The scam that is "good human"
Nerds, dorks, and all kinds of geek like to say things like “be a good human”.
That expression belongs with such vulgarities as “good person”, “better world”, and “greater good”.
Not a one of them has any meaning.
Think about a simple word, like “rock”. You know what a rock is. It’s easy to find examples. Every major language has a word for rocks. (Probably most all of them, as far as I know.) Nobody has any problem talking about rocks because, worst case scenario, you pick one up off the and say “This is a rock.”
Over a hundred years ago British moral philosophers got to chewing on that word “good”. They came to realize that it wasn’t a word like “rock”.
You can see and touch a rock. Nothing visible or tangible corresponds to “good”. You can’t point to “good”. You can’t identify a “good chair” the way you can pick out a “red chair” or “broken chair”.
This led to a famous problem in ethics. If we can’t talk about “good” the way we talk about “rock”, “chair”, “star” or “E. coli” …
… then what is going on with all of these moral judgments and ethical beliefs we claim to hold?
Simple.
A moral word like “good” gets its meaning from the desires and intentions of the person speaking it.
“Good” means something like
“I recommend this”, or
“I prefer this choice to the alternatives”, or
“This is how we are expected to behave around here”.
Whatever meaning the word has, it has because of inner feelings and wants, or cultural norms (which are also connected to feelings and wants).
This position, called emotivism, was and remains a popular view among philosophers. It’s also a widespread sub-belief in today’s culture. If you’ve ever come across a sniffing smart-boy who reminds you that “morals are subjective” and “ethics is relative”, you’ve encountered an emotivist in the wild.
In these hallowed pages, I’ve often made reference to the fact that our technocrats use moral words but don’t seem to understand what they mean.
That’s by design.
When our overlords use morally-loaded language, it doesn’t mean what is really Good and True.
It means “whatever advances our interests”.
I am always suspicious when I hear anyone, no matter how well-intended they seem on the surface, using phrases like “good human” and “make the world a better place”.
The absolute best you can say about such sayings is that they are banal platitudes with no content. Empty signaling of the sort you expect from the social media generation.
The reality is often more sinister.
Imagine if you will a person who is unable to distinguish between genuine goodness and his own personal desires and interests.
All those moral words, the platitudes, the vehement faith in the vision of “betterness”, that’s all a mask.
What’s doing the work is a very interested form of desire.
The overlords learned ages ago, maybe even at the beginning, that appealing to Higher Powers can advance the interests of the powers of this world.
You don’t have to imagine that person too hard. He, she, they, xir is all too real. Today, even the wokest warrior of social justice knows how to hijack the language of morals as a strategic weapon.
Ever notice how “good” tends to boil down to some flimsy ideal of being nice?
As long as you never hurt anyone’s feelings, never say anything they might find offensive or hurtful, never contradict anyone else’s convictions, you’re being nice and therefore you are good.
If you can frame your own personal will and interests as a neutral, universal, necessary force, then you’ve tapped into deep, powerful, emotional motivations.
The forces of guilt and shame and moral indignation have few rivals.
Congratulations. You’ve discovered a nearly unmatched recipe for influence over others.
If you can harness those forces to the service of the “be nice” cult, you get… well, you’ve seen it. Shrieking toddlers in grown adult bodies, perpetual victims unable to take the slightest challenge without an emotional breakdown.
But there’s a twist.
I’m happy to make use of those idea lifted from Marx/Nietzsche/Freud to carpet-bomb the pretensions and illusions of the foo-foo elites.
Their ideas of “better people” and “a better world” don’t track with anything that I value, care about, or judge worthwhile in my life.
I sure don’t care about the Cult of Nice, which is cover for the forces slowly dismantling our civilization.
Revealing their moral signaling for the sustained lie that it is helps get at the truth of their distortions and manipulations.
But I’m no moral skeptic or relativist.
I don’t believe that moral words are “just feelings bro”, or that morality itself is mere custom of the community.
Some moral words do have meanings, and some moral judgments are true.
The problem is focusing all attention on the most abstract, and therefore most vague and empty, moral words like “good” and “right”.
Putting all the attention on “good” ignores all of the many different words we use to judge and evaluate people and actions.
“Cruel” or “generous” aren’t nearly so hard to define as “good”.
If you judge an action cruel or a man generous, there’s factual content to consider. Did he punch a puppy? Did he help feed 80 people at the homeless shelter on Christmas?
The definitions of these words have a built-in appraisal, too. You don’t find many people talking about cruelty as an admirable, desirable trait or action.
Once you wander into the finer grains of moral evaluation, away from the abstractions that so enchant the nerdlings, you find it harder and harder to make their pronouncements add up.
As we’ve seen over the last two years of disease panic, the elite class’s concept of “good” and “better” ends up being cruel, unthinking, sanctimonious, resentful, thoughtless, and unjust.
Sure, I have my own ideas of good and better ways of living and existing.
The difference is that I take the words as placeholders.
There’s no such thing as a “good event” or even a “good state of affairs”. “Better world” and “greater good” are expressions that literally have no meaning.
To understand them is to refer to what the speaker wants and prefers.
There is no “good person” or “good human” unless you can unpack that idea into the concrete traits, actions, and qualities that count as good.
If you do that, you’ll have to talk about distinctions of real worth. Cruelty is an unworthy trait and a vice. Generosity and justice are generally worth and virtuous.
So let’s see it. Spell it out. Tell us what is worthy and why we should care
Don’t see many of the technocrats ready to take that leap as they starve out millions (or more…) and lock us into endless slavery in the name of the Greater Good, do you?