What is Moral Inversion?

Why all the vices are now virtues

Recently we have seen the re-emergence of the idea that ‘freedom’ is somehow dangerous. Thanks to the Canadian Regime Media, we know that ‘freedom’ is a dangerous far right idea. Freedom of speech is now dangerously extremist too, with beloved figures such as Sadiq Khan warning about the dangers of hate which this kind of freedom entails.

The appeal of this kind of distortion is to a sense of complete moral nihilism. It is addressed to a self which answers its own emptiness in a momentary explosion of intense emotion. This fanatical hollowness, the howl of the vacant, is a symptom of what Michael Polanyi called moral inversion.

Moral inversion also means what you think it means. That all the vices are indeed virtues now is a cliché. Consider the following meme:

There are service industries built around each vice, because vice is much more marketable than virtue. What could be the reason to make such a sweeping remark? Polanyi himself offers the idea that moral inversion is not only real, but inevitable. It is the result of Western civilisation minus God.

Polanyi argues that the West is infused with the idea of Christ as Man perfected. With no Christ, the impulse to perfection becomes corrupt, leading to a complete inversion of the moral structure proceeding from the example of God.

What we call ‘progress’ - which is usually taken to mean the moral and intellectual progress of mankind inspired by the Enlightenment – therefore inexorably results in the emptying out of the human soul. Liberalism and technology assist in the process, just as they also help to undermine the Divine. This is the Archimedean point of existence from which all sense, moral and otherwise, flows.

How does Liberalism do this? We are living in the end stage of Liberalism, which I have described elsewhere as the third religion of Man. The others – Fascism and Communism – have already expired in barbarism, as all utopian cults are wont to do.

The end stage of Liberalism explains the relation of Liberalism to moral inversion in several ways. Liberalism is the religion of Liberated Man, of the Liberty of action, of belief, of ownership and expression. To mention these basic precepts is also to indicate how poorly Liberalism is faring today.

Why is Liberalism so ill? Why is there so little liberty left? To recap, the last two years have seen people lose their liberty en masse due to a health emergency feverishly supported by the frail, the elderly and those with an interest in justifying their political legitimacy. The unfreedom of the last two years has given the political class a shot in the arm – a temporary sense of power and of immunity to consequences – which is proving to exact a cost that may be fatal.

The populations of the liberal democracies have seen that their so-called liberties can be taken away. Ditto their property, and also their sense of bodily autonomy. This panic has seen dramatic limitations on free speech applied to mentions of alternative medications, vaccine dangers and injury, statistics on mortality and comorbidity and on various measures such as the indemnity from prosecution of the novel mRNA treatment manufacturers. All this is deeply illiberal, and downright immoral. Perversely, it is the very people who ten years’ previously would have despised Big Pharma and its skulduggery who are most enthusiastic about supporting them now without question. This in itself is a noteworthy moral inversion.

The legal paradox of Liberalism is also evident elsewhere. In the aggressive promotion of individual rights, Liberalism finds itself in a quandary. It becomes necessary to preserve the claims of extreme individuals from the oppression of the majority by enacting laws which restrict majority preference from being expressed and which sanction majority opinion. Minority groups with favourable legal leverage have benefited enormously from Liberalism’s endorsement of deeply illiberal laws to ring fence their chosen beliefs and behaviours with the threat of punishment. Public expressions of fact, as in the case of women, or dislike - as with the hate speech laws of the UK – can and do attract the attention of the police.

In the moral and intellectual sphere the impulse of Liberalism has resulted in widespread and near total destruction of order. The Liberal idea of freedom is not universal and is not readily interchangeable with any usage of the word. It reduces to ‘freedom from’, distinct from ‘freedom to -’, a distinction which helps to explain the restrictions which it curiously enforces in the name of Liberty.

Freedom from what? Liberalism conceives of freedom as the result of the removal of all restraint. Moral, cultural, customary and legal restraint, as well of course as the near total rejection of Christian ethics. The idea is that Man is freed from chains, and proceeds to rise morally and intellectually from his reduced state of repression into a better version of himself. This, collectively, is what is meant as Progress.

We can see that the removal of all restraints on moral behaviour is complete, as indicated by the full throated celebration of vice in public life as in all forms of popular media. This indulgence without limit is identified strongly as freedom in the modern mind, which is a kind of vessel which thirsts but can never drink.

This curious image is suggested by the kind of society which has made of man a clamour of unsatisfiable demands. This society is the combination of the Liberal idea of freedom with technology. The mechanisms of advertising, modern production and logistics, the dark art of branding which crowds out our lives with wants have partnered with the unrestricted appetite to produce an addiction economy.

Sex, pornography, drugs legal and otherwise. Junk and substitute foods. Ever cheaper consumer trash. The worship of avarice, the glamour of crime, the consumer choice located in the self which is the transgender craze. To purchase a new you through the fusion of shopping, drugs and surgery is the ultimate act of retail therapy. No one asks what made people so sick as to reach for such a cure.

Moral inversion is a helpful term to explain how the world has come to represent the opposite of what it once was. The fact of moral inversion explains much – including the reason to vociferously reject any cultural object which reminds us of a time when virtue corresponded to acts which improved, and did not destroy, the moral goodness of the self. True virtue, as with true liberty, is the freedom granted by mastery of and not surrender to the self. It the discipline of a life’s work, to be crowned by the inescapable limit of all mortals.

Such reminders - as with any connection to historical continuity – must be removed, to allow the self its final departure from reality, as there is nothing more terrifying to the self important empty vessel than the thought of its own death. If there were a fitting epitaph to the morally inverted self it could be this - “But who will curate my instagram when I am gone?”