Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So then likewise: as you do unto others, so would you have them do unto you.
Social Justice Warriors always project (hat tip: Vox Day). They insist that we foment violence and hatred, e.g., when it is of course they who mostly do so. They accuse us of being antiscientific, when of course they are the ones who reject the plain data and revolutionary discoveries of climatology and of genetics, which radically undermine their most precious most romantic notions of how humans really are and how life might be, if only it were not for our deplorable sort. They accuse us of being intolerant and close-minded, when of course they are the ones who are most intolerant and close-minded. They accuse us of irrational barbarity, when of course they are the ones who rage and foam inarticulately – who tear their clothes off in their madness (this is what the OT called “rending one’s garments”) – would be maenads, hapless, hopeless, who have no longer even the art of dismemberment, who know nothing of butchery, or even of sharpening, and a fortiori do not remember how to eat raw bloody male flesh.
There is no point here in rehearsing the myriad instances of such projections on their part. All of us on the Right are quite familiar with the phenomenon.
So here’s the thing that struck me the other day. Our adversaries project upon us their own emotional and intellectual defects and inadequacies. They propose radical policies in response to those defects.
The question then is this: given that they diagnose us as suffering from the defects that in fact bedevil them, may we not infer that the way they propose to treat us is the way that they think – at some deep, unconscious level of their psychic economies – they themselves ought to be treated?
It comes down at the last to the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would be done to. This rule applies at a fundamental level, that is utterly incontrovertible: each one of us does – finds himself doing – unto others as he would be done to, willy nilly; so that your acts toward others betray your notion of how you yourself ought rightly to be treated, mutatis mutandis.
The corollary to the Golden Rule then is this: as you do unto others, so would you be done unto.
The Social Justice Warriors are telling us how they want us to treat them.
It’s a cry for help. No?
The Orthosphere 
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Dear Kristor,
Perhaps the most decent response from us might be rather to ‘love our enemy’ or to ‘turn the other cheek’? My sense is that the wonderfully articulate and perspicacious essays written by Professors Bertonneau and Cocks et al, which are coming from the right spirit of love, ultimately do far more good than any unkind reciprocity, no matter how justified. It can be difficult to restrain oneself but I think if we accept the invitation to play their game, we have already lost. Thank you though for writing as you have. It is soothing to know that it is not the entire world that has gone mad.
Nic
By no means do I think that we ought to descend to the moral insanity of the Left. That really would be a victory for the Enemy. In fact, the post said nothing about how to respond to the Left. It was not about how we should treat people, but about how people of the Left manifestly believe that it is OK to treat people – including, presumably, people such as themselves.
It is this belief of theirs that opens moral room in their hearts for the generally observed phenomenon that the Revolution devours her children.
The commandment to do unto others as you would by done by does not entail that you are presently doing unto others as you would be done by. So SJW persecution does not express a subliminal desire to be persecuted. My telling scandalous lies about X is not rooted in a deep desire to that X tell scandalous lies about me. Persecution and lies are rooted in hatred.
Hatred has a history, and this history often has some odd kinks, but understanding this history and its kinks is seldom effective as a defense against the hatred. Understanding the genealogy of Cultural Marxism and the psychological tricks of the Frankfurt School are not much use when the SJWs change your child’s curriculum, tear down your monuments, or get you fired for an offensive tweet.
I agree of course that there is no logical entailment of “I would be done by as I do” by “do as you would be done by.” And of course I also agree that the fact that I am doing some specific thing to another does not mean I want that specific thing done to me. Finally, I agree also that my acting badly toward others does not mean I want them to act badly toward me.
I was trying to get at something deeper than just tit for tat (not to shortchange tit for tat; it’s pretty doggone deep), and I don’t think I succeeded. This is not just a matter of my sloppy writing, although that did contribute to the murk. It is a matter of my not quite yet understanding the psychological dynamic I suspect is there, lurking below the surface.
When we do x, we effectually assert that it is good, right and proper to do x, all things considered. So when a Social Justice Warrior hates and persecutes whites per se, qua whites, she effectually asserts that under her moral calculus such hatred and persecution are good, right, and proper. If she is herself white – as most Social Justice Warriors seem to be – she is then effectually asserting that it is good, right, and proper to hate and persecute her. And why does she calculate that it is good, right, and proper to hate and persecute whites such as the Social Justice Warrior? Because she understands that people such as herself deserve such treatment; so that such treatment of them is just.
