On the Moral Fortitude of PureBloods
"He who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards that he gets stepped on." - Emmanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals
No matter how punishing the psyops got during the height of the Covid hoax - back when society was being crushed beneath lockdowns and the cruel absurdity of mask mandates, looming medical apartheid and the threat of forced vaccinations - arguably the deepest and most enduring scar remains the trauma of witnessing the quite monstrous transformation which gripped almost everyone around us.
The reader no doubt gets what I am referring to. Whether it was your once mild-mannered sister’s reincarnation as a double-masked, quadrupled-jabbed spokeszealot for Big Pharma, or whether it was the horrifying relish with which your buddies recounted the demise of another alleged “anti-vaxxer”, the reality which Covid forced us to confront was that, upon the say-so of some self-anointed authority figures, huge segments of western civilization can be instantly and enthusiastically weaponized against the rest of it.
Needless to say, this is no easy pill to swallow. After all, while most people rationally understood, prior to the events of 2020, that a majority of historical atrocities were committed by perfectly ordinary people, human nature is such that many harbored the secret conceit that mankind had somehow outgrown such blatant divide-and-conquer tactics. It was a conceit obliterated in the most comprehensive manner imaginable, and yet, having had someone on Gab recently alert me to Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development - long held to be the standard psychological measurement of a child’s moral reasoning - I have found myself, if not exactly able to forgive our Covid-crazed loved ones, then at least willing to consider their grotesque metamorphosis in slightly more clinical terms.
The Basis of Kohlberg’s Theory
Lawrence Kohlberg, a Jewish-American Psychologist and illustrious Harvard professor, first began organizing his ideas on children’s moral maturation in response to the work of Jean Piaget, whose two-stage model then represented the accepted authority on the matter. It was claimed by the French academic that, sometime around ten-years-old, behaviorally normal youngsters experience a seismic breakthrough in how they analyze their world. While younger children look at rules as fixed and based on repercussions, Piaget’s older subjects were considerably more sophisticated, the rightness or wrongness of an action judged on the intent which inspired it.
Kohlberg, however, considered Piaget’s model incomplete. Given that one’s intellectual growth does not stop at such a tender age, neither he contended could moral development – the capacity for abstract thought (which generally improves with time) enabling a person to ponder evermore intricate ethical complexities.
Kohlberg’s Research Methods
Adopting a similar approach to that of Piaget, Kohlberg interviewed groups of 72 boys aged either 10, 13 or 16, all of whom were from suburban Chicago. Each testee was presented with a series of morally ambiguous scenarios and asked to give their opinion on the most virtuous course of action. Kohlberg was in no way interested in their answers. Instead, what the psychologist wanted to know was the rationale which informed them, the most famous of his hypothetical quandaries known as ‘The Heinz Dilemma’:
“In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her… The druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about… half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: ‘No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.’ So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife.”
After explaining the story to his participants, Kohlberg would then quiz them on whether or not they felt the husband’s crime was justified. From here, the boys’ answers were expanded upon via a series of supplemental questions designed to discern how they reached their conclusions. The resulting data was enough to convince Kohlberg that, in addition to the two levels of moral reasoning proposed by Piaget, there also existed a third, each of these further subdivided into two stages which individuals move through sequentially over the course of their life.
