Barbarian, Troglodyte, Morlock
Longtime reader Nate Winchester says:
I don’t know… I guess like the lovely Mrs Wright, I’ve known a few… I guess they weren’t full SJWs, but one might call them larvae… and they’re not bad people!
It’s like the zombie movies ya know? They’re infected, I get that we’ll have to shoot them in the head, just wish we could figure out some way to cure them before it gets to that point, ya know? Especially because they seem to fight it sometimes.
It just gets… old.
I agree. The SJWs are not bad people. Not at first. Even Lucifer was not totally wretched and evil at first.
That is the important thing to remember.
They are good people with a bad theory who are addicted, like a cocaine addict, to the rush of ego-gratification that comes from self-righteousness.
The Morlocks once were human, once dwelt on the surface, under the sun, and once ate wholesome meats, and did not feast on human flesh. It takes several steps of evolution to go from being a good man to being a subhuman troglodyte cannibal. Not all have taken all the steps
It is a three stage trap into which they fall, and at each stage, for the best of reasons.
The first stage is an appeal to their sense of fairplay not to make a decision until all the facts are in, not to condemn the wicked until they are proved wicked, and to question everything, to question authority.
But this first stage trap closes when their sense of fairplay comes to the conclusion that no authority, not the authority of morality, not the authority of reason, not the authority of logic, can sit in judgment on any matter. They become so open minded that their brains fall out. They cease to reason in the name of fairplay.
Call this the Appeal to Equality. If all men are equal, no man’s opinion is better than any others’, and so there is no such thing as a right man and the wrong man, a right answer and a wrong answer, a civilized culture or barbaric one. The Appeal to Equality says that to think one answer correct and the other wrong, one behavior a vice and another a virtue, is a hasty judgment, even bigotry.
Reasoning becomes a hate crime.
Once they cease to reason, that is, cease to look at facts for answers, they are thrown back on their emotions and nothing else for a standard of judgment by which to organized their lives, and to build their model of the universe.
At this point, have lost the civilized gift of reason, they are barbarians.
At first, for their moral code, the barbarians will take the model of the surrounding Christian culture, by inertia, but since they have eschewed all authority, the authority of priests and prophets is suspect, and they must seek elsewhere: self-help gurus, political messiahs, fads, or the strange hybrid I call Saganists, who somehow believe that science can make moral judgments by means of mathematical measurements of matter in motion.
Such freakish Saganists do not do real science, and, if their online spokesmen and combox partisans are any clue, do not even understand the basics of the scientific method.
But what these science idolaters do is lend a glamour and a pretense of objectivity and expert wisdom to whatever fraud or nonsense the science idolaters are pretending this decade is part of science, anything from Darwinist explanations of morality to a denial of human free will to the tiresome global warming fraud to the endless environmentalist panic-stories.
Without any authority to guide their thinking in matters where they remain ignorant, and without any reason to banish ignorance, the barbarians become overly vulnerable and overly gullible to mere salesmanship. Step by step they move out of the sunlight and into the darkness of the caverns of the mind.
The rejection of authority does not, however, extend to these Saganist science idolaters. Science is allegedly the study of the facts of the physical universe without any bigotry or prejudice.
However, the mental troglodytes abandon the facts, but are still gullible about any claims issued under the guise of science, because it is unbigoted, ergo not a hate crime, ergo does not offend their Appeal to Equality that makes their brains fall out.
How they simultaneously regard scientific fact-finding as unbigoted when they regard facts to be bigoted is a mystery of their religion.
But the Appeal to Science, or, rather, the Appeal to Progress, has nothing to do with real science. And, in fact, it hates real science and flees it, especially when real science shows some politically inconvenient fact about the differences between races or sexes or the nature of the weather or the real conditions of the environment. It has even less to do with progress.
This appeal to science is merely an advertisement ploy, like a Madison Avenue huckster telling a gape-mouthed child that Wonder Bread builds bodies in Twelve Ways, or that scientific studies show most dentists drink Coke, or whatever.
It is meaningless, merely a way of lowering sales-resistance by playing on the self-doubt of dolts with no scientific training.
And so the second part of the trap closes: the salesman preys on the barbarian sense of worthlessness and helplessness their abandonment of reason inevitably creates in them. This sense of worthlessness lards whatever self-help guru, political messiah, fadmonger, or science-idolater they wish to have as their messiah with the promise of being able to make their worthlessness into worth, their helplessness into power.
That is why, as the barbarian intellects get darker and darker, and they turn into cave-brained Troglodytes, the next step of the trap slowly begins to close. The Troglodytes are obsessed with power, think of nothing but power, worship nothing but power, cast all their thoughts and expressions in terms of nothing but power.
