Monday 14 October 2013

moral condemnation

Nietzsche understood correctly that so much of the mass indoctrination into modes of morality is about moving the swamps. In making this judgement, Nietzsche was drawing on his understanding of mass psychology -- that the masses regularly feel a need to release the tensions that come from being squeezed together into a massive conglomeration of human feelings, needs and desires. When the tension starts to build because of the pressures exerted on individual minds in relation to the cause of becoming massively ONE (one state, one national identity, one Führer), another force starts to demand its recompense. It achieves the alleviation of tension through blaming others. "Since I have had to sacrifice so much, to become one in mind and heart and soul with my community, others who seem different from me and who may not have suffered as I have, will now also have to suffer."
Thus the nature of so much of mass morality is to reward oneself for all of the efforts of delayed gratification by going on a psychologically bloodthirsty rampage to impugn outsiders -- those whom, presumably, have not conformed to the programme quite as well as Thou has. Or maybe the masses vote out one governmental party and put another into power to express their moral indignation.
The left is as guilty of this as the right, although in some ways the aspect of oneness and collective action belongs to the right, whilst the aspects of scattered moral indignation and infighting belong to the left.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity