I am a creature of habit, and it is novelty, above all, that this universe seeks to produce.
The Fullmetal Alchemist movie has a mature stroke of genius, where in an alternate universe a beloved character from the series is actually a Nazi. He is a great father, beloved friend, a wonderful man, but he serves in the army of the Third Reich, a fan favorite. He’s a loyal soldier – it was just the wrong place and time for his loyalty. Gurren Lagann also has a moment like this, where at the end of the series a scene acknowledging all who died along the way also includes the villains. The villains were teachers, in the end, necessary forces who helped the protagonist to grow. They could have been stomped out and dismissed as the fascists they were, but instead, they were acknowledged as one more turn in the evolution of the drill. This is another great stroke of maturity and genius.
Most people, when it comes to foreign policy, they don’t even pretend to have empathy. Take foreign military bases for example. How would you feel if another country, an imperial power, had a base and foreign soldiers in your home city? Would you feel good about this? No one ever thinks if others’ lives were their own, no one in political power has empathy, straight from drones down to Palestine. But even liberals will stop me here. They’ll say I’m being too simplistic, and this is where universities have gone wrong. Corporatized or not, the lesson of academia is relativism. There are always two sides, we can’t really know anything, everything is constructed out of language, this kind of thinking. No one can have strong stances on anything other than gender and race. Everything else is so uncertain. I’m not sure what to do about this attitude, but it leads to a weak willed world, a world where either you work hard and abide by dogma or question that dogma but end up at sea, unsure of yourself and the world, and thus unable to create great things. Relativism is a painful sentence, a life where every thought is immediately answered by its opposite equal. Who can get anything done? But the paradox is that the social issue-obsessed progressives preach relativism while practicing dogma. They are so certain you can’t even discuss Palestine until you’ve done so through the lens of intersectionality. But in doing so they ignore moral truisms, fundamental moral principles, that are far simpler and less controversial. I really believe morality is a common sense thing when it comes to killing people and supporting the killing of people. No one is willing to make a sacrifice, they all want someone else to. It’s the opposite of the golden rule, the opposite of Socrates’ moral ideal, which is that it is better to be harmed than to harm. Better to be afraid than, in fear, to fire rockets over the border. Morality is simple. The left shoots itself in the foot by pretending that nothing is simple, and that you need to study it in in depth first to have an accurate opinion. That’s facile. Common sense is real and has moral implications. Among them being, if you refuse to forget 9/11 when it happens to you, then you can’t kill thousands of some other country’s people for the sake of your national ‘interests’. That’s called being a sociopath. And it is as simple as that. We don’t even need to invoke a lecture on colonialism. We can, but to the common citizen, what is going to matter more – elementary morality or a whole pile of academia? Relativism denies the obvious answer – it says that your common sense is another man’s bullshit. There is no common ground. There is no human nature. All is constructed, and all can be constructed in any way. Reality is not so. There is ground beneath our feet and matter in our brains.
The academy has taken an unforgivable shit on mythology. Either it is all viewed in terms of gender and sexuality, which (mostly) bores me to tears, or it is transformed into evolutionary psychology. Gone is Jung, gone is myth, there is only the politics and the sciences of the day.