But power to do what? Well, obviously the barbarian is a noble savage, and he wants to save the world, to mend what is wrong with the human condition. They take vestiges of Christian ideas, such as compassion for the poor and downtrodden, and the deep pity for victims that is unknown in the pagan world, or in any land whose God never suffered as a victim, and affix that idea out of context to their obsession over power relations.
The conclusion that turns the barbarian into a troglodyte, the one idea that shoves him into the subterranean darkness that robs him of his remaining natural nobility, is the idea that all misery comes from want of power.
The troglodyte theory of the fall of man goes like this: back in the primordial state of nature before civilization arose, all men were equal in power hence all were happy. Now, not all men are happy. This must be due to a power imbalance: the strong who have power are oppressing the weak who lack power.
The reason why the poor are poor is not because of their bad work habits, welfare addiction, or lack of a two-parent family, but because of their lack of power. They are oppressed by the stronger rich.
The reason why the inner city is a bastion of crime is not because of Leftwing sabotage of the Anglo-American legal system, but because of racism, which is defined as a lack of power of Blacks. They are oppressed by the stronger whites.
The reason why the heathen world is a bastion of terror and injustice is not because non-Chrisitian have a cruel and primitive worldview based on despair and fatalism, it is because the Third World lacks power. The Christians are oppressing the weaker heathens.
The reason why women are unhappy is not because the sexual revolution has made them all valueless and unprotected from male predators, while at the same time forcing them into unnatural and unsatisfying roles which they do badly, and discouraging them from following roles they do well, it is because they lack power. Males oppress the weaker females.
The reason by sexual perverts and the victims of neurotic or psychotic sexual malfunctions are unhappy is not because of their mental diseases or the obviously unnatural and illogical contour of their sexual desires. It is because they lack power. The straights are oppressing the alternate-orientations and noncisgendered cross dressers.
Why are White, Straight, Christian Males unhappy? Answer: they cannot be, because they have power!
See how absurdly simple and absurdly stupid life becomes once all questions have only one answer? No matter what is wrong with your food, add salt. Lack of salt will fix all recipes of all foods no matter who is eating what nor what mistakes where made in preparing it! No matter what your disease is, take snake oil! Snake oil cures all disease known on Earth, and half the diseases known on Mars! All you need to solve all the complex historical inequities and injustices of fallen man is not virtue, truth, and beauty, but power, power and power!
If only, so the Troglodytes reasoning goes, the invisible and mystical conspiracy of the powerful and privileged could be overturned, the powerless would become powerful, and the human condition would be corrected, all would be well, and your meaningless and senseless life would be make meaningful and sensible. Progress will cure everything!
Such is the promise of the Appeal to Progress.
So falls the third stage of the trap. The salesmen and gurus and messiahs of their empty lives have to fill the emptiness with power. It is clearly not personal power for themselves the Troglodytes want. They want their messiahs to have power, their party, their political leader.
They merely want anyone not a member of some defined victim group to lose power. They want to destroy the current world and its power structure. The degeneration reaches the final stage. The Troglodytes turn into Morlocks.
It is an appeal to the Crusader instinct, the desire to be a martyr or a hero. The Morlocks are not so inhuman that they lack the human instinct for self-sacrifice, and the craving to correct great wrongs.
But having left reason behind in the name of equality, and having left Christian humility as well as pagan honor behind in the name of progress, they have no reason to expose themselves to self sacrifices of real martyrdom or real heroism.
What they do instead is act like spoiled brats and sick degenerates, antimoralists, who, when decent society shuns them for the sick self indulgence in sin and perversion, can claim to be brave (brave enough to give in to their darkest and sickest desires) and can claim to be martyrs (as if being mildly criticized for public displays of disgusting behavior is the same as death by torture).
And for the same reason so real injustices are never selected for correction. People who are never the targets for Morlock outrage happen to be the ones who hold real power, such as Oil Sheikhs funding international terrorism and funding regimes that slay homos, kill rape victims, and make women wear bags over their heads. The Morlocks do not fight or even criticize these powerful figures: indeed, they defend them, and call criticism of the terror masters an insanity, i.e. Islamophobia.
Fighting real power would require real courage and real sacrifice. The Morlock wishes to make only pretend sacrifices and get the applause for being courageous when he is not.
And soon he finds the softest targets are those who preemptively surrender. The Morlock prefers those who are willing to bow to ‘white blackmail’.
White blackmail is when you use a man’s own good nature against him: putting a grenade under a wounded man while flying a white flag, asking for equal time but not granting him time to speak, being a bully while being a crybaby, and so on.
