Let's start with someone in the headlines right now, John Edwards. Well, the first thing that we have to say for Mr. Edwards is that he has admitted that he had "sex with that woman", and that it was quite wrong. He hasn't made a laughably lame attempt to excuse his marital misconduct, à la Newt Gingrich and his dopey defense that he had an adulterous affair because he was "working so hard for the country at the time".
Secondly, the scandal and situation that Edwards finds himself facing is not as bad as it appears at first blush. That is, he hasn’t been convicted of any criminal wrongdoing, he’s still innocent until proven guilty. As for the possibility that he’ll be proven guilty of any illegalities, well, the talking heads with a law degree that you see on the news shows seem to be of the expert opinion that the prosecution has a fairly difficult case on its hands. This is because it’s a somewhat subjective question as to whether the hush money Edwards obtained from supporters was a meant as a campaign contribution or not, and the whole case hinges on this subjective issue! There’s really no tangible, definite crime for a trier of fact to look at, the case really will just be a matter of each side, of both the defense and the prosecution, trying to sway how the mind’s eye of twelve beholders on a jury perceives and interprets the senator’s acceptance of his backers beneficence in his time of need.
Now then, the real distinction with a significant difference between the sexual shenanigans of someone such as Edwards, and a character like Newty, is that Edwards was not the moralistic, family-values-preaching defender of society against moral decline at the hands of gays and other supposed enemies of the family that arch conservative Gingrich was. Ergo and ipso facto, he’s certainly not guilty of the same kind or degree of hypocrisy. That is, Edwards hasn’t fallen off the same conservative high horse of holier-than-thouness, because he never had the sanctimonious chutzpah to mount it.
Some people might simplistically lump Edwards and Gingrich together because they’re both high-profile politicians with embarrassing sexcapades to live down, but although adultery is adultery, and is always an unethical thing to do, Edwards is simply not the same hypocrite as his congressional colleague Newt. Sure, as a politician Edwards had to present the public image of a model family man, and is guilty of being disingenuous in doing so. But, again, he didn’t ever play the part of the simon-pure conservative guardian of society’s moral fiber.
Nope, sorry conservatives, but the for-public-consumption false face of Edwards is not at all interchangeable with, or equal in its reprehensibility to the pious duplicity of certain members of the self-righteous right. So, the upshot is that conservatives are simply scandalmongeringly using the messes of Edwards and Weiner to try to offset the embarrassment caused by the fall from grace of prominent members of their own camp. But it won’t really work, conservatives still come off looking like the bigger moral frauds, the more heinous hypocrites, because they are. John Edwards, for instance, did not hold himself out to be a Jonathan Edwards, a preachy paragon – conservatives do, and for this reason they fittingly have much more to answer for, and their careers are put in much more jeopardy when their peccadilloes and closeted skeletons are eventually exposed by the media’s harsh lights.
The lesson of the story is really quite simple, moral phonies such as many of the folks you find on the conservative side of the aisle, are worse scammers of the public’s trust, and worse sinners, a good deal worse than mere moral transgressors like Messrs. Edwards, Weiner, Clinton, etc. Why, because they compound the transgressive wrong of cheating on one’s wife with a kind of moralistic hubris.
And it’s such hubristic goody-goodiness that really goeth before a moral pratfall. Well, according to Dante’s imaginative conception of hell, prideful pretenders to moral superiority earn themselves the poetic fate of spending the afterlife walking the perimeter of the hypocrite’s circle weighed down by lead-lined monk’s robes, “The robes are brilliantly gilded on the outside and are shaped like a monk's habit, for the hypocrite's outward appearance shines brightly and passes for holiness, but under that show lies the terrible weight of his deceit which the soul must bear through all eternity”.
At any rate, I think we can all agree that being a hanky-panky perpetrating, unfaithful spouse is bad enough, but to hide the truth of your characterless character behind the moralistic masquerade of being a stalwart champion of the institution of marriage, for example staunchly opposing same-sex unions on the grounds that they undermine the true meaning and sanctity of marriage, adds insult to injury, and insincerity to impropriety.
We also then must wonder where the strong moral stance of conservatives really comes from. Well, if it doesn’t just well up from a conservative’s inner virtues, where then does it arise from? One partial explanation is of course that conservatives cultivate the public persona of propriety and piety to con voters into electing them to office. This is an obvious explanation, and I’m one that has some truth to it in many cases. However, I also suspect that there’s a bit more to it, that there’s also a psychological motive at play and underlying the whole conservative mentality.
