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TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
2 Corinthians 3:6 [1]
Morality can never operate according to "rules." Whatever is the right thing for any time and situation must be felt and intuited. No moral choice happens in a vacuum, but in an endlessly complex set of circumstances that we can only scratch the surface of understanding. And each set of circumstances never appears in exactly the same way again. Any attempt to constrain what is moral and "good" in a set of rules is like trying to constrain what is beautiful in a work of art into a set of rules: it narrows it down in a very shortsighted manner and misses its real essence.
And yet, today this is being lost track of. And I think that if one thing can be blamed for it, it is the shift of so much communication to large social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and so on. Why is this so? Because all of these platforms operate according to "terms of service" and ban people according to terms of service. I think this is something to be concerned about especially with zoomers, because if all of their socialization occurs over a platform with a terms of service like this, they will begin to have a very constrained idea of what is right and wrong. And worst of all, these terms of service are pretty much always artificially skewed not towards whatever is most moral, but what is most friendly to advertisers. I'd like to give some examples of attitudes I've seen shift over my time on the internet and why I think that the ToS-ification of morality is to blame. Also I'll speak of zoomers negatively in much of this but I do want to make it clear that in any generation there are those who recognize their generation's follies and grow sick of them, and zoomers are no exception. I've talked to enough zoomers to know: a great number of them secretly hate all this puritanical bullshit.
One of the scariest things I can remember seeing might sound kind of silly to get worked up over, but it really shocked me. I remember a number of years ago seeing some old Renaissance painting (Michelangelo or Raphael probably but it's not really important) briefly shown in some YouTube video. And they censored the nipples in it! This astonished me. Of course, I understand why they had to do it. They didn't want to be demonitized, and according to an AI there's no inherent difference between nipples in the "high art" of a Renaissance painting and the "obscenity" of a hentai manga or some shit. Of course, if you know me, you know that I think censoring any artwork for "obscenity" is unjustified and that the double standard we hold for considering one worthy of "artistic merit" over the other is ludicrous. But all my life I've at least known that Renaissance paintings, Greek statues, and the like were exempted from puritanical regulations. You can show a child a Greek statue of a naked lady but not a magazine with one, apparently. Of course, these kinds of distinctions are arbitrary from the point of view of an AI, but these little arbitrary distinctions we make are precisely the kind of thing that make us human. I find it horrifying to see humans go along with an AI that can no longer make these all-too-human "arbitrary" distinctions, and even more so to do so in a way that errs on the side of censorship and puritanism.
I see something very similar when it comes to the word "nigger." Of course, this has always been a controversial word that is highly regulated, far more than any Renaissance paintings. But the attitude has become so much more extreme in a social media era. Again, I have to distinguish my personal view from societal norms: Personally, I think any attempt to regulate what words people can use or not is something to be abhorred and fought against. I think that langauge is too precious a thing to limit people from using in any way they see fit. But even from an objective look at the past, I think things have changed. In the past, people would have been more forgiving to something like reading the word when reading a passage from an old book, or from quoting someone (including mockingly!), etc. but found offense in it when you used it to signify your own hatred (i.e., the way we judge the offensiveness of any other word). Nowadays, people have this warped view where a guy quoting some lyrics from a hip hop song is the same thing as someone shouting GET OUT OF OUR TOWN NIGGER at some random black guy. Zoomers now basically imagine the word nigger is a magical incantation and that saying it is the equivalent of a Spirit Walker from Warcraft III casting Ancestral Spirit and resurrecting Robert E. Lee and an army of confederate soldiers. It's patently absurd. But again, I think it's the influence of the "ctrl+f for 'nigger' to detect immorality" AI sense of inhuman puritanism that has spread to people in a social media era.
This doesn't even get into the most disturbing and ridiculous elements of this trend of language-policing. Nowadays, braindead zoomers get all their media diet from YouTubers who censor words that you could have easily said on primetime TV in the past just because corporations only want to advertise on HECKIN WHOLESOME content. So you can't even say "suicide" or "kill yourself" anymore, but have to say "un-aliving." You can't say "pedophile" so you have to say "PDF file." You can't say "porn" so you have to say "corn" (apparently they legitimately do this on TikTok now...). And the worst is when kids actually use these substitutions IN REAL LIFE! They have sacrificed parts of their own expressive linguistic imagination to help the bottom line of corporations. Orwell couldn't have dreamed this shit in his worst nightmares.
The last one I want to touch on is the relation people have to the age of consent and to things like lolicon. And again, just so we're on the same page, let me make my position clear: I believe in an age of consent of somewhere between 16-18 with Romeo and Juliet laws of about three years. I could get into a rant of my own about how age of consent laws for as long as they have existed have usually been around 12-14 years of age and how they were raised to 18 largely because of fundamentalist Christian puritans in the US in the late 19th century who have successfully memory-holed hundreds of years of legal precedent, but that's for another time... Again, I'll stick to the attitudes I grew up with. Now, the way age of consent laws work make this kind of awkward to talk about, but ideally the age of consent is the age you become mature enough to make informed decisions about sex. There is an important underlying assumption here: It is the final crown of a gradual process, not an immediate overnight shift.
Of course, it's not going to be perfect. If we're honest, some individuals are probably mature enough to sexually consent before the age of 18 and others are still not mature enough after the age of 18, but the law has to draw some line to enforce as an age of consent that balances these in the most reasonable way. And I'm not opposed to that, although I think that's why Romeo and Juliet laws are reasonable to have. Given both parties consent and all that, is it wrong if an 18-year-old has sex with a 17-year-old on the day before their 18th birthday? I think you'd have to be an idiot to think that. Of course, in writing laws you have to sometimes have get into weird technicalities like this. Laws are necessary in our current world, but they'll always be somewhat imperfect too. We can accept that as a trade-off. But that doesn't mean we have to align our morality with these weird technicalities! I'm not saying break the law, but I am saying that most zoomers often speak like having sex with a 17-year-and-364-day-old girl at 19 is for all intents and purposes the same as having sex with a 10-year-old girl at 55, which is fucking ridiculous. And I think it's again because of a very inhuman, ToS-ified understanding of what is right and wrong.
When I was a kid, everyone knew that high schoolers would start trying to hook up with each other and get laid and that, while legally you don't want to endorse it, in most cases it's not the kind of thing that will lead to trauma. Nowadays, with the insane destruction of public communities and the death of third spaces, young people are the most sexless they've ever been. The age of consent was once as young as 12 in the early United States. Do I think that's because everyone was a pedo back then? No! I think it's because back then, a 12-year-old probably matured a lot faster to the point where they may have been as mature as an 18-year-old is today. In the modern, sexless world of zoomer minors, they are so isolated because of a lack of any genuine social spaces that they never get a chance to experiment. So people infantilize them more and more, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a result, our understanding of our own sexuality becomes constrained by a very limited, lawyer-ish understanding of what is right and wrong.
Reject the ToS-ification of morality. Return to your intuition. Don't have sex with minors though (I said it like three times but people will still call me a pedo for this article, because of exactly what I'm complaining about).