Against Morality
Let's exorcise obscurantist banshees from public life.
A lot of you—perhaps the majority—are sure to open this essay rolling your eyes and expecting me to peddle some vapid 13yo edgelord take.
That’s not what I’m doing here. Contrary to the low resolution image some folx have of me (which I’ve likely played into on occasion amidst grandiose fits of amphetamine abuse), I’m just about the furthest thing possible from a Social Darwinist or Stirnerian Brutalist. For one thing I’m a former vegan who continues to support cultured meat and animal rights. I’m also sort of a faggot by disposition as regards the fairer sex, having used whatever purchase I have with internet racists to advocate for wahmen’s interests on several occasions now. Whatever you think of them, these aren’t the views of a sadistic chud who creams his jeans whenever The Weak Suffer What They Must.
I guess I do sort of have that attitude toward poor people who aren’t actively taking steps to fix their situation yet still have the gall to bitch about it, but that’s just because my family and I have bounced around in social class so dramatically over the years. As a consequence I tend to view money as a fairly trivial thing that follows pretty reliably from acquiring useful skills and applying them to an observable market demand, and see not having money as the unglamorous consequence of being lazy or impulsively spending everything on drugs and hookers. So when I meet a poor person I’ll usually conclude they either don’t care about money (which is cool) or are just kind of a mentally ill dirtbag kvetching about no opportunities as opportunities abound.
But generally speaking my inclination is to stand up for the powerless. Yet I’m on the political right because I find it nothing short of revolting when someone who’s actually quite strong cynically pretends to be weak to weaponize an appearance of vulnerability / victimhood against someone vastly less formidable than themselves (think Weimar Germans, Jews in 20th century America, or modern pantsuit women). I likewise find it absolutely contemptible when a low status group with nothing to lose attempts to take advantage of their betters’ sense of mercy or noblesse oblige to justify naked barbarism (think Palestinians, incels, and roughly nine in ten Black Americans).
But this isn’t about unconsciously worshipping power and status for its own sake like a woman. Nor is it about rejoicing in asymmetry and unfairness as a positive good like a hotdog chud. It’s about recognizing that hierarchies and asymmetries are inevitable and hyper-salient, and concluding it’s a lot more desirable for these power dynamics to be overt, formalist, and organic than covert, subtextual, and artificial.
We need to talk about status and power a lot more openly than we currently do.
In this essay I’ll argue that we ought to socially ostracize moral realists.
I’ll show that their worldview fatally undermines the basic viability of complex civilization and tends to promote personally dishonorable behavior, and for this reason ought to be severely disincentivized in the marketplace of ideas.
I’ll also demonstrate that (at least in the public square) it makes sense to reject all notions of “morality” for a more organic game theoretic framework predicated on reciprocity and concentric circles of tribal duty-bonds.
This stance originates in a pragmatic determination that philosophy (especially moral philosophy) doesn’t matter and is mostly a maladaptive waste of intellectual energy.
I say “mostly” because I actually majored in philosophy and found the subject quite useful and enjoyable when I was like sixteen. But by the time I turned seventeen I’d stopped doing the assigned reading and coasted to a perfect GPA primarily by rephrasing Wikipedia. Perhaps I only got away with this because it was ASU, but the experience made it rather difficult for me to take the subject seriously in subsequent years—particularly once I started pulling in enough cash as an actuary that I no longer felt a need to defend the field’s honor on identitarian grounds.
Anyway my point is that philosophy is a perfectly good thing to study as a young man because it teaches you the power of effective sophistry. It shows you how to manipulate people in a way that makes them think everything was their idea, which any woman will tell you is the only manner sustainable over the long term.
But if you approach philosophy in a rigorous and intellectually serious way where the goal is to pursue “truth” it’s basically a huge waste of time.
