrptr

I'm not looking to blame anyone.

I am saying that we all have a responsibility to do what is morally right and to "live the truth".

I think scapegoating and blaming the media absolves us of the responsibility that we have collectively and individually to do the right thing.

The media would have no control over what you do or what you think if you turned it off.

How did we get here?

The answer is in ancient texts.
Man is not going to be able to fix Man no matter how much time passes or what science accomplises.
Nothing will be better until the foretold things complete and they are clearly in the process.
At which point goodbye to all those who have things that they have done in the dark which will be seen in the light! Vengence day! Time to choose the right side!!


luke18 17
For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that ... seen; nor anything secret, which shall not be known and come into the light of day

a reply to: Inc_9x

A right wing truther thinks all his opinions are facts and his own negative way of looking at the world is some kind of profound truth resulting in coming to the conclusion our morality is messed up when in actual reality he is just ignoring everything that would be counter evidence to his prejudice and bigotry.

a reply to: dfnj2015

I'm not really sure what this means. Are you calling me a right wing bigot? If you are, I think you may need to look up the terms "right wing" and "bigotry" because what I have said is neither of those things.

a reply to: SeaWorthy

I respect your position but if you are going to put your faith and the future of humanity in an ancient text, I think you have missed my point. Socrates was persecuted for challenging people to think for themselves and not to blindly follow text and abide by the status quo.

a reply to: Inc_9x

And for all of this, you can blame Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Once gone down that road, there's no coming back.

One last observation. You obviously missed the part that this is no longer about "building a society". No body is trying to "build" anything except their savings accounts. There's a reason no one is on about "building a society"; "Justice Clarence Thomas stated that he doesn’t know what Americans can say they have in common as a country."
www.breitbart.com...

a reply to: Inc_9x

So certain are you knowing the right thing. But not blaming...

As the holes in the web grow bigger, we allow bigger *rseholes and greater evil to pass through. There was a time when perverts, paedophiles, terrorists and murderers would not have been tolerated – now they pass amongst us freely and unimpeded –

What are you suggesting, a good ol fashion witch hunt?

a reply to: Inc_9x

Life:
Shakespeare referred to life as "This mortal coil."
Scientists call it the double helix.
As for a layman's term , I suggest "All screwed up"

Coil ,helix, screwed. Get the idea? SCREWED FROM DAY ONE. EVERYONE!!!

My own personal theory is that we won't be whole (hole) (holy)
until toroidal DNA is achieved.

a reply to: intrptr

No, not at all.

I am saying that there needs to be a fundamental understanding of what is right and what is wrong that transcends race, religion, gender and sexuality.

I am saying that whilst individual freedoms are important, they should not be advanced at the cost of, and at the detriment to, an underlying sense of human morality.

If you say that everyone is free to do as they want, then you can't really complain when some people choose to be arseholes and do evil things to each other.

I understand that individual rights are important but those individual rights are born out of the fact that as citizens in society we each subscribe to a moral code which is common to us all.

It's a bit like being a member of a club. You pay your membership fee, you agree to abide by the club rules and the constitution and in return you derive certain benefits. I do not think it is an unfair criticism to say that there are many factions in our society who have been empowered to adopt a disproportionate view of their entitlement to the benefits of existing in our society without having very much regard for their obligations under rule book.

I want to live in a world where people aren't scared and where people are nice to each other. I happen to believe that such a place can only exist within a moral framework that applies to us all equally.

I know I am not gonna change the world, hence why my OP was made in the "rant" section and isn't masquerading as anything other than that.

I just think it would be nice if we could step outside our front doors and get on with each other, safe in the knowledge that we all subscribe to a common sense of what is right and what is wrong.

There are those who will work to divide us and make us afraid when what we need to do, now more than ever, is to talk, listen and understand the truths that we hold in common.

a reply to: Inc_9x

I am saying that there needs to be a fundamental understanding of what is right and what is wrong that transcends race, religion, gender and sexuality.

Fundamentalism...

sich heil.

a reply to: intrptr
You're an idiot.

Fundamental: Forming a necessary base or core; of central importance

Fundamentalism: A belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture in a religion.

They are 2 different words with different meanings!

As for your little Nazi salute - my OP talks about social democracy and socialism which is literally the complete opposite of a right wing view!

By your own admission, I know that you only do and think what the media, films and computer games tell you to do or think - but labelling everyone a Nazi who tries to challenge you to think for yourself really only serves to show you up.

Maybe try reading a book or something.