Illiberalism is Cancer

I am convinced that the reason for the ludicrous view that the roots of the Orlando massacre are found in conservatism is the toxic mix of the Platonic cognitive style and the care-centric moral matrix, both of which can be improved with some relatively minor tweaks to K-16 curricula.

This problem, which I refer to here as illiberalism, does not exist among Aristotelian thinkers of ANY moral matrix on the left or the right.

But when half (or so) of the evolved psychological mechanisms of social perception, subconscious intuitive understanding, and conscious rational argumentation are effectively unavailable to one’s cognition, and when one’s dot-connecting cognitive wiring is set to “Plato” (aka John Lennon’s “Imagine”), one is left with no alternative but the self-evident (in this way of thinking) conclusion that people who think differently must be, can only be, hate filled bigots who are sick in the head.

And when one “knows” that people who think differently are sick in that way one feels not only justified but morally obligated not merely to deny them access to public discourse but also even to sometimes punish them physically (bloodied Trump supporters) or otherwise (deny the livelihood of bakers, photographers, Internet CEOs, etc). After all, their hateful sickness harms everyone so they deserve it.

This toxic mix is a cancer in our culture, and always has been.  We see it in history in The Terror of the French Revolution, and we see it in the campus protests of today.  

It varies in degree from person to person. Some people are more seriously afflicted with it than others. But there is no doubt that it causes the belief that the country needs to be “fundamentally transformed,” and the smug condescension of “cling to their guns and their religion,” and the steadfast refusal to recognize the Muslim problem for what it really is.

It may be true that every morality/ideology/religion is a consensual hallucination.

And it’s definitely true that morality binds and blinds, and reason is chockablock full of built-in biases, and truth is the first victim of the violation of sacred values, and that everyone is susceptible to all of those things regardless of morality.

But it is factually, empirically, historically NOT true that all hallucinations are equally moored to reality.

Moral Foundations and Aristotelian thinking are the moorings. They are the tendrils that reach out from our righteous minds to connect them to the real world and to each other (i.e., binding). The less one uses EITHER of those the less connected one is to reality, the less capable one is of empathy (the ability to imagine one’s self in the mind of another), and the more prone one is to thinking like that in the first linked article above.

We MUST STOP PRETENDING, or in any way acting and talking, as if all moralities are equally moored to reality but just in different ways or in different milieus.

The disconnect from reality of the Platonic one-foundation mentality, and our dogmatic unquestioning faith in the false belief that its connection is equal to that of Aristotelian mentalities, out of some sense of decorum or politeness or not offending people or heaven forbid “fairness” or “equality,”  is.  literally.  killing.  us.

Unless and until we pull back the curtain of politically correct “fairness” of moral relativism and expose the cancer beneath for what it really is I fear we are destined to continue on our current path of head in the sand denial of realities like those exposed by Milo, and to continue on the path of self-satisfying head in the clouds misperception and misdirection like that of Jonathan Katz from which more will die.