The reason for this is straightforward: all human knowledge stems from thoroughly unjustified axioms about the nature of existence taken entirely on blind faith. There’s no such thing as a “justified true belief,” because everyone has their own such axioms (most of which are entirely unconscious or impossible to reject without contradiction—think the laws of thought) and there’s no basis for designating one man’s axiom as more justified than another’s without begging the question as to where this purported objectivity is coming from.
And this applies doubly to moral philosophy, because you can’t derive an ought from an is. Moral realists either have to appeal to a theism accepted entirely on blind faith or devise some obviously retarded reason to believe in normative spooks as an atheist. I can respect the former impulse, but the latter tendency is where most midwit reddit philosophags seem to end up, and that’s another major reason I stopped taking academic philosophy seriously by the time I was old enough to drink.
Though in the interest of fairness I should note that the redditor mindset is hardly confined to philosophers; the vast majority of scientists (and especially engineers) are unsophisticated boors who’ve never even considered interrogating the foundational epistemics of their discipline. And this, of course, is the genesis of that faggoty fart-sniffing Neil Degrassi Tyson attitude so ubiquitous in STEM undergrads who haven’t read their Kuhn and naively idealize scientists as “truth-seekers.”
What such philistines fail to understand is that the basic limitations of our rational faculties inexorably curtail human knowledge (consider that each new paradigm in physics requires an increasingly high IQ to substantively understand), as do the limitations of sense experience (hallucinations, mirages, psychosis, dreams). This makes it impossible to understand the world “as it actually is,” such that even attempting to do so is a hugely wrongheaded category error. The goal of science is to create useful models with explanatory and predictive power, not to discover “truth.”
The purpose of philosophy, meanwhile, is to manipulate people into changing their beliefs by convincing them to adopt positions you hold by syllogistically deriving these positions from their own personal Blind Retard Axioms (BRAs)—even though you almost certainly adopted those same positions for completely different reasons.
I’ll assume the reader is familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory.
You’re probably also familiar with the OCEAN / Big 5 personality traits and how these dimensions tend to break down by political orientation (higher openness people trend Left, higher conscientiousness niggas trend Right, and so on).
If you haven’t heard of either of these things you should really fix that—both for your own edification and because it underscores all argumentation beyond this point.
The way I see the world is as follows:
Our moral values are entirely downstream of temperamental factors (and cultural factors that should be understood as temperamental factors at scale).
Such factors arise from a feedback loop of genetics, environment, and technology. Something approximating “free will” can meaningfully (and beautifully) exist on an individual level, but on a collective level people are unthinking automatons deterministically responding to incentives (though this understanding tends to severely undermine personal agency and should probs remain esoteric).
Society needs all kinds of people. We observe meaningful variation in moral foundations because it was highly adaptive for paleolithic tribes to contain both mean-minded hotdog chuds and indulgent fibromyalgia aunts. We likewise needed both a healthy base of sheeple to consistently respect Chesterton’s Fence and some segment of degenerate bigbrains to gleefully kick it down and invent fire before developing goiters because they didn’t boil their Manioc Root.
We likely had some basic understanding of the need for temperamental pluralism in the past, because when you live in tribe smaller than Dunbar’s Number you have no choice but to put up with people whose moral foundations you find revolting (read any Jane Austen novel to see what this looks like). But as the tribe is gradually displaced by the Nation State you get things like “national character” emerging, and then as society grows far more urbanized and communication / transit tech grows vastly more sophisticated people begin to have the option to self-segregate by temperament. That means you get things like suburbanization and assortative mating, which accelerated to such an extent in the last few decades that White Americans have practically begun speciating into Eloi and Morlocks.
Meanwhile as the economy grows more sophisticated and specialized it’s just inevitable that something like Marxism will emerge. An industrial society will reward certain temperaments (high conscientiousness or high openness + low agreeableness) with massively asymmetric returns, and people who get the short end of the stick temperamentally will (understandably) demand some gay “worker’s revolt” to overthrow the feller benefiting from a favorable dice roll, who’ll (just as understandably) see the defense of his dragon’s hoard as a moral imperative.
