The vice must flow

Society is sick, but we are society.

It is easy to believe society is responsible for the vices we see around us.

Smartphone zombification is visible on every street.

Young men are addicted to porn or video games, throwing their lives away on entertainment.

Women are lost in social medialand, custom designed to manipulate the worst of their urges, from vindictive gossip to shopping sprees.

We are becoming lost in dopamine prisons designed to entrap us.

These distractions have contributed to our decline. And this is being orchestrated by social engineers using psychological manipulation to control us.

Except we seem to forget nothing is being done to us. The vices are all ours.

All vice is personal

Our cultural decline reflects our own weakness for ease, convenience and the path of least resistance. From deviant sexual thrills to plain old enjoyment, any number of producers exist to give us what we want. That is how markets work; suppliers meet demand and in a permissive society nothing is going to stop the producers from satisfying the demand if it exists.

But the need is wholly ours. It is not manufactured even if it is manipulated. We are our own worst enemy.

We want the doomnews and the gossip and the fast food. This is an uncomfortable realization, so we invent enemies to blame no matter how implausible.

Societal controllers encouraging porn or harmless computer games keeps all that testosterone in check. The young men become placated by these synthetic pursuits, so they won’t cause a revolution or, worse, build some gallows for our social masters.

Women squabbling about the Kardashians or buying even more tat means they won’t spend time wondering why they don’t have kids or husbands who can support them.

Saturating our lives with mindless news about distant wars, impending collapse or approaching catastrophes keeps us endlessly distracted.

It is comforting then to believe all these things are being done to us as it absolves us of responsibility and the pressure that comes with it.

McDonalds is making you fat. TikTok is destroying your attention span. Instagram is making you socially anxious.

YouTube is somehow preventing you reading books just as Netflix bingeing means you don’t have time to do important things.

None of this is true. These are all choices.

It is a belief in the power of external forces that makes escape hard, not the vice itself.

Exercising choice

Society reflects us and our choices. It shows our appetites, and the view can be unflattering. We avoid the pain of this realization by looking outside of ourselves.

This happens at a personal level when we blame companies or people for our downfall.

At the societal level it is often disguised as well-meaning initiatives. More regulation or government control. We should restrict access to social media or porn sites. We must stop people eating bad diets or drinking too much.

These initiatives typically fail, and this leaves us in a worse position as they don’t tackle the underlying lack of discipline or self-awareness.

Even if this were possible controlling the flow of vice only removes an opportunity to improve. All development requires stress, like lifting weights to grow muscle.

Removing temptations removes the source of growth. A wasted opportunity for those with the potential to master their urges.

Instead we ought to confront the vice. The porn, the convenience food, avoiding the stairs to take the lift, doomscrolling irrelevant news, wasting our lives one minute at a time. Face up to what we are actually doing to ourselves and recognize it as a stupendous opportunity to rise above our weaknesses to become stronger.

We are never powerless, we always have some choices.

A high agency society

Personal action, however small, represents a significant mental leap away from the inertia that characterizes a vice-ridden society.

The failure of a society like ours then is not the presence of vice but the absence of self-control in the face of temptation.

Learned helplessness, external locus of control, looking to others to fix our problems; call it what you like. We are the problem which means we are also the solution.

We are living through the end state of modern liberalism that suggests liberty is freedom from all constraints holding us back. Tradition, old fashioned ideas, even ancient customs and laws.

But liberty in the Anglosphere is traditionally understood not as freedom from societal constraints but the internalization of restraint so laws and rules are not needed. We hold our passions in check and in doing so elevate ourselves above temptation and weakness to render them irrelevant.

This requires a capacity to master our impulses. It requires both a belief we can do this and the drive to take action. It requires agency.

A successful society is populated with high agency people. Indeed, this is traditionally what differentiated the liberal West from the rest of the world, the capacity to self-regulate while the world needed elaborate rituals and social rules we ridiculed.

Now this has come to dominate us too. Low agency thinking has seeped into everything.

Too many of us believe our decline is caused by tech firms, billionaires or alien tribes in our midst.

This kind of scapegoating is everywhere.

Feminists have unprecedented freedom to do what they wish in Western nations and yet they still complain about being oppressed. The most striking of their failures is poor self-awareness of their own natures, their needs and wants, few of which are met by feminist ambitions. They blame an invisible Patriarchy for the widespread unhappiness Western women now report.

Similarly, black Americans live in the wealthiest country in the world. They have opportunities many others around the world lack. Despite this, the well documented dysfunction of black America is blamed on anything but themselves; whites, slavery, a history of racism, cosmic rays, the weather, mayonnaise, invisible Klansmen, the police, the entire justice system. Everything we are told is arrayed against black America despite all evidence to the contrary.

Echoing this mentality, many on the dissident right are hung up on the Jews who get blamed for everything that befalls us. This preoccupation even has its own monicker, the JQ; the Jewish Question. Every calamity we face, from mass immigration to falling birthrates, is attributed to a cabal of scheming Jews, or at least some facsimile of them.

This is elaborate learned helplessness. A moderately sophisticated method to excuse the part we ourselves play in our decline. Our own weaknesses scapegoated to another group, nicely skimming over the things we are not doing to help ourselves.

It doesn’t matter if they are true, partly true or outright fabrications. The scapegoating is an attempt to avoid the implication we are second-rate, beaten or outclassed. Our base assumptions are incorrect and may need revised. Our worldview is wrong and cannot work. There may be more effective ways to operate.

The vice of scapegoating is too tempting for many. And it is a vice, perhaps the most insidious of them all and one that characterizes growing numbers in Western nations.

Agency defines entire cultures

The most celebrated success stories are individuals finally embracing discipline, abstinence and self-control. None are about government smoking bans, restricting alcohol or drugs, or controlling internet content.

Success is rarely about people coming to their senses after an external intervention or legal penalty is put in place.

Of those who quit heroin addiction, ninety percent manage it solo without special help or programmes. They grit their teeth and find a way to stop.

In doing so they summon up a drive from a reservoir of stoicism we all possess but often lose the capacity to access thanks to ease and convenience.

What they do mentally is take control of their own behaviour. It is that simple, although not always easy.

Embracing agency as individuals amends our worldview and inculcates action as a response to life’s calamities.

Our seemingly vice-addicted, hedonistic society reflects the choices made by the people who inhabit it. They are the source of the decline just as they are the solution even if they are being manipulated. Overcoming manipulation is a learnable skill and more common in those with high agency.

Temptation is always available in some form. Once we have VR sets and biochips many will sink ever deeper into the matrix too, losing themselves to easy indulgence.

For some the future will be irresistible no matter what the cost.

This is the natural end state of Western liberalism. It is not freedom for all but enslavement to vices we are discouraged from overcoming through self-discipline. Everything is indulged because it is a right.

The vices are really a test of our mettle, so they will continue to be present, flowing into our lives whether we like it or not. There will always be something we can blame if we wish.

This is useful. An initial challenge to set us on the path to strength we can all attain.

Our job is to embrace agency and control in response to the inevitable temptations around us. To resist the ultimate temptation of compelling others to solve our own problems.

Escape will always be personal and individual, and that begins with the choices we make. Understanding we can choose differently.

Anyone who manages this will find themselves free by embracing an older conception of liberty, one requiring self-discipline, while others degenerate into licentiousness and hedonism.

It is a societal test. Those who pass will create the future as the rest sink into misery.

Liberty, then, is always there for anyone with the discipline to get it. It is not provided by others, only by ourselves. And when we learn to control our behaviour, when we reach inside to summon the strength to control more of our fate, we can move the whole world

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