Virtue Signaling and the “New Morality”
In "The New Normal," fake virtue, feigned moral supremacism and over-the-top, hysterical righteous indignation combined with visceral hatred, are the pillars of a new "moral" value system.
During the last few decades–concentrating itself and intensifying over the last ten years–we've been experiencing a trend of social thought and being that by today has evolved into a universalist ideology, in which a new set of parameters is being imposed on whole societies to define a new kind of “morality” we’re all being told is the “superior” spiritual-value dope all the cool kids are smoking.
It has its roots in the meteoric rise in the popularity and influence of “Social Justice” (capitalized, of course, because they mean business!) as a general, definitive and “authoritative” moral and social value set.
In the nutshell in which I only have the time and space here, essentially it’s a nebulous, amorphous and ill-defined value system that says how we feel about justice is definitive and constant; however, what justice actually is, is relative to whatever whoever is doing the defining wants it to be and to mean. Whether we’re just and behave justly is a matter of relativity, opinion and, in reality, simple momentary convenience and transient expediency, rather than any committed, consistent, coherent and cogent set of principles.
So we’re being persuaded that only the most morally superior of us have the spiritual courage to care about justice to the extent that those who believe in Social Justice do. Whatever they tell us is just, is definitively so; and whatever they tell us is unjust, is also definitively so; regardless of whether it actually is (superior, or even just), or whether it even makes any sense, or is actually even real, as opposed to just made up to make its proponents look good; or what’s even more insidiously worse, wholly fabricated for the sole purpose of making an opponent–or just anybody Social Justice warriors don’t like or of whom they're afraid to admit they're afraid–out to be evil.
And what it all really is, to get to the bottom of it finally, is a way in which elitist supremacists have fabricated a system of feigned moral superiority to take the place of the actual morality upon which our societies and their cultures have been based and regulated for millennia, guided by the spiritual laws and Word and will of God that the mostly lawless and criminally corrupt elites refuse to accept, deny the validity of, and defy enthusiastically with zealous sinfulness as a matter of pride.
To be crass but accurate for brevity’s sake, Social Justice is putting spiritual lipstick on an immoral pig: “Sins aren’t what some “pretend” God says, but what WE say they are now!”
And so, in the Social Justice system, it’s no longer “a sin” to commit sins as we’ve known them to be since the beginning of Creation. That means it’s no longer a spiritual or moral transgression to lie, cheat, steal, kill, fornicate, oppress, violate, deny, disrespect, covet, envy and otherwise debase, abuse and exploit, so long as it’s done in the name of some disingenuously devised and invariably unjust “Just End.”
The “New Morality” is Social Justice (or Woke, or Progressivism, or whatever other associated terms fall under the general umbra covered by the Social Justice circus tent): it defines injustice as the “traditional” oppression of the “traditionally marginalized,” (some of them genuinely, and they’re the disposable patsies; but mostly it's just traditionally enthusiastic sinners tired of being held accountable for their sinfulness by spiritual “oppression,” while aspiring to be perceived as literally holier-than-everybody).
The only socially-acceptable morality, they say, therefore, is a staunch defense of whom they say the traditionally marginalized and oppressed are, against their traditional oppressors still among us, who are simply defined as whomever the Social Justice system disagrees with or simply dislikes, and to whom are attributed the responsibility for all the sins and suffering of mankind since forever.
It's kind of a reverse, perverse, anti-Messiah kind of thing, in which all the sins of history are heaped on convenient scapegoats, not for the spiritual salvation of all, but as an excuse for marginalizing, stigmatizing and ideally, removing from society completely, everybody and everything preventing the lawlessness and corruption preferred by our ruling elites from establishing global dominion.
Except, they don’t send the goats out into the desert, slap them in the behind and let them run off into the wilderness carrying all of society’s sins with them. They keep the goats locked up in a stockade in the town square, so that anybody who feels like it can take out their righteously indignant frustrations on them in the most publicly humiliating and hurtful ways they can conjure up.
The new “sinfulness” taking the place of the “outdated” and “obsolete” kind, means being in contravention of whatever Social Justice defines as just, or to practice or manifest whatever social justice says is “sinful.”
So, our Social Justice priestesses and priests and their allies tell us, if we’re opposed–to the point of hair-trigger hysteria–to what they tell us are the sins of “systemic” racism, white supremacy, trans-and-homophobia, misogyny, man-made Climate Change, private property, lawfulness, or countries with borders, we’re morally superior.
If we show even the slightest hesitation in hypnotically embracing–let alone the slightest signs of blatantly objecting to–expressions and displays of pride, lust, wrath, envy, greed, sloth, gluttony, sexual immorality, crime and lawlessness, we're told we're actually intolerant, unjust and represent the new sinfulness that needs to be eradicated.
And they mean eradicated.
The only thing standing in the way of a global Holocaust tomorrow, is personal mobile technology and social media; and the optics of mass extermination that technology would now make instantly transmittable before billions of pairs of eyes, which would appear uncomplimentary of the ruling elites, who are themselves ruled by sociopathic narcissism and megalo-egomaniacal attachments to the promotion and acceptance by the rest of us of their own “flawless” images.
What we now know as “cancel culture” became the “next best” beast that reared its ugly head in that respect, becoming a social and cultural proxy for the new Final-Solution-With-a-Human-Face.
In brief, the psychopathically sociopathic psychology of cancel culture can be summarized as follows: the zealously prideful rely on themselves alone as the source of their presumed indomitability; as well as assuming the “natural right” by virtue of their “superiority,” to define for the rest of us what our common reality must look like. So when they come upon anything or anybody they can't–through either manipulation or coercion–dominate and force into submission and at least compliance if not outright enthusiastic obedience, they have to eliminate it or them, or else the image of indomitability upon which they base their delusion of superiority is under threat of being exposed as the patent fraud it is.
