As a teenager I used to work on local farms, mucking out stalls with a pitch fork and wheelbarrow. It was a long cycle ride but good work. I remember dead milking cows being winched onto the back of the local hunt's lorry so they could be fed to the dogs. I even used to wrestle young bullocks to the ground for veterinary inspections.
According to the modern media morality most of this is shockingly immoral. We are so much better people now that we would never fight bullocks or be so disrespectful to a venerable old, and beloved cow that it would be winched, spinning onto a lorry. We would never sit on the back of a dead animal like the hapless Mr Elliot.
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| Daily Mail |
We are so much more advanced than our predecessors that we put our cattle and pigs into massive barns so that they never see the real daylight or smell the open air. Our cows wander through automated milking parlours. We crop our fields to supply feed because it yields more cattle growth and milk yield per acre than letting the animals feed naturally. The insects and worms have left the fields along with the cattle and the countryside is strangely silent as the birds retreat to back gardens to make a living. Our towns are endlessly expanding over the greenness. Vegans yearn for the day when all livestock are dead. Yet we tell ourselves that we are morally superior to the hard hearted animal trainer and other survivors of the agricultural past.
We sit in front of the modern Panopticon of the media and await moral judgement on the events of the day. If the media sharks begin feeding ferociously we send each other whatsapps and instagrams so that we can feel part of the morally superior society.
But in truth we have no morals. Our displays of goodness are often no more than agreeing with a transient media consensus. The great achievement of Western society is to have liberated moral condemnation from any defensible morality.
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| Parliamentary Briefing |
It seems that the spurious "moral" condemnation of others according to the latest fashion and the lack of clear ideas of how to live is actually worse for the mental well being of the people than Islam or Christianity.
Thirty years ago the West was relatively free from the random "morality" of the media and was the envy of the world. Now our enemies across the world gain strength from believing that although they deny their people freedom they are not "disgusting" like the West. Their morale grows as we display our moral confusion. Most of our enemies, except for a few Westernised academics and students, now believe that the Western approach to life is no longer such an attractive choice except to earn money. Had the Soviet Union survived another forty years it would not have fallen. This should worry us.
It seems that those who lose their gods, whether these are Yahweh or Marx, will eventually lose their society because religions are a way of life and a prescribed way of life is a religion.
For myself I would prefer a society where people are free and can very largely say and behave as they wish, within a libertarian legal code, without either proselytising or moral condemnation. If a dopey little man wants to sit on a dead horse, let him. Unfortunately the tolerant spirit of the age of the hippies is almost extinct.
Will the desire for moral condemnation lead us back to a prescribed way of life or polarise society into self-destruction or neither? These are interesting times.
2/3/2021
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