
The Age of Cretinism - dsr12
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/the-age-of-cretinism
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misja111
I read an interesting article recently related to this, which posted the
following problem: that in recent times, moralism has become hijacked by the
financial elite.

For instance, to protect our environment you should eat local and organic
food, which unfortunately tends to be more expensive than its mass produced
alternatives. When you earn enough, you can live the 'right' way and telll all
your friends; people who have to save money and buy cheaper mass produced
foods are 'worse' not just because they are poor, but because they live their
lifes the 'wrong' way.

When you have a good job and live in a good neighbourhood, you might welcome
immigrants and want to give them a new home in your country so they can escape
all the sufferings from where they are coming from. But when you are poor, you
might also have worries that those immigrants compete with you in your job or
might overwhelm your neighbourhood. But again, morally this worry is 'wrong';
until recently, bringing this out in the open would make you a racist or
worse.

So lower classes see themselves pushed in a corner where they are not only the
losers in a financial way, but more than that, they are 'bad' people because
they dare to have second thoughts about all those morally right choices above.
As a result, there is a growing movement to let go of morals altogether, which
is the cretinism from the article.

~~~
pjc50
These aren't the same kind of thing at all, though. "Ethical consumption" is a
bit of a mess and I would agree that it's vulnerable to becoming just another
form of conspicuous consumption unless people are diligently self-critical
about their moralising.

Migration, on the other hand, involves key elements of human dignity. The
right not to be subject to racial discrimination (e.g. the bad old days of "no
dogs, no blacks no irish" signs). The right to family life: to live with your
spouse and children even if they weren't born in the same country as you.

People who are worried about e.g. people moving from Mexico to California but
not Ohio to California need to take a look at themselves. Are we really saying
that to avoid overcrowding and ensure access to jobs for locals, that
countries would be better off with _internal_ migration control? You'd need a
visa to move to the big city?

~~~
brobdingnagians
I think his point is that when morality gets co-opted and redefined to be a
mind-control tactic of the wealthy to get the poor to do relatively
meaningless things for the agenda of the wealthy, the poor stop caring about
morality. That would go quite well with the point of the article about
cretinism being a disregard of morality in political process; though it would
also turn part of the blame from the poor to the rich.

I don't necessarily agree with him, but it is a valid point connected to the
article.

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pjc50
> "It is hard to imagine a time in recent history where political leaders
> openly support a culture of violence without compunction or any trace of
> self-consciousness, public discourse routinely carpet-bombs fine
> distinctions with a view to making any nuanced moral responses impossible,
> and sympathy is routinely so partitioned along partisan lines that the
> possibility of any human response to tragedy and atrocity seems like a
> distant gleam."

Not sure about "hard to imagine a time in recent history"; "carpet-bomb" is
after all a phrase from the Vietnam War. Or the 80s when nuclear MAD was such
an omnipresent threat that it was all over pop culture.

To me it all seems tied to colonialism, which despite what everyone thinks is
definitely not dead. Colonialism always comes with justifications for violence
against the colonized.

Edit: ah, this article is about India, but I think the cultural drivers are
the same - exclusionary nationalism by a group, in this case Hindus, opposed
to the idea that minorities deserve rights as individuals.

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tjr225
Really well written article. It is hard to articulate what is so frustrating
about the attitude of the far right, but it is captured here.

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dandare
I kind of started to believe in chemtrails, except the poison sprayed over the
world is probably digital, not chemical. That is the only way I can explain
this worldwide slide into cretinism so perfectly captured in this article.

I would like to see what will science in the future say about this period - if
the culprit was an orchestrated destabilization campaign by the likes of
Russia or if it was a natural and inevitable outcome of the change of human
communication patterns brought by the internet.

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nhanq
Ctrl+F "reaction" highlights half the article.

"not being a progressive makes you a cretin" is not a good argument, maybe you
should look at yourself to see why Modi is winning. This notion that
progressivism is inherently and unquestionably good is a blight that comes
from the West and has to stop.

~~~
austincheney
I believe both the behaviors in the article and your point are well summarized
by the word: _conformity_. The danger is when the behavior of conformity
becomes more important than the subject matter regardless of how noble or
moral that subject matter may appear or whether or not the conformist
behaviors are apparent to the participants.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity)

~~~
wallace_f
If you ever have the misfortune of being on the wrong end of injustice,
particularly where perpetrated by greater authority, or number of authorities,
you start to really quickly realize how pernicious conformity can be.

It's still possible for one to be infected with the kind of unjust hatred that
turns one into a _bad_ or _wrong_ kind of person. Perhaps our collective
consciousness tells us that is not possible anymore--we are not really
persecuting witches, anabaptists, the poor, racial minorities, etc, etc. It's
deceptive because there's truth we have made lot of progress there. But what
is still true is that these human behaviors that made all of this constantly
possible throughout history are still a part of us. Hatred and _wrongness_ is
extremely infectious under the right circumstances and you would be amazed by
how many people immediately conform to that, no matter how unjust, rather than
at least ask questions. In that way the shadow of our unacceptable past still
lives on in the present.

If it were not for this experience, I believe I would be ignorant of this and
unbelieving in it: that the willingness to conform to unjust authority--
perhaps _the_ vital ingredient in all of the mass injustices in the world--is
still something that most of the human population possess, not unlike in our
past. Which is really scary. I hope I'm just particularly unlucky and wrong
about this conclusion.

~~~
austincheney
Perhaps the most finite ingredient (or virtue) is selflessness. Is the action
or opinion expressed primarily for your own emotions or for something
completely external? I suspect most people cannot honestly discern those two
criteria and that indistinguishable quality is what allows people to conform
unknowingly or fear originality.

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fvdessen
The concept of 'Godwin Point' seem to have been completely forgotten in the
last two years. Gratuitous Hitler comparisons used to mean that the discussion
had degenerated into meaninglessness. Now it's in opening paragraph of serious
articles, by serious authors. The global debate has degenerated into
meaninglessness.

~~~
simonask
At what point does it become fair to describe literal imitations of the
developments that led to the rise of Nazi Germany as such? Such comparisons
should not be made lightly, but when how far do we have to go in that
direction before "Godwin's Law" stops being invoked to stop criticism?

~~~
fvdessen
When a politician starts to literally call for the end of democracy, freedom
of speech, genocide of people, conquest of neighbouring countries,
nationalisation of major industries, etc ?

~~~
bartread
I would suggest that if you wait that long you've waited too long.

~~~
fvdessen
Too long to fight against it, or to make Hitler comparisons ?

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vixen99
I'm amused to learn that "The term ‘parliamentary cretinism’ was coined by
Marx to describe a condition ...' which is 'a stunted political imagination
that is consistently out of touch with reality'. Excellent description of
Marxism.

~~~
ben_w
I’m not saying I agree with it, but you should read the Communist Manifesto
some time (it’s short and free on Kindle).

Things it called for include stuff now totally non-controversial: free school
education for everyone; women _not_ being the personal property of their
husbands; that sort of thing.

Yes, there’s also stuff I can’t even comprehend well enough to either agree or
disagree (it might have made sense to someone in 1848 but not to me), yet it
is surprising how much of it is now “just the way things are” — even in
nations which hate communism so much that mandatory private insurance is
demonised as “socialist”.

