Becoming a Moral Person Takes Work

Building a reputation as a moral and trustworthy person is the work of a lifetime. It can be destroyed in a second. It isn’t a trivial thing to build or to maintain.

So it’s only natural to seek shortcuts. To be a good person takes work. To identify someone else as bad, however, is not so difficult, so long as one doesn’t have to be true.

To identify evil in others, one needs to know something of the kind in oneself. That’s why it is so hard to be good — we all have an inclination, on occasion, to ignore our better angels. Instead of confronting that side of ourselves, with all the resolution that takes, it seems a much better deal to project the evil outwards. It’s certainly much easier than the hard work of self-improvement. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Israel Abides by Rules of War Its Enemies Would Never Dream Of)

But what can serve as the target for this downloading of evil? It has to be credible to ourselves most of all. To have and keep a good reputation, it has to be credible to others.

So, let’s suppose that one is in politics, what a wag has called the second oldest profession. Power can easily translate to money if one is willing to overlook morality and illegality. The more power, the bigger the opportunities. People who play high-stakes games are willing to pay a lot of money to have access to power.

All must be plausible. One can’t just take a pile of cash. But one can accede to having a family member appointed to a very high-paying, very low-responsibility position by the one seeking favorable treatment. It looks on the surface to be employment, not a bribe.

But now imagine that the arrangement is in a foreign country, and it attracts the attention of s serious and uncorruptible investigator there. He smells a rat and starts to gather evidence. The arrangement of the politician and his son is in danger. The access to power will be cut off and so will the flow of money to the politician and his son. Worse, it might discredit the politician as criminally corrupt. He would lose not only this lucrative arrangement but any possibility of any other such arrangement in the future.

Because this man has always sought the easy way out, he has accustomed himself to projecting his own unexamined failures onto others. He knows how to do this effectively, as he’s already succeeded projecting opprobrium onto — let’s say — a superb legal scholar of Supreme Court caliber. So now, he thinks big and projects his own corruption onto the foreign investigator, threatens that foreign government with gigantic loss of funding, and gets the investigator fired.

Just saying.

Lying takes over as a way of life. One lie requires another to support it, and that lie needs another. Eventually, one does not have enough energy to keep the all the lies up. And when one lie collapses, the whole structure of lies starts to totter, and the politician is left, still lying to himself, exposed before the millions who had been suckered into believing him.

It’s a cruel punishment, but condign.

To this point, we have only imagined, theoretically of course, the dynamics of one person seeking a shortcut to being esteemed. But what if we have a general societal movement seeking to achieve moral superiority — along with the esteem and trust that people willingly grant to integrity — on the cheap? Instead of devoted work, they simply search for a target on whom to project their own faults. But since this is a societal movement, the target on which it projects must be a large group target. That’s what it needs to forward the cause of the group seeking easy esteem and the opportunities it brings.

In a society afflicted with this projective disorder, the crucial question is no longer: Has the group made genuine achievements or does it have a culture that supports achievement? Instead, the question is: Are you a member of the group that off-loads its every failure as being caused by another group? Just as the forward path of the politician required the investigator-fall-guy to be condemned as corrupt, so too the group seeking to forward itself on the cheap must find another group or groups on which to dump its own unexamined faults.

Admittedly, this is asking a lot, but can one imagine such a societal movement taking hold in our country? What deep harm that would do! For the success of a self-governing country depends on people doing a good job in governing themselves, and this attitude that we have imagined would pull out that entire enterprise from the roots.

Free societies succeed because they don’t introduce unnecessary or irrelevant priorities. They leave their self-governing people to use their local knowledge, their knowledge of their own selves, to bring their all to the work of doing good and doing well. Their people appreciate and collaborate with each other, thereby building a society of unparalleled strength, resilience, and adaptability. Free societies engage the fullest dedication of their citizens and waste little creative energy in forcing people to do things.

Free societies fight off philosophies of hatred, recognizing them as merely the projection of their own inner demons on others. The oldest of those philosophies, antisemitism, has for centuries been the sure sign of a society’s moral corruption. (READ MORE: Welcome to Venezuela, America)

Who could imagine that America would ever tolerate that?

And if it suddenly awoke from moral slumber to find this malignancy in its body politic, it would swiftly take every action to eliminate it and consign it to the hell from which it emerged and where it belongs.

The post Becoming a Moral Person Takes Work appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.