Take The Moral High Ground
by Ross Elliot
Ever get into one of those situations where some statist sympathiser is pontificating about the failure of the market, slamming individual choice and demanding some "corrective" action from government? And, you sigh inwardly, your eyes (and your mind) glaze over, and you think: oh, dear, here we go again? How many times have you avoided conflict by making some harmless observation, by moving away to freshen your drink, by turning the conversation to a less contentious subject, by remaining silent?
Yep, we’ve all done it. Some of us have even turned it into an art-form. But, remember what Edmund Burke said: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Now, some tipsy idiot mouthing off statist cliches at a dinner party may not seem like the most important target in the battle between good and evil, but remember that the opinions and thoughts of low men flow together like the poisonous trickling tributaries of a mighty, polluted river, gathering force and momentum, until they become ubiquitous, axiomatic, seemingly irrefutable.
And that’s the situation we find ourselves in; we’re awash in a swirling, Amazon-sized sluice of stinking cultural flotsam. And the flood can’t be dammed or diverted. It has to be cut off at the source. You need to tramp back up into the foothills and cleanse the flow at it’s source. Dinner party dickheads need to be burned so badly that they wish they’d died as children. And you can only do that by taking the moral high ground. Not to preach or moralise but to intellectually slam-dunk these backsliders with clear, forceful, irrefutable arguments. You need to radiate a sense of dignified indignation. You need to portray the collectivist ideal as a corruption, a deviancy, a repugnance. Operate from that point of view. Wind the cultural clock back to a time when the vermin would have been shunned, cast out and vilified. Treat their arguments with contempt and disdain, not as de rigueur, as they unfortunately have become.
And don’t be afraid to use a polemical or mildly sarcastic attack. Most dinner party dullards have been educated far beyond their intelligence quotients and hold opinions that they don’t fully understand. They aren’t sure (or aware) of their premises and are robotically reciting spew that dovetails nicely with their corrupt sense of life. Wade into them!
Now, here’s the thing. You’re firing at hard targets, flabby minds, but hard targets. You can shame them, refute them, reduce them to quivering jelly, but you won’t change them. They are who they are: idiots, dangerous for sure, but idiots nevertheless. Lock ‘n’ load. Aim. Fire. Fuck ‘em and forget ‘em.
Your real target is the sort of person who is always present at any social gathering: the quiet observer. Hope that some of your moral shrapnel ricochets off the target dummy and hits "the silent one" fair and square in their quiescent sense of life. Show them that they don’t have to stand silent and listen to the bullshit that infects modern life. Show them that moral outrage is not only alive and well but that it is proper and necessary. Most importantly, show them that good men don’t have to stand around and do nothing.
Does this mean you have to be a martyr for freedom? A sacrificial animal that serves only to make tracks for silent followers, ingrates? No. First and foremost you are being true to your own sense of life. You are refusing to allow the stench of intellectual dishonesty and moral ambivalence to go unnoticed and its effluviators to go unmolested. You do what you need to do and if others take heart from that, all the better.
And, if events go ballistic and your hosts chuck you out? So what? You might leave with an empty stomach but your most important hunger will be well satisfied. Party on!
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