To pithily spitball my amateur psychoanalysis, the conservative worldview is fundamentally a projection of an alpha male-female mentality. A dominance-oriented psychology in which everything is interpreted in macholy dualistic terms of strong and weak, winner and loser, worthy and unworthy, righteous and unrighteous. This is why conservatives are wont to favor “solutions” for social ills, such as drugs and crime, that involve viewing the people caught up in these ills as morally weak and wretched losers who deserve punishment, who need to be dealt with from a “position of strength”, given a show of society’s force in the form of police crackdowns and stern prison sentences. That is, conservatives are the real men from Mars, with a Martian mentality that, apropos of the ancient Roman god of armed conflict, sees every problem facing the nation as something to be resolved with another war. Whether it’s a war on crime, a war on drugs, war on undocumented immigration, or a war on terror, aggressively dominating the problem and the people they blame for it, is the conservative’s stock answer.
This explains why conservatives support the death penalty, it’s of course the ultimate show of force. It explains why conservatives tend to be more hawkish, more supportive of their country’s wars, and more pro-military. Naturally people with a Martian mind-set are going to stridently support actual wars, and the military personnel who fight in them. After all, the primitive alpha mind views soldiers and veterans as the national tribe’s warriors, embodiments of the superior qualities of a dominant male, precisely the kind qualities the alpha mind prizes. Hence the alpha-minded conservative will seldom speak ill of the military, and will back it in all of its actions.
The alpha mentality also explains a host of other conservative opinions and policies. For example, it explains why conservatives are such big fans of capitalism. The capitalist is just our modern society’s updated version of an alpha male, exercising social dominance through the amassment of economic wealth and power. Naturally alpha-minded conservatives identify with and take a positive view of alpha capitalists. And naturally they think that a socioeconomic system, such as capitalism, in which people have license to pursue economic and social dominance, is the best of all possible systems. But of course they don’t wish to be crude about it, so they formulate a pack of political and economic principles that rationalize Darwinian capitalism into something almost loftily idealistic. They then hide their alpha mentality behind their idealistic ideology, behind the ideology of freedom, and self-deceivingly hold themselves forth as confirmed liberty-loving conservatives. We’re back to conservatism’s tendency to fall into hypocrisy!
Okay then, let’s finally get back to conservatism’s fake morality. Quite simply, the pro-family, pro-chastity, “pro-life”, anti-abortion stance, and all the social-moral stances of conservatives, are likewise just ways of holding oneself forth as men and women of righteous “values”, as ethically superior individuals who have the right to assert a domineering agenda.
Well, the way it works is pretty straightforward. The alpha-minded conservative’s Neanderthaloid cognitive binaries of strong-weak, worthy-unworthy, all too easily segue into dualistic moral thinking, into thinking in categories of good and bad, moral and immoral.
The conclusion is located directly below
Secondly, the scandal and situation that Edwards finds himself facing is not as bad as it appears at first blush. That is, he hasn’t been convicted of any criminal wrongdoing, he’s still innocent until proven guilty. As for the possibility that he’ll be proven guilty of any illegalities, well, the talking heads with a law degree that you see on the news shows seem to be of the expert opinion that the prosecution has a fairly difficult case on its hands. This is because it’s a somewhat subjective question as to whether the hush money Edwards obtained from supporters was a meant as a campaign contribution or not, and the whole case hinges on this subjective issue! There’s really no tangible, definite crime for a trier of fact to look at, the case really will just be a matter of each side, of both the defense and the prosecution, trying to sway how the mind’s eye of twelve beholders on a jury perceives and interprets the senator’s acceptance of his backers beneficence in his time of need.
Now then, the real distinction with a significant difference between the sexual shenanigans of someone such as Edwards, and a character like Newty, is that Edwards was not the moralistic, family-values-preaching defender of society against moral decline at the hands of gays and other supposed enemies of the family that arch conservative Gingrich was. Ergo and ipso facto, he’s certainly not guilty of the same kind or degree of hypocrisy. That is, Edwards hasn’t fallen off the same conservative high horse of holier-than-thouness, because he never had the sanctimonious chutzpah to mount it.
Some people might simplistically lump Edwards and Gingrich together because they’re both high-profile politicians with embarrassing sexcapades to live down, but although adultery is adultery, and is always an unethical thing to do, Edwards is simply not the same hypocrite as his congressional colleague Newt. Sure, as a politician Edwards had to present the public image of a model family man, and is guilty of being disingenuous in doing so. But, again, he didn’t ever play the part of the simon-pure conservative guardian of society’s moral fiber.
Nope, sorry conservatives, but the for-public-consumption false face of Edwards is not at all interchangeable with, or equal in its reprehensibility to the pious duplicity of certain members of the self-righteous right. So, the upshot is that conservatives are simply scandalmongeringly using the messes of Edwards and Weiner to try to offset the embarrassment caused by the fall from grace of prominent members of their own camp. But it won’t really work, conservatives still come off looking like the bigger moral frauds, the more heinous hypocrites, because they are. John Edwards, for instance, did not hold himself out to be a Jonathan Edwards, a preachy paragon – conservatives do, and for this reason they fittingly have much more to answer for, and their careers are put in much more jeopardy when their peccadilloes and closeted skeletons are eventually exposed by the media’s harsh lights.