White blackmail is the Saul Alinsky tactic convincing your opponent to abide by the rules you yourself are breaking: to convince the foe to tell the truth when you tell only lies, to convince the foe to be a chivalrous gentleman when you are a harlot, to convince the foe to bind and fetter himself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the Constitutional technicalities of civilian law courts when you are a terrorist out of uniform targeting innocent civilians. White Blackmail is shrieking with insane indignation over the photos from Abu Graib.
This is the Appeal to Self-Esteem which we Christians call the Appeal to Self Righteousness, also called the Appeal to Satanic Pride. It is Narcissism, pure and simple.
But then two odd and horrible things happen to the Morlocks to confirm they will never, absent the miraculous grace of God, ever extricate themselves from the trap. These two horrid things brick shut the exits, to ensure there is no escape from the Morlock world.
The first horrid thing is that the the gullible dunderheaded Morlock who seeks meaning in fads and progress-worship finds that progress usually means progress away from the normal strictures and rigors of morality.
In the progressive world, you are free to sleep with whores and betray your wife in the name of women’s rights, and progressivism gives you the ability to denounce moral, decent, honest people who do not betray their wives, as bigots on the grounds that decency is ‘slut shaming’.
Even as gang members force recruits to commit crimes in order to prevent their ever turning to the police for help, so too do the Morlocks make new Morlocks voice public approval of the most disgusting sins and crimes, from pederasty to collaboration with the enemy in wartime, to prevent the new Morlock from any hope of returning to decent society.
The conscience of the Morlock is smothered.
The odd reason why the Morlocks all talk as if they are as innocent and pure as Adam in Eden before the fall is that, like animals, they pretend to have no consciousness of sin.
At that point as one falls deeper and deeper into the trap, the salesmen and fadmongers need only invent new and ever more meaningless phrases to cast a bad light on good things while using equally dishonest vocabulary to cast a good light on bad things.
Thus, what is actually correct falls by the wayside in favor of false advertising techniques.
This is political correctness, and its point is to smother the workings of the conscience, and dull the awareness of sin, under a blanket of self righteousness and self congratulation.
The Morlocks lose the gift of speech.
They can no longer call things by their right names, and what names they use for things are mere jabberwocky, squawking noise signifying nothing. Like the wretches in Orwell’s Oceania, they have no words by which to express themselves. The slaves can only talk in their master’s voice.
The second horrid thing is the retreat into Unreality, the delight in falsehood for its own sake.
You see, as the Morlock with his jabberwocky speech and darkened intellects seeks to get the thrill of being righteous without doing the actual work of being right, he seeks out only imaginary problems, like global warming, to solve, and ignores real problems, like a global war on terror masters.
The Morlocks lose their eyes.
In order to sustain this fragile bubble of unreality in which the addicted Morlock can picture himself as a bold crusader for justice and an imposed upon victim of oppression, the addict must lie and lie and lie again, and must accept the lies sold to him by the salesmen and ad-men and fad-mongers and attention-seekers,and his own wee circle of like-thinking narcissists.
It is for this reason that Morlocks always lie.
They feel about lies they way honest men feel about truth. Truth sets honest men free. Truth cages Morlocks from their wild freedom of unfettered make-believe into the narrow ambit of what is real. Lies promise escape from reality. Lies give Morlocks power, or so they imagine.
Since, at this point, the poor fool is so far down the throat of the trap, he has no use of reason to correct these lies, no honest or uncorrupted emotions left, no healthy instincts untouched by the attempt to smother his conscience, ergo he has no one but salesmen, flatterers, and grievance-mongers to turn to for advice and help. And all they do is stuff him further down the hole.
He is facefirst in the throat of a fishtrap, and every wiggle drives him further down.
Whatever the original generous or happy impulse toward fairplay, openmindedness, or compassion for the poor once governed him is gone, replaced by the addictive desire to lie and to be told lies, in order to sustain the fires of self-righteousness.
His humanity is replaced with mere sadism, a desire to hurt the alleged enemy of his alleged crusade.
The illusion-world replaces the real world, and anything that threatens the illusion-world, what they call ‘the narrative’, must be obliterated at all costs. Their sense of self worth, their picture of themselves as superior intellectual beings, moral giants, crusaders and martyrs, their network of friendships and mutual flatter societies, their purpose in life and hope of salvation, everything, everything, everything depends on defending the narrative.
But the narrative cannot be defended, since it rests on logical fallacies a schoolboy could see through, and make-believe lies so transparent a single honest question could shatter them like glass. And so the defense of the indefensible consists of a frantic and unsleeping effort to prevent that question from ever being asked, or the schoolboy from ever being educated enough to see a simple error in logic.
