It's not just the US Gary. The modern West as a whole has dropped its compass, and isn't even trying to fish it up out of the bilge anymore.Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2020 2:45 pm My country seems to be a country that has lost our moral compass.
Paradoxically, phony "moral" language has never been more common. Everybody who does anything does it for "justice," or "fairness," or "equity," or "the common good," or "virtue," or "hope," or "the future." But in each person's mouth those words mean different things. And ultimately, all they indicate is everybody seeking for his own self-interest, in which moral language plays the role of a tool.
Using other people provides another such tool. Even the collectivists only collectivize to whip up their own sense of virtue and advance their personal agendas. And their opponents and detractors, well, to them those people are not even human...they're just filth in the street, to be trodden by the marching feet of the revolution. No thought can be spared for them. How moral is that?
Now, had they a real compass, they could not possibly bring themselves to lie, manipulate, vilify, scream, dominate, brutalize, riot, seize, steal, assault, burn and bludgeon -- but all this they do with the loftiest moral rhetoric.
Insincere moral earnestness is just a hallmark of our era. But we do know we're lying. The compass is still around. We just refuse to consult it.