We Have Been Hamstrung By Values For Too Long

What happens when a society becomes so fixated on what is good and what isn’t good that it starts to make rules about how people should behave? I’ll tell you what happens: people start to feel limited, and then their feelings are hurt. We can no longer allow this.

It’s time we admit something very simple: we are tired of being told what we can and can’t say, tired of being told what we can and can’t do, tired of being told that our lives are less important than other lives. There is only one way to react to all this: we need to tell others what they can and can’t say, tell others what they can and can’t do, and tell others their lives are less important than ours, especially foreigners.

I’ve been a Trump voter ever since I was born, and I’m proud of it. For too long I have felt hemmed in by all these values that have been promoted by the left, and I’ve finally had enough. Who are they anyway, claiming to know things and claiming that I should know them too? How dare they impose that on me?

I don’t even understand why they want values, anyway. Can’t they see that as soon as you have some ideals or an idea of how people should behave, then you actually have to behave that way yourself? In real life, too! Why would I want to limit my behaviour? That is basically the opposite of freedom.

What matters most is freedom, and the first step to having freedom is getting rid of all these values. Let me break it down for you.

All too often I see lefties saying something grand and honourable as if that were a good thing, and I immediately laugh because I know they have just removed themselves from the game. If you go on the record saying you think people should be honest, for example, what happens when you eventually want to lie? Your ideas about honesty, your “value” if you will, is just going to be used against you. There’s no better weapon, and you’ve basically just handed it to your opponent.

Just imagine, all you did was say some words, and yet those tiny little things will be able to undermine you more than you can possibly imagine. People can bring up those words whenever you say new ones, and if the new ones aren’t the same as the old ones (especially if you made a big deal about them) you will have revealed the worst type of moral failing: one you knew about.

Anyway, you can avoid this problem by talking in a way as if your words do not matter. If anybody ever disagrees with you or tries to show how you have lied, you can simply respond with more words that do not matter. This will show your consistency and your resiliency in a way that being truthful never can.

How can you best manage this? Well, the left is always going on about truth, treating their words as if they are not just words but also true, as if they refer to something greater than themselves. But remember, there is nothing greater than yourself. It’s best to abandon the idea of truth altogether.

So many opportunities and freedoms are open to you if you do. You have to really commit to this, exclusively; it is hard work, but eventually you can reach the stage where it does not make a difference if what you have said is true or not. That is the best way for your words not to matter.

This will have many benefits: it will allow you to speak with confidence and say whatever you like (not to mention how much you will save in preparation time) and it will give you an unbeatable advantage over those who are still trapped by notions of what they can and cannot say. They won’t even be able to argue against you very well, because they’ll probably have some values that restrict them from doing that. They wouldn’t call it free speech if it was restricted by facts, would they?

And remember, the idea of free speech is one of your greatest assets. I always relish it when my opponents declare themselves to be believers in free speech. This gives me an unbeatable advantage when I want to say things that I have just made up or when I want to be actively insulting or hateful; my opponent cannot complain, because he believes in my right to say those things! Worse, he has made a big deal of believing that idea, so he has already struck down any available counter-argument about how I shouldn’t be allowed to say those things. He is then forced into saying something about how my words conflict with his values, which of course only makes him look weaker.

And the benefits don’t stop there: as soon as you have used your free speech to defeat your enemies and gain power, you can then limit the scope of free speech for everyone else. You will be able to do that because you never said anything about how you believed it was a good thing in the first place. No can act surprised when you start taking it away, can they? And the whole time, you can mercilessly abuse and attack however you see fit, and you don’t even have to worry if anything you say is true.

Are you starting to see why having values is such an absurd strategy? Who does it even benefit, anyway? Someone else?

The other leftie habit you can use to your advantage is the way they always care deeply about knowledge and learning, and especially because their quest for knowledge has a pious and self-critical aspect to it. Whenever you beat them, you can rest assured they will scurry off to examine all their assumptions and their actions in great detail so that they can learn more about themselves, the world, and what they can do better next time. You know, the sort of thing you or I would never, ever do.

They will invariably find some grievous fault on their part (probably relating to one of their values) and in the meantime you will not be bothered by any such concerns. Better yet, after they apply all their skills at compassion, understanding, and empathy, writing hundreds of articles and essays and think-pieces on how they got it so drastically wrong, they will conclude by saying it was their fault. Amazing, isn’t it? They will say it is all their fault because they didn’t understand you well enough.

And the best part is, they didn’t! That idea is, if you like, “true”. They have one blind spot that makes them unable to see you clearly, because they take it for granted that all people want to be like them. They think people are supposed to care about values, as a matter of course. In their world, it isn’t an option not to, so they naturally presume that everyone will want to do this.