And all that... comes from the fear–the zealously prideful are afraid to admit they can't help but feel–of the illusion being exposed before others and, even more frighteningly, to themselves in their own minds. Pride then turns that fear on its head into hatred, disguises it as feigned righteous indignation as a cover, and becomes the justification for every cruel, malicious, unfair, unjust and unjustifiable act of exclusion, stigmatization, ostracism and punishment they can imagine and with which they can get away, to which no petty-minded extent is ever too far.
Because all this “morality” is purely fabricated, it has to rely on very public demonstrations by its practitioners to prove to the rest of us that Social Justice is real, and they mean business. However, precisely because it’s a made up morality, so do their demonstrations of it have to be made up, too.
That’s how we got to a point of social existence where we now see the people who rail hysterically at us about Climate Change in public forums and how anybody not on the Climate Change Kool-Aid™ is obviously stupid, regressive and evil, are the same people driving gas-guzzling SUV’s to the corner store to buy industrially-processed water in plastic bottles, and flying around the world in jets to environmental emergency summits that leave greater carbon footprints than most developing countries; while the cities under their control are run down, broken, nearly irreparable, filth-infested dystopias.
To a point where people who call us racists if we're against millions of unvetted illegal aliens flooding into our countries along with the criminals and terrorists using them as cover, are the same people who cheer triumphantly when a group of 50 foreign migrants is unceremoniously deported from an elitist resort community within 48hrs of their arrival; because the rich, mostly woke progressive residents calling all the rest of us racists… don’t want them there.
To a point where we’re screamed at for being intolerant and inhuman because we object to our primary-school-aged children being forcibly exposed to drag queens playing with themselves in public, by the same people who become hysterically enraged to displays of incontinent hysteria in large numbers and acts of destructive violence over restrictions on the abortion of what they consider to be nothing more than clumps of cells, or pieces of living property at best.
To the point where the people who tell us nobody should be allowed to own a firearm because it contributes to the runaway crime they all say they deplore, are the same people releasing millions of criminals from prisons, refusing to prosecute violent crimes, releasing illegal aliens apprehended in the commission of violent crimes so they can go on murderous rampages terrorizing already battered and vulnerable populations; while the cities under these people's control and domination are the same run down, broken, nearly irreparable filth-infested crime-ridden and blood-soaked dystopias mentioned above.
The point is, these kinds of people are the new social Pharisees among us, with the same zeal for the same kind of empty, demonstrative, formulaic and formalistic virtue signaling–combined with the same kind of hysterical hatred for anybody or anything that doesn’t play along with their game and submit to their authority just because they say so–with which Biblical Jews and Christians, and their descendants, are familiar.
They fabricate moral offsets in the same way environmentalist fakers who light their homes up like Christmas trees every night, claim moral superiority and deny any hypocrisy because they donate to the WWF: where truly spiritual virtues as defined by the Creator of existence, are thrown out and replaced with politically correct, “socially just,” woke, environmentalist values adhered to with fundamentalist fervor and intractability, as the new morally superior and definitive spiritual virtues.
So that sins against God–which have been consistently defined and understood and accepted for millennia–are no longer sins at all, while sins speciously, inconsistently and conveniently defined by the constantly morphing narcissistic caprices of proud men and women who believe their feelings and attitudes are what makes them holy, are.
So that we now have a society in which the definitions of what's moral and lawful and correct are so nebulous, amorphous and transient–changing according to whatever expediency of power-lust needs to be satisfied by the powerful–that we have “learned” leaders of society in all seriousness proclaiming publicly that we don't have the cognitive or moral capabilities necessary for defining what a woman is.
That sad, emblematic statement concludes the sordid story of the fake righteousness in the “New Morality” of the self-worshiping world being imposed on us all today.
Our created nature since “Let there be light!” is innocent. Our corrupted nature since Satan threw his slippery monkey wrench into God's machinery, is sinful. That's why we need faith in the Lord to define our spiritual virtues and morality and regulate our behavior: firstly, because our sinful natures make it simply impossible for us to dig or climb our way out of the deep hole into which we ourselves jumped, and; secondly, so that we have the best chance to go through this world doing the best we can for one another, while being obedient to and consistent with the Word and will of the God who created us all, and thereby demonstrating faith in the Savior by which we assure ourselves of salvation instead of judgment and damnation.
Denying all that is in fact embracing sinfulness as our desired nature, excusing and even glorifying sin, and replacing real virtue with the fake morality that becomes the doomed lie we can't help but live when we embrace our sinful nature as a desirable default.
All the while telling ourselves that because we wallow in a paradoxical miasma of self-pity, self-loathing, self-righteousness and self-supremacy and throw impeccably-timed, righteously indignant, hysterical hissy fits to prove that we’re the epitome of superior morality…
We must be.
Sounds superior, doesn't it?
Author’s Note: Don’t forget to check out the free preview and subscribe for the exciting serialization of the short-fiction anthology, Living With Caligula, available exclusively on the Kentucky Fried Christian Substack. In the latest installment from the first story, “A Tale of Two Sisters,” the woman entrapped by the Pharisees into committing adultery is dragged out of the Antonia Fortress and brought before Jesus as he’s teaching in the Temple. To hear a serialized, free audio preview of another story from the book, the detective murder-mystery “Quid Sequenter,” check out the Kentucky Fried Christian podcast. Blessings and Thanks for every single one of our readers and all your kind interest in the Kentucky Fried Christian.