The Creatives Attack Dignity. Of Course They Do

I often find something useful to react to at the Zman, and today is another such day. For he is writing about "The Loss of Dignity." He is singing my reductive Three Peoples song, only in another key.

How come we have lost the valuing of dignity in cultural and political life?

In the Demon In Democracy, Polish academic Ryszard Legutko observed that liberal democracy had abandoned the concept of dignity. This is the obligation to behave in a certain way, as determined by your position in society. Dignity was earned by acting in accordance with the high standards of the community. In turn, this behavior was rewarded with greater privilege and responsibility. Failure to live up to one’s duties would result in the loss of dignity, along with the status it conferred.

Well yes. That, in my Three Peoples terms, would mean that Responsible behavior would earn a person Dignity points, thereby confirming people in their decision to become and remain one of the People of the Responsible Self.

Instead, modern liberal democracy awards dignity by default. We are supposed to respect all choices and all behaviors as being equal. There are no standards against which to measure human behavior, other than the standard of absolute, unconditional acceptance. As a result, the most inventively degenerate and base activities spring from the culture, almost like a test of the community’s tolerance. Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, liberal democracies look down in the gutter.

Well, yes. Do you see what is going on here? If you are a Creative, and your world view constitutes advancing your right to be creative, and cuddling your Little Darlings in the Subordinate classes, then it makes complete sense to devalue dignity, to award the dignity that the Responsibles strive for by default to all the Creatives messing about being "inventively degenerative" and the Subordinates that are just degenerate. Really, it's brilliant.

And yet, there is obviously something wrong with it. What is it? Why do we get to the point in "liberal democracy" where our masters go about "elevating the profane and vulgar, while pulling down the noble and honorable?" Zman notes that Legutko blames the Protestant reformation. But what is the problem, really?

Maybe we are just not built for anything but scarcity. Want gives us purpose and without it, we lose our reason to exist. Either way, without dignity, we cannot defend ourselves and the results are inevitable.

Well, I would say that this is not so hard. It falls naturally out of the structure of my Three Peoples theory, and the wrong turn that many Creatives have taken.

As a result of reading and deep thought and lucky inspiration that comes to me in the dead of night, I can say that the People of the Creative Self have two paths before them. Both paths are versions of the Hero's journey. Path One is the path of the Egoist Hero: it's all about me and my creative life. Path Two is the path of the Sacrificial Hero. He returns from his Hero's journey sadder and wiser. And he demonstrates his creativity and his heroism by exploring the border between Order and Chaos, trying to understand the borderlands of Chaos so that others may benefit from his trials and his hard-won knowledge.

I am afraid that the dominant part of our modern People of the Creative Self opt for the path of the Egoist Hero. And naturally whatever the Egoist Hero does must be right, because he is being creative. That's at the cultural level. At the political level he needs to maintain the political dominance, the hegemony of the People of the Creative Self, and ever since the brilliant Marx this has involved a political coalition between the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self.

What would be the most obvious way to keep your Creative Dominance? Simple. You strip the People of the Responsible Self of their Dignity. You say that the Clients of the Gentry should be accorded just as much dignity as the deplorables in the middle class. Not to mention all the creative types in the yeasty woke neighborhoods of our major cities with their non-binary genders and the like.

You have to appreciate the genius of this. The very thing that Responsibles live by is the dignity of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules. Our educated Gentry is telling us that this means nothing, nay, worse than nothing: deplorable.

Note that this pejorative attack on the Responsibles and calling them names is merely a power play -- what playground bullies have done since the dawn of playgrounds. It is just the natural thing to do if you want to dominate the culture and the politics and keep the Responsibles down so you and your Gentry pals can enjoy your appetite for "ambition, honor, and vanity."

In Maps of Meaning Jordan B. Peterson calls the Egoist Hero by his old name, the Devil,

the spirit who eternally states, "all I know is all that there is to be known"; the spirit who falls in love with his own beautiful productions and, in consequence, can no longer see beyond them. The devil is the desire to be right, above all, to be right once and for all and finally, rather than to constantly admit to insufficiency and ignorance, and to therefore partake in the process of creation itself.

The Egoist Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero.

So, the way that Responsibles must act to regain their dignity is to have the courage to stand forth and take a stand against leftist conformity, to risk being canceled by the Cancel Culture. As Dave Rubin says, "if everyone started speaking up more—they can’t take us all out."

And I think what we would learn is that the cancel culture mob really is a paper tiger. It gets its power from our acquiescence. From our fear and silence. So I want more people to stand up... Because they use the mob, and they use cancel culture, and they use fear, so that good people won’t say what they think. 

When you think about it, all this is a good thing. Responsibles need to stand up and assert our dignity, and that means taking a risk. You don't earn dignity points just be existing; you earn them by action that deserves to be dignified. Our lefty friends have basically challenged up to stand up for what we believe in.

Why don't we take them up on the challenge?