Understanding people such as herself as deserving hatred and persecution, she cannot but hate herself at some level, and feel guilty at her essential, chthonic and incorrigible defect. Her inbuilt sense of the logic of justice then convicts her that she ought to be hated and persecuted.
None of this ought to be taken to suggest that it is indeed good, right, and proper to hate and persecute Social Justice Warriors. It is a suggestion only about their inner state.
I agree that “under her moral calculus such hatred and persecution are good, right, and proper,” but in her moral calculus X is always conditioned by Y, Z, etc. The rightness of my shooting a rabid dog does not entail the rightness of shooting anything whatsoever, or even all dogs. So we must focus on the Y, Z, etc., and not the X. In the mind of the SJW, hatred becomes something other than hatred when it is directed against a “hater,” and oppression and exclusion become something other than oppression and exclusion when they are directed against oppressors and excluders. In the social theory that drives the SJW mindset, this is called Othering, which is to say the creation of a dehumanized outgroup.
Here’s my basic explanation. Progressivism ideology vilifies certain groups to explain the relatively poor performance of other groups. If you are a member of one of these vilified groups and imbibe this ideology in large doses, you are bound to feel extraordinarily guilt. People just like you have ravaged the earth, slaughtered the Indians, lynched the Blacks, gassed the Jews, and kept women in chains. In fact, mankind would be living in Eden were it not for villains like you. Of course there should be a law against spreading these demoralizing lies, but there is not, so they are spread. The only way to escape from this guilt (aside from laughing at the lies) is to turn against one’s group and become an ally of the intersectional oppressed. But then the cishet white ally finds himself at the very bottom of the Progressive Stack (if herself, then only slightly higher). To prove that they he belongs (and perhaps gain some intersectional credit) an interloper in the intersectional oppressed become a fanatical SJW. He howls for your blood in the hope that this will cause his new allies in the intersectional oppressed to notice how much he looks like you.
As to your first paragraph: yes, for sure. Such rationalization engines kick in whenever any of us want to sin. My basic point is that the sinner at some level has somehow or other (that is not necessarily rational) concluded that it is OK to sin in this particular circumstance.
As to your second paragraph: again, yes. I am certain that the dynamic you describe is at work. It is in line with the essentially worldly motive of the Pharisee, who by his public displays of extreme virtue hopes to show his fellow citizens that he at least is irreproachable, so as to forestall his own immolation at the sacrificial pyre. I notice though that its operation would nowise interfere with the operation of the Daddy issues I have adduced. Indeed, nor do either of these explanations conflict with the theses that liberalism originates with nominalism (or for that matter with the Reformation, or with the Puritans, or with the rebellion of the kings against the Pope, or with Eve), or that liberalism is just latter day Gnosticism.
It would be interesting to catalog and compare the various explanations of liberalism that various orthospherean and reactionary writers have proposed. I bet there is a common theme or heading under which they all neatly fit. The hard part would be simply to find them all.
I think you are on to something, but you made me think down a slightly different direction.
It’s not that they want to be persecuted likewise to their persecutions, but rather they are trying to bait the right into aggressive and violent retaliation. They have positioned themselves as the “resistance”, which means ANY action taken counter to them is “retaliation” and makes them martyrs and unequivocal victims. They are offering THEMSELVES as scapegoats, the ultimate end of a holiness spiral.
We, as an ideological people, are not responding in kind. We are following the Golden Rule without any nuance. And since they cannot fathom our non-response, being themselves prone to irrational fits of emotion, versus cool reasoning, they escalate further and further.
I’ve seen periodically across news sites and among my friends people speculating whether we are headed for another Civil War. I decided recently that I don’t think we are. I think they are going to run right up to the line, but since they are unwilling to be the aggressor (insisting on their own victimhood), they will not cross it. They are trying to goad us into a civil war. But as long as we follow the Golden Rule, we are not in danger.
So your corollary is true, but if everyone follows the original rule, it’s rendered moot.
