Why You Are Demoralized
June 28, 2012
ALAN ROEBUCK, the eloquent Calvinist, writes at The Orthosphere that most people in the modern world are profoundly demoralized. He recommends they discover a lost civilization — their own.
In his essay “Why You Are Demoralized and What You Can Do About It,” he writes:
You are demoralized because, first, the authorities say you must be nonjudgmental. This means (whether they admit it or not) that everything is equally valuable, which means (although they’ll never admit it) that everything is equally worthless.
And therefore—through the demand of nonjudgmentalism (an ugly word for an ugly doctrine)—the authorities of Western Civilization have taken away your sources of morale: God, true religion, objective morality, knowledge of philosophically first things, beauty, higher culture, family, nation, honor, and so on. Because the existence of any of these goods requires one to make a judgment that some things are better than others, these goods are not allowed. Our leaders have therefore taken all these goods from you, and replaced them with the false god of nondiscrimination. Of course, these goods have not been destroyed. They still exist, although some are highly attenuated. The authorities have only denigrated them and hidden them.
And you are demoralized also because you are surrounded by ugliness intellectual, moral and esthetic. These are the ugly bastardizations of the true, the good and the beautiful, the supreme values that man needs. It has been decided that the ugly is to be fashionable, so it has become ubiquitous.
Finally, if you are white, you are demoralized because the authorities teach that your ancestors were often wicked, as they enslaved, conquered, oppressed and dominated. And you and your people, so they say, are still wicked, because our society still has inequality and intolerance. Of course, this is an evil lie, but it is widely taught and believed.
He also provides a profound understanding of the spread of ugliness, which is not caused by mere inattention but by a positive belief in and need for ugliness:
The widespread acceptance and promotion of esthetic ugliness are also important phenomena. Through a personal display of esthetic ugliness a man confesses the disorder in his soul; through the acceptance of this ugliness he gains a measure of comfort by apparently having his confession accepted and absolved; through the promotion of ugliness he gains the feeling of dragging the rest of us down to his level, in which case his disorder is apparently not a disorder at all, but just an innocuous lifestyle choice. For these reasons it is no wonder that many worship ugliness. For the aschemiolator, ugliness is not an unpleasant occasional fact of life. It is a way of life and a god who protects its devotees from the threat of normality.
