Virtue lies in giving up the advantage. Virtue is beholding an arsenal and keeping your hands empty. Virtue is condemning yourself to death because you must either tell the truth or keep silent. Virtue is a winnowing-down, or up. Always the way grows tighter, narrower, the air thinner, the range of action more constricted. The virtuous path is clear, not because it is straight--a narrower, more crooked goat-track does not exist--but because it is uncluttered.
"Ah! It would be virtuous to pick a weapon from the arsenal in order to protect those who cannot themselves pick up a weapon! It would be virtuous to lie in order to save another's life, or the lives of many! A virtuous person would keep all their options open always, so as not to limit the possibility of action, the possibility of improving upon virtue's outmoded shortcomings. Virtue has been shown to lose, loses always, when it is so simple to win! How is it virtuous to lose to a bad person? You have to win! A virtuous person would be cognizant of how much more utile morals are when placed relative to everything, how much more of the greater good can be accomplished when virtue is defined as volumetric accomplishment in the service of institutions which serve the public. Joseph, I have caught you out: by adhering to the ancient, cast-down idols, you place yourself in a regressive mode, and your so-called virtue is immoral by its decrepitude, by its failure of nuance, by its inaccessibility! Virtue, if it is virtue, is actually not hard, difficult, costly, any of that--it's easy, and it's called just being a decent person. You know? Look. Justice is further along now than ever and it still totally sucks, and what the ancients called virtue was their primitive justification for all their terrible crimes, which stain the pages of our wretched histories. What you want to mean by virtue is social responsibility or liberation, or liberating yourself into your social responsibility. Don't be an asshole."
Bullshit! Ugh.
But it feels right and usually produces preferable material results: other bullshitters will respect you, or seem to in order to use you as social capital; I understand talking this way can actually land you a variety of high-paying jobs; you can give yourself permission to write off a great deal of personal responsibility with this frame of thought; it is currently popular and always easy to speak this way, so you are likely to get positive reinforcement for very little effort; you are very free make your life easier to live and more comfortable and stimulating in a staggering variety of ways; you personally get to feel morally superior to and immeasurably more intelligent than all dead people and most of your contemporaries.
Look, I get why this is extremely popular and that it feels very gratifying. It is total fucking bullshit, though.
Immaterial returns are most of what you can expect from virtue, which is part of what makes it stupid, but them's the breaks. Virtue is as inflexible and unapproachable as the truth, as dangerous and as difficult to find, as profitable, and about as palatable. Almost nobody wants anything to do with it. It is not comfortable. It usually hurts. The people who will thank you the most honestly for it are weaker than you, and can give nothing you can show for it in return. It is almost impossible to live up to and probably not even desirable. But it is virtue, and twisting things around to make them easier cannot change that.
But it feels right and usually produces preferable material results: other bullshitters will respect you, or seem to in order to use you as social capital; I understand talking this way can actually land you a variety of high-paying jobs; you can give yourself permission to write off a great deal of personal responsibility with this frame of thought; it is currently popular and always easy to speak this way, so you are likely to get positive reinforcement for very little effort; you are very free make your life easier to live and more comfortable and stimulating in a staggering variety of ways; you personally get to feel morally superior to and immeasurably more intelligent than all dead people and most of your contemporaries.
Look, I get why this is extremely popular and that it feels very gratifying. It is total fucking bullshit, though.
Immaterial returns are most of what you can expect from virtue, which is part of what makes it stupid, but them's the breaks. Virtue is as inflexible and unapproachable as the truth, as dangerous and as difficult to find, as profitable, and about as palatable. Almost nobody wants anything to do with it. It is not comfortable. It usually hurts. The people who will thank you the most honestly for it are weaker than you, and can give nothing you can show for it in return. It is almost impossible to live up to and probably not even desirable. But it is virtue, and twisting things around to make them easier cannot change that.
To be virtuous is to suffer, to be a servant, and to behave idiotically; through this, one has a chance to become wise, to live in bliss, and to be free. Probably. Maybe.
I'm not going to elaborate a length on this point here. That belongs in books. I don't give too much of the real business away for free; remember, the blog supplies but sample cups! The good shit costs seven dollars. If you have a Kindle, less.
Anyway, virtue is stupid, but at least it's not bullshit. I am not, myself, virtuous; I'm not even sure that I'm trying correctly.
--JL
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