Friday, April 13, 2012

Ethical shell game

I wandered into Starbucks today and found myself staring at a wooden wall poster full of ethics, virtue and goodness, based on stuff like this. I almost walked out.

Now businesses like this, to please the liberal egos of their latte-lapping customer base, must play the Benneton and Whole Foods game and sell you righteousness with your morning brew. You'd think they were Global NGO's just selling coffee to underwrite their good works.

Talk about splendida vitia.


PS. A thought about the structure of liberal moralism, a kind of narcissism (self obsession plus a core of self hatred) in which ethical status is show by self-criticism, when the self is the group, and a show of selflessness by concentrating on object of concern that are distant from oneself or one's group, the more distant the better. And if they hate you, even better than that. When it comes to animals and The Earth, one even moves beyond one's species...And it's covered under an ever widening Circle of Concern.

A perverted version of Christianity, like much of liberalism.

Credit for this particular idea from "moral leapfrogging" in Steve Sailer's The Self-Righteous Hive Mind:
In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as Avatar, other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).

This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like. 

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't this what we must expect from anonymous Christianity? I mean, isn't that there wooden wall basically saying to each customer »Far be it from thee, Lord. This shall not be unto thee« (Matthew 16:22)?

Anonymous said...

And isn't »offering balanced food and beverage options« preferable to all those rules and regulations about Trayf on Leviticus (js2963ff)?

Anonymous said...

The "righteousness" also reduces to negation of unrighteousness: diversity and inclusion are attain'd by removing exclusions and barriers, including doctrinal beliefs, no doubt; "ethical sourcing" doesn't mean agape or edification in moral virtues, but only non-exploitation.

... A negative meaning for righteousness congrues with our indefinitely deferring on Father MLK's dream of a nation that will judge his four children with a view to the content of their character. ... We stand in the United Bardos of America, which if we don't want to have to conclude that Hitler was right and we need another great race war of whites killing whites for negative Lebensraum, must judge only population groups. "We hold that all population groups are created equal in potential IQ. and thus every individual's main unalienable right is to be affirm'd in this way in his population group membership."

For an individual person, especially white persons, good will, decency, following Jesus, etc, means above all believing in this tenet, implicitly and explicitly. Otherwise, Shadow Father Hitler will be proved right. Either this belief, or American Hitler. Evidently this is our crossroads.

I suppose if we believed in MLK's dream, we would be concern'd to become moral in character, and have a social culture of moral character, that is with some substantive content. But instead, the focus and hype is entirely negative (don't be exclusivist, racist, sexist, homophobic, etc) plus a nod to altruistic ministry to the unfortunate (volunteering, giving something back etc).

Among Aristotelian gentlemen, a high-IQ show off would only be irritating or at best amusingly absurd. So also among the Persians, Israelites, Germans and Greeks celebrated in "1001 Goals." But Franz Boas would protect our civilization from Nietzsche by the flattering argufication that all civilizations are equally basically high-IQ civilizations.

Starbucked said...

Let he who lives in glass houses, cast the first virtue.

Starbucks is doing what it has to do to continue to make dough. If its customers wanted the baristas to wear bunny ears, the baristas would be wearing bunny ears.

"Global citizenship' coupled with 'Earth's stewardship' sells frappucinos.

Welcome to the world.

Alternatives said...

Try Chock-Full-of-Nuts.

Anonymous said...

»Peccavi, mater meus.«
—Julin Sorel, La Rouge et la Noire

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