"They Just Don’t Care"—Rationalization and the Need to Look Good

“They” in the title of this post refers to our culture’s intelligentsia. This elite includes mainstream media, teachers and professors who control today’s education system, certain entertainers and business leaders who think they are qualified to speak out about politics, and, of course, or especially, politicians and the unelected deep staters who have no second thoughts about issuing totalitarian edicts and imposing them on us.

Those edicts are currently condemning small businesses to bankruptcy and low-wage hourly workers, especially women, to unemployment, poverty, depression and thoughts of suicide, which in some cases have been executed successfully.

Why don’t they, the intelligentsia, care? The facts and science (1, 2) about our past ten months of coronavirus madness say that the bug is at worst a bad flu.*

The answer, whether the non-caring people are honest or not and depending on who we are talking about, is that they think they are doing good, namely, that they are moral and that anyone who criticizes them is not being fair and are themselves immoral.

This is the power of rationalization cloaked as ethics. In today’s culture, Nazi-style and Chinese Communist Party style intimidation, through political correctness and social credit scores, also cloaked as ethics, are used to silence dissent.

It’s for the good of impoverished and victimized groups or collectives, the intelligentsia say. Or: for the health of everyone you may come in contact with.

So don’t be selfish!

Altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice, is the foundation of all variants of socialism and dictatorship. It does not mean kindness or gentleness or giving to charity. It means giving up what you want and deserve. Never acting from “inclination,” as Immanuel Kant said.

The intelligentsia, because they are the self-proclaimed experts and preachers on altruism, which means “looking good” at being moral, are the ones who issue demands for us to obey.**

It’s our duty, after all, to sacrifice ourselves to their edicts.

Criminals (and I include dictators here) rationalize nearly everything they do. “He deserved it,” says the murderer and “She really wanted me,” says the rapist. (See Inside the Criminal Mind, esp. chap. 6 and 7.) Ideologies and systems of ethics can and have become rationalizations for some of the worst behavior in history. (See Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.)

If you label your enemies as vermin or animals (or selfish exploiters or white supremacists), you can justify most any kind of punishment, including torture and death, and not likely feel remorse. You may even feel proud of yourself for having done “something good!” To the outside observer, it looks like you don’t care. And you don’t—about the person you just tortured or murdered.

The intelligentsia today are not quite as bad as torturers and murders, though some have actually expressed such desires about certain people and have used social media to express a need to “cleanse” the supporters of a certain politician. The word “cleanse” was apparently quickly replaced with less harsh language, but if our cultural tide does not turn, the elites will continue to advocate more serious punishments.

Federal prosecutors (Applying Principles, pp. 68-70; 2, 3) are already proud of drumming up false charges and sending their bankrupted victims to solitary confinement.

Altruism, however, is not a valid system of ethics. As Ayn Rand said, it is a morality of death. It is a system of sacrifices, which means someone—the elites—must collect the sacrifices. How do we be good? Sacrifice ourselves.

Because this doctrine has not been challenged by many people worldwide, citizens of the world today are gladly and willingly forfeiting their lives and livelihood, their standard of living, and even their health for the sake of being able to say that they have been obediently moral.

No, they have been suicidal, both figuratively and literally.

Altruism is the opposite of what ethics is, namely living up to the requirements of human life, consonant with the survival of a being that possess the capacity to reason. Those requirements are all selfish.

Breathing and eating are selfish. Individual rights and private property ownership are selfish. Capitalism, by encouraging the cooperation of everyone under a division of labor, is the system of rational egoism that benefits all individual lives. Capitalism and rational egoism do not ask for obedience or sacrifices. They ask for trade between productive equals. And we are all equal under capitalism—before the law, the objective, not-corrupted-by-postmodernism law.

Pretension to ethics through rationalization is rampant today, made possible by the updated Marxism of postmodernism’s abandonment of reason, logic, objectivity and objective reality, and, in general, Enlightenment values. Lies, hypocrisy, inconsistency? Doesn’t matter, say the postmoderns. They have no intellectual arguments, just “narratives,” and they equate words to physical force and preach that there is no such thing as free speech.

But narratives are fictions, as I have written before. How do you respond to such condescending, cynical skeptics who are ruining our lives? You can’t argue with them. If you try, they will change the meanings of your words or, more likely, just hurl Goebbelsian smears (1, 2) at you and say you are the one doing everything they have already done or are currently doing, and that you are the one being Goebbelsian.

The ancient Greeks knew what follows from skepticism as a philosophy: dictatorship. You have your fiction. I have mine. How do we decide who is right? We have to have a “strong public sword” to keep the peace, as skeptic Thomas Hobbes said in the seventeenth century.

The solution is to find people who are not leaders of the corrupt intelligentsia, who have not totally swallowed the postmodern nonsense, and enlighten them.

And vote. The American sense of life is the Enlightenment sense of life and is still strong, at least in half of the country, probably more than half.

See Related posts in Applying Principles: “The Dangerous Admiration of BS” (2007, pp. 293-95),  “Facts Don’t Matter, Or: The Art of BS” (2013, pp. 307-09), and “Why Don’t Facts Matter?”(2016, pp. 311-15).


* For many historical examples of the madness of crowd psychology, see Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

** “Looking good at being good” is not always an issue of ethics; it may be an issue of competence. A cursory search of Google Scholar reveals an interesting listing of academic papers about colleges and businesses preferring to look good—rather than be good—at educating or serving customers, though these competencies in education and business can also be infused with a dose of altruism. In a meeting years ago at my university, the dean held up an email from a dean at another school. The content, according to my dean, essentially said, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” meaning they should praise each other’s school in a survey of college rankings! Such polls are mostly popularity contests and are relatively harmless when compared to the totalitarian edicts mentioned above.