The ultimate EMO is playing God, substituting our own moral framework(s) and authorities for His singular, unchanging one. Thus, the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before Me."
"In the nineteenth century, somebody like Bill Gates would be far more likely to run domestic charities, but in our present hyper-EMO world, he spends every waking moment thinking about Africa, and how he can help Africans". I think the many Africans who have lost family members to Gates' insane drive to vaccinate everyone on the planet, as often as possible, would beg to differ. I think Gates wants everyone to be vaccinated because he makes money out of it, not out of philanthropic motives. If he really wanted to help people in Africa he would spend money on getting clean water for them, which would be far more effective.
When I was an adolescent, a long time ago, I posed one of those idiot moral quandary questions kids are prone to imagining to someone--"If there was only one pair of breeding rhinos left in the world, and you could save them or your own child, what would you do?" And of course I was thinking, at that age, that I'd have to sacrifice my child to the Greater Good of the Universe.
A quarter-century later I did have my own child, and I can say, without the least shred of moral ambivalence, "fuck them rhinos."
To have the world run by simulations of my adolescent self is a pretty grim thing.
Mar 14, 2023·edited Mar 14, 2023Liked by eugyppius
Wonderfully argued and communicated, Eugyppius!
This is gold. "The banal truth is that Gates is an unoriginal flabby Western liberal. He’s worried about the environment, about population and about disadvantaged brown people, and he thinks he can solve all these problems by improving healthcare."
This attitude, which is absolutely, positively, what Gates has, really pisses me off. My favorite way to summarize my disgust is this statement. "The last thing Africa needs is another white boy trying to save it." This protective benevolence narrative animates so much of "flabby Western liberal" thought. I find it tiring as hell. And typical. "Disadvantaged brown people" are not pets, needing to be adopted.
This is also gold. "It’s a world where millions of people share the ideological anxieties of eccentric children like Greta Thunberg, manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries, and dream of a future earth devoid of humans like themselves."
This snippet summarizes, wonderfully, an admission made by Melinda French Gates during an interview. She admitted that they *knew* we should lockdown but did not fully anticipate or understand the negative ramifications thereof. This is, chapter and verse, the type of "escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes" you note from Greta Whats-Her-Name! (Of course, we know, and frankly, they should have known, that locking down was a horrible, shitty, knee-jerk idea, but that ship has sailed.) What animated them, what continues to animate them, is a vapid belief that their concerns for Mother Earth, and their pure hearts will make their dumb-assed, banal, short-sighted ideas and decisions work out for the benefit of all in the long run. Bullshit.
"How bad things have to get before this happens, is the terrifying question." The answer from my standpoint is, pretty effing bad.
The love of the distant idea of some group rather than one's actual neighbor is so unhealthy. Of course, they really don't love the distant people. They world hate them too as soon as they meet them up close.
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no.’ The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
“Globally, we are so far above the population and consumption levels which can be supported by this planet that I know in one way or another it’s gonna come back down.… I hope that it can occur in a civil way, and I mean ‘civil’ in a special way. Peaceful. Peace doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy, but it means that conflict isn’t solved through violence, through force but rather in other ways, and so, that’s what I hope for, that we can, I mean—the planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion, depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption you want to have. If you want more liberty and more consumption, you have to have fewer people.
“Conversely, you can have more people … we could even have eight or nine billion probably if we have a very strong dictatorship which is smart. Unfortunately, you never have smart dictatorships. They’re always stupid. But if you had a smart dictatorship and a low standard of living, you could have them. But we want to have freedom, and we want to have a high standard, so we’re going to have a billion people. And we’re now at seven, so we have to get back down. I hope that this can be slow, relatively slow, and that it can be done in a way which is relatively equal so that people share the experience and you don’t have a few rich trying to force everybody else to deal with it. So those are my hopes.”
From what I've observed, the basis of these ideologies is, "I'm smarter, more moral & ethical, and virtuous than others. Therefore, I can live my moral, ethical, virtuous & intelligent life anyway I choose. You, on the other hand, lacking all my fine qualities should do as I say. You must submit to my wise world view. It's for your own good"
The response to this is, "Kiss my ass."
Right now my overriding concern is whether the US voters will be able to elect in 2024 a new president and a majority Congress who will FIX THIS MESS.
And you are correct that it is not a matter of "conservative" or "liberal." It's sensible versus crazy.
You only have to look at the rate africans, arabs and other intruders and invaders in Europe breed, to know that birth rates are tied more to race and culture than factors of civilisation, technology or economy.
