Weaponized Ignorance and False Moral Certainty

If the Left are allowed to deny Christians' right to religious practice without consequences, the feeling of moral certainty on the Left to terrorize average people will skyrocket.

As an American, you have a choice in how you are governed. You can live under Democratic Party rule, in which your government bears the outward ornaments of functionality, your media repeats soothing assurances of how well things are going, and otherwise obnoxious progressives are all polite and mollified at their government funded conciliatory day jobs, but your society is being drained of all its resources, your neighborhoods filled with foreign threats, and your children exposed to every kind of heinous filth against your will. Or you can live under Republican Party rule, in which someone in power at least appears to be trying to prevent civilization from crashing into the fiscal and moral toilet, but you are assaulted every day by dysgenic radical Leftists making a circus of daily life, your government is in constant turmoil with progressives and neocons entrenched within it emboldened to interfere with its basic operations without fear of repercussion, your media is a 24-hour feed pushing hatred and violence against average law-abiding Americans, and you cannot escape the incoherent, irrational, but brimming with a sense of absolute moral certainty, terroristic screeching of your average Left-leaning neighbors. Your choice is between two miseries—social-material or psychological.

Why are we limited to this dismal binary?

I have spent much time arguing that progressivism is undergirded by a worldview that there is no objective moral truth, and therefore the progressive gets his sense of moral goodness not by actually being moral, but by constantly moving in a direction he perceives as achieving progress, so I won’t belabor that argument again. To the progressive, it doesn’t matter what that progress is, as long as it sounds sufficiently future-y, he is on the side of good if he supports it. Now, because the “good” is constantly “out there” in the future somewhere, it is impossible for anyone to achieve now. Thus, he doesn’t actually need to have any particular character to be morally justified, since that would be impossible. All he has to do to be justified is support the progressive thing, whatever it may be, and be on the “right side of history.” Being “good” comes down entirely to having the right beliefs and has nothing to do with your character or actions.

From this comes the Left’s most powerful weapon: extreme moral certainty in the hands (and heads) of radical midwits.

Only moral certainty can explain the commitment to destruction and mayhem on full display from the Left in recent years despite all rational evidence of its incoherence. As of this writing, the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul appear to be full of seeming lunatics willing to put their well-being on the line to interfere with trained and armed law enforcement officers to prevent illegal immigrants—much of those targeted being violent criminals—from being apprehended and removed from their own neighborhoods. Social and legacy media both are filled with equal lunatics preening with straight faces that the lunatics using violence to protect violent illegal immigrants are models of virtue.

It is almost an admirable thing. If Western Christians expressed half as much moral certainty in their beliefs as progressives seem to feel in theirs, I think the world would look much different today.

The immediate example of this is the disruptors who “journalist” Don Lemon accompanied to storm a church in Minneapolis, interrupt its Sunday services with riotous protests and beratement of its parishioners and pastors, and prevent the congregants from exercising their first amendment rights to religious practice. In a nutshell, a felony was committed by violent Leftists absolutely convinced of their moral justification to do anything, hurt anyone, and violate anyone’s rights, in pursuance of their self-perceived all-important mission to protect the ability of foreigners to invade and pilfer their own neighbors.

Did you know you could just do whatever you want as long you carry a microphone around with you and call it journalism?

This recent article exploring “Minnesota Nice” by David Ziffer seems compatible with this assessment. Ziffer reports that Minnesotans are largely devoted to the illusion that consequences aren’t real. He explains:

Talking with Minnesotans about politics is almost impossible; they regale me with their worldview as if it were the only conceivable reality, on the presumption that I certainly must already agree with them. Presenting Minnesotans with data is pointless; they have been somehow well trained in mechanisms to shut down any message they don’t want to hear. […]

Minnesota residents, avid members of the Church of Woke, strut around with their moral superiority, lording it over the rest of us who live in the real world. Minnesotans, by and large, see themselves as social justice warriors, saving the world from Republicans.

I think the rest of America’s Left aren’t far behind Minnesota. But the fact that the last several outbreaks of lunatic protesting in the face of reality have all come from Minnesota recently says something. If Minnesotans see themselves as inherently “nice,” and they see this as a feature of their mere geography rather than as an assessment of their character, then they are perhaps more prone to others to embrace destructive moral certainty. If your community simply considers itself “nice” as an indelible trait, then whatever you happen to believe must also be “nice.” No actual good actions or justification for your violent actions is required.

In my day-job, I’ve observed over the years that everybody shares this mindset a little. I’ve never met a disputing person who hasn’t managed to see his side with slanted moral weight. Everything the other side did, they did out of evil and malice. The other person knew every step of the way with Machiavellian calculation what they were doing to disadvantage me. But every action I took to disadvantage them was justified as entirely reasonable self-preservation. We all like to give ourselves moral certainty even when we haven’t actually earned it, because having it, even unjustifiably, makes it so much easier to do what we already wanted to do.

