{"id":30923,"date":"2016-11-25T01:00:14","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T06:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30923"},"modified":"2016-11-15T09:39:32","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T14:39:32","slug":"qotd-megalothymia-the-malady-of-our-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/25\/qotd-megalothymia-the-malady-of-our-age\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Megalothymia, the malady of our age"},"content":{"rendered":"

… so many people want to glom onto the moral stature of the civil-rights movement and reenact it for every single American with a grievance (save for conservatives who, like the Civil War re-enactor who\u2019s always forced to play a Confederate, must always be cast as the bad guys). If you take all the people idiotically, reflexively, and sanctimoniously invoking Jim Crow at face value, it\u2019s hard not to conclude they\u2019re reflexive and sanctimonious idiots \u2014 or simply dishonest. And while that\u2019s probably true of some, it\u2019s clearly not true of many. Instead, I think you need to see this tendency as a Freudian slip, a statement of yearning, a kind of self-branding or what you (well, probably not you) might call moral megalothymia.<\/p>\n

Megalothymia is a term coined by Francis Fukuyama. It\u2019s a common mistake to think Fukuyama simply took Plato\u2019s concept of \u201cthumos\u201d or \u201cthymos\u201d and put a \u201cmega\u201d in front of it because we all know from the Transformers<\/a> and Toho Productions<\/a> that \u201cmega\u201d makes everything more cool.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the case. Megalothymia is a neologism of megalomania (an obsession with power and the ability to dominate others) and thymos, which Plato defined as the part of the soul concerned with spiritedness, passion, and a desire for recognition and respect.<\/p>\n

Fukuyama defined megalothymia<\/em> as a compulsive need to feel superior to others.<\/p>\n

And boy howdy, do we have a problem with megalothymia in America today. Everywhere you look there are moral bullies utterly uninterested in conversation, introspection, or persuasion who are instead hell-bent on grinding down people they don\u2019t like to make themselves feel good. If you took the megalothymia out of Twitter<\/em>, millions of trolls would throw their smartphones into the ocean.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake: This is a problem across the ideological spectrum, because it is a problem of human nature in general and modernity in particular. But in this context, it\u2019s a special malady of elite liberalism.<\/p>\n

Jonah Goldberg, “Moral Heroism without Morality”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2015-04-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… so many people want to glom onto the moral stature of the civil-rights movement and reenact it for every single American with a grievance (save for conservatives who, like the Civil War re-enactor who\u2019s always forced to play a Confederate, must always be cast as the bad guys). If you take all the people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,53,41,13],"tags":[828,1020,139,310],"class_list":["post-30923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-bullying","tag-progressives","tag-psychology","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-82L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30924,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30923\/revisions\/30924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}