Preposterous, I know. But after you have finished laughing you need to realise that it’s a real blessing for you. Why they want to saddle themselves with such a poor strategy is still not clear to me, but that means there’s all the more for us to take.

I’m not even really sure what they are hoping to learn, especially if all their learning seems to be aimed at finding their own mistakes and then changing them. I mean, they can do that if they like, but that doesn’t mean we have to. If we did, how could we keep being ourselves? No amount of learning should ever change who you are.

3 thoughts on “We Have Been Hamstrung By Values For Too Long

  • November 14, 2016 at 10:26 am
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    You’re wasted on the piano……… wry smiley, if there is such a thing!

    • November 14, 2016 at 11:00 am
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      Haha- wry acknowledgement smiley!

  • November 15, 2016 at 3:44 am
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    Such a compelling read. I am currently in Sociology on a small college campus and those I interact with on a daily basis also take women’s studies where they learn about feminism ideology.

    I have recently begun paying attention to the EXACT words people use when they speak and how they CHOOSE to organize their words in the sentences they speak. The consistency of meaning is off (note: did this experiment on myself. Noticing how similar I sounded was another reality check). It’s like they’re always paraphrasing what they hear, ‘putting it in their own words,’ that they lose meaning in translation because they’re not actually that good with words and they don’t have the life experience to really make sense of conceptual statements that actually refer to life situations. And the ideological framework helps them place feelings into well-defined categories, that more or less generalizes the gist of these thoughts they can’t properly articulate, “white privilege,” “essentalizes,” “patriarchy,” “empowerment,” “inspiring.”

    The problem is they’re being taught to do it on everything that happens in the environment around them: what they hear, read, see, or experience. It really feels like a form of conditioning.

    I personally don’t ascribe this to “lefties” or “righties,” because I don’t have the experience to draw an opinion on it, but I’ve been watching more Trump videos since the election (I’m not American so I wasn’t going to lose my head until anything was certain; it’s looking certain so I delved into the info-war propaganda pile of goo that I consider American politics to be) and it’s been a real reality check.

    This video really did it for me: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxcAN0t6GrI

    The reporter asks a Trump Support “What do you think about the fact that white supremacists support Donald Trump.” But when he’s challenged on his question, and asked to explain why he ask that question specifically–if he wasn’t actually trying to plant the idea that Trump himself was racist because “some racist guy supports him”–the reporter couldn’t.

    He literally answered, “Me?” / “I’m just doing my job.”

    Where is the individuality? Where is the gusto and passion that made him /want/ the job??? Does he not care at all about Trump, Politics, Racism or the Fact That He’s a Citizen? Why couldn’t they have sent someone to cover the Trump election that did care on even just one of these?

    The reporter is an ideological puppet, but what is saddening to me is that he doesn’t even realize it himself. And he doesn’t realize the harm his naivity has on others.

    The situation is becoming quite similar in Canada.

    We actually have our own ‘mini-version’ of the Hillary/Trump phenomenon in Ontario. A professor at the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson, is getting a lot of media attention for his refusal to balk to political correctness and address students by “preferred pronouns.” He’s being labeled a bigot and neo-Nazi and all sorts of hateful things from people who supposedly want to promote social equality and harmonious spaces of safety.

    Peterson has managed to arrange a debate at the university to discuss the issue (legislative and political in nature) that he originally raised in his video that went viral, “Professor Against Political Correctness: Fear and the Law”.

    In his conference held after Trump’s election, Obama described Trump as someone who “likes a vigorous debate” and who “isn’t ideological.” I hope the Trump ideal/phenomenon spreads over the border and shames the university for having enabled the perscussion against Peterson and other profs who refused to pander to every single individual’s sufferings and hardships in life.

    That’s not the same as racism. Yeah, we shouldn’t just stop fighting to end racism, but who said that the conflict-approach theories (which is what Marxism and Feminism and Social Justice STEM from) are the best course of action? And also who says everything being /labelled/ as racism/sexism/whateverisms actually /is/ racism/sexism/etc?

    Coincidently, or perhaps not so coincidently, Peterson is also a psychologist/clinical psychologist who has spent his entire life researching how human beings can gravitate towards malevolent ideologies that allow them to ignore the immense suffering going on around them (Facism, Communism…Democracy? Social Justice??). If the young people confronting him and demanding explanations would shut up and stop being obnoxious and watched his Maps of Meaning lectures, they would learn a few things about life and their perceptions of reality. But for them to even to hear his words /properly/ they’d need to stop automatically filtering them through their ideological screen before they ‘interpret’ it. And….how is that going to happen? Some are really, really deep into it.

    Anyway, I’m glad I stumbled upon your article! I’ll be sharing it 🙂

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