the Red and the Black

Two blogs I read are Monkey Smashes Heaven and roissy. Here are their points of agreement:

• Moral language is useless and moral restrictions are actively crippling. The clear-eyed achieve their goals by any means available.
• The civilization of industrialized countries will collapse under the weight of its own contemptible decadence. Jihadists and commissars will dance in the rubble.
• The duty of the writer is truth. Clarity and strength demand obedience to logic and fact.

Of course they disagree on everything else: their sympathies and factual beliefs regarding races, sex, class, &c. This could be another homily on the analagmatic character of The Extremes, but that's a stupid genre. Instead I'd rather discover here the opposite point: the total irrelevance of the supposedly driving affective, formal aspect to substantive engagement with the world (where "substantive engagement with the world" equals electronic temporizing.) That you have a gun doesn't dicate where you point it.

(Even more: that the extremes are similar in certain respects shouldn't strike us as particularly interesting, unless the intended point is that this makes them so crazy compared to the dominant morality. Coming through one's one accord to a position that is impossible to utter in polite society entails things entirely on its own. When your every ethical intuition clashes with your every moral conclusion, it's hard not to conclude that the whole enterprise is absurd. But the philosophically violent break into "all that is neccessary for X!" of course entails a whole bucketful of written and unwritten rules. The rules that all our instincts scream out are of this character too; but the partisans of X have grown strong enough that we can no longer give it a name.)

The psychological question is interesting, of course. Weirdly, this mix of internet tough guy and Jacobin Virtue probably entails someone more willing than less to attribute their acceptance of the statements they defend on a totally logical or empirical basis to their own irrational characteristics. There's a worship of strength here, discipline: even roissy in his hedonism is with every post invoking the discipline of Nietzsche's dancer - not to mention seven or ten syphillitic calumnies about women, socialists, God. Roissy would of course attribute this to the self-aggrandizing bravura of men, until you told him that most of MSH's writers are female, at which point he would say of course, women worship power. We're all just going where the facts lead us.