Among swedes, the birth rates dropped sharply from the early 1900s to the 1950s with a peak during the 1940s,and the decline has continued. Among african negroes and palesinian arabs in Sweden, there is no such trend at all, not even among the third and fourth generations of colonists.
The theory, as are virtually all currently accepted sociological theories, is simply wrong.
You’re right about the Lizard People. Once I complained to my Very Liberal co-worker that I hate wind turbines because they kill lots of birds, and she said, quite angrily, that if we don’t stop climate change, there won’t be ANY BIRDS! She was willing to sacrifice lots of currently living breathing birds and animals, entire ecosystems and forests to burn for “biofuel,” endless farms, fields and meadows for solar panels…all to “save” some mythical future life form that might be threatened. They would absolutely blow up the Earth to save the Universe.
Bill Gates does not "worry" about disadvantaged brown people.
If he did, instead of spending billions on vaccines, from which he directly profits, he would spend money building (imagine the economic boom) sustainable infrastructure starting with sanitation, clean and available water, nutrition, education and maybe some basic housing.
These are things which do help the people.
But he does not. He basically pushes vaccines. He make more money.
The elites do not have a too big moral system. They are without morals. They worry mostly about their own mortality and resources.
They are without empathy and can you be moral without empathy?
"manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries" I hadn't contemplated it before but this also city-level phenomena like San Francisco. The elites take a certain grim moral satisfaction in living adjacent to third-world conditions (not in of course, that would be dangerous) because they don't want their local city to be in some way privileged above a third-world city. They also will deny until death that San Francisco is anything other than a great place, even unto its total collapse, showing their globalist sophistication.
On target. The enemy is the Liberal worldview that has infected everything. We need to offer a counter-revolution in thinking. We do need a great reset, just not the one Greta and Schwab want.
I ran into this issue teaching first and second year students in university. We discussed the great chain of being, which is a hierarchy with human life at the top. My students objected to it, saying all things are equal. When I asked if that included small creatures, like bacteria and amoeba they assented. Then I asked them if the covid virus was equal to them, with the same right of existence as them. Of course they answered no, but couldn't come up with a coherent case for that conclusion. Then I asked about mosquitos, cockroaches, and other pests and got the same answer. Essentially, "well if its directly affecting me or annoying me or a threat to my health then I can kill it on self defense grounds". Still, they couldn't seem to come up with an argument for why they should have the right to self defense, or why they should be able to own animals as pets or anything else.
The impression I got from this interaction was that claiming all things are equal is what the students believe they needed to say to be maximally moral and good, even though after closer inspection they didn't believe it at all. Despite my leading them into various contradictions, they never openly denied the belief in total equality of everything. I dont think they could muster the will in front of other students.
We ran into several similar problems discussing their apparent moral universalism and their anti-colonialism, e.g. they endorsed intervening in foreign places to stop genocide, but couldn't come up with a reason that didn't also endorse other forms of intervention etc.
The whole pop moral system is an incoherent melange of Christian "be humble and nice" ethics and utilitarianism taken to the maximum, such that all things count as 1 and we need to submit ourselves to being nice even to rocks and single celled organisms.
There's another point: in virtually every non-Western part of the world, people are dependent on their family and their community to an extent that would make us Westerners run away, screaming. These people know that family is everything - not only their baby sitters and caretakers, but much more - their insurance policy, their support system, their ladder, should they want to try to climb to higher social stratae.
Here, we are not. Every Christmas we're treated to articles by bellyaching 20-somethings who feel they *have to spend Christmas with their obnoxious relatives, whom they seem to hate with abandon on account of their outdated values and morals.
For many of us, family is something to run away from in order to lead a satisfying life. (This changes later in life, I think, and is changing in the younger generations now, who value their families immensely). Why should we care for THEM if we could care for a rock on an atoll in the South Pacific that is neither embarrassing, obnoxious, racist or transphobic? Much more convenient.
The ultimate EMO is playing God, substituting our own moral framework(s) and authorities for His singular, unchanging one. Thus, the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before Me."
"In the nineteenth century, somebody like Bill Gates would be far more likely to run domestic charities, but in our present hyper-EMO world, he spends every waking moment thinking about Africa, and how he can help Africans". I think the many Africans who have lost family members to Gates' insane drive to vaccinate everyone on the planet, as often as possible, would beg to differ. I think Gates wants everyone to be vaccinated because he makes money out of it, not out of philanthropic motives. If he really wanted to help people in Africa he would spend money on getting clean water for them, which would be far more effective.