Everyone is likewise inclined to see their particularist / sectoral interests through a moral lens. Doctors famously love to blame ambulance-chasing lawyers and greedy insurance companies for medical costs, but get all pissy when you mention the AMA artificially inflating medical salaries. Clearly they *deserve* that pay for all the hours they spent slaving away in med school! Meanwhile as a credentialed actuary I find it just as easy to defend the insurance industry and pin all the blame on hospitals, big pharma, and dumb regulations. At the end of the day we all have our side of the story and our own set of selfish interests, and anyone with a high enough verbal IQ can convince an unwashed normie it’s ackchully the other guy’s fault. It’s all a cynical shell game of manipulation and trickery, and anyone who tells you something different is either a useful idiot or trying to scam you.
Basically the same thing is true when it comes to personally-charged questions of sociology or anthropology. Without resorting to Dr. Mengele / Unit 731 tactics there’s simply no way to study human behavior in a rigorous way, because it’s impossible to “ethically” control for causal noise and there’s nothing stopping people from lying (consciously or otherwise) on sociological surveys. There are also just a lot of grimy aspects of human nature that can only be apprehended anecdotally. Meanwhile society exists in a bunch of isolated silos / feedback loops / protective bubbles that create self-reinforcing impressions of “how things are,” and the one that wins out in broader society seldom does so because it’s “true.” In practice it’s always a matter of rhetorical skill and status coding. I could sit down with
and the two of us could trade utterly contrary but equally plausible takes about human social dynamics ad infinitum, and any normalfag listening would need to dehumanize one of us to avoid losing his basic grasp on reality. This makes debating such points a massive waste of time.
The logical consequence of all this is that as any civilization grows more sophisticated purely material factors will inevitably create enormous social cleavages on the basis of temperament (and by extension moral foundations) that gradually escalate into political factions that isolate themselves into echo chambers and dehumanize the opposition until productive cohabitation becomes all but impossible.
The only way out of this swamp is adopting a more transactional attitude toward public morality that overtly stigmatizes moral universalism.
There are three distinct approaches one can take in a political debate with someone who doesn’t share their moral foundations or material interests.
The first approach—seemingly favored by the vast majority of people these days—is to earnestly state their beliefs and leave it at that. Often this amounts to a simple lack of sophistication, probably stemming from a dearth of trait openness; the hotdog chud and fibromyalgia aunt are either not aware that others might have completely different moral foundations, or simply dismiss the possibility of this ever being acceptable, and instead choose to dehumanize the opposition.
The way I see it niggas like this make life in an advanced civilization quite hellish by functionally obliterating the possibility of transactional negotiation. They need to have this behavior gently massaged (and failing that, overtly bullied) out of them by members of their respective moral tribes. But until then their power at the ballot box is a real problem for society, the one silver lining being that they’re typically too poor and unlettered to have any real influence on The Discourse.
The overwhelming majority of public intellectuals and moralists will instead take the route of politely manipulating each other into embracing the “right” views—either through sophistry (“philosophy”) proceeding from the interlocutor’s Blind Retard Axioms or through deeper artistic / spiritual appeals aimed at unhooking the interlocutor’s BRA and replacing it with something more agreeable.
Hell, I do quite a bit of this myself! But only when it makes sense.
I’d never waste my breath trying to convince a physician that his salary is too high or an incel that some degree of covert polygyny is incredibly prosocial and adaptive. That would be retarded. Instead I focus on areas of agreement, and then when dealing with someone I have little to no common ground with in either moral foundations or material interests my tack is to engage transactionally.
Unlike white nationalists I’m not deluded enough to think America will ever see a formal partition along racial lines. But unlike dunderhead “colorblind conservatives,” I recognize that race is fantastically salient to the overwhelming majority of Black people—so much so that it’s impossible for most of them to ever be on the same team as honkeys who don’t genuflect like faggots. But that certainly doesn’t mean I *hate* Black people—they’re merely pursuing their own interests the same way I am!