So perhaps this is why the vitriol coming from Minnesota seems to be so strong these days. If Minnesotans have perfected the art drinking deeply from the cool aid of false moral certainty as a feature of their state’s culture, then it makes sense that they would be the loudest, most radically determined patrons on the road to civilizational suicide. They would be the least affected by arguments that their feigned niceness to criminals who happen to aid their political interests is overwhelmingly detrimental to their real neighbors. Their average citizens would be the most susceptible to believe that outward shows of solidarity with the perceived victim of the day will grant them absolution, and the most likely to end their thinking there.

“Yeah, it was this big. Listen bud…we don’t lie about ice fishing in this state. That’s the kind of decent people we are.”

Back to Don Lemon and his friends.

Here we have the ultimate example of “my interests supersede your rights.” I’ve watched several of the videos more than once. I’ve read accounts of parents being cut off by rioters preventing them from getting to their children in Sunday school classrooms. I’ve read allegations that rioters surrounded parishioners’ cars and prevented them from leaving. I’ve heard accounts that children thought their parents were going to be killed, with rioters screaming in their faces as they cried and clutched their fathers for protection. These people had a first amendment right to freely practice their religion inside their own church, without fear, but the rioters believed this to be entirely inconsequential.

I don’t doubt that Mr. Lemon believed he was being clever when he dismissed the pastor’s concerns for his flock by suggesting that sometimes protests have to make people uncomfortable. He seemed to treat the congregation as if their mere existence was for the benefit of the rioters, as if their only purpose for existing was to be abused as a means of amplifying the rioters’ message. I don’t doubt that Lemon still considers this a valid argument. I believe it because I believe Lemon was infected with “Minnesota nice” moral certainty, or some brand of it. Of course he should have every right to protest in whatever manner he wants. His concern is the only thing that could possibly matter. You going to church is inconsequential to the grand moral crusade going on in his head.

The real problem, for those of us not directly affected by this event, is that legions of Americans will agree with Lemon unthinkingly. If his friends are prosecuted, and they should be, millions will ignore all the evidence of their eyes and conclude the Left is being persecuted for exercising their First Amendment right to speech. That the parishioners had a First Amendment right to practice their religion will be ignored as inconsequential. Why? Because it’s inconvenient to cause I believe in. Those who even grapple with the contradiction will conclude that the violation of the parishioners’ rights was somehow justified because one of the church’s pastors allegedly had a second job with ICE. There won’t be any argument to support that judgment, the feeling of moral certainty that this alone makes the church culpable will be sufficient.

If Mr. Lemon himself is prosecuted, that will not be taken by progressives as a consequence of his appearing to aid in the storming of a church, disrupting their services, and interfering with its leadership’s safety response, but as Trump censoring journalists he doesn’t like. Like with his friends, because his cause was just, he has the shield of moral certainty to protect him. Everyone else can just send their children to therapists for the next five years to get over the night terrors from thinking their parents were about to be killed.

And thus, armed with moral certainty, the Left can do whatever it wants. With the Democratic Party apparently willing to sacrifice its own to commit violent interference with police operations and to prosecution for inducing the chaos it seems to thrive on, it will continue pumping out the message of moral certainty that amplifies all of this. It transforms concerned citizens into militant foot soldiers. It turns left-of-center Americans into Democratic Party brownshirts. And it does so by the millions.

I hope anyone who’s read this far understands what I mean by “moral certainty.” Obviously I don’t mean anything like moral clarity or wisdom. I mean only the subjective sense of righteousness progressive causes so easily fill this type of person with. These kinds of causes tend to be so oversimplified and emotionally targeted that they bypass common scrutiny. It is the feeling of ignorant confidence when you don’t know enough to even realize you might be wrong. Moral certainty sets in when you don’t even know enough to realize there could possibly be something you’re missing.

And because of this ignorance, the morally certain person can’t help but view his opponent as evil. To the morally certain, it was never a battle of arguments or of nuanced consideration of the evidence or even of competing values. When you feel this type of moral certainty, when your entire sense of self is that your goodness is tied to your supporting the current progressive ideal, the only explanation for opposing points of view is evil and its lies.

Prosecuting Don Lemon or his friends won’t remove this destructive kind of moral certainty, but failure to prosecute them will only spread and encourage it. As they see their myopic and emotion-driven beliefs given precedence over other people’s rights, it will only embolden them further. It will weaponize more people’s ignorance of the nuances of their beliefs into seeing anyone who disagrees with them as an enemy they are justified to destroy.