The foundation of our new moral order is the idea of STIGMA and its eradiction or reversal in the name of Justice and Equality, the sacred abstractions that take the place of God in our liberal, secular dispensation.
"Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies or trailer-park studies because these people are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely economic selfishness." Richard Rorty
"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in 2020 at the start of Covid.
That last quote tells you all you need to know about the sacred beliefs of our global technocratic leadership class: at the start of a global pandemic, when it was still possible that we had a new Black Plague on our hands, Stigma was claimed to be more important than life or death itself, a value higher than humans, their families or their societies.
But the goal of this crusade is not the eradication of Stigma, but its reversal or transference, moving from groups and people who once bore it to groups and people who once benefited from it: hence things like anti-racism which is a project to shift the Mark of Cain from black people to white people, or "cis" privilege, which aims to take the shame felt by gay or Trans people and place it on the people who mock or oppose them. (This is all a perfect example of Nietzsche's "Transvaluation of Values").
It seems like human societies always need taboos, In and Out Groups, Good/Evil and their incarnations, and the Crit Theorists were brilliant in how they captured post-Civil Rights morality and gave it a hard-edged Marxist Manichaean twist—with bigotry accusations working for them in the same way as accusations of atheism and heresy worked in prior centuries for prior theocrats.
Social Justice morality seems to me to be the inevitable terminus of secular multiethnic liberal societies, where the Self and its feelings of worth and safety become the new sacred, and as the years pass this new morality may lose some of its punitive force and anger, but I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.
The foundation of our new moral order is the idea of STIGMA and its eradiction or reversal in the name of Justice and Equality, the sacred abstractions that take the place of God in our liberal, secular dispensation.
"Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies or trailer-park studies because these people are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely economic selfishness." Richard Rorty
"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in 2020 at the start of Covid.
That last quote tells you all you need to know about the sacred beliefs of our global technocratic leadership class: at the start of a global pandemic, when it was still possible that we had a new Black Plague on our hands, Stigma was claimed to be more important than life or death itself, a value higher than humans, their families or their societies.
But the goal of this crusade is not the eradication of Stigma, but its reversal or transference, moving from groups and people who once bore it to groups and people who once benefited from it: hence things like anti-racism which is a project to shift the Mark of Cain from black people to white people, or "cis" privilege, which aims to take the shame felt by gay or Trans people and place it on the people who mock or oppose them. (This is all a perfect example of Nietzsche's "Transvaluation of Values").
It seems like human societies always need taboos, In and Out Groups, Good/Evil and their incarnations, and the Crit Theorists were brilliant in how they captured post-Civil Rights morality and gave it a hard-edged Marxist Manichaean twist—with bigotry accusations working for them in the same way as accusations of atheism and heresy worked in prior centuries for prior theocrats.
Social Justice morality seems to me to be the inevitable terminus of secular multiethnic liberal societies, where the Self and its feelings of worth and safety become the new sacred, and as the years pass this new morality may lose some of its punitive force and anger, but I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.
…and how do we plane the sacred heights of our moral taboos down to size?
New stories via movies, novels, social media memes
Hopefully the students of Buckingham Uni will be in the vanguard - its a veritable mountain to climb