Violence is mimetic, as in the well-known “trading of blows.” The mimesis in violence escalates, as if by its own volition, beyond anyone’s control once it gets started. The admonition “to turn the other cheek” is an extraordinarily wise one, since it is the only way to avoid the temptation of violence. The Right (as absurd an appellation as that is) has wisely thus far not responded to the provocations of the Left. That would be because, I believe, the Right instinctively if not explicitly understands the mimetic and spiraling character of violence. On the contrary, the Left thinks that it can control violence; that it can foment an insurrection, appropriating violence to itself exclusively, and suffer no consequences. The French have a word for that: Betise (stupidity at the bestial level). Just as bestial is the abdication of police power that we see in all civic polities where the Left is in control; that abdication abets violence, on which the state is supposed to have a monopoly. Violence contains a great temptation and a great fascination. It is associated with the Old Gods (and mistakenly with the God of Scripture). The proof of that temptation and of that fascination can be found in popular culture, which, when it is not about sex, is about violence — gruesome, sadomasochistic violence, mass violence, and the egoistic justification of violence.
The Right as conservative wants to conserve and prosper civilization. The rule of just law under duly constituted legitimate authority is valuable to the Right, as being eucivil.
Reformers who are not themselves duly constituted legitimate authorities have no way to enact their schedule of desiderata other than by usurpy of duly constituted legitimate authority. The Left then by definition is rigidly disestablishmentarian, not just with respect to institutional religion, but with respect to all existing institutions (including eventually their own; of such is their autophagy). They are *essentially* rebellious, and destructive.
The Right on the other hand, in response to the evergreen challenge proposed by the Left, is *in general* and *flexibly* antidisestablishmentarian.
Civilization = Non-Violence.
Yes. And you need a properly working altar to generate non-violence.
This reminds me of the argument a frequent Orthosphere commenter made that he was under no biblical obligation to love his neighbor because he did not love himself.
I don’t recall ever reading any such thing here. Love of the self is desire for and enjoyment of the good. And the self is the good that has been realized therein. Hard to see how you could be a self and not love the goods that motivated its constitution and now constitute it.
Agreed.
Even those who do hate themselves do so on account of an apprehension that their selves have failed to realize the goods potential in them at their creation. Self hatred is self love disappointed.
I don’t think this individual hated himself so much as he felt loving himself was not a good strategy to “strive for perfection”.
Now, now, winstonScrooge.
There is no authoritative command to “love thyself.”
And one’s “greatest enemy” IS thyself.
Those two understandings are in perfect accord with known reality.
The question then becomes, “How do I treat my neighbor” assuming I am not my “greatest enemy” and therefore command myself to “love thyself” so as to treat even volatile strangers as “neighbors?”
Again winstonScrooge… In the real world of free will, one chooses his neighbors so as to love them as one loves thyself. The alternate reality… The reality upon which mad liberation is socially constructed so as to destroy neighborhoods, is that, “no,” one does not get to choose those neighbors that he shall love as he loves thyself. So his “greatest enemy” lives next door.
I don’t know that Jews and Samaritans chose to be neighbors and yet Christ seemed to think “love thy neighbor as thyself” applied to their situation.
wS…
Christ was not a self-annihilator…
Therefore, Christianity cannot preach self-annihilation.
Worldly totalitarianism is self-annihilating.
Not choosing your neighbors is totalitarian.
Intepreting “love thy neighbor as thyself” in favor of the totalitarian wishing to force your “greatest enemy” to live next door is self-annihilating.
Ergo, your interpretation is anti-Christ.
[A man] asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” LK 10:25-37
It’s actually, LK 10:29-37. @Thordaddy I’m not sure what your response means but I think the gospel speaks for itself.
wS…
You’ve reiterated what I have already stated. One chooses his neighbors. Ergo, a “neighbor” is not forced upon another. The latter scenario creates an “enemy” by manner of totalitarianism.
I don’t believe I have reiterated what you stated. The Jews and Samaritans did not choose to live near each other nor were they forced to live next to each other by a totalitarian regime. Yet Christ clearly considered them neighbors and beholden to the 2nd Greatest Commandment.
I’d say this “cry” is a perverse invitation to perpetual self-annihilation.
And I’d say this “cry” has been incredibly persuasive on a mass scale, racially-speaking.
Not much different in aim than leveling the accusation of “white supremacy” on everything to the right of mad liberation.
In the mind of a “white” self-annihilator, “white supremacy” is perpetually free to oppress and dominate. In his denial to dominate and oppress the self-annihilators, the “white” rightist accedes to self-annihilation thus granting it a perpetuating status.
It seems more a case of dueling projections and desire for dysfunctional relationship.