Categories
Uncategorized

The dignity of courage

A few points I don’t have time to explore further at the moment.

1. What I think we esteem most in “primitive” tribal peoples, in addition to their sense of community, is the dignity they seem to have, the courage of equanimity in the face of trouble, difficulty and pain. Many of our own grandparents had or have it.  But mob culture is built on a nearly universal repudiation of courage, and the embrace of a generalized amorphous fear.

2. Denunciation is the virtue of the mob, whose only crime is not fitting in. I think of the hybrid Darkness in the most recent Stranger Things. Or The Blob. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Take your pick.

3. Loyalty, for mob people (to be differentiated from Mob people, who in theory have some form of virtue based on courage and genuine loyalty), is based on the expectation that their friends and associates will have the good sense never to be caught being different. If they are, then they are disowned. I actually saw this recently happen to someone I know. One foot over the line is all it takes.

4. You cannot belong to a mob. You merely participate. And participation is precisely equal to the dignity of personal courage and the will to pursue your own conception of virtue.

5. Our nation is built on the personal pursuit of individual virtue. This is the Eudaemonia Jefferson has in mind when he used the word happiness. Our system, as many have noted, is useless to cowards.