The weaponization of morality

Post Reply New Topic

A very common thing I have noticed in the politics of authoritarians, is the manipulation of one's morality to justify tyranny. I will keep it ambiguous and I'm sure either side can come up with examples of the other doing this, because it's rather universal. Every political entity has a moral philosophy underpinning it and often they can use this philosophy to sway its followers into accepting and/or participating in the most vile of acts.

For instance, when political opposition is jailed by the government in power, it's not often explicitly worded as that. Often it's something more along the lines of "insulting heroes" or "disrupting the peace". Or they just make up an unrelated charge entirely. This is to build a moral case to jail them because they want to make an example out of them to perpetuate their authority.

Or perhaps the authoritarian state would like to institute a brand new policy that strips citizens of certain freedoms they cherish. They couldn't do that out of the blue. But come up with some kind of moral reason and then ram it through? At the very least it prevents an uprising.

Never trust it when governments pedal moral viewpoints. More often than not it's just a tool in the authoritarian's belt to keep you comfortable with them violating your basic right in some way.

It doesn't just have to be philosophy either, it can also be a religion. Looking at you, catholic church. The bottom line is, these belief systems are often just ploys for control so rather than buy into what a political party is selling it's better to develop your own sense of what is right based on your own reasoning, not that of a faction and their constituents.

Exactly.
The US government is now trying to legislate morality/civility of its own variety with the implementation of Critical Race Theory and hate speech laws. They believe that they have to eliminate WrongThink amongst the Prolitariat.

"Morality" ... what a concept!

Every government uses some kind of morality-centered argument to legitimize its actions. This person deserves to be arrested because they're a threat to society/they are an extremist/they hate what we stand for/they want to divide us/they want to invite violence. Most of us know better than to buy into this nonsense just bc someone in power tells us so. I try to take morality on a case by case basis, because despite their best efforts sometimes politicians can actually manage to be right about some things. If a politician is moral, they're doing it despite their profession, not because of it.

A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. Typical moral panics from the poast involved, but were not limited to:

Late 1500s to Early 1600s: Witches, Witchcraft, Devil Worship

1850s: Immigrants

1910s: "White Slavery" (Sex Trafficking)

1920s: "Devil's Music" (i.e., Blues, Jazz)

1930s: Alcohol (e.g., Prohibition)

1950s: Comic Books, Communists, The Bomb, Switchblade Knives

1960s: Hippies, Rock & Roll, Backmasking, The Pill

1970s: War on Drugs, Increase in Crime, Video Game Violence, Crack Babies, Gay Recruitment, Poisoned Hallowe'en Candy

1980s: Dungeons and Dragons, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Super-Predators.

1990s: AIDS, Sex offenders, Pit Bulls and Rotweilers

2000s: Jihadists, Human trafficking

2010s: Transphobia, Homophobia

2020s: Election Fraud, Vaccines

Moral Panics are largely contrived and driven by ignorance.

In the words of Slavoj Zizek:
Where there is a god, everything is permitted - to the one who thinks of himself as directly acting out divine commands.

People whose primary goal is winning as many zero-sum games as they can and stilting the world in their favor won't be above weaponizing absolutely anything. From that perspective you probably don't want to take their recommendations on what's moral - it's almost guaranteed to be gaslighting and if what they're recommending is actually beneficial to you it's more likely to be purely accidental.

Morality's really something that's imminently practical to the person applying it in their own lives - whether for keeping your psyche integrated, simply for mental health, whether you just don't want to license other people to feel justified in robbing you of all your stuff (what's what 'evil' and 'sin' are great for - othering and transfer frontier, it's also why people hate to forgive when there's nothing for them to gain from it), or whether you have some concerns about where your actions now might land you either in after death states or in reincarnation. Coming from a government megaphone the better term for it is 'propaganda'.