Stigma and a non-reciprocal special privilege

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“The claim for individual toleration cannot extend to cancelling other people’s right to judge as they will what a given individual does. Much of the modern demand for individualism—including John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’—is a plea for exemption from social feedback from those negatively judging individual behaviour. Such an exemption is especially inconsistent when it emanates from those actively criticizing the rest of society. However democratic the language in which it is phrased, it is not a demand for equal rights, or a general freedom, but for a non-reciprocal special privilege.”

— Thomas Sowell in Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

Under threat of sanction with “hate speech” laws, we are constantly admonished by the anointed to remove the “stigma” (formerly, and more appropriately, called shame) associated with behaviours that in the recent past would have been considered unnatural and abhorrent. Instead, we are told to “normalize” them. But this requirement for toleration runs only in one direction. In trenchant fashion typical of his genius, Sowell cuts through misdirection and bullshittery with clear insight and plain language.

The Categorical vs. the Incremental

“The vocabulary of the ‘anointed’ is filled with words reflecting their rejection of incremental trade-offs and advocacy of categorical ‘solutions.’ This is most clear in the law and in writings among the legal intelligentsia, where individual and social trade-offs are transformed into categorical legal ‘rights.’ Ronald Dworkin perhaps best expressed this view when he said: Individual rights are political trumps held by individuals. Just as the smallest trump beats the highest card in any other suit, so these ‘rights’ take precedence over the weightiest other considerations which are not in the form of rights. Thus the ‘rights’ of criminals take precedence over crime control, the ‘right’ to various social ‘entitlements’ takes precedence over the interests of taxpayers, the ‘rights’ of those entitled to compensation for past injustices take precedence over the interests of displaced contemporaries who complain of ‘reverse discrimination,’ and so on. Rights trump interests in this vision.”

— Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed (1995)

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

In a recent debate between Stardusk and Dave the Distributist, Dave uses Stardusk’s rhetorical question (the assumed answer to which is always an emphatic “no”) to frame his analysis of how young men in particular should approach living with a black-pilled world-view. Dave makes the crucial observation that it’s necessary for us to decide what we mean by the “juice,” for it is upon this definition that the answer turns. If we mean simple “pleasure” (or even the more nuanced “happiness”) then the juice is unequivocally not worth the squeeze. Why bother with the trouble and risk of seeking and maintaining a romantic relationship when, a mere tap away, there is open prostitution on OnlyFans; and there is an infinite variety of pornography that becomes ever-more pleasurable and realistic as technology improves? (A moment’s reflection leaves one appalled by the multitudinous uses to which VR could be put to satisfy base human instincts.) If, however, we interpret the the word “juice” as “meaning,” then, Dave contends, we have something that is worth living for, however uncertain and tenuous the pathway to meaning may be. Dave argues that every man will face the following, binary decision, and that it should come sooner rather than later:

Are you a pleasure-seeking man who is occasionally haunted by the spectre of hollow meaninglessness?

Or:

Are you a meaning-seeking man who occasionally succumbs to the seduction of pleasure?

This framing made me think of Philip Rieff’s difficult masterpiece, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” which investigates the wrenching changes that Freud’s psychoanalysis has wrought in the way that Western man considers himself and his relationship to society. To use Thomas Sowell’s evocative phrasing, Rieff presents a “conflict of visions” between “therapeutic” (post-Freudian, post-enlightenment) and “commitment” (traditionalist) orientations of the human soul, which I summarize and augment in the table below. (Those versed in Sowell’s work will recognize significant overlap between his “constrained,” or “tragic,” vision and Rieff’s “commitment” orientation.) The “axes of comparison” presented in the left-most column are my own. Rieff does not categorize as I have done; his analysis is confined to describing and probing the differences between therapeutic and commitment orientations.

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A table giving a high-level view of the dichotomy that Rieff identifies does not capture the range and subtlety of his thought, but it is sufficiently clarifying for the argument I am making here, which is that the therapeutic orientation is doomed to failure, or as already failed. We live in a world dominated by the ideologies of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy, wherein each individual is supposed to act rationally in his own self-interest and to possess self-evident, inalienable rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, where does this liberalism lead? What is its inevitable end? Given the evidence of degeneration and decay that is easily visible all around us, it is difficult to deny that liberalism contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. We are now reaping what the enlightenment has sown.

It is only by lashing ourselves to the mast of systems of belief that may lie outside the Overton window and by adopting inviolable commitments that we have any hope of discovering a deep and nourishing meaning that stands outside of ourselves and makes our lives worth living. But in doing so we may run afoul of what is almost universally considered to be acceptable: we may be guilty of thought-crime, if not of actual crime. It may not be for a century, or even longer, that this choice will come to be generally accepted as the correct one. And so, I would put Dave’s question in a different way:

Do you have the courage to be found on the wrong side of history?