I personally believe in altruism over selfishness. However if altruism is coerced or forced is it really altruism? Is it really a virtue? If a virtue is coerced is it a good or evil? This quote strikes me in this regard.
“Big Sister does not want her peasants holding values that are incompatible with the Good Society. She will not tolerate adult behavior, or independent thought and action. Thus she hates religion, morality, political dissent of any kind (democracy is, again, intolerant of dissent, even in dress), and in particular she hates the kind of moral abolutism that underlies most systems of honor. As an example of how this works, Big Sister promulgates the now widespread idea that anyone who refuses welfare to which he is “entitled” is INSANE. Thus even a debased petit-bourgeois notion of personal responsibility and independence becomes a symptom of insanity, and since insanity is, in our mythology, a disease like influenza, the insane must accept treatment. Must. Tyrannies of the left-socialist type are characterized by their insistence on compulsory altruism as the prime “social directive”.
Compulsory altruism is NOT a virtue, it is the behavior pattern of a slave or a mechanism. NO compelled behavior is virtuous. The Lizards have convinced most people that “obeying the law under pain of death” is *virtuous*. This is useful to them, but there is no virtue in it. It is virtuous to give alms to a worthy beggar, but it is not virtuous to pay taxes that aid the poor. This is why socialist tyrannies strive to monopolize charity: through taxation the element of private virtue is eliminated, through the perversion of meaning of virtue into “obedience”, virtue is no longer the result of honorable behavior, but is another “entitlement” dispensed by Big Sister. Consider the travesty of “Honors Day” in the UK, when people are rewarded for making money and paying large taxes, i.e. for being good subjects.” – Marmota monax, the digital peasant, on a Def Con mailing list 30 Oct 1999
A note for anyone who gets in a tizzy over the writer’s mentioning, in a linked phrase, a nanny-state’s hatred of “religion, morality, political dissent of any kind” – the writer was an agnostic or atheist, if I recall, and certainly not religious. One does not need to be, however, to notice that when the State is effectively presented as god – or goddess as the case may be – then it obviously cannot tolerate other forms of religious expression. This is a matter of degrees of course, ranging from the gross to the subtle. In more subtle cases religion, morality, political dissent of any kind, are best assimilated to the operative logic of the state’s civil religion itself.
“Yet Schiller, Dante, Shakespeare I devoured.
My forehead trembled as I read their works.
As to those rakes that former tunes admired,
Virgil, and Horace, Homer, Cicero,
We know, thank God! just what to think of them.
Then quick to learn the art poetical,
My lisping muse began to plagiarize;
And then, in turn, I worshiped England, Spain,
And Italy, and, chiefly, Germany.
What would I not have done to know the dialect
The cobbler Sachs had gloried years a-gone!” – Alfred de Musset
If one wishes to be subtle, and not gross, and thus in the long term to be effective One may consider adding to one’s worship by consent and not naked bare coercion.
The Muslim, the Hindu, the Jain, the Christian, the Odinist, the Mithraist, the Jew: each becomes an acolyte of the mother goddess of the state. His or her belief system and sense of morality and virtue are best re-molded in ways consistent with the dominant narrative.
How many Hindus worship India instead of Vishnu or Krshina – in actual effect. How many Israeli Jews worship Israel instead of YWEH, in effect? How many Evangelical Christians worship Old Glory, the US Flag, and the Unites States of America – instead of Jesus? How many Anglicians worship Britain (and indeed it’s How many Muslims worship – in actual effect, as in each case – the Arab State and Qawm, or Pakistan or what-like, instead of Allah? How many Mithraic soldiers worshiped (rather openly) Rome itself and her emperor instead or, or in addition to, Mithras.
What is it to worship? It is to obey and to adore. Find out whom you obey and adore with emotional fervor and then you shall know who or what it is that you really worship.
So I think that a clever Big Sister would express her underlying intolerance of her little siblings’ questioning by more subtle, than gross, coercions and cooptations. In this way the Soft Tyranny is more effective in the long term than the Hard Tyranny, for is tyranny with the consent of the tyrannized really even tyranny anymore? Irrespective of how that consent was gained?