So unless they’re a personal friend or I know they’re a Republican I’ll take a third route and engage them honorably but as an outgroup: transactionally, honestly, and self-interestedly. And I’ll generally take the exact same approach with lesbians, trannies, and so forth. But I’d never be personally cruel to someone or dehumanize them—I simply accept that we’re subtextually on opposite sides of a Cold Civil War.
Of course there are certain occasions where dehumanization is just a brutal fact of life. Some of these sex negative dykes, for instance, will always see me as their uncle whenever I date a 23 year-old, so I haven’t any choice but to accept I’ll always be Hitler to them (in a bad way). A lot of black militants and Buzzfeed Jews and even white nationalists at this point will approach me in basically the same spirit, and responding in kind is just a matter of survival. But this is always defensive.
Adopting such a posture offensively codes as low status.
So how do I propose we discuss the intersubjective rules governing personal conduct in the public square?
I already explained this at length in Women Don’t Have Agency, and without my addy lack the attention span to write much more here, so I’m just going to quote myself:
I’ve never trusted people who talk a lot about “morality.”
To me moralizing language has always seemed like a despicable impulse to obfuscate messy power dynamics and deter people from Taking Their Own Side, which to my mind is the most basic and universal human impulse.
I’m personally a lot more interested in the idea of honor, which allows for a workable system of norm enforcement and group coordination without relying on any sort of retarded schoolmarmish universalism. It also allows you to game around the easy assumption that others will act in accordance with their own rational self-interest.
Under this framework as I conceive it social order requires us to adhere to duty-bonds extended through concentric circles of relational proximity. You owe the most to your children, and then to your spouse, your extended family members, your friends and close collaborators, your “tribe” (coworkers or members of voluntary associations), your coethnics and coreligionists, and finally to your countrymen and species.
Then when operating outside your ingroup honor becomes mostly a matter of transactional negotiation and reputation management, with the principle of reciprocity as the underlying ideal. It’s a “repeated prisoner’s dilemma” dynamic where the end goal is to nurture confidence you’ll follow through on your promises while brutally punishing your enemies and dispensing largesse to your friends and followers.
The most egregious way to defect against this system is to treat your ingroup badly—an abusive father or husband probably can’t be trusted in any domain of life—but it’s very nearly as bad to break a transactional understanding with someone on the outside. One reason for this is it makes you unreliable to future counterparties and ghettoizes you within your ingroup. Another reason is that it prevents your initially transactional arrangement from evolving organically into an ingroup duty-bond (such as between longtime business partners) that expands your personal network and facilitates a less cold and strictly mercantile approach to value exchange.
But there are two notable exceptions to this rule.
The first is when dealing with a hostile outgroup. When someone has established themselves as unwilling or unable to behave reliably and honorably toward you it is obviously appropriate to respond in kind. But even then it’s important to be attentive to proper escalation / jus belli, because exceedingly few people desire to live in a zero sum world of Nietzschean maximalism without any kind of safety net for losers.
The second is in the domain of love and romance. You generally can’t expect people to be honorable / reciprocal when something this personal, vulnerable, and existentially significant is involved. In the past you could *somewhat* corral human behavior by enforcing strict courtship norms in the Jane Austen sense, but this is basically impossible in a diverse pluralist society where everyone comes from a different cultural background and is free to affiliate with whichever subculture best matches their natural temperament. In a world like that everyone will have totally different sensibilities on acceptable romantic / sexual behavior, and whenever you engage with someone from a different “world” there are bound to be crossed wires.
There’s also the simple fact that the heart wants what it wants, you can’t negotiate desire, etc. It’s basically impossible to subordinate emotion to rational morality. When a moral code tells someone not to do something they want to do and can, they will typically just find an alternative moral code. And so the less constrained we are by practical necessity (and higher order mores / institutions initially created to address such necessities) the more you have to expect people to simply follow their desires.
