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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous.

What master morality has a problem with (and thus the problem that slave morality has with it) is not doing good. It's not that the master never does anything good or nice, or that he doesn't do so on even just pragmatic grounds. Even a pagan aristocrat like Caesar saw reason to be seen as liberal and generous (generosity coming out of overflowing capacity is okay).

It's the leap to "okay, but you can help everyone in your community". It's the totalizing, the flattening. There's no community, this is an idea from slave societies. We're not equals. Some people are better than others and their capacities matter more. In fact, caring about everybody denies them the aristocratic surplus they need to achieve their potential.

To use an example: let's say a Frenchman could sell the Mona Lisa to a billionaire who really wants to burn it and, in exchange a million nondescript, randomly selected people across the globe (no Frenchmen) will be saved from death. The part of him that feels this is either obviously right or not easily argued against is slave morality. The part that recoils sheds light on the impulse behind master morality. There's just something here worth more than some people's lives. And that impulse would almost certainly be called cruel if articulated, if it came down to a choice.