Why do anything?

There’s a misconception that the political left spreads lies for their own sake, in worship of a platonic deceiver. That assumes quite a bit more agency than I believe is warranted. It is more correct to say that truth is not a leftist value–that is, a leftist is unconcerned with whether their ideas correspond to reality. They don’t get that jolt of pleasure from achieving a position of heightened clarity that you or I might. Mere understanding has no benefit except for the pragmatic purpose of winning some other battle, and as often as not it is more adaptive to not understand. Even the platonic deceiver O’ Brien from 1984 does not warp minds for its own sake–rather, he’s doing it as a flex to solidify his position of power.

In the same way, the political right places no emotional weight on winning political battles. Effectiveness is not a rightist value. Those few precious moments in recent memory when the right was winning, it was because they adopted the political pragmatism that has been the near-exclusive domain of the left for 250 years or so. Their inability to achieve anything is due to defining their self-concept by what they are NOT: not shills, not liars, not hypocrites, not degenerates, not Jewish, etc. Because happiness is best defined as the progressive actualization of deeply held values, this means actions which define rightists as NOT something–purity spiraling, criticism of ideological impurity, and disavowal–are their purest sources of dopamine. This leads to the aphagia of Mouse Utopia’s “death squared” without fail, which I’ve described best in these two posts:

NEETs and pathological virtue signalling, explained
Diagnosis of the West: libido decoupling

Most people absorb their values from the collective unconscious, through the biased filter of their genetic temperament. I’m no exception to this–more of my worldview probably comes from Veggie Tales than I would be comfortable to know. Thus, most people can’t deconstruct their ethics, which brings us to the question in the title. Why do anything? It’s the most basic question in ethics and I bet if I asked you right now you’d give me a list of noble adjectives with no logical, syllogistic content describing someone you’d like to be someday as long as it’s not too uncomfortable. I can count on my hand the number of people I know who can answer this question five whys deep. No offense, but if you can’t even do this you’re basically subhuman filth.

>Why do anything?

“Because doing nothing is degenerate.”

>Why is doing nothing degenerate?

“If you have to consciously analyze morality you’re genetically a leftist.”

>Why is degeneration bad?

*Posts disgusting memes to show it’s an instinctive value*

>Why does anything you do matter?

“In the end it doesn’t.”

>Why do good things instead of doing things that aren’t bad but aren’t really good either and don’t discomfort you?

*Gets distracted by organizing anime collection*

I deal with a lot of people who are wrestling with their lack of motivation (i.e. the aphagia mentioned above). When it comes down to it, they find they really can’t justify pushing through discomfort to achieve material results. Usually this is due to either materialist hedonism (“nothing I do on earth matters in the end”) or Christian nihilism (“nothing I do on earth matters in the end”). The most important example is pushing through the difficulty of forming meaningful connections with other people, which hedonistically speaking is not worth the effort of dragging a dysfunctional modern white person through a half-decent conversation. Anyone who tells you connecting with other people is an easy and natural thing to do is selling you a line of bullshit–they’re basically Boomers. Social institutions like the family, the church, the workplace, and the academies are not functional by nature. We’re biased to think they are because no one bothers to write down anything in the Hobbesian state of nature, so we’re biased to think that the Song Dynasty and the Italian Renaissance are representative of normal human life on earth, rather than times of extraordinary genius and human flourishing. But these moments of civility and decency in human history have been the exception rather than the rule.

To contrast with the conversation above, here’s my five whys:

>Why do anything?

Because acting in the world is necessary to love others.

>Why love others?

Because 1. God commands it and 2. God models the behavior.

>Why do those things matter?

The first because God’s commands always have consequences, and the second because modeling God’s behavior brings me spiritually closer to him.

>Why do consequences and this abstract “spiritual closeness” matter?

Because these consequences are eternal and because closeness to God is the telos of my existence. It’s designed into my nature.

>Why are the consequences eternal? Why are you designed that way?

I don’t know.

>Then how are you absolutely certain those things are true?

I don’t. It’s a judgment call based on the reliability of the Bible as a witness, which is based on the cosmological argument for the existence of God, the argument laid out in Mere Christianity, the average behavior of Christians in contrast with other groups, and a lot of evidence picked up from a lifelong enjoyment of Christian apologetics.

I phrased the title of the post as a question because lately I’m trying to get as much feedback as possible about NEETs’ moral precepts. I don’t think it’s possible to be moral if you can’t even say why you’d choose to be moral, because otherwise you’re not choosing at all, you’re reacting according to your instincts. If there’s a common philosophical ground it will be possible to reason with some of them and get a good return on the effort. If they’re ruled by pure nihilism then they will have to be dragged by the nose to a new philosophy with propaganda and subconscious influences, lacking the mental categories for motivating themselves through anything more mentally uncomfortable or demanding.

Also, if anyone knows of a good resource that helps people to get draw this sort of reasoning out of people with less effort (maybe an encyclopedia of ethical philosophies or something like that), please post it. I figure a middle ground between pure solipsistic self-talk and pure visual brainwashing will have the best returns.