The smug-junkies are lining up for the latest designer drug to hit the streets, a hot-shot of fentanyl-laced oblivion that is viewed, in the perverse logic of the addict, as the really good stuff.
The Pursuit of Offendedness is never pretty, but don't avert your gaze from the horrors of what you're about to see. Look on with pity at the degradations of stupidity and dishonesty and the realization that these poor addicts in the throes of their disease are willing to abandon all reason, all integrity, and reality itself for the diminishing returns of chasing that ever-receding high of moral superiority.
This example was found in that notorious drug den, the Christian Worldview Network:
Please e-mail this program to EVERYONE you know! Topic: Ron Meyers interviews Brannon Howse on Obama's national healthcare that will euthanize America's seniors and the disabled through the rationing of healthcare, make someone's intrinsic value based on the State's definition of whether or not they are productive human resource, require doctors to break their Hippocratic Oath in order to be able to make a living and continue practicing medicine, force seniors on Medicare to go through "end of life counseling" every five years so they can be brainwashed into the liberal's "duty to die" propaganda …
This is utter fantasy — pure, uncut lies repackaged as truth for an audience willing and eager to believe the absolute worst about everyone other than themselves.
But that audience is long past the point where it matters whether any such claims are true, or even plausible. To say that Brannon Howse is a liar would be to suggest that he was still capable of distinguishing between what is real and what is unreal, or concerned with what is true or false. True and false aren't categories that matter or even exist in these people's world. Is Howse lying? Of course he is, but the man is a junkie and he's stoned out of his mind. He traded his grasp on reality years ago for a nickel-bag of moral superiority and now he can't even remember the last time he was thinking straight. Whatever he needs to say for his next fix, that's what he's going to say.
This is your brain on drugs, kids. This is why you should just say No.
We've discussed the broad outlines of this downward spiral before: Being good is exchanged for being better than, and then being better than is exchanged for feeling better than. And the downward slope is steep and slippery from there.
This downward plunge is bound to accelerate. The goal is a feeling of moral superiority, achieved at first by telling oneself little lies about the behavior and motivations of others. But those little lies lead to feelings of guilt. That guilt is legitimate, earned and wholly deserved, but this isn't about whether one's feelings are just or appropriate, it's about whether one's feelings feel good. So the guilt provokes a feeling of moral inferiority that can, for those addicted, only be countered by telling slightly larger lies about the even-more-inferior morality of others. Those bigger lies carry with them a larger sense of guilt and so the cycle repeats itself again and again with the lies getting larger and larger. And with every downward spiral, the ever-larger lies become ever more implausible, so that it becomes harder and harder to pretend that one actually believes the lies one is telling oneself and the guilt becomes that much more intense and undeniable and can only be staved off, temporarily, through ever more outrageous lies until finally one finds oneself desperately asserting that President Obama's desire to provide health care for the uninsured is actually a plot to murder your grandmother in cold blood and reinstate the Third Reich here in America.
Consider what the example above means for those embracing it. Even a cursory examination of this claim would reveal it to be false, but they have chosen not to examine it, chosen to swallow it unexamined and to pass it on to others because they need it to be true. They need it to be true because this is what it would take for them to recapture at least the illusion of moral superiority.
Let that sink in for a moment.
To be confident of the claim that they are better than some other group, they have chosen to compare themselves to a eugenic Nazi regime that euthanizes senior citizens. That such a regime is wholly a figment of their warped imaginations is less revealing than the fact that they have been forced to imagine such a horrifying scenario in order to find something with which they can believe they compare favorably.
I can't imagine what that's like. If my sense of self-worth had shriveled to the point that my only consolation was to reassure myself that I was still better than imaginary grandma-killing Nazis then I can't imagine finding a great deal of consolation from such a thought. Imagine someone saying this to you, "Well, you're better than Nazis euthanizing the elderly." Can you imagine feeling pride to receive such a meager compliment? Can you imagine even thinking of that as a compliment at all?
So, viewed from the outside, this sure looks like it'd have to be rock bottom. Where could they possibly go from here?
But that's the thing about hard-core addicts. Their idea of rock bottom tends to be way beyond what those of us who aren't in their shoes could imagine.
Even now the implausibility and the outlandishness of this Obama The Grandma-Killer lie is taking too much work to maintain, killing whatever buzz they might have gotten from the first rush of moral superiority. Plus this whole forced-euthanasia meme is being used to help kill health care reform, which even Brannon Howse will dimly realize will result in more troubles for people already facing trouble enough. So they're in for a hell of a crash and a world of guilty pain when this lie wears off.
What will they do then? What do they always do? They'll chase the next fix — something bigger, stronger and even more outrageous. No longer able to believe themselves when they tell themselves that at least they're morally superior to Nazis promoting forced-euthanasia, they'll invent something even worse. They'll dream up some even more atrocious atrocity, accuse everyone else of committing it, and then try to reassure themselves that this makes them the best people around.
I can't imagine what they'll make up next to accuse everyone else of. But they can imagine it. And they will imagine it. And so it goes.
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