When I was an adolescent, a long time ago, I posed one of those idiot moral quandary questions kids are prone to imagining to someone--"If there was only one pair of breeding rhinos left in the world, and you could save them or your own child, what would you do?" And of course I was thinking, at that age, that I'd have to sacrifice my child to the Greater Good of the Universe.
A quarter-century later I did have my own child, and I can say, without the least shred of moral ambivalence, "fuck them rhinos."
To have the world run by simulations of my adolescent self is a pretty grim thing.
Wonderfully argued and communicated, Eugyppius!
This is gold. "The banal truth is that Gates is an unoriginal flabby Western liberal. He’s worried about the environment, about population and about disadvantaged brown people, and he thinks he can solve all these problems by improving healthcare."
This attitude, which is absolutely, positively, what Gates has, really pisses me off. My favorite way to summarize my disgust is this statement. "The last thing Africa needs is another white boy trying to save it." This protective benevolence narrative animates so much of "flabby Western liberal" thought. I find it tiring as hell. And typical. "Disadvantaged brown people" are not pets, needing to be adopted.
This is also gold. "It’s a world where millions of people share the ideological anxieties of eccentric children like Greta Thunberg, manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries, and dream of a future earth devoid of humans like themselves."
This snippet summarizes, wonderfully, an admission made by Melinda French Gates during an interview. She admitted that they *knew* we should lockdown but did not fully anticipate or understand the negative ramifications thereof. This is, chapter and verse, the type of "escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes" you note from Greta Whats-Her-Name! (Of course, we know, and frankly, they should have known, that locking down was a horrible, shitty, knee-jerk idea, but that ship has sailed.) What animated them, what continues to animate them, is a vapid belief that their concerns for Mother Earth, and their pure hearts will make their dumb-assed, banal, short-sighted ideas and decisions work out for the benefit of all in the long run. Bullshit.
"How bad things have to get before this happens, is the terrifying question." The answer from my standpoint is, pretty effing bad.
The love of the distant idea of some group rather than one's actual neighbor is so unhealthy. Of course, they really don't love the distant people. They world hate them too as soon as they meet them up close.
Thank you for this nuanced perspective, eugyppius, and while I still think you underestimate the philanthropaths (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-philanthropath-dreams), I appreciate the amount of thought you put into this analysis.
I know you’re not giving Bill Gates a pass, but you do seem to believe his cover story that he’s trying to help the poor Africans and so on, but then why were the tetanus vaccines his foundation helped distribute to Africans laced with infertility technology (https://rumble.com/v184bw8-infertility-a-diabolical-agenda-2022-wakefield-kennedy-chd-documentary.html)?
And what about Klaus Schwab’s mentor Maurice Strong (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-klaus-schwab), who once mused under the guise of “fiction”:
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no.’ The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Since you mentioned the Club of Rome, you are likely familiar with this Dennis Meadows clip (https://rumble.com/v14uz0z-depopulation-i-hope-it-can-occur-in-a-civil-manner-club-of-romes-dennis-mea.html), but it merits inclusion in case you haven’t seen it:
“Globally, we are so far above the population and consumption levels which can be supported by this planet that I know in one way or another it’s gonna come back down.… I hope that it can occur in a civil way, and I mean ‘civil’ in a special way. Peaceful. Peace doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy, but it means that conflict isn’t solved through violence, through force but rather in other ways, and so, that’s what I hope for, that we can, I mean—the planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion, depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption you want to have. If you want more liberty and more consumption, you have to have fewer people.
“Conversely, you can have more people … we could even have eight or nine billion probably if we have a very strong dictatorship which is smart. Unfortunately, you never have smart dictatorships. They’re always stupid. But if you had a smart dictatorship and a low standard of living, you could have them. But we want to have freedom, and we want to have a high standard, so we’re going to have a billion people. And we’re now at seven, so we have to get back down. I hope that this can be slow, relatively slow, and that it can be done in a way which is relatively equal so that people share the experience and you don’t have a few rich trying to force everybody else to deal with it. So those are my hopes.”
From what I've observed, the basis of these ideologies is, "I'm smarter, more moral & ethical, and virtuous than others. Therefore, I can live my moral, ethical, virtuous & intelligent life anyway I choose. You, on the other hand, lacking all my fine qualities should do as I say. You must submit to my wise world view. It's for your own good"
The response to this is, "Kiss my ass."
