Maggie's Farm

It's mildly striking that trolling the empathetic reader comes the day after appealing to the appearance of Christian virtue.

Nietzsche developed a deeper view of the dynamics of morality - they being forever the property of mind and not nature - in his theory of "master-slave mentality". An even more interesting development of this insight develops the self-purported lifestyle class, in a variation on politically-correct, neo-Puritanical, progressive virtue-signalling, into the cultural reactionary.

Further developing the same trajectory reveals that the animal is probably the most devalued and then harmed of "all God's creatures", its place in a constant state of arbitrary flux as this class of reactionaries declines developing its fragmented and largely habitual morality to a logical (and meaningful) conclusion.



Don't take "master" and "slave" entirely literally, if at all. Master morality is a theory of the origin of virtue, in its case that virtue is borne of self and identity, not mind or abstract principle, and certainly not of the authentic Christian sense, where, as we'll find, the slave morality not only lies in mind and abstract principle, but too in empathy and classlessness.



Ironically, since "slave morality" is rooted in the abstracts of empathy, liberty, democracy, and rights, it is it that fulfills both Christian virtue and the subsequent American founding. Furthering the irony, master morality, being inherently proud, selfish, and identity-based, is and has become reactionary to the principles of slave morality. That is, to Christianity.

Over time and through eras - some of them very spontaneous and brief - there have been many of these inversions of principle. Today the "liberal" left is a-liberal in the extreme, "conservative" rightists embrace statism, and among moralists, master morality has become an ersatz projection and tool not to define and embrace a principle, but to signal and define its class and self in order to react to more organic, authentic, and as it turns out, more Christian values such as empathy, the sanctity of life, and in fact, the original commanding godly rules, among them the instruction to not kill.

Somehow these rules have been corrupted into a lifestyle signal that wouldn't exist if not for the actual Christian ethics both sides of modern "Christian" culture have inverted to at least some degree. I doubt there's a more un-thought manifestation of it than the tribal lifestyling that portends to frontline religious traditionalism when it is actually taking the Lord's name in vain.

Whether Nietsche was, is, or should be a benchmark for morality is up for debate. It's not likely he purported to speak for virtually all human structure in the way dysfunctional, universal theory flowed from Marx, et al. Not debatable is whether empathy, humility, sanctity, humanity, and love are Christian, and further, whether their opposites could be somehow construed as Christian in what is clearly a temporary cultural affectation.

In the place where ostensible master-moralizing lifestyle signalers technically become slave moralists when they react to vegans while advertising humble godliness?

Quite the alpha pose, isn't it, Will?