Stop Trying to Be One of the BeautifulPeople™
The Opinions of Others and the Road to Hell (DN 4.12)
I hate trigger warnings, but I will issue one here:
This article deals with the difficult topics such as rape and race.
We could write a whole book on the next topic, but time is precious, so we will have to sum it up simply.
Human beings are wired to strive and compete. Like many other animal species, this involves the effort to climb in a hierarchy. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more access you have to high-quality mates, resources, and the respect (and sometimes the deference or obedience) of others.
Early on, in simpler times, the hierarchy types were limited: a combination of strength, intelligence, and prosocial behavior meant a higher ranking. Today, the complexities of human life have created many different hierarchies within which one can climb. An awkward kid with Asperger's can end up with money, prestige, and an attractive mate by hitting it big with a piece of software. In a free market, there are a theoretically infinite number of hierarchies (and that is generally a good thing).
One outcome of toxic collectivism is a hierarchy we might call the hierarchy of perceived social virtue. It works something like this:
Our nature as a social species creates a desire for social consensus: it is easier, we presume, if we have consensus. The result is a mainstream set of values and a range of acceptable ideological positions. This leads to competition among people to
A) express and actuate those values or positions, and/or
B) signal to others one's superior expression and actuation of those values or positions.
When the values or positions are good and reasonably universal, A) can be a good thing. But far too often, people discover that B) is far easier.
Because of our social nature and the importance we place on the views of others, signaling our virtue becomes, for some, far more important than actually being virtuous. And because others cannot always tell the difference, a hierarchy is created in which the only thing one must do is signal one's “virtue.”
In the 1600s in Massachusetts, that hierarchy might have required signaling one's piety: Flagrantly not working on the Sabbath, one-upping one's neighbors in terms of scriptural knowledge and adherence, and perhaps occasionally accusing one of them of being a witch.
Climbing today's virtue-signaling hierarchy generally means adopting and loudly expressing the positions that the mainstream left has established as politically “correct”: Calling everything “racism,” wearing a covid mask alone in a park, changing one's Facebook avatar to a Ukrainian flag, and a thousand other irritating poses with which we are now all too familiar. Not to mention occasionally accusing a neighbor of being a Nazi.
This has real-world implications that go far beyond irritation, however.
Denying the truth
For one case study, let us take the rape epidemic in Europe.
If you have not heard that such an epidemic exists, you cannot be blamed: the media have done their level best to conceal it. The reason? It doesn't fit the narrative and their social objectives—primarily because the perpetrators of this massive surge in stranger rape across Western Europe are not white.
It is not racism to say this; it is simply fact. At one point, during a five-year stretch, every single stranger rape committed in Malmo, Sweden, was committed by a nonwhite immigrant. I read the crime statistics myself. And this was not an anomaly, but the norm around Sweden and much of the rest of Europe.
Swedish officials decided that the solution to this problem was not to attempt to stop the rapes, but to stop reporting the identity of the perpetrators. The statistical data disappeared; they continued importing the cohort responsible for the rapes; and they set about making it outside the window of allowable discourse for Swedes to mention anything about it.
In England, the situation is arguably worse: openly discussing the rape and grooming epidemic there is likely to get you thrown in jail. Even women who were themselves victims of rape or grooming have been arrested.
The narcissistic beast within
The reason for this inexcusable cowardice is tragically simple: The left has established certain requisites for being among the BeautifulPeople™—the tolerant, noble, and compassionate—and one of those requisites is not recognizing patterns that go against the narrative. And the narrative says that white people are exclusively oppressors and nonwhites are exclusively oppressed.
This creates a cheap, tawdry hierarchy within which low-status individuals can climb: take the positions you are told to take, even if they violate the truth, and you will be deemed “virtuous.” Scream it louder and climb the hierarchy. Call anyone who says anything about it a racist and climb higher. Hurt them socially, or in their careers, and you go higher still. Arrest people for telling the truth or fighting back, and you are a Hero of the Fatherland.
A lot of people are weak. A lot of people are narcissistic. And (whether consciously or as part of an emotional circuitry system half a billion years old), people want to climb in a hierarchy. Any hierarchy. And so they choose to value their own gauzy image of themselves more than they do truth, justice, or protecting others from harm.
As a result, daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers are being raped at alarming rates. They could easily be protected. But protecting them would require taking actions that run counter to the narrative. And those doing the protection would lose status in the mainstream hierarchy of virtue. So instead, they allow their daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers to continue being raped at alarming rates.
Stop caring so much what other people think of you!
The point, for our purposes, is not a partisan debate on immigration and crime policy in Europe or anywhere else. Rather, it is that all of this can be boiled down to a single social phenomenon: caring what other people think of us.
There are people who genuinely want to do good. I get that. But every person who seeks to climb a hierarchy of perceived social virtue is highly concerned with the opinions of others. They want to increase their level of social esteem. Social esteem then results in increased hierarchical status and a sense of personal esteem, and the serotonin-boosting effect of climbing in a hierarchy.
It feels good. And it's cheap and cowardly and does great violence to truth. And in many scenarios (as in our case study above), it also abets real violence against real people.
Here, we see yet another outcome of toxic collectivism. It's fine to want to be well-regarded by others. But we should achieve that regard by doing good things. Excessive obsession with social esteem turns some people into virtue-signaling tools.
Or worse—into virtue-signaling monsters who would sacrifice anyone or anything to feed the insatiable maw of their own narcissism.
Esteem is fine, but if you want to prioritize something, don't prioritize the opinions of others—prioritize doing the right thing.
Since it’s technically #FreedomMusicFriday, let’s throw in a music selection. The lyrics aren’t quite right, but the title fits, so that’ll have to do.
"Beautiful People"...that nonsensical term dates back to the 1960s. There was even a song about it by Kenny O'Dell among others I have long forgotten. I never liked that idea. Who determines what a beautiful person really is? Society? Our masters? The elite?
The only beautiful person is the one who is not false, cares not what others think and does not cater to society or anyone else. That's how I see it. An authentic person come Heck or High Water.
Very: Deep, true and pertinent Christopher!
Thank you!