Three Choices
We live in a posthuman age. By that, I do not mean that men can extend life and expand consciousness by bionanotechnology, neural shunts or downloading self-identities into the psycho-cyberverse. I mean, nearly a third of us has sold the heritage of mankind, what it means to be human, for a mess of pottage called political correctness.
The posthumans are bipeds who renounce the gift of reason, and think themselves superhuman, beyond good and evil. Neither the law of cause and effect nor the law of supply and demand has any bearing on their talking points and chanted slogans. I call them Morlocks and Eloi in homage to the first science fiction writer to speculate about regressive human evolution.
At root, mortal men may chose between only three philosophies of life: Reason, Passion, and Appetite.
These three philosophies apply to three ways of life: Living by the truth and the spirit, which is Christianity, living by duty and discipline, which is Stoicism, and living by the appetites of belly and groin, which is Hedonism.
By passion here, I do not mean strong emotion. I mean that habit of devotion to some beloved family, clan, city, or nation which demands and promotes a craving for honor, sacrifice, and noble deeds. By passion I mean spiritedness. It differs from reason because it does not rest on calculation or abstraction.
It differs from appetite by being noble and selfless rather than base and selfish. Hence, a man who lives by passion is rarely an emotional man, but, rather, is disciplined, and conforms his appetites to the bounds of nature, and habituates his drive and force to the needs of duty.
One would never mistake a man of duty for a man of reason. Men of duty are stubborn as old oak stumps. For him, the matter is not open to discussion. Orders are orders. Men of reason are patient as saints, and will discuss any matter until exhaustion.
Living by the spirit of truth before the revelation of Christ is likewise an exercise in stoicism, as when the Jews had no promise of life after death, by lived by the iron discipline of the Mosaic Law, or as when Socrates was able to deduce all the elements of monotheism, and drank hemlock rather than violate the iron demands of what that deduction implied.
Paganism combines morality and ritual, philosophy and poetry, only in Buddhism, which, in effect, is a quietist type of Stoicism. The eightfold path is a life of discipline: rightness in belief, motive, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and spirit, but worldly honor and shame are no part of it.
Having rejected Christianity, and being unsuited to discipline and ignorant even of the concept of duty, no form of Stoicism is available to the posthumans. One or two of them toy with Buddhism, but that is more to tweak the noses of Christians, than any real devotion to the concept of serenity through renunciation.
Stoicism is suited to a military society, like that of the Spartans, or the ancient Chinese, where life and death were held as less significant than honor and shame.
Ergo the pre-posthumans, back before political correctness was called by that name, lived by and promoted hedonism.
This had its roots a generation or two ago. Hedonism is why Marilyn Monroe, the glamor girls of Hollywood in those days, the swinging chicks of the 1960s have both an innocence and a sexual allure.
But hedonism runs out. The innocence is lost. Normal sexual appetites either lure a man into the dignity and manhood of marriage and fatherhood, or sag and turn into ennui. When frustrated by ennui, the appetite turns to perversion, hoping the shock value and visceral disgust will stimulate jaded nerves.
Then that runs out. Homosexuality is no longer shocking nor interesting. The neurotic victims of gender dysphoria are now the object of attention and adoration, and the latest fashion is to castrate young boys and dressed them up as girls, or sterilize young girls and rear them to be butch. I frankly thought that publicizing and normalizing pederasty would be next, and this perversion took me by surprise, because the numbers of sufferers is so microscopic. I was also sure polygamy would be legalized by now.
As I said, mortal men may chose between only three philosophies of life: Reason, Passion, and Appetite. Or they can chose not to have any philosophy of life at all, that is, not to reason, not to live by any code, or ideal, or way of life, and, in sum, not to live at all. Such men seek death for themselves and the world, usually in an indirect fashion, but sometimes more bluntly.
Such wretches are called Nihilists. Their slogan: the one truth is that there is no truth.
Nihilist are not those who sport Goth hair dye and black lipstick, and moan that life is meaningless. That is an emotional attitude. Nihilism is a philosophy, or rather, an anti-philosophy. Nihilism is to reason as atheism is to religion.
The Left promoted hedonism until it ran out of any pleasures to give, and championed socialism until it went broke, and preached skepticism until all men grew skeptical of it. The freethinkers entered the thought prison of political correctness, and threw the keys away, and called a halt to all thought.
So the Left are basically left with nothing. That nothing is called Nihilism.
Aside from trying to eliminate sex and abolish all images of minorities from syrup bottles and butter boxes, they have no more jihads to launch. They do not stand for anything, do not promote anything, do not have anything so say. All they can do now is scream, or sneer, or seethe. All they can do now is destroy.
The sight of anarchists and totalitarians intermingled with plutocrat socialists and secular Islamonazis is a freakish sight, but it shows that none of them stand for anything nor believe in anything, except one: hatred of Christ.
Christ is truth. So they hate truth. Truth is beauty, So they hate beauty. A man cannot hate truth and beauty without hating virtue, so they hate prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance. Granting their wish, nature makes them foolish and craven hypocrites and addicts.
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.
