Here is the principle intellectual difficulty of egalitarianism: given that not all people are created equal in capacity, and that not all cultural forms work equally to facilitate and foster both happiness and economic productivity, even the BEST ideas, and BEST people cannot be valued, in principle, differently.
Meaning formation is at root the development of difference, of valuing this over that, this idea over that idea, this type of behavior over that type of behavior. As one obvious example, hard work is preferable to sloth, if the goal is economic advancement. But they can’t value ANYTHING, including an obviously beneficial, eudaptive (opposite of maladaptive; I may be mixing Greek and Latin, but fuck it) habit like hard work and self reliance.
On the contrary, they RESENT people who show greater resilience, greater organizational capacity, greater SUCCESS on an on-going basis, because it forces them to confront the emptiness of their creed. This is why the Left hates Jews (and even though it contains many Jews). This is why black people who preach hard work, honesty and family are so roundly condemned using what we might term the “Usual Pretexts”.
You can see this process at work everywhere. I was in an Urban Outfitters today, which is obvious geared to the hipsters and urban trendies. Everywhere one sees this sense of insouciance and flippancy with respect to serious matters. They had a CCCP t-shirt (red, of course). They had many books which failed to take anything seriously.
Jon Stewart speaks to this crowd. They don’t have the emotional capacity to deal on a sustained bases in an HONEST way with serious problems. They learn the talking points, learn to demonize the Right, but they are not actually in the room if and when they engage in what they term “debate”. They have turned those controls over to stereotypes, and propaganda.
Yes, of course I am myself generalizing. But I feel the right to do so, having spent literally thousands of hours engaging with these people on their own turf. What general pictures I use in performing logical or perceptual operations, I have won through a LOT of work and data gathering.
Here is the crux of the thing: in the process of meaning formation, you must VALUE something absolutely; you must have a code; yet codes that are immutable are rejected at the HEART of their cultural ethos.
This breeds madness. This breeds the countless distractions, the colors, the odd books, the quantitative diversity of fashion and food. It breeds emotional superficiality, and ultimately self hate, and a feeling of being lost. Their nascent meaning formations invariably cannibalize themselves, since they can’t be “justified”.
Only to the extent that one is willing to suspend rational thought based on egalitarianism–in effect, to say fuck it with respect to these beliefs–or reject the creed outright and consciously, can meaning be found which does not reside in the abandonment of personal identity in a mass and mutable horde.
I go in these places, and my stomach sinks. I see the darkness. I see the inability to find a meaning in life, then I see the T-shirts that say “Obey”, the Communist shirts, the pornographic t-shirts. I saw 50 Shades of Grey t-shirts today, one of which said “Looking for Mr. Right, Mr. Grey”. Imagine that: a woman advertising that she wants to be sexually (and thus emotionally) dominated. Actually, I look in Amazon, and see a lot more, including “Property of 50 Christian Grey”.
The problem is that YOU CANNOT FIND PERSONAL MEANING within an egalitarian creed. We all must find our own way. We are all different. There are countless answers to the question of why to live, but none will work IF YOU REJECT THEM. That is the root problem of our age. It is related, in my view, to atheism, which tends in principle to make all matter–which is to say all people–equal.
It was the signal contributions of Nietzche and Ayn Rand (who admired him) to try and retain qualitative distinction in the face of materialistic quantitative analysis.
Empirically, the best evidence is that something like God exists, even if not fully in a sense recognized at least by Christianity, and quite possibly in ways not captured by ANY religion fully correctly. It should be the role of science to figure out how the universe actually works, but most people are unwilling to do it, if it requires the balls and INCONVENIENCE of reworking paradigms, of tired paths long trodden.