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The Fallacy of Universal Values
Our needs and capacities as babies are universal: nourishment, affection, and protection. Yet, from infancy, we are shaped by cultural environments that instil distinct norms and ideologies.
Western societies, for instance, celebrate individualism, gender equality, and freedom of expression as core values. However, these ideals are not universally shared. Some cultures prioritise collective honour, strict adherence to tradition, and hierarchical structures that dictate roles based on gender and social class. Anti-Defamation League polling has found in some countries, 93% of their citizens hold anti-Semitic views.
The notion that “we’re all the same” is often a rallying cry for unity, but the voices dim when we draw close. While imagining a universal sameness is comforting, the truth is far more complex and valuable than such bourgeois indulgences as the Disneyfied fantasy of all cultures being of equal worth.
Humans are born into varied cultural frameworks that profoundly shape their values, aspirations, and moral compasses.
The idea that we share identical goals or foundational values across cultures oversimplifies the intricate tapestry of human experience. It is false.
The stupidity of cultural relativism today is weaponised, and the threat of the dreaded kryptonite word “racist!” or “Islamophobe” creates an unwarranted tolerance for persons with views that are simply incompatible with Western values.
The bullet is the accusation of racism; it paralyzes society and makes us afraid to condemn anti-Semitism. We see this with Morrocan gangs in Amsterdam; we see this with the police, city councils and senior levels of government turning a blind eye to 19,000 underaged white girls being raped in England by Pakistani gangs, white slags they called these poor, violated girls
The authorities knew it but were silent. Only Elon Musk has amplified the outrage and finally brought it out of the conversational shadows.
The people who could have stopped it did their best to deny its existence and demonise those who mentioned it.
Why is Montreal now the most anti-semitic city in North America? Lebanese immigrants and French speaking North Africans.
Sorry, sometimes facts sting - but facts are not racist.
Any sophomore can say, “It’s not all of them.”
Well, of course not; nobody says that and certainly, innocent people should not be condemned or lumped in with bad actors based on ethnic affiliation.
But in our zeal to avoid being called racist, we have repeated obvious lies and denied reality. All cultures are not the same, and I’m not talking about inconsequential differences related to social norms, I’m talking about core values that relate to how we treat people in society.
Do we want to be the first culture to fall because we were afraid of being called racist?
When the Palestinian mother tells us, without shame, that her dream for her boys is to have them grow up to die as martyrs, shot by the IDF as they murder Jews, they are not like my wife, and this Palestinian mother would have nothing in common with my late mother. It’s not a potato, ‘potayto’ scenario- not f***** close.
Furthermore, the man who kills his daughter over “honour” because she dared test his evil parental authoritarianism is not like me and would have no similarities to my late father.
Such conceptions of honour, or raising four-year-olds to dream of killing Jews, is vile; we should have the courage to face such evil and not hide it away in our multicultural bouncy castle.
I don’t care if such ideas antithetical to Western values come from religion; religion is not a passcard to allow horrific behaviour, and I do not need to be an Islamic scholar to have the right to express my revulsion.
We do not need the destructive empathy of soft judges like Russell Wood in Canada, who protected an international visa student (who had never attended class). This student, while fleeing the police, collided with a vehicle, killing four Indo-Canadians. Wood lowered the criminal’s sentence to ensure his immigration status was not affected.
This is madness; there should be no second chances, arrest, sentence, serve a sentence, enjoy an armoured van trip to the airport, chain him up in the plane and send him home and don’t ever let him back.
Does he have affairs in Canada that he wants to deal with first? Tough shit. Get him on a plane.
Tell him not to kill grandmothers and infants.
And sorry, call me a racist, go to town, but we are not all the same.
We are different.
I’m not talking about immaterial differences, what you wear, whether you like sorbet while I prefer gelato; I’m talking about significant differences in which the people think the invisible ogre in the sky authorises them to kill me or some book tells them that they are allowed to be violent and irredeemable.
Such persons are nothing like me and likely nothing like you.
Why must these arguments be made?
The human capacity to lie to ourselves is immense - if that power could be converted to energy to power our homes, it would swamp our electrical grid.
The fruit of such toxic self-delusions is pain, suffering and death - how can we throw off hundreds of years of blood, debate, sweat and toil, frivolously and thoughtlessly tossing aside the sacrifices found in the World War graveyards in Europe where row upon row of crosses stretch into the horizon?
These young soldiers fought for the core Western values that we are now allowing to be shat upon. We think such values are like artificial turf that can be ignored and will never meet a lawn mower or need rain and fertilizer. We think they cannot be lost.
But Western values are a single bright flower in the long desert of history.
Our democratic capitalism and Western values are the fruits of hundreds of years of blood and toil, wars, intellectual struggle and young men's deaths. The values we have nurtured are not strong and sturdy; they are fragile, beautiful flowers that must be protected.
They are not perfect, but they are the height of civilisation.
If you don’t believe that, move to what you think is the height of civilization in Riyadh, Tehran, or Caracas.
Don’t go to Winnipeg—mosquitos and cold.