Right now my overriding concern is whether the US voters will be able to elect in 2024 a new president and a majority Congress who will FIX THIS MESS.
And you are correct that it is not a matter of "conservative" or "liberal." It's sensible versus crazy.
You lost me (temporarily, will continue later) at:
"Gates, who like all globalist elites is worried about environmental impacts".
My God! Do you actually believe they are worried about that?!?!?!?!?!?!
You only have to look at the rate africans, arabs and other intruders and invaders in Europe breed, to know that birth rates are tied more to race and culture than factors of civilisation, technology or economy.
Among swedes, the birth rates dropped sharply from the early 1900s to the 1950s with a peak during the 1940s,and the decline has continued. Among african negroes and palesinian arabs in Sweden, there is no such trend at all, not even among the third and fourth generations of colonists.
The theory, as are virtually all currently accepted sociological theories, is simply wrong.
You’re right about the Lizard People. Once I complained to my Very Liberal co-worker that I hate wind turbines because they kill lots of birds, and she said, quite angrily, that if we don’t stop climate change, there won’t be ANY BIRDS! She was willing to sacrifice lots of currently living breathing birds and animals, entire ecosystems and forests to burn for “biofuel,” endless farms, fields and meadows for solar panels…all to “save” some mythical future life form that might be threatened. They would absolutely blow up the Earth to save the Universe.
Bill Gates does not "worry" about disadvantaged brown people.
If he did, instead of spending billions on vaccines, from which he directly profits, he would spend money building (imagine the economic boom) sustainable infrastructure starting with sanitation, clean and available water, nutrition, education and maybe some basic housing.
These are things which do help the people.
But he does not. He basically pushes vaccines. He make more money.
The elites do not have a too big moral system. They are without morals. They worry mostly about their own mortality and resources.
They are without empathy and can you be moral without empathy?
"manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries" I hadn't contemplated it before but this also city-level phenomena like San Francisco. The elites take a certain grim moral satisfaction in living adjacent to third-world conditions (not in of course, that would be dangerous) because they don't want their local city to be in some way privileged above a third-world city. They also will deny until death that San Francisco is anything other than a great place, even unto its total collapse, showing their globalist sophistication.
On target. The enemy is the Liberal worldview that has infected everything. We need to offer a counter-revolution in thinking. We do need a great reset, just not the one Greta and Schwab want.
I ran into this issue teaching first and second year students in university. We discussed the great chain of being, which is a hierarchy with human life at the top. My students objected to it, saying all things are equal. When I asked if that included small creatures, like bacteria and amoeba they assented. Then I asked them if the covid virus was equal to them, with the same right of existence as them. Of course they answered no, but couldn't come up with a coherent case for that conclusion. Then I asked about mosquitos, cockroaches, and other pests and got the same answer. Essentially, "well if its directly affecting me or annoying me or a threat to my health then I can kill it on self defense grounds". Still, they couldn't seem to come up with an argument for why they should have the right to self defense, or why they should be able to own animals as pets or anything else.
The impression I got from this interaction was that claiming all things are equal is what the students believe they needed to say to be maximally moral and good, even though after closer inspection they didn't believe it at all. Despite my leading them into various contradictions, they never openly denied the belief in total equality of everything. I dont think they could muster the will in front of other students.
We ran into several similar problems discussing their apparent moral universalism and their anti-colonialism, e.g. they endorsed intervening in foreign places to stop genocide, but couldn't come up with a reason that didn't also endorse other forms of intervention etc.
The whole pop moral system is an incoherent melange of Christian "be humble and nice" ethics and utilitarianism taken to the maximum, such that all things count as 1 and we need to submit ourselves to being nice even to rocks and single celled organisms.
There's another point: in virtually every non-Western part of the world, people are dependent on their family and their community to an extent that would make us Westerners run away, screaming. These people know that family is everything - not only their baby sitters and caretakers, but much more - their insurance policy, their support system, their ladder, should they want to try to climb to higher social stratae.
Here, we are not. Every Christmas we're treated to articles by bellyaching 20-somethings who feel they *have to spend Christmas with their obnoxious relatives, whom they seem to hate with abandon on account of their outdated values and morals.
For many of us, family is something to run away from in order to lead a satisfying life. (This changes later in life, I think, and is changing in the younger generations now, who value their families immensely). Why should we care for THEM if we could care for a rock on an atoll in the South Pacific that is neither embarrassing, obnoxious, racist or transphobic? Much more convenient.
Actually, I think Trudeau IS a shape-shifting lizard ...