In Britain, the most lunatic ideas imaginable were to be proposed genteelly, at cocktail parties, by men and sometimes women in full dress attire, with tuxedos and suitable evening gowns, and the Queen’s English. Oxbridge men, speaking in robust tenors, expecting agreement, and making everyone who failed to agree immediately feel they had committed a serious faux pas.
In America, this whole thing is encoded in the cult of niceness, which I have written on from time to time. Niceness is not a moral code. It has no content, and specifically, no means of self defense. If you are walking down the street eating an ice cream cone, and someone walks up to you and asks “can I have your ice cream?”, many Americans would say yes, and hand it over. They don’t want to be thought mean.
Niceness is slippery ice. Once you understand the system, these people are defenseless. They can be made to say or do anything, because they don’t want to risk seeming rude, or unprofessional, or somehow out of touch with the crowd.
Mask wearing, in my view, is an obvious example of niceness gone wrong. The data supporting it is very weak, at least for people not showing symptoms, who in any event should be home, and non-existent where any amount of physical distance is present or the people involved are outside or even alone.
But you see these people, so proud to be able to physically demonstrate their niceness, their kindness, their consideration, and so happy to agree that non-mask wearers must be some sort of dark, dank, awful human being. Such are the vapid lies that fill empty minds.
But this rot is deep in many souls in this country, and the cult of niceness can be and is being used to implement a regime of sadism, violence, repression and death.
To take one example that pisses me off every time I think about it, the Dalai Lama travels the world preaching the doctrine of kindness while Tibet is being destroyed, and nuns, in particular, gang raped in Chinese prisons by the thousands if not tens of thousands. He has not a word to say about any of this, that I have seen. Anger is often an inherently moral virtue. It is what tells us something is wrong. It can and does mislead us often–making the application of reason an important corrective–but people who lack this instinctive sense really lack the foundations of honest morality.
And of course, anger can also preceded morality. You are angry first, then find something to be angry about. Most of the Left is like this. This is why there is no content to anything they claim they believe. What they hate in one moment they ignore in the next. The anger is the inner reality, not any innate sense of propriety.
All of this is enormously complicated, but by their fruits you shall know them. The Dalai Lama is, in my view, not an honest man.