Both of these exceptions are obviously exacerbated by modern labor-saving and communication technology that greatly expands personal freedom and choice, but even a cursory read of literature demonstrates they’ve always existed in some sense.
Hence that infamous old adage:
“All’s fair in love and war.”
Such beautiful prose! You’d never see its kind from a modern analytic.
Anyway, I continue to feel this is an infinitely better approach than “morality”, for the following reasons (I’ve structured them in a bulleted list because the aforementioned dopamine withdrawal has rendered me too lazy to style them artfully into paragraphs):
You don’t waste time mediating your self-interest / disgust reflex through a bunch of gay high-minded bullshit that needlessly obfuscates the real issues at play; instead you just talk turkey so everyone can go home to their tribe ASAP
It robs hucksters and parasites of the rhetorical wedge they often use to persuade weak-minded simpletons into taking the Other’s side against their own interests
It deprives haters and losers of an easy vector for obtaining self-esteem dopamine cummies by being a toothless little wiener who never does anything
It strongly curbs the incentive to defect against friends and allies due to envy, resentment, or tall poppy janteloven ankle-biting under a lame moralistic pretext (a tendency that brings down the vast majority of heterodox movements)
It provides a useful framework for being friends with black people, Muslims, lesbians etc. while accepting that we’re simultaneously sort of enemies
I could list a bunch of other shit but you get the idea.
Some people will obviously be more responsive to this framework than others.
I predict my proposal will face the most hostility from Europeans and Midwesterners of cishajnal (and particularly Teutonic) heritage. Meanwhile I imagine that WASPs (particularly in Dixie) will chafe at how gauche my phrasing is while also recognizing that this is literally the only way to govern an empire. The exception to this are Mormons and unreconstructed Boston Brahmin types, who’ll oppose it as fiercely as Omaha Krauts. Meanwhile coastal Americans of transhajnal extraction will take to it rather easily, as this is already the ethos that made NYC capital of the world.
At the end of the day I don’t have some big fancy syllogism for why you should adopt this mindset, and even if I did I wouldn’t deploy it out of principle. Instead I aim to demonstrate the efficacy of my approach through praxis while deftly unhooking BRAs by way of compelling art. I’m quite good at both of these things, so I predict I will eventually succeed, but ultimately we’ll just have to wait and see.
Because no matter how you spin it, pretty much every single thing that matters in life eventually boils down to a vulgar ad baculum.
**EDIT 2/27/25** —
reached out a few days ago alleging that the framework I advance here is very similar to his own Biofoundationalism. I had not read this piece, and have been advancing an inchoate version of this approach ever since joining Substack early last year, but it’s quite possible I was influenced by him at some point or another either subconsciously or via intellectual regurgitation through the broader memeplex. So next week I’m going to have him on the pod to discuss his theory and assess where the two of us overlap and diverge. In the meantime you should definitely take a look at the essay linked above and give Brother Dmitry a follow.
Surprisingly, this is a valuable article for social conservatives to read. Rather then attempting to cast a religious viewpoint as 'civic virtue' while modernizing the surrounding aesthetics, it is far better to preserve ones values in their entirety than to embark on a doomed effort to make them universal.
A practical example of this would be how the position of the Catholic church has changed in America. In the first half of the twentieth century, Catholic culture was largely intact, thriving and self-sufficient, but Catholics were largely separated from public life and government in the United States. However, in the Sixties, the Church largely traded cultural integrity for civic respectability and influence. Today, the religion is largely seen as normal, there have been two Catholic presidents and there are currently six Catholic Supreme Court justices, but Catholic birth rates have collapsed, churches are empty, and the after effects of Vatican II are still causing further damage. Therefore, it is far better to preserve ones values than to pursue national prestige or a "moral victory", and to approach public affairs in a transactional way.
I more or less agree that morality is fake but I think that deep down most people are aware there is a "greater good" and are aware of who the parasites and hosts are in the "global society". Logically morality (probably) cannot be deduced, but that doesn't stop moral realism from potentially being true or people from believing in it.