The defense consists of nothing but attack, attack, character assassination, and attack. It is all ad hominem. The Morlocks have no other weapon in their arsenal. It is all they know how to do.
Unreality becomes a mark of virtue and a badge of courage to them. They admire those in their hive who tell the biggest lies, and the more shocking and outrageous the lie, the better it is.
Honest men pride themselves on their ability to look truth in the face, no matter how humbling the experience, or how painful to their emotions. Morlocks pride themselves on their ability to maintain their false pride and avoid pain to their emotions, and pride themselves on their ability to flee truth as rapidly and entirely as possible.
It is for this reason Morlocks never apologize, never retract a false statement, never correct themselves. Morlocks always double-down on a bad bet. To apologize or to admit wrong would be to grant power to the truth, their enemy, and to admit that a lie is powerless — yet lies (according to their sick thinking) are their friends and saviors.
But the horrid addiction to unreality, combined with the horrid loss of the power of speech and thus of reason, the love of lies for their own sake, leads to one more and darker step.
When one has the authority, at least in one’s own mind, to rewrite the rules of reality to suit your own darkest desires, what you naturally desire, if you are addicted to self righteousness, is an excuse to hate without limit, without regret, without any scraps of decency or chivalry giving the enemy a chance to speak for himself. You want to punch a gagged victim, someone so evil he is not even owed a fair fight. You want a Nazi to hate. You demand a devil.
And this unleashes sadism, the pathological desire to inflict pain for its own sake.
Hate is permitted when one hates a total devil who is beyond all pity, and so the creature addicted to morlockery must generate devils, one after another after another, to keep the failing fires hot.
Soft targets are always preferred over those who might fight back, and snark and sarcasm are not merely preferred over reason and logic, reason and logic are unavailable because they are incomprehensible.
And so people who do devilish deeds, as Mohammedans who throw homos off buildings, are never criticized. Instead, innocent bystanders with no reason to enter into a lengthy and wearisome fight, such as science fiction writers who have no particular desire to write stories full of homos and lacking all science, are mugged.
In order to paint the innocent target as a devil, he must be accused of every evil one can imagine or concoct. Unfortunately, now that the Morlock is blind to facts and his language is nothing but stereotyped or mimeographed jabberwocky phrases of no particular meaning, the only evils of which he is aware are his own. And so he accuses others of his own evils.
A personal aside: I have found it surrealistic to be on the receiving end of the vomit of Morlock accusations, only to discover that their thought process consists of nothing but accusation, which they need because morlockery consists of nothing but hate, and the accusations justify the hate.
But never once, not even by accident, did any Morlock accuse me of any evil of which I am all-too-acutely aware in my own dark heart. I am not a kindly man, and not a paragon of virtue. I am, however, virtuous in two areas: I am abnormally intelligent, rational, just and fair, dispassionate as a Houyhnhnm, or, more to the point, as emotionless as a hanging judge. I am also honest to a fault. If this sounds like boasting, you misjudge my character: sounding like boasting is one of the faults of an honest man.
Naturally, I heard myself accused only of things I have never done and never felt the least impulse to do: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, being bigoted, unfair, or being dishonest.
Good grief.
I have far darker sins on my soul than those of which I am falsely accused.
No accusation, naturally, was supported by evidence. Morlocks don’t do evidence.
But the Morlocks for whatever reason cannot imagine any sins other than their own. And so they accuse a snow man of being scalding hot and dark, when his true sin is his hueless whiteness and his coldness.
It is for this reason the Morlock always projects his flaws and his motives on all other men.
Nor is the fight ever fair, ever straightforward, masculine, direct. Sadism does not work that way. The approach is always en mass, a sneak attack, under the color of negotiation or friendship, always elliptical, cowardly, craven. This is because self-righteousness based on falsehood seeks the maximum self-congratulation for the minimal effort.
If you are fighting a devil, lies are not only permitted, they are meritorious. All becomes fair. Everything is permitted. And so the Morlock turns the rest of humanity into Eloi, merely food animals, whom he can torment for his amusement, but also for the humorless rush of self-righteous indignation which is the most addictive of all possible human and posthuman emotions: the invincible belief of one’s own total purity, total rightness, and total justification, at the same time linked to a total abandonment of all scruples, fairness, wholesomeness, courage, and honor.
At this point, all virtue is gone. The man goes from subhuman to troglodyte to Morlock, and there is no way he can climb out of the trap under his own power.
Therefore, good men, pray for them.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
