American morality scam

Several years ago I worked for a company whose manager would routinely say “Life isn’t fair” whenever he cheated an employee out of a raise or benefits. A few years later, while in law school, I listened in stunned silence as an adjunct professor, who also worked as a prosecuting attorney, nonchalantly remarked “Oh well!” after informing my class that a man she believed was innocent had just been found guilty.

	George Bush
	BREAKING NEWS It was only the USSR that defeated Nazism Dmitry Medvedev becomes Russia's new President War on Iran: Unleashing Armageddon in the Middle East
	Cat mothers fox-cub More...

These two examples, and countless others like them, confirm an unfortunate and often dangerous reality: The human mind possesses the capability to rationalize anything, even when the foundations for these rationalizations are built upon specious arguments.

The company manager, for example, was simply regurgitating the debunked theory of Social Darwinism—that the concept of “survival of the fittest” could be adapted to sociological and economic situations. But even Darwin himself emphasized the difference between events caused by uncontrollable natural forces and events caused by the conscious choice of the individual.

The prosecutor’s rationalization, however, was even more egregious, because the issue was not just employment benefits, but liberty itself. So after class I asked her what the difference was, in the moral sense, between her unjustly depriving a person of freedom by using the law as a weapon, and the criminal who unjustly deprives a person of freedom by using a knife or gun. Her answer was, “I only argued the case. The jury returned the guilty verdict.”

But she had no response when I reminded her that, just as a criminal chooses to commit a crime, she chose to place this man in front of a jury. Had she not done so, there would have been no risk of a wrongful conviction.

During the past few years this power of specious rationalization has transformed America into a haven for bigotry, injustice, greed, discrimination, jingoism, violence, hypocrisy, intolerance and fanatical Puritanism deceptively cloaked in the garments of conservatism, religion or “community values.” So while other industrialized nations (with the possible exception of England , whose leader is Bush lapdog Tony Blair) are moving into the twenty-first century, America stagnates in a milieu of regression and repression, courtesy of THE MORALITY SCAM.

Discuss this article with others on Pravda.ru forum