The lesson of the story is really quite simple, moral phonies such as many of the folks you find on the conservative side of the aisle, are worse scammers of the public’s trust, and worse sinners, a good deal worse than mere moral transgressors like Messrs. Edwards, Weiner, Clinton, etc. Why, because they compound the transgressive wrong of cheating on one’s wife with a kind of moralistic hubris.
And it’s such hubristic goody-goodiness that really goeth before a moral pratfall. Well, according to Dante’s imaginative conception of hell, prideful pretenders to moral superiority earn themselves the poetic fate of spending the afterlife walking the perimeter of the hypocrite’s circle weighed down by lead-lined monk’s robes, “The robes are brilliantly gilded on the outside and are shaped like a monk's habit, for the hypocrite's outward appearance shines brightly and passes for holiness, but under that show lies the terrible weight of his deceit which the soul must bear through all eternity”.
At any rate, I think we can all agree that being a hanky-panky perpetrating, unfaithful spouse is bad enough, but to hide the truth of your characterless character behind the moralistic masquerade of being a stalwart champion of the institution of marriage, for example staunchly opposing same-sex unions on the grounds that they undermine the true meaning and sanctity of marriage, adds insult to injury, and insincerity to impropriety.
We also then must wonder where the strong moral stance of conservatives really comes from. Well, if it doesn’t just well up from a conservative’s inner virtues, where then does it arise from? One partial explanation is of course that conservatives cultivate the public persona of propriety and piety to con voters into electing them to office. This is an obvious explanation, and I’m one that has some truth to it in many cases. However, I also suspect that there’s a bit more to it, that there’s also a psychological motive at play and underlying the whole conservative mentality.
To pithily spitball my amateur psychoanalysis, the conservative worldview is fundamentally a projection of an alpha male-female mentality. A dominance-oriented psychology in which everything is interpreted in macholy dualistic terms of strong and weak, winner and loser, worthy and unworthy, righteous and unrighteous. This is why conservatives are wont to favor “solutions” for social ills, such as drugs and crime, that involve viewing the people caught up in these ills as morally weak and wretched losers who deserve punishment, who need to be dealt with from a “position of strength”, given a show of society’s force in the form of police crackdowns and stern prison sentences. That is, conservatives are the real men from Mars, with a Martian mentality that, apropos of the ancient Roman god of armed conflict, sees every problem facing the nation as something to be resolved with another war. Whether it’s a war on crime, a war on drugs, war on undocumented immigration, or a war on terror, aggressively dominating the problem and the people they blame for it, is the conservative’s stock answer.
This explains why conservatives support the death penalty, it’s of course the ultimate show of force. It explains why conservatives tend to be more hawkish, more supportive of their country’s wars, and more pro-military. Naturally people with a Martian mind-set are going to stridently support actual wars, and the military personnel who fight in them. After all, the primitive alpha mind views soldiers and veterans as the national tribe’s warriors, embodiments of the superior qualities of a dominant male, precisely the kind qualities the alpha mind prizes. Hence the alpha-minded conservative will seldom speak ill of the military, and will back it in all of its actions.
The alpha mentality also explains a host of other conservative opinions and policies. For example, it explains why conservatives are such big fans of capitalism. The capitalist is just our modern society’s updated version of an alpha male, exercising social dominance through the amassment of economic wealth and power. Naturally alpha-minded conservatives identify with and take a positive view of alpha capitalists. And naturally they think that a socioeconomic system, such as capitalism, in which people have license to pursue economic and social dominance, is the best of all possible systems. But of course they don’t wish to be crude about it, so they formulate a pack of political and economic principles that rationalize Darwinian capitalism into something almost loftily idealistic. They then hide their alpha mentality behind their idealistic ideology, behind the ideology of freedom, and self-deceivingly hold themselves forth as confirmed liberty-loving conservatives. We’re back to conservatism’s tendency to fall into hypocrisy!
Okay then, let’s finally get back to conservatism’s fake morality. Quite simply, the pro-family, pro-chastity, “pro-life”, anti-abortion stance, and all the social-moral stances of conservatives, are likewise just ways of holding oneself forth as men and women of righteous “values”, as ethically superior individuals who have the right to assert a domineering agenda.
Well, the way it works is pretty straightforward. The alpha-minded conservative’s Neanderthaloid cognitive binaries of strong-weak, worthy-unworthy, all too easily segue into dualistic moral thinking, into thinking in categories of good and bad, moral and immoral.
The conclusion is located directly below
