Ad Hominem has become not only the prime argument of the scalawag, but, in the current intellectual climate, the only argument. It is the only arrow in the quiver and the only dart they have.
Hence, I myself have developed a particular enmity and impatience with the art of merely labeling opposing viewpoints as anathema, and dismissing them, sight unseen, with no further investigation.
These are not cases where a particular person known to have an ulterior motive or suffering a well earned reputation for dishonesty find his remarks being regarded with judicious skepticism. These are cases where to disagree with the party line or popular gossip provokes the accusation of being such a person.
While not all scalawags are Morlocks, all Morlocks are scalawags. Scalawaggery is the core of their philosophy. Morlock borrowed from the generous genius of HG Wells, for anyone who imagines himself to be evolved beyond human norms and into the realm of moral inversion, so that all rules of right and wrong, only for oneself, are flipped downside up.
In Wells, the Morlock is a cannibal troglodyte who treats other human descendants as cattle. In my wry jest, a Morlock is an intellectual trapped in a structure of reasoning he erected, at first, to justify his inhumanity toward his fellow human beings. That structure has since become for his his thought-prison. The bars and chains are mental and spiritual. Impalpable, they are unbreakable.
Their inhumanity include treating the children of other men as lab experiments and a mass attempt at sexual social engineering, namely, the elimination of the two sexes. Inhumanity also includes treating individuals as fungible and interchangeable nonentities in the great game of identity politics, so that simplistic and bigoted generalizations about minorities or majorities become not merely permitted, but mandatory. Inhumanity includes treating the prosperity and freedom of other men as optional, or even as hindrances, in the headlong panics and stampedes inspired by orchestrated ecological scaremongering and virtue-signaling.
Inhumanity includes regarding other men as meat-robots, or hairless apes, or helpless cells of blind historical forces, and hence as nothing more than the raw materials to be bred like livestock or organized like chain gangs or stacked like cordwood or slaughtered like scapegoats to create the foundations of the towers of Utopia.
The inhumanity, sadly, also and finally includes an inhumanity toward themselves, whenever a godless and soulless mind turns inward, and develops terminal narcissism. All men beyond the narrow orbit of self-absorbed self-regard are reduced to flitting shadows, and seem to Narcissus to be merely echoes, not real.
John C. Wright, “Ad Hominem and Illusion”, John C. Wright, 2022-03-18.
June 21, 2022
QotD: The modern age of ad hominem
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